Henry D. Thoreau 32

Henry D. Thoreau 32

During his first residence at Mr. Emerson's in 1841-43, Thoreau

managed the garden and did other hand-work for his friend; and when

Mr. Emerson went to England in 1847, he returned to the house (soon

after leaving his Walden hut), and took charge of his friend's

household affairs in his absence. In a letter to his sister Sophia

(October 24, 1847), Thoreau says:--

 

"... I went to Boston the 5th of this month to see Mr.

Emerson off to Europe. He sailed in the 'Washington Irving'

packet ship, the same in which Mr. Hedge went before him.

Up to this trip, the first mate aboard this ship was, as

I hear, one Stephens, a Concord boy, son of Stephens, the

carpenter, who used to live above Mr. Dennis. Mr. Emerson's

state-room was like a carpeted dark closet, about six feet

square, with a large keyhole for a window (the window

was about as big as a saucer, and the glass two inches

thick), not to mention another skylight overhead in the

deck, of the size of an oblong doughnut, and about as

opaque. Of course, it would be in vain to look up, if any

contemplative promenader put his foot upon it. Such will be

his lodgings for two or three weeks; and instead of a walk

in Walden woods, he will take a promenade on deck, where

the few trees, you know, are stripped of their bark."

 

There is a poem of Thoreau's, of uncertain date, called "The

Departure," which, as I suppose, expresses his emotions at leaving

finally, in 1848, the friendly house of Emerson, where he had dwelt

so long, upon terms of such ideal intimacy. It was never seen by his

friends, so far as I can learn, until after his death, when Sophia

Thoreau gave it to me, along with other poems, for publication in

the "Boston Commonwealth," in 1863. Since then it has been mentioned

as a poem written in anticipation of death. This is not so; it was

certainly written long before his illness.

 

"In this roadstead I have ridden,

In this covert I have hidden:

Friendly thoughts were cliffs to me,

And I hid beneath their lee.

 

"This true people took the stranger,

And warm-hearted housed the ranger;

They received their roving guest,

And have fed him with the best;

 

"Whatsoe'er the land afforded

To the stranger's wish accorded,--

Shook the olive, stripped the vine,

And expressed the strengthening wine.

 

"And by night they did spread o'er him

What by day they spread before him;

That good will which was repast

Was his covering at last.

 

"The stranger moored him to their pier

Without anxiety or fear;

By day he walked the sloping land,--

By night the gentle heavens he scanned.

 

"When first his bark stood inland

To the coast of that far Finland,

Sweet-watered brooks came tumbling to the shore,

The weary mariner to restore.

 

"And still he stayed from day to day,

If he their kindness might repay;

But more and more

The sullen waves came rolling toward the shore.

 

"And still, the more the stranger waited,

The less his argosy was freighted;

And still the more he stayed,

The less his debt was paid.

 

"So he unfurled his shrouded mast

To receive the fragrant blast,--

And that same refreshing gale

Which had woo'd him to remain

Again and again;--

It was that filled his sail

And drove him to the main.

 

"All day the low hung clouds

Dropped tears into the sea,

And the wind amid the shrouds

Sighed plaintively."

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER XII.

 

POET, MORALIST, AND PHILOSOPHER.

 

 

The character of poet is so high and so rare, in any modern

civilization, and specially in our American career of nationality,

that it behooves us to mark and claim all our true poets, before

they are classified under some other name,--as philosophers,

naturalists, romancers, or historians. Thus Emerson is primarily

and chiefly a poet, and only a philosopher in his second intention;

and thus also Thoreau, though a naturalist by habit, and a moralist

by constitution, was inwardly a poet by force of that shaping and

controlling imagination, which was his strongest faculty. His mind

tended naturally to the ideal side. He would have been an idealist in

any circumstances; a fluent and glowing poet, had he been born among

a people to whom poesy is native, like the Greeks, the Italians, the

Irish. As it was, his poetic light illumined every wide prospect and

every narrow cranny in which his active, patient spirit pursued its

task. It was this inward illumination as well as the star-like beam

of Emerson's genius in "Nature," which caused Thoreau to write in his

senior year at college, "This curious world which we inhabit is more

wonderful than it is convenient; more beautiful than it is useful,"

and he cherished this belief through life. In youth, too, he said,

"The other world is all my art, my pencils will draw no other, my

jack-knife will cut nothing else; I do not use it as a means." It was

in this spirit that he afterwards uttered the quaint parable, which

was his version of the primitive legend of the Golden Age:--

 

