His robust common sense, armed with stout hands, keen perceptions, and
strong will, can not yet account for the superiority which shone in
his simple and hidden life. I must add the cardinal fact that there
was an excellent wisdom in him, proper to a rare class of men, which
showed him the material world as a means and symbol. This discovery,
which sometimes yields to poets a certain casual and interrupted
light, serving for the ornament of their writing, was in him an
unsleeping insight; and whatever faults or obstructions of temperament
might cloud it, he was not disobedient to the heavenly vision. In his
youth he said one day, "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." This was the muse and genius that ruled his opinions,
conversation, studies, work and course of life. This made him a
searching judge of men. At first glance he measured his companion,
and, tho insensible to some fine traits of culture, could very well
report his weight and caliber. And this made the impression of genius
which his conversation often gave.
[Footnote 71: From Emerson's address at the funeral of Thoreau, as
expanded for the _Atlantic Monthly_ of August, 1862; usually printed
since as an introduction to Thoreau's volume entitled "Excursions,"
published by Houghton, Mifflin & Company.]
I think his fancy for referring everything to the meridian of Concord
did not grow out of any ignorance or depreciation of other longitudes
or latitudes, but was rather a playful expression of his conviction of
the indifferency of all places, and that the best place for each is
where he stands. He exprest it once in this wise: "I think nothing is
to be hoped from you, if this bit of mold under your feet is not
sweeter to you to eat than any other in this world, or in any world."
The other weapon with which he conquered all obstacles in science was
patience. 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 his habits, nay, moved by curiosity,
should come to him and watch him.
It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him. He knew the
country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths
of his own. He knew every track in the snow or on the ground, and what
creature had taken this path before him. One must submit abjectly to
such a guide, and the reward was great. Under his arm he carried an
old music-book to press plants; in his pocket his diary and pencil, a
spyglass 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 a squirrel's nest. He
waded into the pool for the water-plants, and his strong legs were no
insignificant part of his armor.
No college ever offered him a diploma, or a professor's chair; no
academy made him its corresponding secretary, its discoverer, or even
its member. Perhaps these learned bodies feared the satire of his
presence. Yet so much knowledge of Nature's secret and genius few
others possest, none in a more large and religious synthesis. For not
a particle of respect had he to the opinions of any man or body of
men, but homage solely to the truth itself; and as he discovered
everywhere among doctors some leaning of courtesy, it discredited
them. He grew to be revered and admired by his townsmen, who had at
first known him only as an oddity. The farmers who employed him as a
surveyor soon discovered his rare accuracy and skill, his knowledge of
their lands, of trees, of birds, of Indian remains, and the like,
which enabled him to tell every farmer more than he knew before of his
own farm; so that he began to feel as if Mr. Thoreau had better rights
in his land than he. They felt, too, the superiority of character
which addrest all men with a native authority.
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 for 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. Tho 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 savants 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 this 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 can not 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 possest every
kind of interest.
He had many elegances of his own, while 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 it 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 ax was always destroying his forest. "Thank God,"
he said, "they can not cut down the clouds!"....
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.