HENRY DAVID THOREAU.

INTRODUCTION.

HERE died at Concord, Massachusetts, in the

THE

year 1862, a man of forty-five who, if one were to take his word for it, need never have gone out of the little village of Concord to see all that was worth seeing in the world. Lowell, in his My Garden Acquaintance, reminds the reader of Gilbert White, who, in his Natural History of Selborne, gave minute details of a lively world found within the borders of a little English parish. Alphonse Karr, a French writer, has written a book which contracts the limit still further in A Journey round my Garden, but neither of these writers so completely isolated themselves from the outside world as did Thoreau, who had a collegiate education at Harvard, made short journeys to Cape Cod, Maine, and Canada, acted for a little while as tutor in a family on Staten Island, but spent the best part of his life as a looker-on in Concord, and during two years of the time lived a hermit on the shores of Walden Pond. He made his living, as the phrase goes, by the occupation of a land surveyor, but he followed

the profession only when it suited his convenience. He did not marry; he never went to church; he never voted; he refused to pay taxes; he sought no society; he declined companions when they were in his way, and when he had anything to say in public, went about from door to door and invited people to come to a hall to hear him deliver his word.

That he had something to say to the world at large is pretty evident from the books which he has left, and it is intimated that the unpublished records of his observation and reflection are more extensive. Thus far his published writings are contained in seven volumes. The first in appearance was A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers. It was published in 1849 and built upon the adventures of himself and brother ten years before, when, in a boat of their own construction, they had made their way from Concord down the Concord River to the Merrimac, up that to its source, and back to the starting point. It will readily be seen that such an excursion would not yield a bookful of observation, and though Thoreau notes in it many trivial incidents, a great part of the contents is in the reflections which he makes from day to day. He comes to the little river with its sparse border of population and meagre history, and insists upon measuring antiquity and fame by it. All of his reading he tests by the measure of this stream, and undertakes to show that the terms, big and little, are very much misapplied, and that here on this miniature scale one

may read all that is worth knowing in life. His voyage is treated with the gravity which one might use in recording a journey to find the sources of the Nile.

Between the date of the journey and the publication of the book, Thoreau was engaged upon an experiment still more illustrative of his creed of individuality. In 1845 he built a hut in the woods by Walden Pond, and for two years lived a selfcontained life there. It was not altogether a lonely life. He was within easy walking distance of Coucord village, and the novelty of his housekeeping attracted many visitors, while his friends who valued his conversation sought him out in his hermitage. Besides and beyond this Thoreau had a genius for intercourse with humbler companions. There have been few instances in history of such perfect understanding as existed between him and the lower orders of creation. It has been said of him: "Every fact which occurs in the bed [of the Concord River], on the banks, or in the air over it; the fishes, and their spawning and nests, their manners, their food; the shad-flies which fill the air on a certain evening once a year, and which are snapped at by the fishes so ravenously that many of these die of repletion ; the conical heaps of small stones on the rivershallows, one of which heaps will sometime overfill a cart, these heaps the huge nests of small fishes; the birds which frequent the stream, heron, duck, sheldrake, loon, osprey; the snake, muskrat, otter, woodchuck, and fox on the banks; the turtle, frog,

hyla, and cricket which made the banks vocal, were all known to him, and, as it were, townsmen

....

and fellow-creatures. . . . . His power of observation seemed to indicate additional senses. He saw as with a microscope, heard as with ear-trumpet, and his memory was a photographic register of all he saw and heard. . . . . His intimacy with animals suggested what Thomas Fuller records of Butler the apiologist, that either he had told the bees things or the bees had told him ;' snakes coiled round his leg; the fishes swam into his hand, aud he took them out of the water; he pulled the woodchuck out of its hole by the tail, and took the foxes under his protection from the hunters." 1

Walden, published in 1854, is the record of Thoreau's life in the woods, and inasmuch as that life was not exhausted in the bare provision against bodily wants, nor in the observation even of what lay under the eye and ear, but was busied about the questions which perplex all who would give an account of themselves, the record mingles common fact and personal experience, the world without and the world within. Thoreau records what he sees and hears in the woods, but these sights and sounds are the texts for sermons upon human life. He undertook to get at the elementary conditions of living, and to strip himself as far as he could of all that was unnecessary. In doing this he discovered many curious and ingenious things, and the unique method which he took was pretty sure to 1 Emerson's Biographical Sketch.

give him glimpses of life not seen by others. But the method had its disadvantages and chiefly this, that it was against the common order of things, and therefore the results reached could not be relied upon as sound and wholesome.

The great value of Walden, and indeed of all Thoreau's books, is not in the philosophy, which is often shrewd and often strained and arbitrary, but in the disclosure made of the common facts of the

world about one. He used to say; "I think nothing is to be hoped from you, if this bit of mould under your feet is not sweeter to you to eat than any other in this world, or in any world;" and the whole drift of his writing is toward the development of the individual in the place where he happens to be. Thoreau's protesting attitude, and the stout resistance which he made to all influences about him except the common ones of nature, betray themselves in the style of his writing. He has a way, almost insolent, of throwing out his thoughts, and growling forth his objections to the conventions of life, which renders his writing often crabbed and inartistic. There is a rudeness which seems sometimes affected, and a carelessness which is contemptuous. Yet often his indifference to style is a rugged insistence on the strongest thought, and in his effort to express himself unreservedly he reaches a force and energy which are refreshing.

These two were the only writings of Thoreau published in his lifetime. He printed contributions to the magazines from time to time, and out of