HENRY DAVID THOREAU

[Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Mass., July 12, 1817, and died there May 6, 1862. His father, a pencil-maker, was the son of a Boston merchant, who came of a Jersey family of French extraction, and had emigrated to America in 1773. Both Thoreau's mother and grandmother were Scotch. He was educated at Harvard College, where he was graduated in 1837. For a few years he taught school, and at times, in later years, he lectured, but throughout his life he preferred to support himself largely by the work of his hands. He was an expert pencil-maker, an excellent surveyor, and by the intermittent exercise of these employments, as well as by farm work, he earned enough to supply his simple wants and the needs of the relatives who were at times dependent upon him. He was on intimate terms with the little band of American transcendentalists, especially with Emerson, at whose house he lived for some years, repaying the cost of his maintenance by his labor. But wherever Thoreau lived, and whatever was his occupation, his prevailing passion was a deep and constant delight in nature. Much of his time was spent in the open air in pleasant companionship, or, more commonly still, alone. He was thoroughly familiar with the woods, fields, and waters about his native place, and made longer journeys, on several occasions, to Cape Cod, the Maine forests, and the White Mountains. His ruling passions — his love for simplicity and independence and his love for nature—were perhaps most completely and naturally gratified when he spent more than two years in a little hut which he built on Walden Pond near Concord, tilling a small plot of ground, and depending for sustenance and for enjoyment almost entirely on his own resources. Thoreau was a man whose personal views and tenets were carried out to the point of eccentricity; but his life was blameless and he was loved and respected by all who knew him.

Only two books of Thoreau's were published during his lifetime, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1848) and Walden; or Life in the Woods (1854). He contributed, however, to several periodicals, and these essays and addresses, together with much matter from his journals and other papers, have since been issued in the following volumes: Excursions (1863), The Maine Woods (1863), Cape Cod (1865), Letters to Various Persons (1865), A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers (1866), Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881), Summer (1884), Winter (1888), Autumn (1892), Familiar Letters (1894).]

THERE has been in America no such instance of posthumous reputation as in the case of Thoreau. Poe and Whitman may

be claimed as parallels, but not justly. Poe even during his life rode often on the very wave of success, until it subsided presently beneath him, always to rise again, had he but made it possible. Whitman gathered almost immediately a small but stanch band of followers, who have held by him with such vehemence and such flagrant imitation as to keep his name defiantly in evidence, while perhaps enhancing the antagonism of his critics. Thoreau could be egotistical enough, but was always high-minded; all was open and above board; one could as soon conceive of self-advertising by a deer in the woods or an otter of the brook. He had no organized clique of admirers, nor did he possess even what is called personal charm or at least only that piquant attraction which he himself found in wild apples. As a rule, he kept men at a distance, being busy with his own affairs. He left neither wife nor children to attend to his memory; and his sister seemed for a time to repress the publication of his manuscripts. Yet this plain, shy, retired student, who when thirty-two years old carried the unsold edition of his first book upon his back to his attic chamber; who died at forty-four still unknown to the general public; this child of obscurity, who printed but two volumes during his lifetime, has had ten volumes of his writings published by others since his death, while four biographies of him have been issued in America (by Emerson, Channing, Sanborn, and Jones) besides two in England (by Page and Salt).

Up to the time of his death he was unappreciated away from home, and this was naturally also true of him at his place of residence, since such is the way of the world. Even Sir Walter Scott, as we learn from the lately published letters of Mrs. Grant, was not so much of a hero in Edinburgh as elsewhere. Thoreau was born in Concord, Mass., and died there, and was therefore more completely identified with that town than any of her other celebrities. Yet when I was endeavoring, about 1870, to persuade his sister to let me edit his journals, I invoked the aid of Judge Hoar, then lord of the manor in Concord, who heard me patiently through, and then said: "Whereunto? You have not established the preliminary point. Why should any one wish to have Thoreau's journals printed?" Ten years later four successive volumes were made out of these journals by the late H. G. O. Blake,

and it is a question whether the whole may not yet be published. I hear from a local photograph dealer in Concord that the demand for Thoreau's pictures now exceeds that for any other local celebrity. In the last sale catalogue of autographs which I have encountered I find a letter from Thoreau priced at $17.50, one from Hawthorne valued at the same, one from Longfellow at $4.50 only, and one from Holmes at $3, each of these being guaranteed as an especially good autograph letter. Now the value of such memorials during a man's life affords but a slight test of his permanent standing,— since almost any man's autograph can be obtained for two postage stamps if the request be put with sufficient ingenuity, but when this financial standard can be safely applied more than thirty years after a man's death, it comes pretty near to a permanent fame.

