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 river-shallows, one of which heaps will sometimes 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 microscrope, heard as with eartrumpet, 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, 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." 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 1 Emerson's Biographical Sketch. method which he took was pretty sure to 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. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden were the only writings of Thoreau published in his lifetime. He printed contributions to the magazines from time to time, and out of these and his manuscripts have been gathered eight other volumes, Excursions in Field and Forest, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, Letters to Various Persons, A Yankee in Canada, Early Spring in Massachusetts, Summer, and Winter. To Excursions was prefixed a biographical sketch by R. W. Emerson, which gives one a very vivid portrait of this unique man. Cape Cod, which is the record of a walk taken the length of the Cape, and Walden are likely to remain as the most finished and agreeable of Thoreau's books. All of his writings, however, will be searched for the evidence which they give of a mind singular for its independence, its resolute confronting of the problems of life, its insight into nature, its isolation, and its waywardness. I. I DID not read books the first summer; I hoed beans. Nay, I often did better than this. There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. For the most part I minded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished. Instead of singing like the birds, I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune. As the sparrow had its trill, sitting on the hickory before my door, so had I my chuckle or suppressed warble which he might hear out of my nest. My days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock; for I live like the Puri Indians, of whom it is said that "for yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow they have only one word, and they express the variety of meaning by pointing backward for yesterday, forward for to-morrow, and overhead for the passing day." This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting. A man must find his occasions in himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence. I had this advantage, at least, in my mode of life over those who were obliged to look abroad for amusement, to society and the theatre, that my life itself was become my amusement and never ceased to be novel. It was a drama of many scenes and without an end. If we were always indeed getting our living, and regulating our lives according to the last and best mode we had learned, we should never be troubled with ennui. Follow your genius closely enough and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour. Housework was a pleasant pastime. When my floor was dirty, I rose early, and, setting all my furniture out of doors on the grass, bed and bedstead making but one budget, dashed water on the floor, and sprinkled white sand from the pond on it, and then with a broom scrubbed it clean and white; and by the time the villagers had broken their fast, the morning sun had dried my house sufficiently to allow me to move in again, and my meditations were almost unin |
