THE WALDEN HERMITAGE.
It is by his two years' encampment on the shore of a small lake in
the Walden woods, a mile south of Concord village, that Thoreau is
best known to the world; and the book which relates how he lived and
what he saw there is still, as it always was, the most popular of his
writings. Like all his books, it contains much that might as well have
been written on any other subject; but it also describes charmingly
the scenes and events of his sylvan life,--his days and nights with
Nature. He spent two years and a half in this retreat, though often
coming forth from it.
The localities of Concord which Thoreau immortalized were chiefly
those in the neighborhood of some lake or stream,--though it would be
hard to find in that well-watered town, especially in springtime, any
place which is not neighbor either to the nine-times circling river
Musketaquid, to the swifter Assabet,
"That like an arrowe clear
Through Troy rennest aie downward to the sea,"--
to Walden or White Pond, to Bateman's Pond, to the Mill Brook, the
Sanguinetto, the Nut-Meadow, or the Second Division Brook. All these
waters and more are renowned again and again in Thoreau's books. Like
Icarus, the ancient high-flyer, he tried his fortune upon many a
river, fiord, streamlet, and broad sea,--
"Where still the shore his brave attempt resounds."
He gave beauty and dignity to obscure places by his mention of them;
and it is curious that the neighborhood of Walden,--now the most
romantic and poetical region of Concord, associated in every mind with
this tender lover of Nature, and his worship of her,--was anciently
a place of dark repute, the home of pariahs and lawless characters,
such as fringed the sober garment of many a New England village in
Puritanic times.
Close by Walden is Brister's Hill, where, in the early days of
emancipation in Massachusetts, the newly freed slaves of Concord
magnates took up their abode,--
"The wrathful kings on cairns apart,"
as Ossian says. Here dwelt Cato Ingraham, freedman of 'Squire Duncan
Ingraham, who, when yet a slave in his master's backyard, on the day
of Concord fight, was brought to a halt by the fierce Major Pitcairn,
then something the worse for 'Squire Ingraham's wine, and ordered to
"lay down his arms and disperse," as the rebels at Lexington had been
six hours earlier. Here also abode Zilpha, a black Circe, who spun
linen, and made the Walden Woods resound with her shrill singing:--
"Dives inaccessos ubi Solis filia lucos
Assiduo resonat cantu, tectisque superbis
Urit odoratam nocturna in lumina cedrum,
Arguto tenues percurrens pectine telas."
But some paroled English prisoners in the War of 1812, burnt down her
proud abode, with its imprisoned cat and dog and hens, while Zilpha
was absent. Down the road towards the village from Cato's farm and
Zilpha's musical loom and wheel, lived Brister Freeman, who gave his
name to the hill,--Scipio Brister, "a handy negro," once the slave of
'Squire Cummings, but long since emancipated, and in Thoreau's boyhood
set free again by death, and buried in an old Lincoln graveyard, near
the ancestor of President Garfield, but still nearer the unmarked
graves of British grenadiers, who fell in the retreat from Concord.
With this Scipio Africanus Brister Libertinus, in the edge of the
Walden Woods, "dwelt Fenda, his hospitable wife, who told fortunes,
yet pleasantly--large, round, and black,--such a dusky orb as never
rose on Concord, before or since," says Thoreau. Such was the African
colony on the south side of Concord village among the woods, while
on the northern edge of the village, along the Great Meadows, there
dwelt another colony, headed by Cæsar Robbins, whose descendants still
flit about the town. Older than all was the illustrious Guinea negro,
John Jack, once a slave on the farm which is now the glebe of the Old
Manse, but who purchased his freedom about the time the Old Manse was
built in 1765-66. He survives in his quaint epitaph, written by Daniel
Bliss, the young Tory brother of the first mistress of the manse
(Mrs. William Emerson, grandmother of Emerson, the poet):--
"_God wills us free, Man wills us slaves,
I will as God wills: God's will be done._
Here lies the body of
JOHN JACK,
A native of Africa, who died
March, 1773, aged about sixty years.
Though born in a land of slavery,
He was born free;
Though he lived in a land of liberty,
He lived a slave;
Till by his honest though stolen labors
He acquired the source of slavery
Which gave him his freedom;
Though not long before
Death the grand tyrant
Gave him his final emancipation,
And put him on a footing with kings.
Though a slave to vice,
He practised those virtues
Without which kings are but slaves."
This epitaph, and the anecdote already given concerning Cæsar Robbins,
may illustrate the humanity and humor with which the freedmen of
Concord were regarded, while an adventure of Scipio Brister's, in his
early days of freedom, may show the mixture of savage fun and contempt
that also followed them, and which some of their conduct may have
deserved.
The village drover and butcher once had a ferocious bull to kill, and
when he had succeeded with some difficulty in driving him into his
slaughter-house, on the Walden road, nobody was willing to go in and
kill him. Just then Brister Freeman, from his hill near Walden, came
along the road, and was slyly invited by the butcher to go into the
slaughter-house for an axe,--being told that when he brought it he
should have a job to do. The unsuspecting freedman opened the door
and walked in; it was shut behind him, and he found the bull drawn up
in line of battle before him. After some pursuit and retreat in the
narrow arena, Brister spied the axe he wanted, and began attacking
his pursuer, giving him a blow here or there as he had opportunity.
His employers outside watched the bull-fight through a hole in the
building, and cheered on the matador with shouts and laughter. At
length, by a fortunate stroke, the African conquered, the bull fell,
and his slayer threw down the axe and rushed forth unhurt. But his
tormentors declared "he was no longer the dim, sombre negro he went
in, but literally white with terror, and what was once his wool
straightened out and standing erect on his head." Without waiting to
be identified, or to receive pay for his work, Brister, affrighted and
wrathful, withdrew to the wooded hill and to the companionship of his
fortune-telling Fenda, who had not foreseen the hazard of her spouse.
It was along the same road and down this hill, passing by the town
"poor-farm" and poor-house,--the last retreat of these straggling
soldiers of fortune,--that Thoreau went toward the village jail from
his hermitage, that day in 1846, when the town constable carried him
off from the shoemaker's to whose shop he had gone to get a cobbled
shoe. His room-mate in jail for the single night he slept there, was
introduced to him by the jailer, Mr. Staples (a real name), as "a
first-rate fellow and a clever man," and on being asked by Thoreau why
he was in prison, replied, "Why, they accuse me of burning a barn,
but I never did it." As near as Thoreau could make out, he had gone
to bed in a barn when drunk, and smoked his pipe there. Such were the
former denizens of the Walden woods--votaries of Bacchus and Apollo,
and extremely liable to take fire upon small occasion,--like Giordano
Bruno's sonneteer, who, addressing the Arabian Phenix, says,--
"_Tu bruci 'n un, ed io in ogni loco,
Io da Cupido, hai tu da Febo il foco_."
It seems by the letter of Margaret Fuller in 1841 (cited in chapter
VI.), that Thoreau had for years meditated a withdrawal to a
solitary life. The retreat he then had in view was, doubtless, the
Hollowell Farm, a place, as he says, "of complete retirement, being
about two miles from the village, half a mile from the nearest
neighbor, and separated from the highway by a broad field." The
house stood apart from the road to Nine-Acre Corner, fronting the
Musketaquid on a green hill-side, and was first seen by Thoreau as a
boy, in his earliest voyages up the river to Fairhaven Bay, "concealed
behind a dense grove of red maples, through which I heard the
house-dog bark." This place Thoreau once bought, but released it to
the owner, whose wife refused to sign the deed of sale. In his Walden
venture he was a squatter, using for his house-lot a woodland of Mr.
Emerson's, who, for the sake of his walks and his wood-fire, had
bought land on both sides of Walden Pond.
How early Thoreau formed his plan of retiring to a hut among these
woods, I have not learned; but in a letter written to him March 5,
1845, by his friend Channing, a passage occurs concerning it; and it
was in the latter part of the same month that Thoreau borrowed Mr.
Alcott's axe and went across the fields to cut the timber for his
cabin. Channing writes:--
"I see nothing for you in this earth but that field which
I once christened 'Briars;' go out upon that, build
yourself a hut, and there begin the grand process of
devouring yourself alive. I see no alternative, no other
hope for you. Eat yourself up; you will eat nobody else,
nor anything else. Concord is just as good a place as
any other; there are, indeed, more people in the streets
of that village than in the streets of this." [He was
writing from the Tribune Office, in New York.] "This is
a singularly muddy town; muddy, solitary, and silent. I
saw Teufelsdröckh a few days since; he said a few words
to me about you. Says he, 'That fellow Thoreau might be
something, if he would only take a journey through the
Everlasting No, thence for the North Pole. By G--,' said
the old clothes-bag, warming up, 'I should like to take
that fellow out into the Everlasting No, and explode him
like a bombshell; he would make a loud report; it would be
fun to see him pick himself up. He needs the Blumine flower
business; that would be his salvation. He is too dry, too
composed, too chalky, too concrete. Does that execrable
compound of sawdust and stagnation L. still prose about
nothing? and that nutmeg-grater of a Z. yet shriek about
nothing? Does anybody still think of coming to Concord to
live? I mean new people? If they do, let them beware of you
philosophers.'"
Of course, this imaginary Teufelsdröckh, like Carlyle's, was the
satirical man in the writer himself, suggesting the humorous and
contradictory side of things, and glancing at the coolness of Thoreau,
which his friends sometimes found provoking. In his own person
Channing adds:--
"I should be pleased to hear from Kamchatka occasionally;
my last advices from the Polar Bear are getting stale.
In addition to this I find that my corresponding members
at Van Diemen's Land have wandered into limbo. I hear
occasionally from the World; everything seems to be
promising in that quarter; business is flourishing, and
the people are in good spirits. I feel convinced that the
Earth has less claims to our regard than formerly; these
mild winters deserve severe censure. But I am well aware
that the Earth will talk about the necessity of routine,
taxes, etc. On the whole it is best not to complain without
necessity."
It is well to read this shrewd humor, uttered in the opposite sense
from Thoreau's paradoxical wit in his "Walden," as an introduction
or motto to that book. For Thoreau has been falsely judged from the
wit and the paradox of "Walden," as if he were a hater of men, or
foolishly desired all mankind to retire to the woods. As Channing
said, soon after his friend's death,--
"The fact that our author lived for a while alone in a
shanty, near a pond, and named one of his books after
the place where it stood, has led some to say he was a
barbarian or a misanthrope. It was a writing-case; here in
this wooden inkstand he wrote a good part of his famous
'Walden,' and this solitary woodland pool was more to
his Muse than all oceans of the planet, by the force of
imagination. Some have fancied, because he moved to Walden,
he left his family. He bivouacked there and really lived at
home, where he went every day."
This last is not literally true, for he was sometimes secluded in his
hut for days together; but he remained as social at Walden as he had
been while an inmate of Mr. Emerson's family in 1841-43, or again
in 1847-48, after giving up his hermitage. He, in fact, as he says
himself,--
"Went to the woods because he wished to live deliberately,
to front only the essential facts of life, and see if he
could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when he came
to die, discover that he had not lived."
In another place he says he went to Walden to "transact some private
business," and this he did to good purpose. He edited there his
"Week," some portions of which had appeared in the "Dial" from 1840
to 1844, but which was not published as a volume until 1849, although
he had made many attempts to issue it earlier. It was at Walden,
also, that he wrote his essay on Carlyle, which was first published
in "Graham's Magazine," at Philadelphia, in 1847, through the good
offices of Horace Greeley, of which we shall hear more in the next
chapter.
Thoreau's hermit life was not, then, merely a protest against the
luxury and the restraints of society, nor yet an austere discipline
such as monks and saints have imposed upon themselves for their souls'
good. "My purpose in going to Walden was not to live cheaply, nor to
live dearly there, but to transact some private business with the
fewest obstacles." He lived a life of labor and study in his hut.
Emerson says, "as soon as he had exhausted the advantages of that
solitude, he abandoned it." He had edited his first book there; had
satisfied himself that he was fit to be an author, and had passed his
first examinations; then he graduated from that gymnasium as another
young student might from the medical college or the polytechnic
school. "I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there."
His abandoned hut was then taken by a Scotch gardener, Hugh Whelan
by name, who removed it some rods away, to the midst of Thoreau's
bean-field, and made it his cottage for a few years. Then it was
bought by a farmer, who put it on wheels and carried it three miles
northward, toward the entry of the Estabrook Farm on the old Carlisle
road, where it stood till after Thoreau's death,--a shelter for corn
and beans, and a favorite haunt of squirrels and blue jays. The
wood-cut representing the hermitage in the first edition of "Walden,"
is from a sketch made by Sophia Thoreau, and is more exact than that
given in Page's "Life of Thoreau," but in neither picture are the
trees accurately drawn.
On the spot where Thoreau lived at Walden there is now a cairn of
stones, yearly visited by hundreds, and growing in height as each
friend of his muse adds a stone from the shore of the fair water he
loved so well.
"Beat with thy paddle on the boat
Midway the lake,--the wood repeats
The ordered blow; the echoing note
Is ended in thy ear; yet its retreats
Conceal Time's possibilities;
And in this Man the nature lies
Of woods so green,
And lakes so sheen,
And hermitages edged between.
And I may tell you that the Man was good,
Never did his neighbor harm,--
Sweet was it where he stood,
Sunny and warm;
Like the seat beneath a pine
That winter suns have cleared away
With their yellow tine,--
Red-cushioned and tasseled with the day."
The events and thoughts of Thoreau's life at Walden may be read in
his book of that name. As a protest against society, that life was
ineffectual,--as the communities at Brook Farm and Fruitlands had
proved to be; and as the Fourierite phalansteries, in which Horace
Greeley interested himself, were destined to be. In one sense, all
these were failures; but in Thoreau's case the failure was slight, the
discipline and experience gained were invaluable. He never regretted
it, and the Walden episode in his career has made him better known
than anything else.