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Henry David Thoreau’s Best Books & Essays

Henry David Thoreau published two books and numerous essays during his lifetime and many more of his works were published after his death in 1862.

Deciding on which of these Thoreau books or essays you should read really depends on what type of Thoreau writing is your favorite.

If you are more of a fan of his political writing, then his essays and books such as Civil Disobedience, Slavery in Massachusetts and John Brown are probably more your style.

If you are more drawn to his nature and philosophical writing, then Walden, Walking, Wild Apples, Cape Cod would be a better option for you.

If you haven’t read much of Thoreau’s work and don’t know what type of his writing you prefer, here is a general overview of his best essays and books:

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Published in 1854, Walden is Thoreau’s most famous book and many would argue is his best. The book is about the virtues of simple living and self-sufficiency in a modern world and was inspired by the two years Thoreau spent living in a small cabin at the edge of Walden Pond in the 1840s.

The book is a complex work that is part memoir, part sermon, part manifesto and, at its heart, is about how to live a full and meaningful life amid a world full of drudgery and meaningless distractions.

Walden was moderately successful when it was published, but took five years to sell 2,000 copies. It then went out of print until Thoreau’s death in 1862. It has since become an American classic.

The book received a number of favorable reviews when it was originally published in 1854, though its unique perspective and subject matter perplexed many reviewers.

The Boston Commonwealth found it thought-provoking and delightful:

“We mean, before long, to say how delightful a book this is but it is now Saturday, the very day when people buy books, and we can only say that it is just the pleasantest and most readable, the most-thought-provoking book of the present season. It is a better work than the author’s previous one, ‘A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,’ though we reckon that as a book which will live in American literature a good while.”

The Saturday Evening Post declared it strange but interesting:

“We have, now and then, in this jostling, civilized world, an unmistakable human oddity, and the author of this strange, but interesting book, is one of that class…Nevertheless, his ‘Life in the Woods’ is a most fascinating book.”

The Boston Herald deemed the book “a readable and interesting one” while the New York Times declared Thoreau a genius but also wrote the book off as selfish:

“The author of this book – Mr Henry D. Thoreau – is undoubtedly a man of genius. It is not possible to open twenty pages without finding plentiful indications of that fact. Unfortunately, however, he is an erratic genius, thoroughly impracticable, and apt to confuse rather than arrange the order of things, mental and physical…Mr. Thoreau is a good writer, possessed of great comic powers, and able to describe accurately many peculiar phases of nature. But the present work will fail to satisfy any class of readers. The literary man may be pleased with the style, but he will surely lament the selfish animus of the book.”

As beloved as the book is, modern readers still sometimes struggle with the old-fashioned prose as well as the overall message of the book, as can be seen from the handful of reader reviews on Goodreads and Amazon criticizing it as judgemental, elitist and hard to read.

Nonetheless, some readers who said they initially struggled with the book eventually came to understand and enjoy it, as one reviewer on Goodreads explained:

“The concluding chapter, to an extent, rewarded me for my persistence and toil. In this final chapter, he comes back to the real purpose of the book: to drill home a simple idea – ‘I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws will be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.’ This I think was the core philosophy of the book – if you pursue the ideal direction/vision you have of how your life should be, and not how convention dictates it should be, then you will find success and satisfaction on a scale unimaginable through those conventional routes or to those conventional minds.”

Published in 1849, under its original title of Resistance to Civil Government, this essay advocates resistance to unjust laws and governments and was inspired by Thoreau’s experience of being arrested and jailed for refusing to pay his poll tax because he believed it was being used to fund the Mexican-American war, which he opposed.

As activist and historian Howard Zinn explained in the introduction to the book The Higher Law: Thoreau on Civil Disobedience and Reform, which is a collection of Thoreau’s political essays including Civil Disobedience, Thoreau was addressing important questions in these essays about how to do the right thing in an unjust world:

“You will find in this volume (published previously in hardcover as Reform Papers) what are usually called the ‘political writings’ of Thoreau. Indeed, he is dealing here with the incendiary issues of his time: the Mexican War, the Fugitive Slave Act, the execution of John Brown. The term ‘political,’ however, does not do justice to the breadth and depth of Thoreau’s ideas. He looks beyond the immediate subjects of contention to ask the fundamental questions pondered before and after his time by the world’s great thinkers: Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, Tolstoy. That is, he addresses the obligations of the citizen to government, of law to justice, of human beings to one another. In this collection, he does something more–he asks the most troubling question of human existence: how shall we live our lives in a society that makes being human more and more difficult?”

In the 20th century, many activists of the time cited the book as a major influence on their own ideas and activism, particularly Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandi and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr:

“My first introduction to Thoreau’s writing was, I think, in 1907, or later, when I was in the thick of the passive resistance struggle. A friend sent me an essay on ‘Civil Disobedience.’ It left a deep impression on me.” – Mahatma Gandi “I became convinced that what we were preparing to do in Montgomery [Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955] was related to what Thoreau had expressed. We were simply saying to the white community, ‘We can no longer lend our cooperation to an evil system.’” – Martin Luther King, Jr

Published posthumously in the Atlantic Monthly Magazine one month after Thoreau’s death in 1862, this essay is about the art of taking a walk and how it allows you to better explore and appreciate nature, which, Thoreau argues, humans are not separate from but are a part of, as he explains in the opening line of the essay:

“I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil – to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.”

An article in Slate Magazine, titled Walking Home from Walden, argues that Walking is a precursor or perhaps even a companion piece to Walden:

“If you understand ‘Walking,’ you can almost skip Walden. (I’m not really recommending that—in fact, please don’t.) What I mean is this: It’s clear that ‘Walking,’ and the actual walking that inspired it, leads to Walden. Within a year of delivering the ‘Walking’ lecture for the first time, in the spring of 1851, Thoreau was back at his draft of the big book, revising and expanding with renewed creative energy. You could almost say Thoreau ‘walked’ to Walden. And yet if ‘Walking’ is a sermon, then Walden is something more like prophecy—its author the Reformer and child of wildness, divine messenger, sent to save the town. ”

Thoreau himself seems to have agreed with this sentiment when he scribbled on the title page of a draft of the essay in 1852: “I regard this as a sort of introduction to all that I may write hereafter.”

Published posthumously in 1864, the book chronicles three separate trips Thoreau took to the woods of Maine in the 1840s and 1850s.

It consists primarily of a series of articles previously published in the Atlantic Monthly Magazine in 1858, as well as some unpublished material, that describe the Maine landscape and identify the types of trees, plants and animals of the area while also weaving in a bit of philosophy from time to time.

In the introduction to the 1983 Princeton University Press edition of the book, Paul Theroux explains that since the book was published after Thoreau’s death, it is a bit unfinished but, although it is not exactly a cohesive work, it is still an excellent read:

“The Maine Woods published posthumously is a set of three narratives in various states of completion; not a unified book, but rather a three-decker sandwich of woodland excursions. As a record of impressions, a work in progress, it is all the more interesting. ‘Ktaadn’ is a polished and youthful piece, ‘Chesuncook’ finished and mature, and ‘The Allegash and East Branch’ somewhat provisional though containing a wealth of information.”

The New York Times recently described it, in an article about retracing Thoreau’s Maine trips, as “an insightful reporter’s picture of a rugged wilderness the moment before being irrevocably altered by armies of loggers.”

Reviewers on Amazon describe the book as more of a travel story than a manifesto like Walden, as one Amazon reviewer said: “Do not read this and compare it to Walden or as a some window into Thoreau, but for sheer joy of kicking off the canoe at Telos and the wonder of the north country.”

Published posthumously in 1865, this book is similar to Thoreau’s other book The Maine Woods because it is about three separate trips that Thoreau took to Cape Cod in the 1840s and 1850s.

It consists primarily of a series of articles previously published in Putnam Magazine in 1855 that describe the natural beauty of Cape Cod and suggests that a trip to the beach, like many journeys into the wilderness, can be a spiritual journey.

According to an article titled At the Threshold of Chaos: Henry Thoreau on Cape Cod, on the Thoreau Society website, the book suggests that the beach is the place to go if you want to think and be inspired:

“At the center of Cape Cod is an idea of the beach as a threshold of creative energy: ‘The sea-shore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate this world’…A man may stand there and put all America behind him.”

