It was a happy thought of Thoreau's friend Ellery Channing, himself a
poet, to style our Concord hermit the "poet-naturalist;" for there
seemed to be no year of his life and no hour of his day when Nature
did not whisper some secret in his ear,--so intimate was he with her
from childhood. In another connection, speaking of natural beauty,
Channing said, "There is Thoreau,--he knows about it; give him
sunshine and a handful of nuts, and he has enough." He was also a
naturalist in the more customary sense,--one who studied and arranged
methodically in his mind the facts of outward nature; a good botanist
and ornithologist, a wise student of insects and fishes; an observer
of the winds, the clouds, the seasons, and all that goes to make up
what we call "weather" and "climate." Yet he was in heart a poet, and
held all the accumulated knowledge of more than forty years not so
much for use as for delight. As Gray's poor friend West said of
himself, "like a clear-flowing stream, he reflected the beauteous
prospect around;" and Mother Nature had given Thoreau for his prospect
the meandering Indian river of Concord, the woodland pastures and fair
lakes by which he dwelt or rambled most of his life. Born in the East
Quarter of Concord, July 12, 1817, he died in the village, May 6,
1862; he was there fitted for Harvard College, which he entered in
1833, graduating in 1837; and for the rest of his life was hardly away
from the town for more than a year in all. Consequently his letters to
his family are few, for he was usually among them; but when separated
from his elder brother John, or his sisters Helen and Sophia, he wrote
to them, and these are the earliest of his letters which have been
preserved. Always thoughtful for others, he has left a few facts to
aid his biographer, respecting his birth and early years. In his
Journal of December 27, 1855, he wrote:--
"Recalled this evening, with the aid of Mother, the various houses
(and towns) in which I have lived, and some events of my life. Born
... in the Minott house on the Virginia Road, where Father occupied
Grandmother's 'thirds,' carrying on the farm. The Catherines [had] the
other half of the house,--Bob Catherine and [brother] John threw up
the turkeys. Lived there about eight months; Si Merriam the next
neighbor. Uncle David [Dunbar] died when I was six weeks old.[2] I was
baptized in the old meeting-house, by Dr. Ripley, when I was three
months, and did not cry. [In] the Red House, where Grandmother lived,
we [had] the west side till October, 1818,--hiring of Josiah Davis,
agent for the Woodwards; there were Cousin Charles and Uncle Charles
[Dunbar], more or less. According to the day-book first used by
Grandfather [Thoreau],[3] dated 1797 (his part cut out and [then] used
by Father in Concord in 1808-9, and in Chelmsford in 1818-21), Father
hired of Proctor [in Chelmsford], and shop of Spaulding. Chelmsford
till March, 1821; last charge in Chelmsford about middle of March,
1821. Aunt Sarah taught me to walk there, when fourteen months old.
Lived next the meeting-house, where they kept the powder in the
garret. Father kept shop and painted signs, etc.
"Pope's house, at South End in Boston (a ten-footer) five or six
months,--moved from Chelmsford through Concord, and may have tarried
in Concord a little while.
"Day-book says, 'Moved to Pinkney Street [Boston], September 10, 1821,
on Monday;' Whitwell's house, Pinckney Street, to March, 1823; brick
house, Concord, to spring of 1826; Davis house (next to Samuel Hoar's)
to May 7, 1827; Shattuck house (now Wm. Munroe's) to spring of 1835;
Hollis Hall, Cambridge, 1833; Aunts' house to spring of 1837. [This
was what is now the inn called 'Thoreau House.'] At Brownson's
[Canton] while teaching in winter of 1835. Went to New York with
Father peddling in 1836."
This brings the date down to the year in which Henry Thoreau left
college, and when the family letters begin. The notes continue, and
now begin to have a literary value.
"Parkman house to fall of 1844; was graduated in 1837; kept town
school a fortnight in 1837; began the big Red Journal, October, 1837;
found my first arrowheads, fall of 1837; wrote a lecture (my first) on
Society, March 14, 1838, and read it before the Lyceum, in the Masons'
Hall, April 11, 1838; went to Maine for a school in May, 1838;
commenced school [in the Parkman house[4]] in the summer of 1838;
wrote an essay on 'Sound and Silence' December, 1838; fall of 1839 up
the Merrimack to White Mountains; 'Aulus Persius Flaccus' (first
printed paper of consequence), February 10, 1840; the Red Journal of
546 pages ended June, 1840; Journal of 396 pages ended January 31,
1841.
"Went to R. W. Emerson's in spring of 1841 [about April 25], and
stayed there to summer of 1843; went to [William Emerson's], Staten
Island, May, 1843, and returned in December, or to Thanksgiving, 1843;
made pencils in 1844; Texas house to August 29, 1850; at Walden,
July, 1845, to fall of 1847; then at R. W. Emerson's to fall of 1848,
or while he was in Europe; Yellow House (reformed) till the present."
As may be inferred from this simple record of the many mansions,
chiefly small ones, in which he had spent his first thirty-eight
years, there was nothing distinguished in the fortunes of Thoreau's
family, who were small merchants, artisans, or farmers mostly. On the
father's side they were from the isle of Jersey, where a French strain
mingled with his English or Scandinavian blood; on the other side he
was of Scotch and English descent, counting Jones, Dunbar, and Burns
among his feminine ancestors. Liveliness and humor came to him from
his Scotch connection; from father and grandfather he inherited a
grave steadiness of mind rather at variance with his mother's
vivacity. Manual dexterity was also inherited; so that he practiced
the simpler mechanic arts with ease and skill; his mathematical
training and his outdoor habits fitted him for a land-surveyor; and by
that art, as well as by pencil-making, lecturing, and writing, he paid
his way in the world, and left a small income from his writings to
those who survived him. He taught pupils also, as did his brother and
sisters; but it was not an occupation that he long followed after
John's death in 1842. With these introductory statements we may
proceed to Thoreau's first correspondence with his brother and
sisters.
As an introduction to the correspondence, and a key to the young man's
view of life, a passage may be taken from Thoreau's "part" at his
college commencement, August 16, 1837. He was one of two to hold what
was called a "Conference" on "The Commercial Spirit,"--his alternative
or opponent in the dispute being Henry Vose, also of Concord, who, in
later years, was a Massachusetts judge. Henry Thoreau,[5] then just
twenty, said:--
"The characteristic of our epoch is perfect freedom,--freedom of
thought and action. The indignant Greek, the oppressed Pole, the
jealous American assert it. The skeptic no less than the believer, the
heretic no less than the faithful child of the church, have begun to
enjoy it. It has generated an unusual degree of energy and activity;
it has generated the _commercial spirit_. Man thinks faster and freer
than ever before. He, moreover, moves faster and freer. He is more
restless, because he is more independent than ever. The winds and the
waves are not enough for him; he must needs ransack the bowels of the
earth, that he may make for himself a highway of iron over its
surface.
"Indeed, could one examine this beehive of ours from an observatory
among the stars, he would perceive an unwonted degree of bustle in
these later ages. There would be hammering and chipping in one
quarter; baking and brewing, buying and selling, money-changing and
speechmaking in another. What impression would he receive from so
general and impartial a survey. Would it appear to him that mankind
used this world as not abusing it? Doubtless he would first be struck
with the profuse beauty of our orb; he would never tire of admiring
its varied zones and seasons, with their changes of living. He could
not but notice that restless animal for whose sake it was contrived;
but where he found one man to admire with him his fair dwelling-place,
the ninety and nine would be scraping together a little of the gilded
dust upon its surface.... We are to look chiefly for the origin of the
commercial spirit, and the power that still cherishes and sustains it,
in a blind and unmanly love of wealth. Wherever this exists, it is too
sure to become the ruling spirit; and, as a natural consequence, it
infuses into all our thoughts and affections a degree of its own
selfishness; we become selfish in our patriotism, selfish in our
domestic relations, selfish in our religion.
"Let men, true to their natures, cultivate the moral affections, lead
manly and independent lives; let them make riches the means and not
the end of existence, and we shall hear no more of the commercial
spirit. The sea will not stagnate, the earth will be as green as ever,
and the air as pure. This curious world which we inhabit is more
wonderful than it is convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it
is more to be admired and enjoyed than used. The order of things
should be somewhat reversed; the seventh should be man's day of toil,
wherein to earn his living by the sweat of his brow; and the other six
his Sabbath of the affections and the soul,--in which to range this
widespread garden, and drink in the soft influences and sublime
revelations of Nature.... The spirit we are considering is not
altogether and without exception bad. We rejoice in it as one more
indication of the entire and universal freedom that characterizes the
age in which we live,--as an indication that the human race is making
one more advance in that infinite series of progressions which awaits
it. We glory in those very excesses which are a source of anxiety to
the wise and good; as an evidence that man will not always be the
slave of matter,--but ere long, casting off those earth-born desires
which identify him with the brute, shall pass the days of his sojourn
in this his nether paradise, as becomes the Lord of Creation."[6]
This passage is noteworthy as showing how early the philosophic mind
was developed in Thoreau, and how much his thought and expression were
influenced by Emerson's first book,--"Nature." But the soil in which
that germinating seed fell was naturally prepared to receive it; and
the wide diversity between the master and the disciple soon began to
appear. In 1863, reviewing Thoreau's work, Emerson said, "That oaken
strength which I noted whenever he walked or worked, or surveyed
wood-lots,--the same unhesitating hand with which a field-laborer
accosts a piece of work which I should shun as a waste of strength,
Henry shows in his literary task. He has muscle, and ventures on and
performs feats which I am forced to decline. In reading him I find the
same thoughts, the same spirit that is in me; but he takes a step
beyond, and illustrates by excellent images that which I should have
conveyed in a sleepy generalization." True as this is, it omits one
point of difference only too well known to Emerson,--the controversial
turn of Thoreau's mind, in which he was so unlike Emerson and Alcott,
and which must have given to his youthful utterances in company the
air of something requiring an apology.
This, at all events, seems to have been the feeling of Helen
Thoreau,[7] whose pride in her brother was such that she did not wish
to see him misunderstood. A pleasing indication of both these traits
is seen in the first extant letter of Thoreau to this sister. I have
this in an autograph copy made by Mr. Emerson, when he was preparing
the letters for partial publication, soon after Henry's death. For
some reason he did not insert it in his volume; but it quite deserves
to be printed, as indicating the period when it was clear to Thoreau
that he must think for himself, whatever those around him might think.