Henry D. Thoreau 14

Henry D. Thoreau 14

"Look across the fence into Captain Hardy's land. There's a

musician for you who knows how to make men dance for him in

all weathers,--all sorts of men,--Paddies, felons, farmers,

carpenters, painters,--yes, and trees, and grapes, and ice,

and stone,--hot days, cold days. Beat that true Orpheus

lyre if you can. He knows how to make men sow, dig, mow,

and lay stone-wall; to make trees bear fruit God never gave

them, and foreign grapes yield the juices of France and

Spain, on his south side. He saves every drop of sap, as

if it were his blood. See his cows, his horses, his swine!

And he, the piper that plays the jig they all must dance,

biped and quadruped, is the plainest, stupidest harlequin,

in a coat of no colors. His are the woods, the waters,

hills, and meadows. With one blast of his pipe he danced a

thousand tons of gravel from yonder blowing sand-heap to

the bog-meadow, where the English grass is waving over

thirty acres; with another, he winded away sixty head of

cattle in the spring, to the pastures of Peterboro' on the

hills."

 

Such were and are the yeomen of Concord, among whom Thoreau spent

his days, a friend to them and they to him, though each sometimes

spoke churlishly of the other. He surveyed their wood-lots, laid

out their roads, measured their fields and pastures for division

among the heirs when a husbandman died, inspected their rivers and

ponds, and exchanged information with them concerning the birds, the

beasts, insects, flowers, crops, and trees. Their yearly Cattle Show

in October was his chief festival,--one of the things he regretted,

when living on the edge of New York Bay, and sighing for Fairhaven

and White Pond. Without them the landscape of his native valley would

not have been so dear to his eyes, and to their humble and perennial

virtues he owed more inspiration than he would always confess.

 

He read in the crabbed Latin of those old Roman farmers, Cato, Varro,

and musically-named Columella, and fancied the farmers of Concord were

daily obeying Cato's directions, who in turn was but repeating the

maxims of a more remote antiquity.

 

"I see the old, pale-faced farmer walking beside his team,

with contented thoughts," he says, "for the five thousandth

time. This drama every day in the streets; this is the

theatre I go to.... Human life may be transitory and full

of trouble, but the perennial mind, whose survey extends

from that spring to this, from Columella to Hosmer, is

superior to change. I will identify myself with that which

did not die with Columella, and will not die with Hosmer."

 

* * * * *

 

_Note._--The account of "Captain Hardy" was copied by

Channing from Emerson's Journal into the first biography

of Thoreau, without the name of the author; and so was

credited by me to Thoreau in a former edition of this book.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER V.

 

THE TRANSCENDENTAL PERIOD.

 

 

Although Henry Thoreau would have been, in any place or time of the

world's drama, a personage of note, it has already been observed, in

regard to his career and his unique literary gift, that they were

affected, and in some sort fashioned by the influences of the very

time and place in which he found himself at the opening of life. It

was the sunrise of New England Transcendentalism in which he first

looked upon the spiritual world; when Carlyle in England, Alcott,

Emerson, and Margaret Fuller in Massachusetts, were preparing their

contemporaries in America for that modern Renaissance which has

been so fruitful, for the last forty years, in high thought, vital

religion, pure literature, and great deeds. And the place of his

birth and breeding, the home of his affections, as it was the Troy,

the Jerusalem, and the Rome of his imagination, was determined by

Providence to be that very centre and shrine of Transcendentalism, the

little village of Concord, which would have been saved from oblivion

by his books, had it no other title to remembrance. Let it be my

next effort, then, to give some hint--not a brief chronicle--of that

extraordinary age, not yet ended (often as they tell us of its death

and epitaph), now known to all men as the Transcendental Period. We

must wait for after-times to fix its limits and determine its dawn

and setting; but of its apparent beginning and course, one cycle

coincided quite closely with the life of Thoreau. He was born in July,

1817, when Emerson was entering college at Cambridge, and Carlyle was

wrestling "with doubt, fear, unbelief, mockery, and scoffing, in agony

of spirit," at Edinburgh. He died in May, 1862, when the distinctly

spiritual and literary era of Transcendentalism had closed, its years

of preparation were over, and it had entered upon the conflict of

political regeneration, for which Thoreau was constantly sounding the

trumpet. In these forty-five years,--a longer period than the age

of Pericles, or of the Medici, or of Queen Elizabeth,--New England

Transcendentalism rose, climbed, and culminated, leaving results

that, for our America, must be compared with those famous eras of

civilization. Those ages, in fact, were well-nigh lost upon us, until

Channing, Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and their fellowship,

brought us into communication with the Greek, the Italian, and the

noble Elizabethan revivals of genius and art. We had been living

under the Puritan reaction, modified and politically fashioned by

the more humane philosophy of the eighteenth century, while the

freedom-breathing, but half-barbarizing influences of pioneer life in

a new continent, had also turned aside the full force of English and

Scotch Calvinism.

 

It is common to trace the so-called Transcendentalism of New England

to Carlyle and Coleridge and Wordsworth in the mother-country, and to

Goethe, Richter, and Kant in Germany; and there is a certain outward

affiliation of this sort, which cannot be denied. But that which

in our spiritual soil gave root to the foreign seeds thus wafted

hitherward, was a certain inward tendency of high Calvinism and its

counterpart, Quakerism, always welling forth in the American colonies.

Now it inspired Cotton, Wheelwright, Sir Harry Vane, and Mistress

Anne Hutchinson, in Massachusetts; now William Penn and his quaint

brotherhood on the Delaware; now Jonathan Edwards and Sarah Pierpont,

in Connecticut; and, again, John Woolman, the wandering Friend of God

and man, in New Jersey, Nicholas Gilman, the convert of Whitefield,

in New Hampshire, and Samuel Hopkins, the preacher of disinterested

benevolence, in Rhode Island, held forth this noble doctrine of

the Inner Light. It is a gospel peculiarly attractive to poets, so

that even the loose-girt Davenant, who would fain think himself the

left-hand son of Shakespeare, told gossiping old Aubrey that he

believed the world, after a while, would settle into one religion,

"an ingenious Quakerism,"--that is, a faith in divine communication

that would yet leave some scope for men of wit like himself. How truly

these American Calvinists and Quakers prefigured the mystical part of

Concord philosophy, may be seen by a few of their sayings.

 

Jonathan Edwards, in 1723, when he was twenty years old, and the fair

saint of his adoration was fifteen, thus wrote in his diary what he

had seen and heard of Sarah Pierpont:--

 

"There is a young lady in New Haven who is beloved of that

Great Being who made and rules the world; and there are

certain seasons in which this Great Being, in some way

or other invisible, comes to her and fills her mind with

exceeding sweet delight, and she hardly cares for anything

except to meditate on Him. Therefore, if you present all

the world before her, with the richest of its treasures,

she disregards it, and cares not for it, and is unmindful

of any pain or affliction. She has a strange sweetness in

her mind, and a singular purity in her affections; is most

just and conscientious in all her conduct; and you could

not persuade her to do anything wrong or sinful, if you

would give her all the world, lest she should offend this

Great Being. She will sometimes go about from place to

place singing sweetly, and seems to be always full of joy

and pleasure, and no one knows for what. She loves to be

alone walking in the fields and groves, and seems to have

some one invisible always conversing with her."

 

Nicholas Gilman, the parish minister of little Durham, in New

Hampshire,--being under concern of mind for his friend Whitefield, and

the great man of New England, at that time, Sir William Pepperell,

just setting forth for the capture of Louisburg--wrote to them in

March, 1745,--to Sir William thus:--

 

"Do you indeed love the Lord? do you make the Lord your

Guide and Counselor in ye affair? If you have a Soul,

great as that Hero David of old, you will ask of the Lord,

and not go till he bid you: David would not. If you are

sincerely desirous to know and do your duty in that and

every other respect, and seek of God in Faith, you shall

know that, and everything else needful, one thing after

another, as fast as you are prepared for it. But God will,

doubtless, humble such as leave him out of their Schemes,

as though his Providence was not at all concerned in the

matter--whereas his Blessing is all in all."

 

To Whitefield, Gilman wrote in the same vein, on the same day:--

 

"Are you sufficiently sure that his call is from above,

that he was moved by the Holy Ghost to this Expedition?

Would it be no advantage to his Estate to win the place?

May he not have a prospect of doubling his Wealth and

Honours, if crowned with Success? What Demonstration has he

given of being so entirely devoted to the Lord? He has a

vast many Talents,--is it an easy thing for so Wise a man

to become a Fool for Christ? so great a man to become a

Little Child? so rich a man to crowd in at the Strait Gate

of Conversion, and make so little noise?... If you see good

to encourage the Expedition, be fully satisfy'd the project

was formed in Heaven. Was the Lord first consulted in the

affair? Did they wait for his Counsell?"

 

John Woolman, the New Jersey Quaker (born in 1720, died in 1772),

said,--

 

"There is a principle which is pure, placed in the

human mind, which, in different places and ages hath

had different names; it is, however, pure, and proceeds

from God. It is deep and inward, confined to no forms of

religion, nor excluded from any, when the heart stands in

perfect sincerity. In whomsoever this takes root and grows,

they become brethren. That state in which every motion from

the selfish spirit yieldeth to pure love, I may acknowledge

with gratitude to the Father of Mercies, is often opened

before me as a pearl to seek after."[7]

 

That even the pious egotism and the laughable vagaries of

Transcendentalism had their prototype in the private meditations of

the New England Calvinists, is well known to such as have studied old

diaries of the Massachusetts ministers. Thus, a minister of Malden

(a successor of the awful Michael Wigglesworth, whose alleged poem,

"The Day of Doom," as Cotton Mather thought, might perhaps "find our

children till the Day itself arrives"), in his diary for 1735, thus

enters his trying experiences with a "one-horse Shay," whose short

life may claim comparison with that of the hundred-year master-piece of Dr. Holmes's deacon:--