Also present in the text are some of Thoreau’s most fundamental beliefs, such as his belief, which is also present in Walden, that one should seek spiritual wealth instead of material wealth. This can be seen when Thoreau describes watching a sloop in Chatham dragging the sea bed for lost ship anchors:

“But that is not treasure for us which another man has lost; rather it is for us to seek what no other man has found or can find,—not be Chatham men, dragging for anchors.”

The Walden Woods Project published a statement in the Cape Cod: Illustrated Edition of the American Classic, explaining that Thoreau’s Cape Cod is a mix philosophy, nature worship and travel adventure:

“Yet, like any Thoreauvian excursion, Cape Cod is anything but a simple travel narrative. It encompasses all the Thoreaus we have come to expect: the saunterer, the reformer, the social critic, the natural philosopher, and the father of the American environmental movement.”

Published in 1849, the book is about a camping trip to the White Mountains that Thoreau took with his brother John in 1839.

After John Thoreau died of tetanus in 1842, Thoreau decided to publish the book as a tribute to him and worked on the early drafts of the book while living at Walden Pond from 1845 to 1847.

Thoreau paid for the publishing costs of the book himself. Unfortunately, the book didn’t sell well and the publisher, James Munroe and Company, returned the remaining 700 copies to Thoreau. In a letter to a friend, Thoreau said: “I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.”

According to the introduction of the Princeton University Press edition of the book, John McPhee states that the book didn’t sell well because Thoreau’s unorthodox style was too ahead of its time and, since it was Thoreau’s first book, readers were unfamiliar with who Thoreau was as a writer. McPhee explains that modern readers appreciate the book more because they know and understand Thoreau’s work better:

“The book’s heterodoxy and apparent formlessness troubled its contemporary audience. Modern readers, however, have come to see it as an appropriate predecessor to Walden, with Thoreau’s story of a river journey depicting the early years of his spiritual and artistic growth.”

An article on the Thoreau Society website, titled Life and Legacy, explains that readers at the time also found the book to be problematic because it had a “looseness of structure and a preaching tone unalleviated by humor, that had put readers off.” These issues actually prompted Thoreau to hold off on publishing Walden so he could revise it and avoid these problems.

Modern readers don’t seem to have an issue with the structure or tone of the book and feel that if there is a problem, it lies in the reader and not the book, as one Amazon reviewer said:

“It is obscene that abridged versions of this book are for sale. ‘A Week…’ is an artistic masterpiece. If it seems a bit dense right now, then put the book on your shelf for a few decades and hope that you, not the book, will improve over time.”

Published posthumously in 1863, the book discusses ethical principles for living a righteous life. It argues that working solely for money will morally bankrupt you and that you should instead do a job because you love the work, as Thoreau explains:

“The ways by which you may get your money almost without exception lead downward. If you traded in messages from heaven, the whole curse of business would attach to it. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself.”

The book was based on an essay in 1856, alternatively titled Getting a Living and What Shall It Profit?, that Thoreau later revised and edited for publication but died before being able to do so. It was finally published in 1863 in the Atlantic Monthly Magazine.

According to the book Reimaging Thoreau by Robert Midler, Life Without Principle is a bold essay that challenges readers to re-evaluate their lives and take stock of what’s really important:

“’Getting a Living’ (as revised in ‘Life Without Principle’) is his most abrasive literary performance, resuming the critique of materialism in ‘Economy’ but converting its reformist stance into a moralism calculated to affront his readers and drive a wedge between his own principled but (financially) ‘profitless’ life and their truly profitless lives.”

Many reviewers on Goodreads describe the essay as insightful and thought-provoking and praise the essay’s anti-consumer and anti-materialistic message, as one reviewer said:

“If an apple a day keeps the doctor away, then a daily page of Thoreau or Emerson will flush the consumer out of your system.”

Published posthumously in the Atlantic Monthly Magazine six months after Thoreau’s death in 1862, this essay discusses the history of the apple and how it came to grow and evolve over time.

The essay is based on a lecture of the same name that Thoreau delivered at the Bedford Lyceum on February 14, 1860.

An article on the website MappingThoreauCountry.org points out that the essay is more than a simple history of fruit and is actually a transcendental lesson about learning and knowledge:

“In narrating the apple tree’s valiant resistance to its enemies and the enterprising methods it used to insinuate itself across the country, Thoreau was not so much anthropomorphizing evolution as he was implying that our direct experience of natural phenomena informs our understanding, which includes but is not limited to facts alone.”

While many of the book’s reader reviews on Amazon seem to have missed the point of the book and state that it’s just a simple book about apples, one reviewer, who titled their review “Not Just About Apples,” picked up on the subtext of the essay:

“While this was an interesting dissertation about apples, it was also about the settling of the New World. Comparing Thoreau’s time with our own, we seem to have lost our spirit of adventure. We seem to have lost our ‘wildness’ so to speak. We have become tribal and no longer have the self reliance that Thoreau and Emerson valued.”

Another Amazon reviewer noted that the book was a “story of overlooked beauty” and enjoyed the inspiring message of the essay:

“While the title is “Wild Apples” and the text describes Thoreau’s love of and experience with the various wild apple trees he “discovered” the story could be about tenaciousness, flexibility and resolve; making something worthwhile from poor circumstances and despite expectations and appearances.”

Published in 1854 in the Liberator Magazine, this essay is based on a speech that Thoreau gave at an anti-slavery rally in Framingham, Massachusetts in July of 1854 after the re-enslavement of fugitive slave Anthony Burns in Boston, Massachusetts.

The essay expands on the ideas in Civil Disobedience and attacks the state of Massachusetts for complying with the Fugitive Slave Act, according to an article on the PoetryFoundation.org:

“His attack is now not merely on slavery in general but on his own state’s complicity with an immoral law. Thoreau retains his Transcendentalist plea that one trust one’s inner conscience to judge the state’s actions, but he moves much closer to advocating the destruction of a state that engages in practices such as slavery.”

The essay is considered a part of Thoreau’s “political writings” and since it explores concepts such as morals, ethics and laws, it is similar in nature to his other essay Civil Disobedience.

Since slavery was abolished over 150 years ago, the subject matter may be seem out of date, but as one reviewer on Goodreads points out, the essay’s message about politics in general make it as relevant as ever:

“Master of rhetoric. This essay contains criticism of American government and press that is still relevant today. My favorite quote is, ‘if the majority in congress were to vote the devil to be God. . . the minority must then wait and comply until a later date to reinstate God.’”

Published posthumously in the Atlantic Monthly Magazine in 1862, this essay was based on a lecture that Thoreau delivered at Frazier Hall in Lynn in 1859. The essay is about nature in autumn and reflects on the changes that occur during this time.

A recent article in the Atlantic Monthly Magazine describes Autumnal Tints as “a naturalist’s guide to truly seeing nature” and argues that the essay reflects on Autumn as a time of renewal instead of a time of death:

“Instead of viewing autumn as a time of death and decay, Thoreau came to see and celebrate the season (and death itself) as nature’s own way of renewing life. He believed that if we could see properly, even fallen leaves on the ground could ‘teach us how to die.'”

Thoreau revised the essay while he was dying of tuberculosis and one reviewer on Goodreads noted the symbolism of the text in the context of Thoreau’s own impending death:

“For Thoreau, an autumn leaf is not just an autumn leaf. Rather, it is a symbol that helps him confront the idea of his own death with the hope that he would live on in some way, much as the dying leaves of fall go on to be a part of future forests.”

