“Now chiefly is my natal hour,
And only now my prime of life;
I will not doubt the love untold,
Which not my worth or want hath bought,
Which wooed me young, and wooes me old,
And to this evening hath me brought.”
Whilst he used in his writings a certain petulance of remark in
reference to churches or churchmen, he was a person of a rare, tender,
and absolute religion, a person incapable of any profanation, by act or
by thought. Of course, the same isolation which belonged to his
original thinking and living detached him from the social religious
forms. This is neither to be censured nor regretted. Aristotle long ago
explained it, when he said, “One who surpasses his fellow-citizens in
virtue is no longer a part of the city. Their law is not for him, since
he is a law to himself.”
Thoreau was sincerity itself, and might fortify the convictions of
prophets in the ethical laws by his holy living. It was an affirmative
experience which refused to be set aside. A truth-speaker he, capable
of the most deep and strict conversation; a physician to the wounds of
any soul; a friend, knowing not only the secret of friendship, but
almost worshipped by those few persons who resorted to him as their
confessor and prophet, and knew the deep value of his mind and great
heart. He thought that without religion or devotion of some kind
nothing great was ever accomplished: and he thought that the bigoted
sectarian had better bear this in mind.
His virtues, of course, sometimes ran into extremes. It was easy to
trace to the inexorable demand on all for exact truth that austerity
which made this willing hermit more solitary even than he wished.
Himself of a perfect probity, he required not less of others. He had a
disgust at crime, and no worldly success could cover it. He detected
paltering as readily in dignified and prosperous persons as in beggars,
and with equal scorn. Such dangerous frankness was in his dealing that
his admirers called him “that terrible Thoreau,” as if he spoke when
silent, and was still present when he had departed. I think the
severity of his ideal interfered to deprive him of a healthy
sufficiency of human society.
The habit of a realist to find things the reverse of their appearance
inclined him to put every statement in a paradox. A certain habit of
antagonism defaced his earlier writings,—a trick of rhetoric not quite
outgrown in his later, of substituting for the obvious word and thought
its diametrical opposite. He praised wild mountains and winter forests
for their domestic air, in snow and ice he would find sultriness, and
commended the wilderness for resembling Rome and Paris. “It was so dry,
that you might call it wet.”
The tendency to magnify the moment, to read all the laws of Nature in
the one object or one combination under your eye, is of course comic to
those who do not share the philosopher’s perception of identity. To him
there was no such thing as size. The pond was a small ocean; the
Atlantic, a large Walden Pond. He referred every minute fact to
cosmical laws. Though he meant to be just, he seemed haunted by a
certain chronic assumption that the science of the day pretended
completeness, and he had just found out that the _savans_ had neglected
to discriminate a particular botanical variety, had failed to describe
the seeds or count the sepals. “That is to say,” we replied, “the
blockheads were not born in Concord; but who said they were? It was
their unspeakable misfortune to be born in London, or Paris, or Rome;
but, poor fellows, they did what they could, considering that they
never saw Bateman’s Pond, or Nine-Acre Corner, or Becky-Stow’s Swamp.
Besides, what were you sent into the world for, but to add this
observation?”
Had his genius been only contemplative, he had been fitted to his life,
but with his energy and practical ability he seemed born for great
enterprise and for command; and I so much regret the loss of his rare
powers of action, that I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he
had no ambition. Wanting this, instead of engineering for all America,
he was the captain of a huckleberry party. Pounding beans is good to
the end of pounding empires one of these days; but if, at the end of
years, it is still only beans!
But these foibles, real or apparent, were fast vanishing in the
incessant growth of a spirit so robust and wise, and which effaced its
defeats with new triumphs. His study of Nature was a perpetual ornament
to him, and inspired his friends with curiosity to see the world
through his eyes, and to hear his adventures. They possessed every kind
of interest.
