Born at Concord, Mass., July 12, 1817: died at Concord, May 6, 1862. An American writer. He graduated at Harvard in 1837, taught school, and afterward became a land-surveyor. He lived alone on the shore of Walden Pond, Concord, 1845–47. He was a transcendentalist, and a friend of Emerson, Alcott, etc.; stood out for the rights of the individual; and was at one time imprisoned for his refusal to pay taxes. Among his works are “A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers” (1849), “Walden, or Life in the Woods” (1854), “Excursions in Field and Forest” (1863: with a memoir by Emerson), “The Maine Woods” (1864), “Cape Cod” (1865), “Letters to Various Persons” (1865: with a notice by Emerson), “A Yankee in Canada, etc.” (1866). He wrote for the leading periodicals, and was the author of several poems.

Personal

  He is a little under size, with a huge Emersonian nose, bluish gray eyes, brown hair, and a ruddy, weather-beaten face, which reminds me of some shrewd and honest animal’s—some retired philosophical woodchuck or magnanimous fox. He dresses very plainly, wears his collar turned over like Mr. Emerson and often an old dress-coat, broad in the skirts, and by no means a fit. He walks about with a brisk, rustic air, and never seems tired.

  There was somewhat military in his nature not to be subdued, always manly and able, but rarely tender, as if he did not feel himself except in opposition. He wanted a fallacy to expose, a blunder to pillory, I may say required a little sense of victory, a roll of the drum, to call his powers into full exercise. It cost him nothing to say No; indeed, he found it much easier than to say Yes. It seemed as if his first instinct on hearing a proposition was to controvert it, so impatient was he of the limitations of our daily thought. This habit, of course, is a little chilling to the social affections; and though the companion would in the end acquit him of any malice or untruth, yet it mars conversation. Hence, no equal companion stood in affectionate relations with one so pure and guileless. “I love Henry,” said one of his friends, “but I cannot like him; and as for taking his arm, I should as soon think of taking the arm of an elm-tree.” Yet, hermit and stoic as he was, he was really fond of sympathy, and threw himself heartily and childlike into the company of young people whom he loved, and whom he delighted to entertain, as he only could, with the varied and endless anecdotes of his experiences by field and river. And he was always ready to lead a huckleberry-party or a search for chestnuts or grapes…. There is a flower known to botanists, one of the same genus with our summer plant called “Life-Everlasting,” a Gnaphalium like that which grows on the most inaccessible cliffs of the Tyrolese mountains, where the chamois dare hardly venture, and which the hunter, tempted by its beauty, and by his love, (for it is immensely valued by the Swiss maidens), climbs the cliffs to gather, and is sometimes found dead at the foot, with the flower in his hand. It is called by botanists the Gnaphalium leontopodium, but by the Swiss Edelweiss, which signifies Noble Purity. Thoreau seemed to me living in the hope to gather this plant, which belonged to him of right. The scale on which his studies proceeded was so large as to require longevity, and we were the less prepared for his sudden disappearance. The country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost.

  Thoreau was a stoic, but he was in no sense a cynic. His neighbors in the village thought him odd and whimsical, but his practical skill as a surveyor and in woodcraft was known to them. No man was his enemy, and some of the best men were his fastest friends. But his life was essentially solitary and reserved. Careless of appearances in later days, when his hair and beard were long, if you had seen him in the woods you might have fancied Orson passing by; but had you stopped to talk with him, you would have felt that you had seen the shepherd of Admetus’s flock, or chatted with a wiser Jacques. For some time past he had been sinking under a consumption. He made a journey to the West a year ago, but in vain; and returned to die quietly at home.

  He was short of stature, well built, and such a man as I have fancied Julius Cæsar to have been. Every movement was full of courage and repose; the tones of his voice were those of Truth herself; and there was in his eye the pure bright blue of the New England sky, as there was sunshine in his flaxen hair. He had a particularly strong aquiline-Roman nose, which somehow reminded me of the prow of a ship.

  If any American deserves to stand as a representative of the experience of recluseness, Thoreau is the man. His fellow-feelings and alliances with men were few and feeble; his disgusts and aversions many, as well as strongly pronounced. All his life he was distinguished for his aloofness, austere self-communion, long and lonely walks. He was separated from ordinary persons in grain and habits, by the poetic sincerity of his passion for natural objects and phenomena. As a student and lover of the material world he is a genuine apostle of solitude, despite the taints of affectation, inconsistency, and morbidity which his writings betray…. There was uncommon love in him, but it felt itself repulsed, and, too proud to beg or moan, it put on stoicism and wore it until the mask became the face. His opinionative stiffness and contempt were his hurt self-respect protecting itself against the conventionalities and scorns of those who despised what he revered and revered what he despised. His interior life, with the relations of thoughts and things, was intensely tender and true, however sorely ajar he may have been with persons and with the ideas of persons. If he was sour, it was on a store of sweetness; if sad, on a fund of gladness.