It is true that Thoreau had Emerson as the editor of four of his posthumous volumes; but it is also true that he had against him the strong voice of Lowell, whose following as a critic was far greater than Emerson's. It will always remain a puzzle why it was that Lowell, who had reviewed Thoreau's first book with cordiality in the Massachusetts Quarterly Review and had said to me afterwards, on hearing him compared to Izaak Walton, "There is room for three or four Waltons in Thoreau," should have written the really harsh attack on the latter which afterwards appeared and in which the plain facts were unquestionably perverted. To transform Thoreau's two brief years of study and observation at Walden, within two miles of his mother's door, into a life-long renunciation of his fellow-men; to complain of him as waiving all interest in public affairs when the great crisis of John Brown's execution had found him far more awake to it than Lowell was, this was only explainable by the lingering tradition of that savage period of criticism, initiated by Poe, in whose hands the thing became a tomahawk. As a matter of fact the tomahawk had in this case its immediate effect; and the English editor and biographer of Thoreau has stated that Lowell's criticism is to this day the great obstacle to the acceptance of Thoreau's writings in England. It is to be remembered, however, that Thoreau was not wholly of English but partly of French origin, and was, it might be added, of a sort of moral-Oriental

or Puritan-Pagan temperament. With a literary feeling even stronger than his feeling for nature—the proof of this being that he could not, like many men, enjoy nature in silence — he put his observations always on the level of literature, while Mr. Burroughs, for instance, remains more upon the level of journalism. It is to be doubted whether any author under such circumstances would have been received favorably in England; just as the poems of Emily Dickinson, which have shafts of profound scrutiny that often suggest Thoreau, had an extraordinary success at home, but fell hopelessly dead in England, so that the second volume was never even published.

Lowell speaks of Thoreau as " indolent," but this is, as has been said, like speaking of the indolence of a self-registering thermometer. Lowell objects to him as pursuing "a seclusion that keeps him in the public eye," whereas it was the public eye which sought him; it was almost as hard to persuade him to lecture (crede experto) as it was to get an audience for him when he had consented. He never proclaimed the intrinsic superiority of the wilderness, but pointed out better than any one else has done its undesirableness as a residence, ranking it only as a resource and a background." "The partially cultivated country it is," he says, "which has chiefly inspired, and will continue to inspire, the strains of poets such as compose the mass of any literature." "What is nature," he elsewhere says, "unless there is a human life passing within it? Many joys and many sorrows are the lights and shadows in which she shines most beautiful." This is the real and human Thoreau, who often whimsically veiled himself, but was plainly enough seen by any careful observer. That he was abrupt and repressive to bores and pedants, that he grudged his time to them and frequently withdrew himself, was as true of him as of Wordsworth or Tennyson. If they were allowed their privacy, though in the heart of England, an American who never left his own broad continent might at least be allowed his privilege of stepping out of doors. The Concord school-children never quarrelled with this habit, for he took them out of doors with him and taught them where the best whortleberries grew.

His scholarship, like his observation of nature, was secondary to his function as poet and writer. Into both he carried the ele

ment of whim; but his version of the Prometheus Bound shows accuracy, and his study of birds and plants shows care. It must be remembered that he antedated the modern school, classed plants by the Linnæan system, and had necessarily Nuttall for his elementary manual of birds. Like all observers he left whole realms uncultivated; thus he puzzles in his journal over the great brown paper cocoon of the Attacus Cecropia, which every village boy brings home from the winter meadows. If he has not the specialized habit of the naturalist of to-day, neither has he the polemic habit; firm beyond yielding, as to the local facts of his own Concord, he never quarrels with those who have made other observations elsewhere; he is involved in none of those contests in which paleontologists, biologists, astronomers, have wasted so much of their lives.

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. This was the standard to which he constantly held his contemporaries. "There is nowhere recorded," he complains, "a simple and irrepressible satisfaction with the gift of life, any memorable praise of God. . . . If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance, like flowers and sweet-scented herbs,—is more elastic, starry, and immortal, — that is your success."

THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON