VI

In "Walden" Thoreau, in playfully naming his various occupations,

says, "For a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide

circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of

my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only my

labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their own

reward." If he were to come back now, he would, I think, open his eyes

in astonishment, perhaps with irritation, to see the whole bulk of

them at last in print.

His Journal was the repository of all his writings, and was drawn upon

during his lifetime for all the material he printed in books and

contributed to the magazines. The fourteen volumes, I venture to say,

form a record of the most minute and painstaking details of what one

man saw and heard on his walks in field and wood, in a single

township, that can be found in any literature.

It seems as though a man who keeps a Journal soon becomes its victim;

at least that seems to have been the case with Thoreau. He lived for

that Journal, he read for it, he walked for it; it was like a hungry,

omnivorous monster that constantly called for more. He transcribed to

its pages from the books he read, he filled it with interminable

accounts of the commonplace things he saw in his walks, tedious and

minute descriptions of everything in wood, field, and swamp. There are

whole pages of the Latin names of the common weeds and flowers. Often

he could not wait till he got home to write out his notes. He walked

by day and night, in cold and heat, in storm and sunshine, all for his

Journal. All was fish that came to that net; nothing was too

insignificant to go in. He did not stop to make literature of it, or

did not try, and it is rarely the raw material of literature. Its

human interest is slight, its natural history interest slight also.

For upwards of twenty-five years Thoreau seemed to have lived for this

Journal. It swelled to many volumes. It is a drag-net that nothing

escapes. The general reader reads Thoreau's Journal as he does the

book of Nature, just to cull out the significant things here and

there. The vast mass of the matter is merely negative, like the things

that we disregard in our walk. Here and there we see a flower, or a

tree, or a prospect, or a bird, that arrests attention, but how much

we pass by or over without giving it a thought! And yet, just as the

real nature-lover will scan eagerly the fine print in Nature's book,

so will the student and enthusiast of Thoreau welcome all that is

recorded in his Journals.

Thoreau says that Channing in their walks together sometimes took out

his notebook and tried to write as he did, but all in vain. "He soon

puts it up again, or contents himself with scrawling some sketch of

the landscape. Observing me still scribbling, he will say that he

confines himself to the ideal, purely ideal remarks; he leaves the

facts to me. Sometimes, too, he will say, a little petulantly, 'I am

universal; I have nothing to do with the particular and definite.'"

The truth was Channing had no Journal calling, "More, more!" and was

not so inordinately fond of composition. "I, too," says Thoreau,

"would fain set down something beside facts. Facts should only be as

the frame to my pictures; they should be material to the mythology

which I am writing." But only rarely are his facts significant, or

capable of an ideal interpretation. Felicitous strokes like that in

which he says, "No tree has so fair a bole and so handsome an instep

as the birch," are rare.

Thoreau evidently had a certain companionship with his Journal. It was

like a home-staying body to whom he told everything on his return from

a walk. He loved to write it up. He made notes of his observations as

he went along, night or day. One time he forgot his notebook and so

substituted a piece of birch-bark. He must bring back something

gathered on the spot. He skimmed the same country over and over; the

cream he was after rose every day and all day, and in all seasons.

He evidently loved to see the pages of his Journal sprinkled with the

Latin names of the plants and animals that he saw in his walk. A

common weed with a long Latin name acquired new dignity. Occasionally

he fills whole pages with the scientific names of the common trees and

plants. He loved also a sprinkling of Latin quotations and allusions

to old and little known authors. The pride of scholarship was strong

in him. Suggestions from what we call the heathen world seemed to

accord with his Gospel of the Wild.

Thoreau loved to write as well as John Muir loved to talk. It was his

ruling passion. He said time never passed so quickly as when he was

writing. It seemed as if the clock had been set back. He evidently

went to Walden for subject-matter for his pen; and the remarkable

thing about it all is that he was always keyed up to the writing

pitch. The fever of expression was always upon him. Day and night,

winter and summer, it raged in his blood. He paused in his walks and

wrote elaborately. The writing of his Journal must have taken as much

time as his walking.

Only Thoreau's constant and unquenchable thirst for intellectual

activity, and to supply material for that all-devouring Journal, can,

to me, account for his main occupation during the greater part of the

last two years of his life, which consisted in traversing the woods

and measuring the trees and stumps and counting their rings.

Apparently not a stump escaped him--pine, oak, birch, chestnut, maple,

old or new, in the pasture or in the woods; he must take its measure

and know its age. He must get the girth of every tree he passed and

some hint of all the local conditions that had influenced its growth.

Over two hundred pages of his Journal are taken up with barren details

of this kind. He cross-questions the stumps and trees as if searching

for the clue to some important problem, but no such problem is

disclosed. He ends where he begins. His vast mass of facts and figures

was incapable of being generalized or systematized. His elaborate

tables of figures, so carefully arranged, absolutely accurate, no

doubt, are void of interest, because no valuable inferences can be

drawn from them.

"I have measured in all eight pitch pine stumps at the Tommy Wheeler

hollow, sawed off within a foot of the ground. I measured the longest

diameter and then at right angles with that, and took the average, and

then selected the side of the stump on which the radius was of average

length, and counted the number of rings in each inch, beginning at the

center, thus:" And then follows a table of figures filling a page. "Of

those eight, average growth about one seventh of an inch per year.

Calling the smallest number of rings in an inch in each tree one, the

comparative slowness of growth of the inches is thus expressed." Then

follows another carefully prepared table of figures. Before one is

done with these pages one fairly suspects the writer is mad, the

results are so useless, and so utterly fail to add to our knowledge of

the woods. Would counting the leaves and branches in the forest, and

making a pattern of each, and tabulating the whole mass of figures be

any addition to our knowledge? I attribute the whole procedure, as I

have said, to his uncontrollable intellectual activity, and the

imaginary demands of this Journal, which continued to the end of his

life. The very last pages of his Journal, a year previous to his

death, are filled with minute accounts of the ordinary behavior of

kittens, not one item novel or unusual, or throwing any light on the

kitten. But it kept his mind busy, and added a page or two to the

Journal.

In his winter walks he usually carried a four-foot stick, marked in

inches, and would measure the depth of the snow over large areas,

every tenth step, and then construct pages of elaborate tables showing

the variations according to locality, and then work out the

average--an abnormal craving for exact but useless facts. Thirty-four

measurements on Walden disclosed the important fact that the snow

averaged five and one sixth inches deep. He analyzes a pensile nest

which he found in the woods--doubtless one of the vireo's--and fills

ten pages with a minute description of the different materials which

it contained. Then he analyzes a yellow-bird's nest, filling two

pages. That Journal shall not go hungry, even if there is nothing to

give it but the dry material of a bird's nest.