He had many elegances of his own, whilst he scoffed at conventional
elegance. Thus, he could not bear to hear the sound of his own steps,
the grit of gravel; and therefore never willingly walked in the road,
but in the grass, on mountains and in woods. His senses were acute, and
he remarked that by night every dwelling-house gives out bad air, like
a slaughter-house. He liked the pure fragrance of melilot. He honored
certain plants with special regard, and, over all, the pond-lily,—then,
the gentian, and the _Mikania scandens_, and “life-everlasting,” and a
bass-tree which he visited every year when it bloomed, in the middle of
July. He thought the scent a more oracular inquisition than the
sight,—more oracular and trustworthy. The scent, of course, reveals
what is concealed from the other senses. By it he detected earthiness.
He delighted in echoes, and said they were almost the only kind of
kindred voices that he heard. He loved Nature so well, was so happy in
her solitude, that he became very jealous of cities, and the sad work
which their refinements and artifices made with man and his dwelling.
The axe was always destroying his forest. “Thank God,” he said, “they
cannot cut down the clouds!” “All kinds of figures are drawn on the
blue ground with this fibrous white paint.”
I subjoin a few sentences taken from his unpublished manuscripts, not
only as records of his thought and feeling, but for their power of
description and literary excellence.
“Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout
in the milk.”
“The chub is a soft fish, and tastes like boiled brown paper salted.”
“The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon,
or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and at length the
middle-aged man concludes to built a wood-shed with them.”
“The locust z-ing.”
“Devil’s-needles zigzagging along the Nut-Meadow brook.”
“Sugar is not so sweet to the palate as sound to the healthy ear.”
“I put on some hemlock-boughs, and the rich salt crackling of their
leaves was like mustard to the ear, the crackling of uncountable
regiments. Dead trees love the fire.”
“The bluebird carries the sky on his back.”
“The tanager flies through the green foliage as if it would ignite the
leaves.”
“If I wish for a horse-hair for my compass-sight, I must go to the
stable; but the hair-bird, with her sharp eyes, goes to the road.”
“Immortal water, alive even to the superficies.”
“Fire is the most tolerable third party.”
“Nature made ferns for pure leaves, to show what she could do in that
line.”
“No tree has so fair a bole and so handsome an instep as the beech.”
“How did these beautiful rainbow-tints get into the shell of the
fresh-water clam, buried in the mud at the bottom of our dark river?”
“Hard are the times when the infant’s shoes are second-foot.”
“We are strictly confined to our men to whom we give liberty.”
“Nothing is so much to be feared as fear. Atheism may comparatively be
popular with God himself.”
“Of what significance the things you can forget? A little thought is
sexton to all the world.”
“How can we expect a harvest of thought who have not had a seed-time of
character?”
“Only he can be trusted with gifts who can present a face of bronze to
expectations.”
“I ask to be melted. You can only ask of the metals that they be tender
to the fire that melts them. To nought else can they be tender.”
There is a flower known to botanists, one of the same genus with our
summer plant called “Life-Everlasting,” a _Gnaphalium_ like that, which
grows on the most inaccessible cliffs of the Tyrolese mountains, where
the chamois dare hardly venture, and which the hunter, tempted by its
beauty, and by his love, (for it is immensely valued by the Swiss
maidens,) climbs the cliffs to gather, and is sometimes found dead at
the foot, with the flower in his hand. It is called by botanists the
_Gnaphalium leontopodium_, but by the Swiss _Edelweisse_, which
signifies _Noble Purity_. Thoreau seemed to me living in the hope to
gather this plant, which belonged to him of right. The scale on which
his studies proceeded was so large as to require longevity, and we were
the less prepared for his sudden disappearance. The country knows not
yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost. It seems an
injury that he should leave in the midst his broken task, which none
else can finish,—a kind of indignity to so noble a soul, that it should
depart out of Nature before yet he has been really shown to his peers
for what he is. But he, at least, is content. His soul was made for the
noblest society; he had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of
this world; wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue,
wherever there is beauty, he will find a home.