  His readers came many miles to see him, attracted by his writings. Those who could not come sent their letters. Those who came when they could no more see him, as strangers on a pilgrimage, seemed as if they had been his intimates, so warm and cordial was the sympathy they received from his letters. If he also did the duties that lay nearest and satisfied those in his immediate circle, certainly he did a good work; and whatever the impressions from the theoretical part of his writings, when the matter is probed to the bottom, good sense and good feeling will be detected in it. A great comfort in him, he was eminently reliable. No whim of coldness, no absorption of his time by public or private business, deprived those to whom he belonged of his kindness and affection. He was at the mercy of no caprice: of a reliable will and uncompromising sternness in his moral nature, he carried the same qualities into his relation with others, and gave them the best he had, without stint. He loved firmly, acted up to his love, was a believer in it, took pleasure and satisfaction in abiding by it…. In height, he was about the average; in his build, spare, with limbs that were rather longer than usual, or of which he made a longer use. His face, once seen, could not be forgotten. The features were quite marked: the nose aquiline or very Roman, like one of the portraits of Cæsar (more like a beak, as was said); large, overhanging brows above the deepest set blue eyes that could be seen, in certain lights, and in others gray,—eyes expressive of all shades of feeling, but never weak or near-sighted; the forehead not unusually broad or high, full of concentrated energy and purpose; the mouth with prominent lips, pursed up with meaning and thought when silent, and giving out when open a stream of the most varied and instructive sayings. His hair was a dark brown, exceedingly abundant, fine and soft; and for several years he wore a comely beard. His whole figure had an active earnestness, as if he had no moment to waste.

  Both admirer and censor, both Channing in his memoir, and Lowell in his well-known criticism, have brought the eccentricities of Thoreau into undue prominence, and have placed too little stress on the vigor, the good sense, the clear perceptions, of the man. I have myself walked, talked, and corresponded with him, and can testify that the impression given by both these writers is far removed from that ordinarily made by Thoreau himself. While tinged here and there, like most New England thinkers of his time, with the manner of Emerson, he was yet, as a companion, essentially original, wholesome, and enjoyable. Though more or less of a humorist, nursing his own whims, and capable of being tiresome when they came uppermost, he was easily led away from them to the vast domains of literature and nature, and then poured forth endless streams of the most interesting talk. He taxed the patience of his companions, but not more so, on the whole, than is done by many other eminent talkers when launched upon their favorite themes. It is hard for one who thus knew him to be quite patient with Lowell in what seems almost wanton misrepresentation. Lowell applies to Thoreau the word “indolent”: but you might as well speak of the indolence of a self-registering thermometer; it does not go about noisily, yet it never knows an idle moment. Lowell says that Thoreau “looked with utter contempt on the august drama of destiny, of which his country was the scene, and on which the curtain had already risen;” but was it Thoreau, or Lowell, who found a voice when the curtain fell, after the first act of that drama, upon the scaffold of John Brown? Lowell accuses him of a “seclusion which keeps him in the public eye,” and finds something “delightfully absurd” in his addressing six volumes under such circumstances to the public, when the fact is that most of these volumes were made up by friends, after Thoreau’s death, from his manuscripts, or from his stray papers in newspapers and magazines.

  From my first introduction, Thoreau seemed to me a man who had experienced Nature as other men are said to have experienced religion. An unmistakable courage, sincerity, and manliness breathed in every word he uttered.

  Thoreau was, probably, the wildest civilized man this country has produced, adding to the shyness of the hermit and woodsman the wildness of the poet, and to the wildness of the poet the greater ferity and elusiveness of the mystic. An extreme product of civilization and of modern culture, he was yet as untouched by the worldly and commercial spirit of his age and country as any red man that ever haunted the shores of his native stream. He put the whole of Nature between himself and his fellows. A man of the strongest local attachments—not the least nomadic, seldom wandering beyond his native township,—yet his spirit was as restless and as impatient of restraint as any nomad or Tartar that ever lived. He cultivated an extreme wildness, not only in his pursuits and tastes, but in his hopes and imaginings.

  Thoreau’s thin, penetrating, big-nosed face, even in a bad woodcut, conveys some hint of the limitations of his mind and character. With his almost acid sharpness of insight, with his almost animal dexterity in act, there went none of that large, unconscious geniality of the world’s heroes. He was not easy, not ample, not urbane, not even kind; his enjoyment was hardly smiling, or the smile was not broad enough to be convincing; he had no waste lands nor kitchen-midden in his nature, but was all improved and sharpened to a point.

  Thoreau “built himself in Walden woods a den” in 1845,—after his return from tutoring in the family of Emerson’s brother at Staten Island; here he wrote most of “Walden” and the “Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers,” and much more that has been posthumously published; from here he went to jail for refusing to pay a tax on his poll, from here he made the excursion described in “The Maine Woods.” He finally removed from Walden in the autumn of 1847, to reside in the house of Emerson during that sage’s absence in Europe. An old neighbor of Thoreau’s, who had often watched his “stumpy” figure as he hoed the beans, and had even once or twice assisted him in that celestial agriculture, tells us that Thoreau’s hut was removed by a gardener to the middle of the bean-field and there occupied for some years. Later it was purchased by a farmer, who set it upon wheels and conveyed it to his farm some miles distant, where it has decayed and gone to pieces.

  Thoreau lived very near to nature; nothing escaped his notice, and over birds, beasts and fishes his influence was almost magical. He had simplified life till he had realized the fine savage in himself. His mind was as pure as that of a child, and the high attainments of the scholar never caused him to think less reverently of human life. He had a moral nature both strong and generous.

  Another peculiar spirit now and then haunted us, usually sad as a pine tree—Thoreau. His enormous eyes, tame with religious intellect and wild with the loose rein, making a steady flash in this strange unison of forces, frightened me dreadfully at first…. When he died, it seemed as if an anemone, more lovely than any other, had been carried from the borders of a wood into its silent depths, and dropped in solitude and shadow, among the recluse ferns and mosses which are so seldom disturbed by passing feet. Son of freedom and opportunity that he was, he touched the heart by giving to nature’s peacefulness like the saints, and girding upon his American sovereignty the hair-shirt of service to self-denial. He was happy in his intense discipline of the flesh, as all men are when they have once tasted power—if it is the power which awakens perception of the highest concerns. His countenance had an April pensiveness about it; you would never have guessed that he could write of owls so jocosely. His manner was such as to suggest that he could mope and weep with them. I never crossed an airy hill or broad field in Concord, without thinking of him who had been the companion of space as well as of delicacy; the lover of the wood-thrush, as well as of the Indian. Walden woods rustled the name of Thoreau whenever we walked in them.

Walden, 1854

  There is nothing of the mean or sordid in the economy of Mr. Thoreau, though to some his simplicity and abstemiousness may appear trivial and affected; he does not live cheaply for the sake of saving, nor idly to avoid labor; but, that he may live independently and enjoy his great thoughts; that he may read the Hindoo scriptures and commune with the visible forms of nature. We must do him the credit to admit that there is no mock sentiment, nor simulation of piety or philanthropy in his volume. He is not much of a cynic, and though we have called him a Yankee Diogenes, the only personage to whom he bears a decided resemblance is that good-humored creation of Dickens, Mark Tapley, whose delight was in being jolly under difficulties.

  In describing his hermitage and his forest life, he says so many pithy and brilliant things, and offers so many piquant, and, we may add, so many just comments on society as it is, that his book is well worth reading, both for its actual contents and its suggestive capacity.

  The oddity of its record attracted universal attention…. As in the author’s previous work, the immediate incident is frequently only the introduction to higher themes. The realities around him are occasionally veiled by a hazy atmosphere of transcendental speculation, through which the essayist sometimes stumbles into abysmal depths of the bathetic. We have more pleasures, however, in dwelling upon shrewd humors of the modern contemplative Jacques of the forest, and his fresh, nice observation of books and men, which has occasionally something of a poetic vein. He who would acquire a new sensation of the world about him, would do well to retire from cities to the banks of Walden pond, and he who would open his eyes to the opportunities of country life, in its associations of fields and men, may loiter with profit along the author’s journey on the Merrimack, where natural history, local antiquities, records, and tradition, are exhausted in vitalizing the scene.

  From whatever point of view it be regarded, “Walden” is undoubtedly Thoreau’s masterpiece; it contains the sum and essence of his ideal and ethical philosophy; it is written in his most powerful and incisive style, while by the freshness and naïveté of its narrative it excites the sympathy and imagination of the reader, and wins a popularity far exceeding that of his other writings.

  Thoreau showed in a very marked degree the influence of Emerson. His biographer, who knew him personally, says that he imitated Emerson’s tones and manners so that it was annoying to listen to him. Unconsciously he acquired Emerson’s style of writing. He became a master of the short, epigrammatic sentence. Yet there is often a rudeness and an inartistic carelessness about Thoreau’s style that is not at all like Emerson. No one has ever excelled him in the field of minute description. His acute powers of observation, his ability to keep for a long time his attention upon one thing, and his love of nature and of solitude, all lend a distinct individuality to his style.

  Like every real book “Walden” is for its own hours and its own minds; a book for those who love books, for those who love nature, for those who love courageous thinking, courageous acting, and all sturdy, manly virtues; a book to be read through; a book, also, to be read in parts, as one uses a manual of devotion; a tonic book in the truest sense; a book against meanness, conformity, timidity, discouragement, unbelief; a book easily conceived of as marking an era in a reader’s life; a book for the individual soul against the world.

  He is an author who has fallen into that abeyance, awaiting all authors, great or small, at some time or another; but I do think that with him, at least in regard to his most important book, it can be only transitory. I have not read the story of his hermitage beside Walden Pond since the year 1858, but I have a fancy that if I should take it up now, I should think it a wiser and truer conception of the world than I thought it then. It is no solution of the problem; men are not going to answer the riddle of the painful earth by building themselves shanties and living upon beans and watching ant-fights; but I do not believe Tolstoy himself has more clearly shown the hollowness, the hopelessness, the unworthiness of the life of the world than Thoreau did in that book.

General

  A vigorous Mr. Thoreau,—who has formed himself a good deal upon one Emerson, but does not want abundant fire and stamina of his own;—recognizes us, and various other things, in a most admiring great-hearted manner; for which, as for part of the confused voice from the jury-box (not yet summed into a verdict, nor likely to be summed till Doomsday, nor needful to sum), the poor prisoner at the bar may justly express himself thankful! In plain prose I like Mr. Thoreau very well; and hope yet to hear good and better news of him.

  He was not a strong thinker, but a sensitive feeler. Yet his mind strikes us as cold and wintry in its purity. A light snow has fallen everywhere in which he seems to come on the track of the shier sensations that would elsewhere leave no trace. We think greater compression would have done more for his fame. A feeling of sameness comes over us as we read so much. Trifles are recorded with an overminute punctuality and conscientiousness of detail. He records the state of his personal thermometer thirteen times a day…. His better style as a writer is in keeping with the simplicity and purity of his life. We have said that his range was narrow, but to be a master is to be a master. He had caught his English at its living source, among the poets and prose-writers of its best days; his literature was extensive and recondite; his quotations are always nuggets of the purest ore; there are sentences of his as perfect as anything in the language, and thoughts as clearly crystallized; his metaphors and images are always fresh from the soil; he had watched Nature like a detective who is to go upon the stand; as we read him, it seems as if all-out-of-doors had kept a diary and become his own Montaigne; we look at the landscape as in a Claude Lorraine glass; compared with his, all other books of similar aim, even White’s “Selborne,” seem dry as a country clergyman’s meteorological journal in an old almanac.

  Of all our moralists, he seemed the wholesomest, the busiest, and the best republican citizen in the world; always at home minding his own affairs. A little over-confident by genius, and stiffly individual, dropping society clean out of his theories, while standing friendly in his strict sense of friendship, there was in him an integrity and love of justice that made possible and actual the virtues of Sparta and the Stoics,—all the more welcome in his time of shuffling and pusillanimity…. A scholar by birthright, and an author, his fame had not, at his decease, travelled far from the banks of the rivers he described in his books; but one hazards only the truth in affirming of his prose, that in substance and pith, it surpasses that of any naturalist of his time; and he is sure of large reading in the future…. More primitive and Homeric than any American, his style of thinking was robust, racy, as if Nature herself had built his sentences and seasoned the sense of his paragraphs with her own vigor and salubrity. Nothing can be spared from them; there is nothing superfluous; all is compact, concrete, as nature is.

  Singular traits run through his writing. His sentences will bear study; meanings not detected at the first glance, subtle hints which the writer himself may not have foreseen, appear. It is a good English style, growing out of choice reading and familiarity with the classic writers, with the originality adding a piquant humor and unstudied felicities of diction. He was not in the least degree an imitator of any writer, old or new, and with little of his times or their opinions in his books. Never eager, with a pensive hesitancy he steps about his native fields, singing the praises of music and spring and morning, forgetful of himself. No matter where he might have lived, or in what circumstance, he would have been a writer; he was made for this by all his tendencies of mind and temperament; a writer because a thinker and even a philosopher, a lover of wisdom…. He had that pleasant art of convertibility, by which he could render the homely strains of Nature into homely verse and prose, holding yet the flavor of their immortal origins; while meagre and barren writers upon science do perhaps intend to describe that quick being of which they prose, yet never loose a word of happiness or humor.

  There are certain writers in American literature who charm by their eccentricity as well as by their genius, who are both original and originals. The most eminent, perhaps, of these was Henry D. Thoreau—a man who may be said to have penetrated nearer to the physical heart of Nature than any other American author. Indeed, he “experienced” nature as others are said to experience religion…. He was so completely a naturalist that the inhabitants of the woods in which he sojourned forgot their well-founded distrust of man, and voted him the freedom of their city. His descriptions excel even those of Wilson, Audubon, and Wilson Flagg, admirable as these are, for he was in closer relation with the birds than they, and carried no gun in his hand. In respect to human society, he pushed his individuality to individualism; he was never happier than when absent from the abodes of civilization, and the toleration he would not extend to a Webster or a Calhoun he extended freely to a robin or a wood-chuck. With all this peculiarity, he was a poet, a scholar, a humorist, also, in his way, a philosopher and philanthropist; and those who knew him best, and entered most thoroughly into the spirit of his character and writings, are the warmest of all the admirers of his genius.

  All I claim for Thoreau is a disinterested and not a one-sided and prejudiced hearing. Because he hated the hypocrisies and makeshifts of our modern social life, and plainly said so, do not let us therefore conclude that he was only morbid and stoical; let us do him justice as the patriot and reformer also; and try to discover how it was that the man who held society in such despite on some accounts was so eager to purify it from the worst incubus that probably ever rested upon it. It was Thoreau’s love of Nature that formed the basis of his peculiar simplicity and dislike of what was involved, doubtful, and morally tortuous: if we get to understand that, much in his character which is otherwise puzzling, may become clear to us.

  “The man who goes alone can start to-day,” was one of his sayings; “but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready, and it may be a long time before they get off.” It is this self-contained and self-sustaining temper which gives zest to all that Thoreau does and says, and makes him so thoroughly original.

  Whatever question there may be of his talent, there can be none, I think, of his genius. It was a slim and crooked one, but it was eminently personal. He was imperfect, unfinished, inartistic; he was worse than provincial—he was parochial; it is only at his best that he is readable.

  It is what Thoreau clearly whispered that Whitman so uproariously bawls.

  Thoreau brought to his intellectual tasks an originality as marked as Emerson’s, if not so brilliant and star-like—a patience far greater than his, and a proud independence that makes him the most solitary of modern thinkers.

  Thoreau appeals to many of us who want to live their own lives in their own way, and who do not want to discover, when they come to approach their long home, that they have never lived. He was a great listener to Nature’s voice; he was a keen observer and faithful recorder; he watched Nature with a big ledger in his hand; he was very patient.

  His English, we might judge, was acquired from the poets and prose-writers of its best days. His metaphors and images have the freshness of the soil. His range was narrow, but within his limits he was a master. He needed only a tender and pervading sentiment to have been a Homer. Pure and guileless, and fond of sympathy, he yet was cold and wintry…. His works are replete with fine observations, finely expressed. One cannot fail to see the resemblance of his style to Emerson’s and Alcott’s. Nothing that he wrote can be spared.

  Among students and lovers of out-door nature Thoreau has no exact counterpart. It could not be said of him what Isaak Walton said of himself, that his humour was to be “free, and pleasant, and civilly merry.” In some respects he reminds us of Gilbert White; but there was this important difference between them—that White loved the study of animals and plants, while Thoreau studied them because he loved them. White desired to know, did not speculate, scarcely wondered; but facts were valuable to Thoreau only in relation to ideas. White once described the author of “The Seasons” as “a nice observer of natural occurrences.” The phrase is very good as a description of White himself, but it would be quite inapplicable to Thoreau. Thoreau’s interest centred not in nature, but in man. He was a student of life. He chose the woods because existence there seemed to him simpler and truer than in the town; yet every object was to him a symbol having reference to the life of man.

  Thoreau’s poetry is not of the kind that will lift the reader by any lyric sweep of prodigious exaltation, but it appeals rather to the inner spirit, like the lines of Wordsworth and Emerson. It brings with it no drum and fife; it expresses, instead, the rapture and fervor and ecstasy of the still, small voice. It carries with it the unconscious melody of the brook’s ripple and the jocund spirit of the bird’s song.

  It may be doubted whether any other name, in the pleasant company of American writers on nature, is worthy of mention beside his…. The writings of Thoreau are comprised in nine volumes—a little library of words written from, to, and in nature. Behind his descriptions is a thoughtful mind, and his observations are strengthened by a decent culture, begun at college and aided by constant reading of a few books. By the bole of the elm-tree Plato seems to stand, and Greek summer hovers over Massachusetts winter. Here is the life of nature, and back of the life, the mind of nature. One of Thoreau’s biographers was right in calling him a “poet-naturalist.” He was too much a poet to forget the soul of things, the ideal behind the real; and too much a naturalist to neglect the constant habit of accurate observation. He might have said to the forests and streams of Concord, to its fauna and flora: “A chiel’s amang ye, takin’ notes.” His notes of nature and natural history were taken because he loved his subjects, and not because he wanted to rush into print.

  The interest in his books has steadily grown, and of late years many other writers have followed his footsteps in the woods and fields. But no one has rivalled Thoreau; the native power and fertility of his mind, his sturdy independence and originality, his keen perception of nature, and of the poetry of nature, the extent of his reading, and the delightful qualities of his style, combine to render him the ablest and most attractive of the writers of this century upon his chosen themes. He must be an author among ten thousand for whom so much has to be ignored or tolerated, and who yet is everywhere read with delight, in spite of passages on which some pitying angel should have dropped a tear.

  One of the most strongly-marked individualities of modern times…. Thoreau’s fame will rest on “Walden,” the “Excursions,” and his “Letters,” though he wrote nothing which is not deserving of notice. Up till his thirtieth year he dabbled in verse, but he had little ear for metrical music, and he lacked the spiritual impulsiveness of the true poet. He had occasional flashes of insight and could record beautifully, notwithstanding: his little poem “Haze” is surcharged with concentrated loveliness. His weakness as a philosopher is his tendency to base the laws of the universe on the experience-born, thought-produced convictions of one man—himself. His weakness as a writer is the too frequent striving after antithesis and paradox. If he had had all his own originality without the itch of appearing original, he would have made his fascination irresistible. As it is, Thoreau holds a unique place. He was a naturalist, but absolutely devoid of the pedantry of science; a keen observer, but no retailer of disjointed facts. He thus holds sway over two domains: he has the adherence of the lovers of fact and of the children of fancy. He must always be read, whether lovingly or interestedly, for he has all the variable charm, the strange saturninity, the contradictions, austerities, and delightful surprises, of Nature herself.

  In his moral and intellectual growth and experience, Thoreau seems to have reacted strongly from a marked tendency to invalidism in his own body. He would be well in spirit at all hazards. What was this never-ending search of his for the wild but a search for health, for something tonic and antiseptic in nature? Health, health, give me health, is his cry. He went forth into nature as the boys go to the fields and woods in spring after wintergreens, black-birch, crinkle-root, and sweet-flag; he had an unappeasable hunger for the pungent, the aromatic, the bitter-sweet, for the very rind and salt of the globe. He fairly gnaws the ground and the trees in his walk, so craving is his appetite for the wild. He went to Walden to study, but it was as a deer goes to a deer-lick; the brine he was after did abound there. Any trait of wildness and freedom suddenly breaking out in any of the domestic animals as when your cow leaped your fence like a deer and ate up your corn, or your horse forgot that he was not a mustang on the plains, and took the bit in his mouth, and left your buggy and family behind high and dry, etc., was eagerly snapped up by him. Ah, you have not tamed them, you have not broken them yet! He makes a most charming entry in his journal about a little boy he one day saw in the street, with a home-made cap on his head made of a woodchuck’s skin. He seized upon it as a horse with the crib-bite seizes upon a post. It tasted good to him.

  There has always been to me something fascinating about this out-door idealist. I never have been, and probably never shall be, a sympathizer with the view which makes Thoreau a skulker, as Carlyle calls him, or a loafer, as most of our typical American business men, if they know anything about him at all, would probably dub him. At the same time, I will confess that the man’s asceticism has less fascination for me than the persistency with which he harps upon the idea that nine-tenths or ninety-nine one-hundredths of our people waste their time in making money; touch Thoreau at any point with regard to business policy or business life, and he fairly bristles with sarcasm and jibes. It has been a life-long wonder to me that the man has not been valued more highly even in this community devoted to matters of fact, and that so few outside of a narrow circle of writers and thinkers know anything about him. I am convinced that the time will come when the name of Henry David Thoreau will stand high in American annals. He was our first noted Protestant—passionate, earnest, persistent, honest,—against the sordid materialism of this country.

  It is the close alliance or unity of Thoreau’s genius and personal character which gives such power to his words for the purpose I have in view, namely, to awaken or revive our interest in the worthiest things, to lift us above the world of care and sadness into that fairer world which is always waiting to receive us.