"I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove,

and am still on their trail. Many are the travelers I have

spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what

calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard

the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the

dove disappear behind the cloud; and they seemed as anxious

to recover them as if they had lost them themselves."

 

In the same significance read his little-known verses, "The Pilgrims."

 

"When I have slumbered

I have heard sounds

As of travelers passing

These my grounds.

 

"'T was a sweet music

Wafted them by,

I could not tell

If afar off or nigh.

 

"Unless I dreamed it

This was of yore;

I never told it

To mortal before.

 

"Never remembered

But in my dreams,

What to me waking

A miracle seems."

 

It seems to have been the habit of Thoreau, in writing verse, to

compose a couplet, a quatrain, or other short metrical __EXPRESSION__,

copy it in his journal, and afterward, when these verses had grown to

a considerable number, to arrange them in the form of a single piece.

This gives to his poems the epigrammatic air which most of them have.

After he was thirty years old, he wrote scarcely any verse, and he

even destroyed much that he had previously written, following in this

the judgment of Mr. Emerson, rather than his own, as he told me one

day during his last illness. He had read all that was best in English

and in Greek poetry, but was more familiar with the English poets of

Milton's time and earlier, than with those more recent, except his own

townsmen and companions. He valued Milton above Shakespeare, and had

a special love for Æschylus, two of whose tragedies he translated. He

had read Pindar, Simonides, and the Greek Anthology, and wrote, at his

best, as well as the finest of the Greek lyric poets. Even Emerson,

who was a severe critic of his verses, says, "His classic poem on

'Smoke' suggests Simonides, but is better than any poem of Simonides."

Indeed, what Greek would not be proud to claim this fragment as his

own?

 

"Light winged smoke, Icarian bird!

Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight,

Lark without song, and messenger of dawn,--

 

* * * * *

 

Go thou, my incense, upward from this hearth,

And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame."

 

No complete collection of Thoreau's poems has ever been made. Amid

much that is harsh and crude, such a book would contain many verses

sure to survive for centuries.

 

As a moralist, the bent of Thoreau is more clearly seen by most

readers; and on this side, too, he was early and strongly charged. In

a college essay of 1837 are these sentences:--

 

"Truth neither exalteth nor humbleth herself. She is not

too high for the low, nor yet too low for the high. She is

persuasive, not litigious, leaving conscience to decide.

She never sacrificeth her dignity that she may secure for

herself a favorable reception. It is not a characteristic

of Truth to use men tenderly; nor is she overanxious about

appearances."

 

In another essay of the same year he wrote:--

 

"The order of things should be reversed: the seventh should

be man's day of toil, in which to earn his living by the

sweat of his brow, and the other six his Sabbath of the

affections and the soul, in which to range this wide-spread

garden, and drink in the soft influences and sublime

revelations of Nature."

 

This was an anticipation of his theory of labor and leisure set forth

in "Walden," where he says:--

 

"For more than five years I maintained myself solely by the

labor of my hands, and I found that, by working about six

weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living;

the whole of my winters, as well as most of my summers, I

had free and clear for study. I found that the occupation

of day-laborer was the most independent of any, especially

as it required only thirty or forty days in the year to

support one."

 

This was true of Thoreau, because, as he said, his "greatest skill had

been to want but little." In him this economy was a part of morality,

or even of religion.

 

"The high moral impulse," says Channing, "never deserted him, and he

resolved early to read no book, take no walk, undertake no enterprise,

but such as he could endure to give an account of to himself." How

early this austerity appeared in what he wrote, has been little

noticed; but I discover it in his earliest college essays, before he

was eighteen years old. Thus, in such a paper of the year 1834, this passage occurs: