Henry D. Thoreau 28

Henry D. Thoreau 28

"In unploughed Maine he sought the lumberers' gang,

Where from a hundred lakes young rivers sprang;

He trod the unplanted forest-floor, whereon

The all-seeing sun for ages hath not shone;

Where feeds the moose and walks the surly bear,

And up the tall mast runs the woodpecker.

He saw beneath dim aisles, in odorous beds,

The slight Linnæa hang its twin-born heads,

And blessed the monument of the man of flowers,

Which breathes his sweet fame through the northern bowers.

He heard, when in the grove, at intervals

With sudden roar the aged pine-tree falls,--

One crash, the death-hymn of the perfect tree,

Declares the close of its green century.

 

* * * * *

 

Through these green tents, by eldest Nature dressed,

He roamed, content alike with man and beast,

Where darkness found him he lay glad at night;

There the red morning touched him with its light.

Three moons his great heart him a hermit made,

So long he roved at will the boundless shade."

 

Thus much is a picture of the Maine forests, and may have been

suggested in part by the woodland life of Dr. Jackson there while

surveying the State. But what follows is the brave proclamation of the

poet, for himself and his heroes, among whom Thoreau and John Brown

must be counted, since it declares their creed and practice,--while in

the last couplet the whole inner doctrine of Transcendentalism is set

forth:--

 

"The timid it concerns to ask their way,

And fear what foes in caves and swamps can stray,

To make no step until the event is known,

And ills to come as evils past bemoan.

Not so the wise: no timid watch he keeps

To spy what danger on his pathway creeps;

Go where he will the wise man is at home,

His hearth the earth, his hall the azure dome;

Where his clear spirit leads him, there's his road,

By God's own light illumined and foreshowed."

 

Thoreau may have heard these verses read by their author in his study,

before he set forth on his first journey to Maine in 1838; they were

first published in the "Dial" in October, 1840, but are omitted, for

some reason, in a partial edition of Emerson's Poems (in 1876). He

never complied with this description so far as to spend three months

in the Maine woods, even in the three campaigns which he made there

(in 1846, in 1853, and in 1857), for in none of these did he occupy

three weeks, and in all but little more than a month. His account of

them, as now published, makes a volume by itself, which his friend

Channing edited two years after Thoreau's death, and which contains

the fullest record of his studies of the American Indian. It was

his purpose to develop these studies into a book concerning the

Indian, and for this purpose he made endless readings in the Jesuit

Fathers, in books of travel, and in all the available literature of

the subject. But the papers he had thus collected were not left in

such form that they could be published; and so much of his untiring

diligence seems now lost, almost thrown away. Doubtless his friends

and editors, upon call, will one day print detached portions of these

studies, from entries in his journals, and from his commonplace books.

 

In his explorations of Concord and its vicinity, as well as in those

longer foot-journeys which he took among the mountains and along the

sea-shore of New England, from 1838 to 1860, Thoreau's habits were

those of an experienced hunter, though he seldom used a gun in his

years of manhood. Upon this point he says in "Walden":--

 

"Almost every New England boy among my contemporaries

shouldered a fowling-piece between the ages of ten and

fourteen; and his hunting and fishing grounds were not

limited, like the preserves of an English nobleman, but

were more boundless than even those of the savage. Perhaps

I have owed to fishing and hunting, when quite young, my

closest acquaintance with Nature. They early introduce

us to and detain us in scenery with which, otherwise, at

that age, we should have little acquaintance. Fishermen,

hunters, wood-choppers, and others, spending their lives

in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of

Nature themselves, are often in a more favorable mood

for observing her, in the intervals of their pursuits,

than philosophers or poets, even, who approach her with

expectation. She is not afraid to exhibit herself to

them.... I have actually fished from the same kind of

necessity that the first fishers did. I have long felt

differently about fowling, and sold my gun before I went

to the woods. I did not pity the fishes nor the worms. As

for fowling, during the last years that I carried a gun my

excuse was that I was studying ornithology, and sought only

new or rare birds. But I am now inclined to think there is

a finer way of studying ornithology than this. It requires

so much closer attention to the habits of the birds that,

if for that reason only, I have been willing to omit the

gun.... We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a

gun; he is no more humane, while his education has been

sadly neglected."

 

Emerson mentions that Thoreau preferred his spy-glass to his gun to

bring the bird nearer to his eye, and says also of his patience in

out-door observation:--

 

"He knew how to sit immovable, a part of the rock he

rested on, until the bird, the reptile, the fish, which

had retired from him, should come back and resume its

habits,--nay, moved by curiosity, should come to him and

watch him."

 

And I have thought that Emerson had Thoreau in mind when he described

his "Forester":--

 

"He took the color of his vest

From rabbit's coat or grouse's breast;

For as the wood-kinds lurk and hide,

So walks the woodman unespied."

 

The same friend said of him:--

 

"It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him. He

knew the country like a fox or bird, and passed through it

as freely by paths of his own. Under his arm he carried

an old music-book to press plants;[12] 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 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, 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. He confessed that he sometimes felt like a hound

or a panther, and, if born among Indians, would have been a

fell hunter. But, restrained by his Massachusetts culture,

he played out the game in the mild form of botany and

ichthyology. 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 order and glory in

his mind, a type of the order and beauty of the whole."

 

It was this poetic and coördinating vision of the natural world which

distinguished Thoreau from the swarm of naturalists, and raised him

to the rank of a philosopher even in his tedious daily observations.

Channing, no less than Emerson, has observed and noted this trait,

giving to his friend the exact title of "poet-naturalist," and also,

in his poem, "The Wanderer," bestowing on him the queer name of

_Idolon_, which he thus explains:--

 

"So strangely was the general current mixed

With his vexed native blood in its crank wit,

That as a mirror shone the common world

To this observing youth,--whom noting, thence

I called _Idolon_,--ever firm to mark

Swiftly reflected in himself the Whole."

 

In an earlier poem Channing had called him "Rudolpho," and had thus

portrayed his daily and nightly habits of observation:--

 

"I see Rudolpho cross our honest fields

Collapsed with thought, and as the Stagyrite

At intellectual problems, mastering

Day after day part of the world's concern.

Nor welcome dawns nor shrinking nights him menace,

Still adding to his list beetle and bee,--

Of what the vireo builds a pensile nest,

And why the peetweet drops her giant egg

In wheezing meadows, odorous with sweet brake.

Who wonders that the flesh declines to grow

Along his sallow pits? or that his life,

To social pleasure careless, pines away

In dry seclusion and unfruitful shade?

I must admire thy brave apprenticeship

To those dry forages, although the worldling

Laugh in his sleeve at thy compelled devotion.

So shalt thou learn, Rudolpho, as thou walk'st,

More from the winding lanes where Nature leaves

Her unaspiring creatures, and surpass

In some fine saunter her acclivity."

 

The hint here given that Thoreau injured his once robust health by

his habits of out-door study and the hardships he imposed on himself,

had too much truth in it. Growing up with great strength of body and

limb, and having cultivated his physical advantages by a temperate

youth much exercised with manual labor, in which he took pleasure,

Thoreau could not learn the lesson of moderation in those pursuits

to which his nature inclined. He exposed himself in his journeys

and night encampments to cold and hunger, and changes of weather,

which the strongest cannot brave with impunity. Mr. Edward Hoar, who

traveled with him in the Maine woods in 1857,--a journey of three

hundred and twenty-five miles with a canoe and an Indian, among the

head-waters of the Kennebec, Penobscot, and St. John's rivers,--and

who in 1858 visited the White Mountains with him, remembers, with a

shiver to this day, the rigor of a night spent on the bare rocks of

Mount Washington, with insufficient blankets,--Thoreau sleeping from

habit, but himself lying wakeful all night, and gazing at the coldest

of full moons. It was after such an experience as this on Monadnoc,

whither Thoreau and Channing went to camp out for a week in August, 1860, that the latter wrote: