IN WOOD AND FIELD.
Except the Indians themselves, whose wood-craft he never tires of
celebrating, few Americans were ever more at home in the open air than
Thoreau; not even his friend John Brown, who, like himself, suggested
the Indian by the delicacy of his perceptions and his familiarity with
all that goes forward, or stands still, in wood and field. Thoreau
could find his path in the woods at night, he said, better by his feet
than his eyes.
"He was a good swimmer," says Emerson, "a good runner,
skater, boatman, and would outwalk most countrymen in a
day's journey. And the relation of body to mind was still
finer. The length of his walk uniformly made the length of
his writing. If shut up in the house, he did not write at
all."
In his last illness says Channing,--
"His habit of engrossing his thoughts in a journal, which
had lasted for a quarter of a century,--his out-door life,
of which he used to say, if he omitted that, all his living
ceased,--this now became so incontrovertibly a thing of the
past that he said once, standing at the window, 'I cannot
see on the outside at all. We thought ourselves great
philosophers in those wet days when we used to go out and
sit down by the wall-sides.' This was absolutely all he was
ever heard to say of that outward world during his illness,
neither could a stranger in the least infer that he had
ever a friend in field or wood."
This out-door life began as early as he could recollect, and his
special attraction to rivers, woods, and lakes was a thing of his
boyhood. He had begun to collect Indian relics before leaving college,
and was a diligent student of natural history there. Whether he was
naturally an observer or not (which has been denied in a kind of
malicious paradox), let his life-work attest. Early in 1847 he made
some collections of fishes, turtles, etc., in Concord for Agassiz,
then newly arrived in America, and I have (in a letter of May 3, 1847)
this account of their reception:--
"I carried them immediately to Mr. Agassiz, who was
highly delighted with them. Some of the species he had
seen before, but never in so fresh condition. Others, as
the breams and the pout, he had seen only in spirits, and
the little turtle he knew only from the books. I am sure
you would have felt fully repaid for your trouble, if
you could have seen the eager satisfaction with which he
surveyed each fin and scale. He said the small mud-turtle
was really a very rare species, quite distinct from the
snapping-turtle. The breams and pout seemed to please the
Professor very much. He would gladly come up to Concord to
make a spearing excursion, as you suggested, but is drawn
off by numerous and pressing engagements."
On the 27th of May, Thoreau's correspondent says:--
"Mr. Agassiz was very much surprised and pleased at the
extent of the collections you sent during his absence; the
little fox he has established in comfortable quarters in
his backyard, where he is doing well. Among the fishes you
sent there is one, probably two, new species."
June 1st, in other collections, other new species were discovered,
much to Agassiz's delight, who never failed afterward to cultivate
Thoreau's society when he could. But the poet avoided the man of
science, having no love for dissection; though he recognized in
Agassiz the qualities that gave him so much distinction.
The paper on "Ktaadn and the Maine Woods," which Horace Greeley
bought "at a Jew's bargain," and sold to a publisher for seventy-five
dollars, was the journal of a visit made to the highest mountain of
Maine during Thoreau's second summer at Walden. An aunt of his had
married in Bangor, Maine, and her daughters had again married there,
so that the young forester of Concord had kinsmen on the Penobscot,
engaged in converting the Maine forests into pine lumber. At the end
of August, in 1846, while his Carlyle manuscript was passing from
Greeley to Griswold, from Griswold to Graham, and from Graham to
the Philadelphia type-setters, Thoreau himself was on his way from
Boston to Bangor; and on the first day of September he started with
his cousin from Bangor, to explore the upper waters of the Penobscot
and climb the summit of Ktaadn. The forest region about this mountain
had been explored in 1837 by Dr. Jackson, the State Geologist, a
brother-in-law of Mr. Emerson; but no poet before Thoreau had visited
these solitudes and described his experiences there. James Russell
Lowell did so a few years later, and, early in the century, Hawthorne,
Longfellow, and Emerson had tested the solitude of the Maine woods,
and written about them. The verses of Emerson, describing his own
experiences there (not so well known as they should be), are often
thought to imply Thoreau, though they were written before Emerson had
known his younger friend, whose after adventures they portray with
felicity.
"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:--
"With the night,
Reserved companion, cool and sparsely clad,
Dream, till the threefold hour with lowly voice
Steals whispering in thy frame, 'Rise, valiant youth!
The dawn draws on apace, envious of thee,
And polar in his gait; advance thy limbs,
Nor strive to heat the stones.'"
Thoreau had much scorn for weakness like this, and said of his
comrade, "I fear that he did not improve all the night as he might
have done, to sleep." This was his last excursion, and he died within
less than two years afterward. The account of it which Channing has
given may therefore be read with interest:--
"He ascended such hills as Monadnoc by his own path; would
lay down his map on the summit and draw a line to the point
he proposed to visit below,--perhaps forty miles away on
the landscape, and set off bravely to make the 'shortcut.'
