"Light-headed, thoughtless, shall I take my way
When I to Thee this being have resigned;
Well knowing when upon a future day,
With usurer's trust, more than myself to find."
NOTE. "Thoreau was born in Concord on the 12th of July, 1817.
The old-fashioned house, its roof nearly reaching to the ground
in the rear, remains as it was when he first saw the light in
the easternmost of its upper chambers. It was the residence of
his grandmother, and a perfect piece of our New-England style
of building, with its gray, unpainted boards, its grassy,
unfenced door-yard. The house is somewhat isolate and remote from
thoroughfares. The Virginia road is an old-fashioned, winding, at
length deserted pathway, the more smiling for its forked orchards,
tumbling walks, and mossy banks. About the house are pleasant,
sunny meadows, deep with their beds of peat, so cheering with its
homely, heath-like fragrance, and in its front runs a constant stream
through the centre of that great tract sometimes called 'Bedford
Levels,'--this brook a source of the Shawsheen River. It was lovely
that he should draw his first breath in a pure country air, out of
crowded towns, amid the pleasant russet fields.
"His parents were active, vivacious people; his grandfather, by
his father's side, coming from the Isle of Jersey, a Frenchman and
Catholic, who married a Scotch woman named Jennie Burns. On his
mother's side the descent is from the well-known Jones family of
Weston, Mass., and the Rev. Charles Dunbar, a graduate of Harvard
College, who preached in Salem, and at length settled in Keene, New
Hampshire. As variable an ancestry as can well be afforded, with
marked family characters on both sides. About a year and a half from
Henry's birth, the family removed to the town of Chelmsford, thence
to Boston, coming back, however, to Concord when he was of a very
tender age; his earliest memory of most of the town was a ride to
Walden Pond with his grandmother, when he thought that he should
be glad to live there. He retained a peculiar pronunciation of the
letter R, with a decided French accent. He says, 'September is the
fifth month with a burr in it.' His great-grandmother's name was
Marie le Galais, and his grandfather, John Thoreau, was baptized
April 28, 1754, and partook of the Catholic sacrament in the parish
of St. Helier, Isle of Jersey, in May, 1773. Thus near to old France
and the church was our Yankee boy.
"A moment may be spent on a few traits of Thoreau, of a personal
kind. In height he was about the average. In his build, spare, with
limbs that were rather longer than usual, or of which he made a
longer use. His face once seen could not be forgotten; the features
quite marked, the nose aquiline, or very Roman, like one of the
portraits of Cæsar (more like a beak, as was said), large overhanging
brows above the deepest-set blue eyes that could be seen,--blue in
certain lights, and in others gray,--eyes expressive of all shades of
feeling, but never weak or near-sighted; the forehead not unusually
broad or high, full of concentrated energy and purpose; the mouth,
with prominent lips, pursed up with meaning and thought when shut,
and giving out when open a stream of the most varied and unusual
and instructive sayings. His hair was a dark brown, exceedingly
abundant, fine, and soft, and for several years he wore a comely
beard. His whole figure had an active earnestness as if he had not
a moment to waste. The clenched hand betokened purpose. In walking
he made a short cut if he could, and when sitting in the shade, or
by the wall-side, seemed merely the clearer to look forward into the
next piece of activity. Even in the boat he had a wary, transitory
air, his eyes on the lookout; perhaps there might be ducks, or the
Blondin turtle, or an otter, or sparrow. He was a plain man in his
features and dress,--one who could not be mistaken, and this kind of
plainness is not out of keeping with beauty. He sometimes went as far
as homeliness, which again, even if there be a prejudice against it,
shines out at times beyond a vulgar beauty."