  It has been claimed for Thoreau by some of his admirers, never by himself, that he was a man of science, a naturalist. Certainly, in some respects, he had in him the material for an almost ideal naturalist. His peculiar powers of observation, and habits of noting and recording natural facts, his patience, his taste for spending his days and nights in the open air, seem to furnish everything that is required. Nor would his morbid dislike of dissection have been any serious bar, for the least worked but by no means the least important portion of natural history is the study of living forms, and for this Thoreau seems to have been peculiarly adapted; he had acquired one of the rarest of arts, that of approaching birds, beasts and fishes, and exciting no fear. There are all sorts of profoundly interesting investigations which only such a man can profitably undertake. But that right question which is at least the half of knowledge was hidden from Thoreau; he seems to have been absolutely deficient in scientific sense. His bare, impersonal records of observations are always dull and unprofitable reading; occasionally he stumbles on a good observation, but, not realizing its significance, he never verifies it or follows it up. His science is that of a fairly intelligent school-boy—a counting of birds’ eggs and a running after squirrels. Of the vital and organic relationship of facts, or even of the existence of such relationships, he seems to have no perception. Compare any of his books with, for instance, Belt’s “Naturalist in Nicaragua,” or any of Wallace’s books: for the men of science, in their spirit of illuminating inquisitiveness, all facts are instructive; in Thoreau’s hands they are all dead. He was not a naturalist: he was an artist and a moralist.

  Thoreau’s Mysticism, though born out of due time, is pure Darwinian. In that Walden wood he stands as the most wonderful and sensitive register of phenomena, finer and more exact than any cunningly devised measure. He is vision and learning, touch, smelling, and taste incarnate. Not only so, but he knows how to preserve the flashing forest colours in unfading light, to write down the wind’s music in a score that all may read, to glean and garner every sensuous impression.

  Of his published works it is not easy to state which is most emphatically characteristic of the man. “Walden” and “A Week” are his most literary productions, and upon the whole, represent him at his highest level, although one may not forget his breezy “Excursions,” nor innumerable poetic and lovely pages of his journals. From these we may gather violets during winter, or be encased with ice-crystals and hoar-frost in the fervid midsummer noon. It were likewise difficult to find Nature and philosophy so poetically interfused as in his week’s sojourn on the Concord and Merrimack rivers; and had he accomplished naught save the results of his two years’ isolation at Walden, his life had been a most eventful one, prolific in the riches bequeathed to posterity…. He is self-conscious and splenetic, full of antipathies and whimsical fancies; and when he would be oracular he ruffles up his feathers after the manner of his beloved Walden owl. A strange embodiment of the cynical and the spiritual, of the cosmical and the translunary, together with a strain of the savage, existed in his character,—a certain element of the ghostly and uncanny, as of one who moved in a different sphere from that of his fellow-men, and whose soul was not actually human, but had absorbed some occult influence from the moon and the night.

  He was a chief of the poet naturalists, and he was not only intimate with nature but friendly. One who knew him said that he talked “about Nature just as if she’d been born and brought up in Concord.” He was always more poet than naturalist, for his observation, interesting as it ever is, is rarely novel. It is his way of putting what he has seen that takes us rather than any freshness in the observation itself. His sentences have sometimes a Greek perfection; they have the freshness, the sharpness, and the truth which we find so often in the writings of the Greeks who came early into literature, before everything had been seen and said. Thoreau had a Yankee skill with his fingers, and he could whittle the English language in like manner; so he had also a Greek faculty of packing an old truth into an unexpected sentence. He was not afraid of exaggeration and paradox, so long as he could surprise the reader into a startled reception of his thought. He was above all an artist in words, a ruler of the vocabulary, a master phrase-maker. But his phrases were all sincere; he never said what he did not think; he was true to himself always.

  His especial greatness is that he gives us standing ground below the surface, a basis not to be washed away. A hundred sentences might be quoted from him which make common observers seem superficial and professed philosophers trivial, but which, if accepted, place the realities of life beyond the reach of danger. He was a spiritual ascetic to whom the simplicity of nature was luxury enough; and this, in an age of growing expenditure, gave him an unspeakable value. To him life itself was a source of joy so great that it was only weakened by diluting it with meaner joys.

  One can hardly know this author, except by reading him thoroughly, up and down and across, in every light, every season, every labor. The truths of nature quiver in his talk, as color quivers on a chameleon; and when we have caught the changing tints—by how much are we wiser? Full-paced naturalists tell us that he is not always to be relied upon for naming of common facts; and the uncommon ones in his story are largely so, because they radiate (for the time) his shine of emotion, of impulse, of far-away comparisons. Yet what tender particularity in his “Excursions” not showing us great wonders; no more does White of Selborne; yet what large country love and yearning! ’Tis a grandchild, telling us of the frosty beard and the quaking voice of the grandpapa. How true is that snowy foliage of his—“answering leaf for leaf to its summer dress!”… Unlike many book-making folk, this swart, bumptious man has grown in literary stature since his death; his drawers have been searched, and cast-away papers brought to day. Why this renewed popularity and access of fame? Not by reason of newly detected graces of style; not for weight of his dicta about morals, manners, letters; there are safer guides than all these. But there is a new-kindled welcome for the independence, the tender particularity, and the outspokenness of this journal-maker. If asked for a first-rate essayist, nobody would name Thoreau; if a poet, not Thoreau; if a scientist, not Thoreau; if a political sage, not Thoreau; if a historian of small socialities and of town affairs, again not Thoreau. Yet we read him—with zest, though he is sometimes prosy, sometimes overlong and tedious; but always—Thoreau.

  It cannot be denied, I think, that Thoreau fascinates. To begin with a minor reason: he is blunt. He attracts a young man because he is an iconoclast. He is no respecter of persons, and he says what he thinks. Often we find that he thinks things we should like to think if we only dared. He is very plain-spoken with his reader. In life such treatment would not be tolerated; in a book it is, on the whole, pleasant. The free-handed way in which he criticises the world and the conventions it has learned to work with is delicious. He has no time to waste upon the things most persons have been taught they have to do. He says those things are unnecessary, and he proceeds to do as he pleases. A man who has found time to do that in this world is to be listened to. It does not matter whether what he pleases is what we please; it does not even matter whether his ways are the best ways or the practical ones; so long as he has the courage of his convictions he is an inspiration. But there are men in plenty who have such a possession and are bankrupt at that. With Thoreau one soon begins to find that the better things lie deeper.

  Thoreau’s individuality is often so assertive as to repel a sympathy which it happens not instantly to attract; but that sympathy must be unwholesomely sluggish which would willingly resist the appeal of his communion with Nature. If your lot be ever cast in some remote region of our simple country, he can do you, when you will, a rare service, stimulating your eye to see, and your ear to hear, in all the little commonplaces about you, those endlessly changing details which make life everywhere so unfathomably, immeasurably wonderous…. Nor is Thoreau’s vitality in literature a matter only of his observation. Open his works almost anywhere,—there are ten volumes of them now,—and even in the philosophic passages you will find loving precision of touch. He was no immortal maker of phrases. Amid bewildering obscurities, Emerson now and again flashed out utterances which may last as long as our language. Thoreau had no such power; but he did possess in higher degree than Emerson himself the power of making sentences and paragraphs artistically beautiful. Read him aloud, and you will find in his work a trait like that which we remarked in the cadence of Brockden Brown and of Poe; the emphasis of your voice is bound to fall where meaning demands. An effect like this is attainable only through delicate sensitiveness to rhythm.

  In an attempt at an extreme statement Thoreau was very unlikely to fail. Thanks to an inherited aptitude and years of practice there have been few to excel him with the high lights. In his hands exaggeration becomes one of the fine arts. We will not call it the finest art; his own best work would teach us better than that; but such as it is, with him to hold the brush, it would be difficult to imagine anything more effective…. The sympathetic reader—the only reader—knows what is meant, and what is not meant, and finds it good; as he finds it good when he is bidden to turn the other cheek to the smiter, or to distribute all his living among the poor.

  His writings cleave so closely to the man that they can hardly be studied wholly apart, nor is it necessary so to consider them at length here. What is most remarkable in them is their wild “tang,” the subtlety and the penetrative quality of their imaginative sympathy with the things of field, forest, and stream. The minuteness, accuracy, and delicacy of the observation and feeling are remarkable; while mysticism, fancy, poetic beauty, and a vein of shrewd humor often combine with the other qualities to make a whole whose effect is unique. Thoreau’s verse is much like Emerson’s on a smaller scale and a lower plane, having the same technical faults and occasionally the same piercing felicity of phrase. On the whole, Thoreau must be classed with the minor American authors; but there is no one just like him, and the flavor of his best work is exceedingly fine.

  The greatest by far of our writers on Nature, and the creator of a new sentiment in literature…. Much of his writing, perhaps the greater part, is the mere record of observation and classification, and has not the slightest claim on our remembrance,—unless, indeed, it possesses some scientific value, which I doubt. Certainly the parts of his work having permanent interest are just those chapters where he is less the minute observer, and more the contemplative philosopher. Despite the width and exactness of his information, he was far from having the truly scientific spirit; the acquisition of knowledge, with him, was in the end quite subordinate to his interest in the moral significance of Nature, and the words he read in her obscure roll were a language of strange mysteries, sometimes of awe. It is a constant reproach to the prying, self-satisfied habits of small minds to see the reverence of this great-hearted observer before the supreme goddess he so loved and studied.