The lowland people wondered to see him scaling the heights
as if he had lost his way, or at his jumping over their
cow-yard fences,--asking if he had fallen from the clouds.
In a walk like this he always carried his umbrella; and
on this Monadnoc trip, when about a mile from the station
(in Troy, N. H.), a torrent of rain came down; without the
umbrella his books, blankets, maps, and provisions would
all have been spoiled, or the morning lost by delay. On
the mountain there being a thick soaking fog, the first
object was to camp and make tea.[13] He spent five nights
in camp, having built another hut, to get varied views.
Flowers, birds, lichens, and the rocks were carefully
examined, all parts of the mountain were visited, and as
accurate a map as could be made by pocket compass was
carefully sketched and drawn out, in the five days spent
there,--with notes of the striking aerial phenomena,
incidents of travel and natural history. The fatigue, the
blazing sun, the face getting broiled, the pint-cup never
scoured, shaving unutterable, your stockings dreary, having
taken to peat,--not all the books in the world, as Sancho
says, could contain the adventures of a week in camping.
The wild, free life, the open air, the new and strange
sounds by night and day, the odd and bewildering rocks,
amid which a person can be lost within a rod of camp; the
strange cries of visitors to the summit; the great valley
over to Wachusett, with its thunder-storms and battles in
the cloud; the farmers' backyards in Jaffrey, where the
family cotton can be seen bleaching on the grass, but no
trace of the pigmy family; the dry, soft air all night,
the lack of dew in the morning; the want of water,--a pint
being a good deal,--these, and similar things make up some
part of such an excursion."
These excursions were common with Thoreau, but less so with Channing,
who therefore, notes down many things that his friend would not think
worth recording, except as a part of that calendar of Nature which he
set himself to keep, and of which his journals, for more than twenty
years, are the record. From these he made up his printed volumes, and
there may be read the details that he registered. He had gauges for
the height of the river, noted the temperature of springs and ponds,
the tints of the morning and evening sky, the flowering and fruit
of plants, all the habits of birds and animals, and every aspect of
nature from the smallest to the greatest. Much of this is the dryest
detail, but everywhere you come upon strokes of beauty, in a single
word-picture, or in a page of idyllic description, like this of the
Concord heifer, which might be a poem of Theocritus, or one of the
lost bucolics of Moschus:--
"One more confiding heifer, the fairest of the herd, did by
degrees approach, as if to take some morsel from our hands,
while our hearts leaped to our mouths with expectation
and delight. She by degrees drew near with her fair limbs
progressive, making pretense of browsing; nearer and nearer
till there was wafted to us the bovine fragrance,--cream of
all the dairies that ever were or will be,--and then she
raised her gentle muzzle toward us, and snuffed an honest
recognition within hand's reach. I saw it was possible for
his herd to inspire with love the herdsman. She was as
delicately featured as a hind; her hide was mingled white
and fawn color; on her muzzle's tip there was a white spot
not bigger than a daisy; and on her side turned toward me
the map of Asia plain to see. Farewell, dear heifer! though
thou forgettest me, my prayer to heaven shall be that thou
may'st not forget thyself.
"I saw her name was Sumach. And by the kindred spots I knew
her mother, more sedate and matronly, with full-grown bag,
and on her sides was Asia, great and small, the plains of
Tartary, even to the pole, while on her daughter's was Asia
Minor. She was not disposed to wanton with the herdsman. As
I walked the heifer followed me, and took an apple from my
hand, and seemed to care more for the hand than the apple.
So innocent a face I have rarely seen on any creature, and
I have looked in the face of many heifers; and as she took
the apple from my hand, I caught the apple of her eye.
There was no sinister expression. She smelled as sweet as
the clethra blossom. For horns, though she had them, they
were so well disposed in the right place, but neither up
nor down, that I do not now remember she had any."
Or take this apostrophe to the "Queen of Night, the Huntress Diana,"
which is not a translation from some Greek worshipper, but the sincere
ascription of a New England hunter of the noblest deer:--
"My dear, my dewy sister, let thy rain descend on me! I not
only love thee, but I love the best of thee,--that is to
love thee rarely. I do not love thee every day--commonly
I love those who are less than thee; I love thee only on
great days. Thy dewy words feed me like the manna of the
morning. I am as much thy sister as thy brother; thou art
as much my brother as my sister. It is a portion of thee
and a portion of me which are of kin. O my sister! O Diana!
thy tracks are on the eastern hill; thou newly didst pass
that way. I, the hunter, saw them in the morning dew. My
eyes are the hounds that pursued thee. I hear thee; thou
canst speak, I cannot; I fear and forget to answer; I am
occupied with hearing. I awoke and thought of thee; thou
wast present to my mind. How camest thou there? Was I not
present to thee, likewise?"
In such a lofty mystical strain did this Concord Endymion declare
his passion for Nature, in whose green lap he slumbers now on the
hill-side which the goddess nightly revisits.
"O sister of the sun, draw near,
With softly-moving step and slow,
For dreaming not of earthly woe
Thou seest Endymion sleeping here!"