III. HENRY D. THOREAU: 1817-1862.

While several of those who composed this group of transcendental thinkers in the Concord circle became more or less noted either for eccentricity or utterance, the most remarkable among them all, after Emerson, was Henry David Thoreau. A genuine lover of nature -- a naturalist first of all -- he was also a philosopher and a poet, too, although a crude one. He was misunderstood by most of those who knew or heard of him while he lived, -- and these were not many, -- but by the inner circle of the transcendentalists he was comprehended and beloved. It is characteristic of his career that but two of his books were published in his lifetime while his published writings now number twenty volumes.

Life.

Thoreau's ancestry was of mingled French and Scotch; his grandfather, John Thoreau, emigrated to New England from the island of Jersey about 1773, and settled in Concord in 1800. Henry Thoreau's father was a maker of lead pencils, and was in rather poor circumstances. Nevertheless Henry received a classical education and was graduated from Harvard in 1837, at the age of twenty. If he won distinction in any of his studies it was in Greek, in which he was especially proficient. He taught for a while, but for the most part he made his living by surveying and by making pencils. He also lectured from time to time, and on his father's death he continued the little business of pencil-manufacturing, which included a small trade in plumbago. He was thoroughly original and independent. Strongly American, he was yet more strongly idealistic in his conceptions of conduct and citizenship. He refused to pay the old parish tax which was then still exacted, and spent one night in jail because he would not pay his poll-tax on account of the government's permission of slavery. When Emerson came to the cell with the inquiry, "Henry, why are you here?" Thoreau received him with the question, "Why are you not here?" He was a friend of John Brown; and declared that "any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already." He regarded only what was necessary as desirable. "A man is rich," he said, "in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone." His acquaintance with Emerson began early. He was for a time a member of his household, and during Emerson's visit to England in 1847, Thoreau occupied his house and took charge of affairs during his absence.

Concerning Thoreau's qualifications as a naturalist, Emerson has this to say: -- The Naturalist.

"He knew the country like a fox or a bird and passed through it as freely by paths of his own.... Under his arm he carried an old music-book to press plants; in his pocket his diary and pencil, a spy-glass for birds, microscope, jack-knife and twine. He wore straw hat, stout shoes, strong gray trousers, to brave shrub-oaks and smilax, and to climb a tree for a hawk's or squirrel's nest. He waded into the pool for the water-plants, and his strong legs were no insignificant part of his armor.... His power of observation seemed to indicate additional senses. He saw as with microscope, heard as with ear-trumpet, and his memory was a photographic register of all he saw and heard.... Every fact lay in glory in his mind, a type of the order and beauty of the whole. His intimacy with animals suggested... 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, and 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." The Hermitage.

In 1845, Thoreau built for himself a cabin on the shore of Walden Pond, and here for two years he lived, cultivating potatoes, corn, and beans sufficient for his subsistence, recording his observations of all natural phenomena, and transcribing from his journal the narrative of an excursion taken with his brother in 1839. It is this experience in his life with its subsequent record which has more than anything else aroused interest in the personality of Thoreau. "My purpose in going to Walden Pond," he says, "was not to live cheaply nor to live dearly there, but to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles." He did not by any means discard human society; he made frequent trips through the woods to his home in Concord and received many visitors at his hut. The simplicity and freedom of this unconventional life and its nearness to the heart of nature were his delight. He was handy with the axe and with all tools. He philosophized as he hoed his beans in the early morning.

"When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment 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."

Walden, or Life in the Woods, contains the story and the thought of these two years; it reveals Thoreau at his best and has long since become an American classic. The book was published in 1854. The Week.

An earlier volume had appeared in 1849, the preparation of which had formed no small part of that "private business" which had induced Thoreau's retirement to the hut on Walden Pond. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers is the title of the volume, and the voyage which is the basis of its chapters had occurred ten years previous, when its author, two years out of college, together with his brother, in a boat built by their own hands, had explored the courses of these beautiful streams. Richly descriptive, the Week is also full of the philosophy of Thoreau, sometimes expanded into essay-like proportions, sometimes expressed in queer, crude lines of verse which somehow suggest the rhyming of an ancient bard; for example: --

"Conscience is instinct bred in the house;
Feeling and Thinking propagate the sin
By an unnatural breeding in and in.
I say, Turn it outdoors,
Into the moors.
I love a life whose plot is simple,
And does not thicken with every pimple,
A soul so sound no sickly conscience binds it,
That makes the universe no worse than 't finds it."

It is in his prose that the essayist oftenest shows himself a poet.

"It required some rudeness to disturb with our boat the mirror-like surface of the water, in which every twig and blade of grass was so faithfully reflected; too faithfully indeed for art to imitate, for only Nature may exaggerate herself. The shallowest still water is unfathomable. Wherever the trees and skies are reflected, there is more than Atlantic depth, and no danger of fancy running aground. We notice that it required a separate intention of the eye, a more free and abstracted vision, to see the reflected trees and the sky, than to see the river bottom merely; and so are there manifold visions in the direction of every object, and even the most opaque reflect the heavens from their surface. Some men have their eyes naturally intended to the one and some to the other object."

Less than three hundred copies of the thousand comprising this first edition were sold; the remainder were thrown on the author's hands after four years' mute appeal in the bookstores. "I have now a library of nearly 900 volumes," Thoreau wrote in his diary; "over 700 of which I wrote myself. Is it not well that the author should behold the fruit of his labor?"

Yet Thoreau continued to write. Shortly after leaving college he had begun to keep a journal which was both diary and commonplace book; and this journal he continued throughout his life. From this source he drew the material of the Week and of Walden as well as of his posthumous books and his lectures, essays, and addresses. The journal was also drawn upon by others after his death to make books and magazine articles, and in 1906 was published in its entirety in fourteen volumes.

Essays and Excursions.

Various articles by Thoreau were published in The Dial and, through the friendship and assistance of Horace Greeley, in the New York magazines as well as in the Tribune itself. Thoreau made other excursions to the Maine woods, to Canada, to Cape Cod; and these furnished fresh material for observation and comment in his journal. He never married, he lived simply and unconventionally in his own independent way. Probably because of exposure -- for he gave little heed to the elements -- he developed consumption, and died in his forty-fifth year, at his home in Concord.

The ground of Thoreau's more recent popularity has been well summarized by Professor Trent: -- Present Place in Literature.

"The years have favored him more than they have any of his friends in The Dial group. Mankind has returned more and more to nature, and at the same time has shown a preference for the minute, semi-scientific, semipoetic treatment of her which Thoreau was supereminently qualified to give, over the rhapsodical, pantheistic treatment illustrated in the writings of Emerson and other transcendentalists, American and British."

Authorities.

The life of Thoreau in the American Men of Letters Series is by F. B. Sanborn; a more serviceable biography is that by Henry S. Salt, in the Great Writers Series. Thoreau: His Home, Friends, and Books, by Annie Russell Marble, is a more intimate relation. A Biographical Sketch by Emerson is prefixed to Thoreau's Miscellanies.