Sources: Midler, Robert. Reimagining Thoreau . Cambridge University Press, 1995. Princeton Alumni Weekly . Vol. 69, 1968. Berger, Michael Benjamin. Thoreau’s Late Career and The Dispersion of Seeds . Camden House, 2000. Thoreau, Henry David. Cape Cod: Illustrated Edition of the American Classic. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008. Dean, Bradley P. and Gary Scharnhorst. “The Contemporary Reception of Walden.” Studies in American Renaissance , 1990, pp: 293-328. Andriote, John-Manuel. “Revisiting the Splendor of Thoreau’s Autumnal Tints.” Atlantic Monthly Magazine , 1 Nov. 2012, theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/11/revisiting-the-splendor-of-thoreaus-autumnal-tints-150-years-later/264291/ “Henry David Thoreau.” The Poetry Foundation , poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/henry-david-thoreau Berman, Paul. “Thoreau Among the Cranberries.” New York Times , New York Times Company, 26 Dec. 1999, nytimes.com/books/99/12/26/reviews/991226.26bermant.html “Bedord.” Mapping Thoreau Country . mappingthoreaucountry.org/itineraries/bedford/ Thoreau, Henry David. “Wild Apples: The History of the Apple.” Atlantic Monthly Magazine , Nov. 1862, theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/1862nov/186211thoreau.htm “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers: With a New Introduction by John McPhee.” Princeton University Press , press.princeton.edu/titles/7720.html “At the Threshold of Chaos; Henry David Thoreau on Cape Cod by Elizabeth Kalman with Nicholas Holdgate.” Thoreau Society , thoreausociety.org/news-article/threshold-chaos-henry-thoreau-cape-cod-elizabeth-kalman-nicholas-holdgate Gilsdorf, Ethan. “Tracking Thoreau Through Maine’s Grim and Wild Land.” New York Times , New York Times Company, 19 Sept. 2008, nytimes.com/2008/09/19/travel/escapes/19american.html Stephenson, West. “Walking Home from Walden.” Slate Magazine, 21 June. 2011, slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/features/2011/walking_home_from_walden/part_3_the_surprises_that_awaited_me_in_the_works_of_henry_david_thoreau.html Thoreau, Henry David. “Walking.” Atlantic Monthly Magazine , June 1862, theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1862/06/walking/304674/ “The Higher Law: Thoreau on Civil Disobedience and Reform: With an Introduction by Howard Zinn.” Princeton University Press , press.princeton.edu/titles/7719.html Dean, Bradley P. “Reconstructions of Thoreau’s Early Life Without Principle Lecture.” Studies in American Renaissance , University Press of Virginia, 1987, pp: 285-364, jstor.org/stable/30228137?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau (see name pronunciation; July 12, 1817– May 6, 1862) was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, and historian. A leading transcendentalist, Thoreau is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay Resistance to Civil Government (also known as Civil Disobedience), an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.

Thoreau’s books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry total over 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions are his writings on natural history and philosophy, where he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern-day environmentalism. His literary style interweaves close natural observation, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore, while displaying a poetic sensibility, philosophical austerity, and “Yankee” love of practical detail. He was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay; at the same time he advocated abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life’s true essential needs.

He was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau’s philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Thoreau is sometimes cited as an anarchist. Though Civil Disobedience seems to call for improving rather than abolishing government—"I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government"—the direction of this improvement points toward anarchism: “'That government is best which governs not at all;' and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.” Richard T. Drinnon reproaches Thoreau for his ambiguity when writing on governance, noting that Thoreau’s “sly satire, his liking for wide margins for his writing, and his fondness for paradox provided ammunition for widely divergent interpretations of 'Civil Disobedience’.”

Name pronunciation and physical appearance

Amos Bronson Alcott and Thoreau’s aunt each wrote that “Thoreau” is pronounced like the word “thorough” (pronounced THUR-oh—/ˈθʌroʊ/—in General American, but more precisely THOR-oh—/ˈθɔːroʊ/—in 19th-century New England). Edward Waldo Emerson wrote that the name should be pronounced “Thó-row”, with the h sounded and stress on the first syllable. Among modern-day American speakers, it is perhaps more commonly pronounced thə-ROH—/θəˈroʊ/—with stress on the second syllable.

In appearance he was homely, with a nose that he called “my most prominent feature.” Of his face and disposition, Ellery Channing wrote: “His face, once seen, could not be forgotten. The features were quite marked: the nose aquiline or very Roman, like one of the portraits of Caesar (more like a beak, as was said); large overhanging brows above the deepest set blue eyes that could be seen, 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 silent, and giving out when open with the most varied and unusual instructive sayings.”

Early life and education, 1817–1836

Henry David Thoreau was born David Henry Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts, into the “modest New England family” of John Thoreau (a pencil maker) and Cynthia Dunbar. His paternal grandfather was born in Jersey. His maternal grandfather, Asa Dunbar, led Harvard’s 1766 student “Butter Rebellion”, the first recorded student protest in the Colonies. David Henry was named after a recently deceased paternal uncle, David Thoreau. He did not become “Henry David” until after college, although he never petitioned to make a legal name change. He had two older siblings, Helen and John Jr., and a younger sister, Sophia. Thoreau’s birthplace still exists on Virginia Road in Concord. The house has recently been restored by the Thoreau Farm Trust, a nonprofit organization, and is now open to the public.

He studied at Harvard College between 1833 and 1837. He lived in Hollis Hall and took courses in rhetoric, classics, philosophy, mathematics, and science. He was a member of the Institute of 1770 (now the Hasty Pudding Club). A legend proposes that Thoreau refused to pay the five-dollar fee for a Harvard diploma. In fact, the master’s degree he declined to purchase had no academic merit: Harvard College offered it to graduates “who proved their physical worth by being alive three years after graduating, and their saving, earning, or inheriting quality or condition by having Five Dollars to give the college.” His comment was: “Let every sheep keep its own skin”, a reference to the tradition of diplomas being written on sheepskin vellum.

Return to Concord, 1836–1842

The traditional professions open to college graduates—law, the church, business, medicine—failed to interest Thoreau, so in 1835 he took a leave of absence from Harvard, during which he taught school in Canton, Massachusetts. After he graduated in 1837, he joined the faculty of the Concord public school, but resigned after a few weeks rather than administer corporal punishment. He and his brother John then opened a grammar school in Concord in 1838 called Concord Academy. They introduced several progressive concepts, including nature walks and visits to local shops and businesses. The school ended when John became fatally ill from tetanus in 1842 after cutting himself while shaving. He died in his brother Henry’s arms.

Upon graduation Thoreau returned home to Concord, where he met Ralph Waldo Emerson through a mutual friend. Emerson took a paternal and at times patronizing interest in Thoreau, advising the young man and introducing him to a circle of local writers and thinkers, including Ellery Channing, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne and his son Julian Hawthorne, who was a boy at the time.

Emerson urged Thoreau to contribute essays and poems to a quarterly periodical, The Dial, and Emerson lobbied editor Margaret Fuller to publish those writings. Thoreau’s first essay published there was Aulus Persius Flaccus, an essay on the playwright of the same name, published in The Dial in July 1840. It consisted of revised passages from his journal, which he had begun keeping at Emerson’s suggestion. The first journal entry on October 22, 1837, reads, “'What are you doing now?' he asked. ‘Do you keep a journal?’ So I make my first entry to-day.”

Thoreau was a philosopher of nature and its relation to the human condition. In his early years he followed Transcendentalism, a loose and eclectic idealist philosophy advocated by Emerson, Fuller, and Alcott. They held that an ideal spiritual state transcends, or goes beyond, the physical and empirical, and that one achieves that insight via personal intuition rather than religious doctrine. In their view, Nature is the outward sign of inward spirit, expressing the “radical correspondence of visible things and human thoughts”, as Emerson wrote in Nature (1836).

On April 18, 1841, Thoreau moved into the Emerson house. There, from 1841–1844, he served as the children’s tutor, editorial assistant, and repair man/gardener. For a few months in 1843, he moved to the home of William Emerson on Staten Island, and tutored the family sons while seeking contacts among literary men and journalists in the city who might help publish his writings, including his future literary representative Horace Greeley.

Thoreau returned to Concord and worked in his family’s pencil factory, which he continued to do for most of his adult life. He rediscovered the process to make a good pencil out of inferior graphite by using clay as the binder; this invention improved upon graphite found in New Hampshire and bought in 1821 by relative Charles Dunbar. (The process of mixing graphite and clay, known as the Conté process, was patented by Nicolas-Jacques Conté in 1795). His other source had been Tantiusques, an Indian operated mine in Sturbridge, Massachusetts. Later, Thoreau converted the factory to produce plumbago (graphite), which was used in the electrotyping process.

Once back in Concord, Thoreau went through a restless period. In April 1844 he and his friend Edward Hoar accidentally set a fire that consumed 300 acres (1.2 km2) of Walden Woods.

Civil Disobedience and the Walden years, 1845–1849

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

Thoreau needed to concentrate and get himself working more on his writing. In March 1845, Ellery Channing told Thoreau, "Go out upon that, build yourself a hut, & there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no other alternative, no other hope for you." Two months later, Thoreau embarked on a two-year experiment in simple living on July 4, 1845, when he moved to a small, self-built house on land owned by Emerson in a second-growth forest around the shores of Walden Pond. The house was in “a pretty pasture and woodlot” of 14 acres (57,000 m2) that Emerson had bought, 1.5 miles (2.4 km) from his family home.

On July 24 or July 25, 1846, Thoreau ran into the local tax collector, Sam Staples, who asked him to pay six years of delinquent poll taxes. Thoreau refused because of his opposition to the Mexican–American War and slavery, and he spent a night in jail because of this refusal. The next day Thoreau was freed when someone, likely his aunt, paid the tax against his wishes. The experience had a strong impact on Thoreau. In January and February 1848, he delivered lectures on “The Rights and Duties of the Individual in relation to Government” explaining his tax resistance at the Concord Lyceum. Bronson Alcott attended the lecture, writing in his journal on January 26:

Heard Thoreau’s lecture before the Lyceum on the relation of the individual to the State– an admirable statement of the rights of the individual to self-government, and an attentive audience. His allusions to the Mexican War, to Mr. Hoar’s expulsion from Carolina, his own imprisonment in Concord Jail for refusal to pay his tax, Mr. Hoar’s payment of mine when taken to prison for a similar refusal, were all pertinent, well considered, and reasoned. I took great pleasure in this deed of Thoreau’s.

Thoreau revised the lecture into an essay entitled Resistance to Civil Government (also known as Civil Disobedience). In May 1849 it was published by Elizabeth Peabody in the Aesthetic Papers. Thoreau had taken up a version of Percy Shelley’s principle in the political poem The Mask of Anarchy (1819), that Shelley begins with the powerful images of the unjust forms of authority of his time—and then imagines the stirrings of a radically new form of social action.

At Walden Pond, he completed a first draft of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, an elegy to his brother, John, that described their 1839 trip to the White Mountains. Thoreau did not find a publisher for this book and instead printed 1,000 copies at his own expense, though fewer than 300 were sold. Thoreau self-published on the advice of Emerson, using Emerson’s own publisher, Munroe, who did little to publicize the book.

In August 1846, Thoreau briefly left Walden to make a trip to Mount Katahdin in Maine, a journey later recorded in “Ktaadn”, the first part of The Maine Woods.

Thoreau left Walden Pond on September 6, 1847. At Emerson’s request, he immediately moved back into the Emerson house to help Lidian manage the household while her husband was on an extended trip to Europe. Over several years, he worked to pay off his debts and also continuously revised his manuscript for what, in 1854, he would publish as Walden, or Life in the Woods, recounting the two years, two months, and two days he had spent at Walden Pond. The book compresses that time into a single calendar year, using the passage of four seasons to symbolize human development. Part memoir and part spiritual quest, Walden at first won few admirers, but later critics have regarded it as a classic American work that explores natural simplicity, harmony, and beauty as models for just social and cultural conditions.

American poet Robert Frost wrote of Thoreau, “In one book... he surpasses everything we have had in America.”

American author John Updike said of the book: “A century and a half after its publication, Walden has become such a totem of the back-to-nature, preservationist, anti-business, civil-disobedience mindset, and Thoreau so vivid a protester, so perfect a crank and hermit saint, that the book risks being as revered and unread as the Bible.”

Thoreau moved out of Emerson’s house in July 1848 and stayed at a home on Belknap Street nearby. In 1850, he and his family moved into a home at 255 Main Street; he stayed there until his death.

Later years, 1851–1862

In 1851, Thoreau became increasingly fascinated with natural history and travel/expedition narratives. He read avidly on botany and often wrote observations on this topic into his journal. He admired William Bartram, and Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle. He kept detailed observations on Concord’s nature lore, recording everything from how the fruit ripened over time to the fluctuating depths of Walden Pond and the days certain birds migrated. The point of this task was to “anticipate” the seasons of nature, in his words.

He became a land surveyor and continued to write increasingly detailed natural history observations about the 26 square miles (67 km2) town in his journal, a two-million word document he kept for 24 years. He also kept a series of notebooks, and these observations became the source for Thoreau’s late natural history writings, such as Autumnal Tints, The Succession of Trees, and Wild Apples, an essay lamenting the destruction of indigenous and wild apple species.

Until the 1970s, literary critics dismissed Thoreau’s late pursuits as amateur science and philosophy. With the rise of environmental history and ecocriticism, several new readings of this matter began to emerge, showing Thoreau to be both a philosopher and an analyst of ecological patterns in fields and woodlots. For instance, his late essay, “The Succession of Forest Trees”, shows that he used experimentation and analysis to explain how forests regenerate after fire or human destruction, through dispersal by seed-bearing winds or animals.

He traveled to Quebec once, Cape Cod four times, and Maine three times; these landscapes inspired his “excursion” books, A Yankee in Canada, Cape Cod, and The Maine Woods, in which travel itineraries frame his thoughts about geography, history and philosophy. Other travels took him southwest to Philadelphia and New York City in 1854, and west across the Great Lakes region in 1861, visiting Niagara Falls, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Mackinac Island. Although provincial in his physical travels, he was extraordinarily well-read. He obsessively devoured all the first-hand travel accounts available in his day, at a time when the last unmapped regions of the earth were being explored. He read Magellan and James Cook, the arctic explorers Franklin, Mackenzie and Parry, David Livingstone and Richard Francis Burton on Africa, Lewis and Clark; and hundreds of lesser-known works by explorers and literate travelers. Astonishing amounts of global reading fed his endless curiosity about the peoples, cultures, religions and natural history of the world, and left its traces as commentaries in his voluminous journals. He processed everything he read, in the local laboratory of his Concord experience. Among his famous aphorisms is his advice to “live at home like a traveler.”

After John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, many prominent voices in the abolitionist movement distanced themselves from Brown, or damned him with faint praise. Thoreau was disgusted by this, and he composed a speech—A Plea for Captain John Brown—which was uncompromising in its defense of Brown and his actions. Thoreau’s speech proved persuasive: first the abolitionist movement began to accept Brown as a martyr, and by the time of the American Civil War entire armies of the North were literally singing Brown’s praises. As a contemporary biographer of John Brown put it: “If, as Alfred Kazin suggests, without John Brown there would have been no Civil War, we would add that without the Concord Transcendentalists, John Brown would have had little cultural impact.”

Thoreau contracted tuberculosis in 1835 and suffered from it sporadically afterwards. In 1859, following a late-night excursion to count the rings of tree stumps during a rain storm, he became ill with bronchitis. His health declined over three years with brief periods of remission, until he eventually became bedridden. Recognizing the terminal nature of his disease, Thoreau spent his last years revising and editing his unpublished works, particularly The Maine Woods and Excursions, and petitioning publishers to print revised editions of A Week and Walden. He also wrote letters and journal entries until he became too weak to continue. His friends were alarmed at his diminished appearance and were fascinated by his tranquil acceptance of death. When his aunt Louisa asked him in his last weeks if he had made his peace with God, Thoreau responded: “I did not know we had ever quarreled.”

Aware he was dying, Thoreau’s last words were “Now comes good sailing”, followed by two lone words, “moose” and “Indian”. He died on May 6, 1862 at age 44. Bronson Alcott planned the service and read selections from Thoreau’s works, and Channing presented a hymn. Emerson wrote the eulogy spoken at his funeral. Originally buried in the Dunbar family plot, he and members of his immediate family were eventually moved to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery (N42° 27' 53.7" W71° 20' 33") in Concord, Massachusetts.

Thoreau’s friend Ellery Channing published his first biography, Thoreau the Poet-Naturalist, in 1873, and Channing and another friend Harrison Blake edited some poems, essays, and journal entries for posthumous publication in the 1890s. Thoreau’s journals, which he often mined for his published works but which remained largely unpublished at his death, were first published in 1906 and helped to build his modern reputation. A new, expanded edition of the journals is underway, published by Princeton University Press. Today, Thoreau is regarded as one of the foremost American writers, both for the modern clarity of his prose style and the prescience of his views on nature and politics. His memory is honored by the international Thoreau Society and his legacy honored by the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods, established in 1998 in Lincoln, Massachusetts.

Nature and human existence

Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

Thoreau was an early advocate of recreational hiking and canoeing, of conserving natural resources on private land, and of preserving wilderness as public land. He was not a strict vegetarian, though he said he preferred that diet and advocated it as a means of self-improvement. He wrote in Walden: “The practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness; and besides, when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth.”

Thoreau neither rejected civilization nor fully embraced wilderness. Instead he sought a middle ground, the pastoral realm that integrates both nature and culture. His philosophy required that he be a didactic arbitration between the wilderness he based so much on and the spreading mass of North American humanity. He decried the latter endlessly but felt the teachers need to be close to those who needed to hear what he wanted to tell them. The wildness he enjoyed was the nearby swamp or forest, and he preferred “partially cultivated country.” His idea of being “far in the recesses of the wilderness” of Maine was to “travel the logger’s path and the Indian trail”, but he also hiked on pristine untouched land. In the essay “Henry David Thoreau, Philosopher” Roderick Nash writes: "Thoreau left Concord in 1846 for the first of three trips to northern Maine. His expectations were high because he hoped to find genuine, primeval America. But contact with real wilderness in Maine affected him far differently than had the idea of wilderness in Concord. Instead of coming out of the woods with a deepened appreciation of the wilds, Thoreau felt a greater respect for civilization and realized the necessity of balance." On alcohol, Thoreau wrote: “I would fain keep sober always... I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor... Of all ebriosity, who does not prefer to be intoxicated by the air he breathes?”

Thoreau strove to portray himself as an ascetic puritan. However, his sexuality has long been the subject of speculation, including by his contemporaries. Critics have called him heterosexual, homosexual, or asexual. There is no evidence to suggest he had physical relations with anyone, man or woman. Some scholars suggest that homoerotic sentiments run through his writings, and conclude that he was homosexual. The elegy Sympathy was inspired by the eleven-year-old Edmund Sewell, with whom he hiked for five days in 1839. One scholar has suggested that he wrote the poem to Edmund because he could not bring himself to write it to Edmund’s sister, and another that Thoreau’s “emotional experiences with women are memorialized under a camouflage of masculine pronouns”, but other scholars dismiss this. It has argued that the long paean in Walden to the French-Canadian woodchopper Alek Therien, which includes allusions to Achilles and Patroclus, is an expression of conflicted desire. In some of Thoreau’s writing there is the sense of a secret self. In 1840 he writes in his journal: “My friend is the apology for my life. In him are the spaces which my orbit traverses”. Thoreau was strongly influenced by the moral reformers of his time, and this may have instilled anxiety and guilt over sexual desire.

Thoreau was fervently against slavery and actively supported the abolitionist movement. He participated in the Underground Railroad, delivered lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law, and in opposition with the popular opinion of the time, supported radical abolitionist militia leader John Brown and his party. Two weeks after the ill-fated raid on Harpers Ferry and in the weeks leading up to Brown’s execution, Thoreau regularly delivered a speech to the citizens of Concord, Massachusetts in which he compared the American government to Pontius Pilate and likened Brown’s execution to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ:

“Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified; this morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung. These are the two ends of a chain which is not without its links. He is not Old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light.”

In The Last Days of John Brown, Thoreau described the words and deeds of John Brown as noble and an example of heroism. In addition, he lamented the newspaper editors who dismissed Brown and his scheme as “crazy”.

Thoreau was a proponent of limited government and individualism. Although he was hopeful that mankind could potentially have, through self-betterment, the kind of government which “governs not at all”, he distanced himself from contemporary “no-government men” (anarchists), writing: “I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government.”

Thoreau deemed the evolution from absolute monarchy to limited monarchy to democracy as “a progress toward true respect for the individual” and theorized about further improvements “towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man.” Echoing this belief, he went on to write: “There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.”

Although Thoreau believed resistance to unjustly exercised authority could be both violent (exemplified in his support for John Brown) and nonviolent (his own example of tax resistance displayed in Resistance to Civil Government), he regarded pacifist nonresistance as temptation to passivity, writing: “Let not our Peace be proclaimed by the rust on our swords, or our inability to draw them from their scabbards; but let her at least have so much work on her hands as to keep those swords bright and sharp.” Furthermore, in a formal lyceum debate in 1841, he debated the subject “Is it ever proper to offer forcible resistance?”, arguing the affirmative.

Likewise, his condemnation of the Mexican–American War did not stem from pacifism, but rather because he considered Mexico “unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army” as a means to expand the slave territory.

Thoreau was ambivalent towards industrialization and capitalism. On one hand he regarded commerce as “unexpectedly confident and serene, adventurous, and unwearied” and expressed admiration for its associated cosmopolitanism, writing:

I am refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past me, and I smell the stores which go dispensing their odors all the way from Long Wharf to Lake Champlain, reminding me of foreign parts, of coral reefs, and Indian oceans, and tropical climes, and the extent of the globe. I feel more like a citizen of the world at the sight of the palm-leaf which will cover so many flaxen New England heads the next summer.

On the other hand, he wrote disparagingly of the factory system:

I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing. The condition of the operatives is becoming every day more like that of the English; and it cannot be wondered at, since, as far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that corporations may be enriched.

Thoreau also favored bioregionalism, the protection of animals and wild areas, free trade, and taxation for schools and highways. He disapproved of the subjugation of Native Americans, slavery, technological utopianism, consumerism, philistinism, mass entertainment, and frivolous applications of technology.

Intellectual interests, influences, and affinities

Indian sacred texts and philosophy.

Thoreau was influenced by Indian spiritual thought. In Walden, there are many overt references to the sacred texts of India. For example, in the first chapter ("Economy"), he writes: “How much more admirable the Bhagvat-Geeta than all the ruins of the East!” American Philosophy: An Encyclopedia classes him as one of several figures who “took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world”, also a characteristic of Hinduism.

Furthermore, in “The Pond in Winter”, he equates Walden Pond with the sacred Ganges river, writing:

In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Brahmin, priest of Brahmaand Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.

Additionally, Thoreau followed various Hindu customs, including following a diet of rice ("It was fit that I should live on rice, mainly, who loved so well the philosophy of India."), flute playing (reminiscent of the favorite musical pastime of Krishna), and yoga.

In an 1849 letter to his friend H.G.O. Blake, he wrote about yoga and its meaning to him:

Free in this world as the birds in the air, disengaged from every kind of chains, those who practice yoga gather in Brahma the certain fruits of their works. Depend upon it that, rude and careless as I am, I would fain practice the yoga faithfully. The yogi, absorbed in contemplation, contributes in his degree to creation; he breathes a divine perfume, he hears wonderful things. Divine forms traverse him without tearing him, and united to the nature which is proper to him, he goes, he acts as animating original matter. To some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a yogi.

Thoreau read contemporary works in the new science of biology, including the works of Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin, and Asa Gray (Charles Darwin’s staunchest American ally). Thoreau was deeply influenced by Humboldt, especially his work Kosmos.

In 1859, Thoreau purchased and read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Unlike many natural historians at the time, including Louis Agassiz who publicly opposed Darwinism in favor of a static view of nature, Thoreau was immediately enthusiastic about the theory of evolution by natural selection and endorsed it, stating:

The development theory implies a greater vital force in Nature, because it is more flexible and accommodating, and equivalent to a sort of constant new creation. (A quote from On the Origin of Species follows this sentence.)

“Thoreau’s careful observations and devastating conclusions have rippled into time, becoming stronger as the weaknesses Thoreau noted have become more pronounced... Events that seem to be completely unrelated to his stay at Walden Pond have been influenced by it, including the national park system, the British labor movement, the creation of India, the civil rights movement, the hippie revolution, the environmental movement, and the wilderness movement. Today, Thoreau’s words are quoted with feeling by liberals, socialists, anarchists, libertarians, and conservatives alike.”

Thoreau’s political writings had little impact during his lifetime, as "his contemporaries did not see him as a theorist or as a radical, viewing him instead as a naturalist. They either dismissed or ignored his political essays, including Civil Disobedience. The only two complete books (as opposed to essays) published in his lifetime, Walden and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), both dealt with nature, in which he loved to wander." His obituary was lumped in with others rather than as a separate article in an 1862 yearbook. Nevertheless, Thoreau’s writings went on to influence many public figures. Political leaders and reformers like Mohandas Gandhi, U.S. President John F. Kennedy, American civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr., U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, and Russian author Leo Tolstoy all spoke of being strongly affected by Thoreau’s work, particularly Civil Disobedience, as did "right-wing theorist Frank Chodorov [who] devoted an entire issue of his monthly, Analysis, to an appreciation of Thoreau.”

Thoreau also influenced many artists and authors including Edward Abbey, Willa Cather, Marcel Proust, William Butler Yeats, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Upton Sinclair, E. B. White, Lewis Mumford, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alexander Posey and Gustav Stickley. Thoreau also influenced naturalists like John Burroughs, John Muir, E. O. Wilson, Edwin Way Teale, Joseph Wood Krutch, B. F. Skinner, David Brower and Loren Eiseley, whom Publishers Weekly called “the modern Thoreau.” English writer Henry Stephens Salt wrote a biography of Thoreau in 1890, which popularized Thoreau’s ideas in Britain: George Bernard Shaw, Edward Carpenter and Robert Blatchford were among those who became Thoreau enthusiasts as a result of Salt’s advocacy. Mohandas Gandhi first read Walden in 1906 while working as a civil rights activist in Johannesburg, South Africa. He first read Civil Disobedience “while he sat in a South African prison for the crime of nonviolently protesting discrimination against the Indian population in the Transvaal. The essay galvanized Gandhi, who wrote and published a synopsis of Thoreau’s argument, calling its 'incisive logic... unanswerable’ and referring to Thoreau as 'one of the greatest and most moral men America has produced’.” He told American reporter Webb Miller, "[Thoreau’s] ideas influenced me greatly. I adopted some of them and recommended the study of Thoreau to all of my friends who were helping me in the cause of Indian Independence. Why I actually took the name of my movement from Thoreau’s essay ‘On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,’ written about 80 years ago.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. noted in his autobiography that his first encounter with the idea of nonviolent resistance was reading “On Civil Disobedience” in 1944 while attending Morehouse College. He wrote in his autobiography that it was, “Here, in this courageous New Englander’s refusal to pay his taxes and his choice of jail rather than support a war that would spread slavery’s territory into Mexico, I made my first contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance. Fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system, I was so deeply moved that I reread the work several times. I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest. The teachings of Thoreau came alive in our civil rights movement; indeed, they are more alive than ever before. Whether expressed in a sit-in at lunch counters, a freedom ride into Mississippi, a peaceful protest in Albany, Georgia, a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, these are outgrowths of Thoreau’s insistence that evil must be resisted and that no moral man can patiently adjust to injustice.”

American psychologist B. F. Skinner wrote that he carried a copy of Thoreau’s Walden with him in his youth. and, in 1945, wrote Walden Two, a fictional utopia about 1,000 members of a community living together inspired by the life of Thoreau. Thoreau and his fellow Transcendentalists from Concord were a major inspiration of the composer Charles Ives. The 4th movement of the Concord Sonata for piano (with a part for flute, Thoreau’s instrument) is a character picture and he also set Thoreau’s words.

In the early 1960s Allan Sherman referred to Thoreau in his song parody “Here’s To Crabgrass” about the suburban housing boom of that era with the line “Come let us go there and live like Thoreau there.”

Actor Ron Thompson did a dramatic portrayal of Henry David Thoreau on the 1976 NBC television series The Rebels.

Thoreau’s ideas have impacted and resonated with various strains in the anarchist movement, with Emma Goldman referring to him as “the greatest American anarchist.” Green anarchism and Anarcho-primitivism in particular have both derived inspiration and ecological points-of-view from the writings of Thoreau. John Zerzan included Thoreau’s text “Excursions” (1863) in his edited compilation of works in the anarcho-primitivist tradition titled Against civilization: Readings and reflections. Additionally, Murray Rothbard, the founder of anarcho-capitalism, has opined that Thoreau was one of the “great intellectual heroes” of his movement. Thoreau was also an important influence on late-19th-century anarchist naturism. Globally, Thoreau’s concepts also held importance within individualist anarchist circles in Spain, France, and Portugal.

Although his writings would receive widespread acclaim, Thoreau’s ideas were not universally applauded. Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson judged Thoreau’s endorsement of living alone and apart from modern society in natural simplicity to be a mark of “unmanly” effeminacy and “womanish solitude”, while deeming him a self-indulgent “skulker.” Nathaniel Hawthorne was also critical of Thoreau, writing that he “repudiated all regular modes of getting a living, and seems inclined to lead a sort of Indian life among civilized men.” In a similar vein, poet John Greenleaf Whittier detested what he deemed to be the “wicked” and “heathenish” message of Walden, claiming that Thoreau wanted man to “lower himself to the level of a woodchuck and walk on four legs.”

In response to such criticisms, English novelist George Eliot, writing for the Westminster Review, characterized such critics as uninspired and narrow-minded:

People—very wise in their own eyes—who would have every man’s life ordered according to a particular pattern, and who are intolerant of every existence the utility of which is not palpable to them, may pooh-pooh Mr. Thoreau and this episode in his history, as unpractical and dreamy.

Thoreau himself also responded to the criticism in a paragraph of his work “Walden” (1854), by illustrating the irrelevance of their inquiries:

I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers if very particular inquiries had not been made by my townsmen concerning my mode of life, which some would call impertinent, though they do not appear to me at all impertinent, but, considering the circumstances, very natural and pertinent. Some have asked what I got to eat; if I did not feel lonesome; if I was not afraid; and the like. Others have been curious to learn what portion of my income I devoted to charitable purposes; and some, who have large families, how many poor children I maintained. [...] Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives; [...] I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.

Recent criticism has accused Thoreau of hypocrisy, misanthropy and being sanctimonious, based on his writings in Walden, although this criticism has been perceived as highly selective.

Aulus Persius Flaccus (1840) The Service (1840) A Walk to Wachusett (1842) Paradise (to be) Regained (1843) The Landlord (1843) Sir Walter Raleigh (1844) Herald of Freedom (1844) Wendell Phillips Before the Concord Lyceum (1845) Reform and the Reformers (1846–48) Thomas Carlyle and His Works (1847) A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) Resistance to Civil Government, or Civil Disobedience, or On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1849) An Excursion to Canada (1853) Slavery in Massachusetts (1854) Walden (1854) A Fully Annotated Edition. Jeffrey S. Cramer, ed., Yale University Press, 2004 A Plea for Captain John Brown (1859) Remarks After the Hanging of John Brown (1859) The Last Days of John Brown (1860) Walking (1861) Autumnal Tints (1862) Wild Apples: The History of the Apple Tree (1862) The Fall of the Leaf (1863) Excursions (1863) Life Without Principle (1863) Night and Moonlight (1863) The Highland Light (1864) The Maine Woods (1864) Fully Annotated Edition. Jeffrey S. Cramer, ed., Yale University Press, 2009 Cape Cod (1865) Letters to Various Persons (1865) A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers (1866) Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881) Summer (1884) Winter (1888) Autumn (1892) Miscellanies (1894) Familiar Letters of Henry David Thoreau (1894) Poems of Nature (1895) Some Unpublished Letters of Henry D. and Sophia E. Thoreau (1898) The First and Last Journeys of Thoreau (1905) Journal of Henry David Thoreau (1906) The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau edited by Walter Harding and Carl Bode (Washington Square: New York University Press, 1958) Poets of the English Language (Viking Press, 1950) I Was Made Erect and Lone The Bluebird Carries the Sky on His Back (Stanyan, 1970) The Dispersion of Seeds (1993) The Indian Notebooks (1847-1861) selections by Richard F. Fleck

Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau

#AmericanWriters

By Elizabeth Witherell, with Elizabeth Dubrulle

THOREAU'S EARLY YEARS

Henry Thoreau was born in 1817 in Concord , where his father, John, was a shopkeeper. John moved his family to Chelmsford and Boston, following business opportunities. In 1823 the family moved back to Concord where John established a pencil-making concern that eventually brought financial stability to the family. Thoreau's mother, Cynthia Dunbar, took in boarders for many years to help make ends meet. Thoreau's older siblings, Helen and John, Jr., were both schoolteachers; when it was decided that their brother should go to Harvard College, as had his grandfather before him, they contributed from their teaching salaries to help pay his expenses, at that time about $179 a year.

ASPIRING WRITER

He returned to Concord after his graduation in 1837 and took up the profession of teaching, first at the district school and then in a school he opened with his brother John. He had already begun to think of himself as a writer, however, and when he and John had to close their school in 1841 Thoreau accepted an offer to stay with neighboring Emerson's family and earn his keep as a handyman while he concentrated on his writing.

GETTING A LIVING

For a steady income, he relied on two sources: the family pencil business and his own practice as a surveyor. The Thoreau family became involved in manufacturing pencils in the 1820s, and Thoreau used his talent as an engineer to improve the product. He invented a machine that ground the plumbago for the leads into a very fine powder and developed a combination of the finely ground plumbago and clay that resulted in a pencil that produced a smooth, regular line. He also improved the method of assembling the casing and the lead. Thoreau pencils were the first produced in America that equaled those made by the German company, Faber, whose pencils set the standard for quality. In the 1850s, when the electrotyping process of printing began to be used widely, the Thoreaus shifted from pencil-making to supplying large quantities of their finely ground plumbago to printing companies. Thoreau continued to run the company after his father's death in 1859. Characteristically, Thoreau put the business letters and invoices associated with the company to a second use as scrap paper for lists and notes, and drafts of his late unfinished natural history essays.

TRANSCENDENTALISM

Thoreau and the Transcendentalist movement in New England grew up together. Thoreau was nineteen years old when Emerson published Nature , an essay that articulates the philosophical underpinnings of the movement. Transcendentalism began as a radical religious movement, opposed to the rationalist, conservative institution that Unitarianism had become. Many of the movement's early proponents were or had been Unitarian ministers, Emerson among them.

INDIVIDUALISM

In "Civil Disobedience," Thoreau expressed his belief in the power and, indeed, the obligation of the individual to determine right from wrong, independent of the dictates of society: "any man more right than his neighbors, constitutes a majority of one" ( Reform Papers , 74). While many of his contemporaries espoused this view, few practiced it in their own lives as consistently as Thoreau. Thoreau exercised his right to dissent from the prevailing views in many ways, large and small. He worked for pay intermittently; he cultivated relationships with several of the town's outcasts; he lived alone in the woods for two years; he never married; he signed off from the First Parish Church rather than be taxed automatically to support it every year.

I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account; for, beside that before he has fairly learned it I may have found out another for myself, I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father's or his mother's or his neighbor's instead. The youth may build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he would like to do. It is by a mathematical point only that we are wise, as the sailor or the fugitive slave keeps the polestar in his eye; but that is sufficient guidance for all our life. We may not arrive at our port within a calculable period, but we would preserve the true course. ( Walden , 71)

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. ( Walden , 326)

be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. ( Walden , 321)

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. ( Walden , 135)

the man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready ( Walden , 72)

MATERIALISM

Allying himself with an ancient tradition of asceticism, Thoreau considered the ownership of material possessions beyond the basic necessities of life to be an obstacle, rather than an advantage. He saw that most people measured their worth in terms of what they owned, and stood this common assumption on its head.

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. ( Walden , 5)

a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone. ( Walden , 82)

By the words, necessary of life , I mean whatever, of all that man obtains by his own exertions, has been from the first, or from long use has become, so important to human life that few, if any, whether from savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without it. ( Walden , 12)

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hinderances to the elevation of mankind ( Walden , 14)

my greatest skill has been to want but little. ( Walden , 69)

For more than five years I maintained myself thus solely by the labor of my hands, and I found, that by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living. The whole of my winters, as well as most of my summers, I had free and clear for study. ( Walden , 69)

It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do. ( Walden , 71)

TECHNOLOGY AND PROGRESS

Thoreau, himself an inventor and an engineer of sorts, was fascinated by technology, and the mid-nineteenth century saw a series of inventions that would radically change the world, such as power looms, railroads, and the telegraph. But these inventions were products of a larger movement, the industrial revolution, in which Thoreau saw the potential for the destruction of nature for the ends of commerce. In Thoreau's view, technology also provoked an excitement that was counterproductive because it served as a distraction from the important questions of life.

perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty, and a regard for the opinions of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility. ( Walden , 21)

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. ( Walden , 52)

I watch the passage of the morning cars with the same feeling that I do the rising of the sun, which is hardly more regular. Their train of clouds stretching far behind and rising higher and higher, going to heaven while the cars are going to Boston, conceals the sun for a minute and casts my distant field into the shade, a celestial train beside which the petty train of cars which hugs the earth is but the barb of the spear. The stabler of the iron horse was up early this winter morning by the light of the stars amid the mountains, to fodder and harness his steed. Fire, too, was awakened thus early to put the vital heat in him and get him off. If the enterprise were as innocent as it is early! If the snow lies deep, they strap on his snow-shoes, and with the giant plow, plow a furrow from the mountains to the seaboard, in which the cars, like a following drill-barrow, sprinkle all the restless men and floating merchandise in the country for seed. All day the fire-steed flies over the country, stopping only that his master may rest, and I am awakened by his tramp and defiant snort at midnight, when in some remote glen in the woods he fronts the elements incased in ice and snow; and he will reach his stall only with the morning star, to start once more on his travels without rest or slumber. Or perchance, at evening, I hear him in his stable blowing off the superfluous energy of the day, that he may calm his nerves and cool his liver and brain for a few hours of iron slumber. If the enterprise were as heroic and commanding as it is protracted and unwearied! ( Walden , 116-117)

Thoreau was a dedicated, self-taught naturalist, who disciplined himself to observe the natural phenomena around Concord systematically and to record his observations almost daily in his Journal. The Journal contains initial formulations of ideas and descriptions that appear in Thoreau's lectures, essays, and books; early versions of passages that reached final form in Walden can be found in the Journal as early as 1846. Thoreau's observations of nature enrich all of his work, even his essays on political topics. Images and comparisons based on his studies of animal behavior, of the life cycles of plants, and of the features of the changing seasons illustrate and enliven the ideas he puts forth in Walden .

All day long the red squirrels came and went, and afforded me much entertainment by their manoeuvres. One would approach at first warily through the shrub-oaks, running over the snow crust by fits and starts like a leaf blown by the wind, now a few paces this way, with wonderful speed and waste of energy, making inconceivable haste with his "trotters," as if it were for a wager, and now as many paces that way, but never getting on more than half a rod at a time; and then suddenly pausing with a ludicrous expression and a gratuitous somerset, as if all the eyes in the universe were fixed on him,--for all the motions of a squirrel, even in the most solitary recesses of the forest, imply spectators as much as those of a dancing girl,--wasting more time in delay and circumspection than would have sufficed to walk the whole distance,--I never saw one walk,--and then suddenly, before you could say Jack Robinson, he would be in the top of a young pitch-pine, winding up his clock and chiding all imaginary spectators, soliloquizing and talking to all the universe at the same time,--for no reason that I could ever detect, or he himself was aware of, I suspect. ( Walden , 273-274)

The grass flames up on the hillsides like a spring fire,--"et primitus oritur herba imbribus primoribus evocata,"--as if the earth sent forth an inward heat to greet the returning sun; not yellow but green is the color of its flame;--the symbol of perpetual youth, the grass-blade, like a long green ribbon, streams from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, but anon pushing on again, lifting its spear of last year's hay with the fresh life below. . . . So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity. ( Walden , 310-311)

Once it chanced that I stood in the very abutment of a rainbow's arch, which filled the lower stratum of the atmosphere, tinging the grass and leaves around, and dazzling me as if I looked through colored crystal. It was a lake of rainbow light, in which, for a short while, I lived like a dolphin. If it had lasted longer it might have tinged my employments and life. ( Walden , 202)

The love of nature that is evident in Thoreau's descriptions in Walden is one of the most powerful aspects of the book. The environmental movement of the past thirty years has embraced Thoreau as a guiding spirit, and he is valued for his early understanding of the idea that nature is made up of interrelated parts. He is considered by many to be the father of the environmental movement.

BEFORE AND AFTER WALDEN

Walden is Thoreau's best-known book, but other works of his written both before and after Walden have met with favorable responses. All of his writing except his poetry is expository--he wrote no fiction--and much of it is built on the framework of the journey, short or long, external or interior. A Week , The Maine Woods , Cape Cod , and the essays "A Winter Walk," "A Walk to Wachusett," and "A Yankee in Canada," for example, are all structured as traditional travel narratives. The speaker--and it is useful to remember that almost all of Thoreau's published essays and books were first presented as lectures--sets out from home in each case, and the reader experiences the wonders of each new place with him, sharing the meditations it inspires, and finally returning with him to Concord with a deeper understanding of both native and foreign places and of the journeying self. Other essays take the reader on different kinds of journeys--through the foliage of autumn ("Autumnal Tints"), through the cultivated and wild orchards of history ("Wild Apples"), through the life-cycle of a plot of land as one species of tree gives way to another ("The Succession of Forest Trees").

I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both north and south. It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself. (7)

and was at first reluctant to speak at abolitionist rallies because he felt he was expected to follow certain formulas, he later gave several impassioned lectures in response to the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law and in support of the activities of John Brown . Considering his neighbors' dismissive responses to Brown at the news of his death, Thoreau wrote,

I hear another ask, Yankee-like, "What will he gain by it?" as if he expected to fill his pockets by this enterprise. Such a one has no idea of gain but in this worldly sense. If it does not lead to a "surprise" party, if he does not get a new pair of boots, or a vote of thanks, it must be a failure. "But he won't gain any thing by it." Well, no, I don't suppose he could get four-and-sixpence a day for being hung, take the year round; but then he stands a chance to save a considerable part of his soul--and such a soul!--when you do not. No doubt you can get more in your market for a quart of milk than for a quart of blood, but that is not the market that heroes carry their blood to. ("A Plea for Captain John Brown," Reform Papers , 119)

This essay was written in 1995 for an exhibit commemorating the 150th anniversary of Thoreau's move to Walden Pond and his writing of the American classic, Walden ; it has been updated for inclusion here. References are to Walden , ed. J. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971) and to Reform Papers , ed. Wendell Glick (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973).

Translations of this essay

For a version of this essay in Estonian, translated by Karolin Lohmus in 2017, go to ELU LÕPUKS KORDA HENRY DAVID THOREAU .

For a version in Ukrainian, translated by Mary Davidson in 2019, go to [Ukranian translation] .

For a version in Russian, translated by Victor Rudnev in 2019, go to [Russian translation] .

Added October 2017; revised April 2019

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• Born: July 12, 1817
• Birthplace: Concord, Massachusetts
• Died: May 6, 1862 (tuberculosis, age 44)
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Thoreau at two hundred : essays and reassessments

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Henry D. Thoreau

The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, edited by Elizabeth Hall Witherall, comprises the complete and authoritative texts of the works of Thoreau (1817–1862), including previously unpublished essays, correspondence, and journals, as well as editions of his best-known titles.

This is the second volume in the first full-scale scholarly edition of Thoreau’s correspondence in more than half a century. When completed, the edition’s three volumes will include every extant letter written or received by...

One of the most influential and compelling books in American literature, Walden is a vivid account of the years that Henry D. Thoreau spent alone in a secluded cabin at Walden Pond. This edition--introduced by noted American writer John...

This illustrated edition of Walden features 66 photographs by Herbert W. Gleason, one of the great American landscape photographers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Gleason, who had a special love for what he called "the...

This is the inaugural volume in the first full-scale scholarly edition of Thoreau's correspondence in more than half a century. When completed, the edition's three volumes will include every extant letter written or received by...

From 1837 to 1861, Henry D. Thoreau kept a Journal that would become the principal imaginative work of his career. The source of much of his published writing, the Journal is also a record of his interior life and of his monumental...

Excursions presents texts of nine essays, including some of Henry D. Thoreau's most engaging and popular works, newly edited and based on the most authoritative versions of each. These essays represent Thoreau in many stages of his...

Thoreau's classic account of a river journey depicting the early years of his spiritual and artistic growth

Henry D. Thoreau traveled to the backwoods of Maine in 1846, 1853, and 1857. Originally published in 1864, and published now with a new introduction by Paul Theroux, this volume is a powerful telling of those journeys through a rugged...

This new paperback edition of Henry D. Thoreau's compelling account of Cape Cod contains the complete, definitive text of the original. Introduced by American poet and literary critic Robert Pinsky--himself a resident of Cape Cod--this...

These thirteen selections from the polemical writings of Henry D. Thoreau represent every stage in his twenty-two years of active writing. This edition, introduced by writer and historian Howard Zinn, is a microcosm of Thoreau's...

From 1837 to 1861, Thoreau kept a Journal that began as a conventional record of ideas, grew into a writer's notebook, and eventually became the principal imaginative work of his career. The source of much of his published writing, the...

From 1837 to 1861 Thoreau kept a journal that began as a conventional record of ideas, grew into a writer's notebook, and eventually became the principal imaginative work of his career. The source of much of his published writing, the...

From 1837 to 1861 Thoreau kept a Journal that began as a conventional record of ideas, grew into a writer's notebook, and eventually became the principal imaginative work of his career. The source of much of his published writing, the...

Volume two of the Journal includes Thoreau's extensive reminiscences of his 1839 excursion with his brother John along the Concord and Merrimack rivers and all his first impressions and observations entered in journals during the famous...

This first volume of the Journal covers the early years of Thoreau's rapid intellectual and artistic growth. The Journal reflects his reading, travels, and contacts with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and other...

This collection of fifty-three early pieces by Thoreau represents the full range of his youthful imagination. Collected, arranged, and carefully edited for the first time here, the writings date from 1828 to 1852 and cover a broad range...

The selections from the polemical writings of Thoreau that make up Reform Papers represent every stage in his twenty-two years of active writing. Consequently, they are a microcosm of his literary career, allowing the reader to achieve...

Thoreau's Walden , ostensibly a simple account of a year spent alone in a cabin by a pond in the woods, is one of the most influential and complex books in American literature. After eight years in the writing,the first edition of 1854...

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Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau by Ben Shattuck (Tin House, 2022)

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David rompf, more online by david rompf.

• When Tarzan Met Leonardo
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Walking with Thoreau: A Review Essay

By david rompf.

The longest single walkable distance on Earth is a little more than fourteen thousand miles, between Cape Town, South Africa, and the Russian port city of Magadan on the Sea of Okhotsk. Google Maps has confirmed this pedestrian possibility. It is not an officially recognized path like, for example, the Trans Canada Trail, a network of pathways that twist and turn across ten provinces and three territories, but rather an intercontinental route that can be traversed without the help of a car, train, or boat. If you walked eight hours a day, the trip could be completed in five hundred days. Near the halfway point, you could eat one of your knapsack lunches at the Great Pyramid of Giza; after the triumphant last step, you might write a book about your adventure. Why did you take that walk? Was it a spiritual pilgrimage? Did you do it for the sheer physical challenge, for a deep and thrilling sense of accomplishment? For the anticipation of discovering something new about the world, about yourself?

If those fourteen thousand miles were lined with bookshelves, a good number might be stocked with the many existing volumes related, in one way or another, to walking and walkers—narratives that meanderingly explore nature, the soul, philosophy, religion, history, love, mystery, addiction, grief, joy, aches and pains, vexing and dangerous interferences, and countless other dimensions of human experience. Books about walking published in the past two decades alone are plentiful. Rebecca Solnit threw her ample intellectual net around the history of walking in Wanderlust , a robust guide to the evolutionary, philosophical, literary, religious, and political underpinnings of her subject (which, as she points out, is one that is always straying). In the aftermath of a breakup, Olivia Laing packed her oatcakes and cheese for an excursion on foot along the Ouse River, where Virginia Woolf, stones in her pockets, drowned herself. Lucky for us, Laing doesn’t follow suit, instead delivering alluring and crystalline prose in To The River . Robert Macfarlane follows ancient paths in The Old Ways , which, he stresses in a note, could not have been written standing still. In Flâneuse , Lauren Elkin charts the course of famous literary and artistic women walking the streets of Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London, while Edmund White, in The Flaneur , ambles exclusively through the City of Lights. Speaking of straying, I would be remiss not to mention Wild , Cheryl Strayed’s memoir of trekking the Pacific Crest Trail alone, more than one thousand miles from the Mojave Desert to Washington; it may be the only New York Times bestseller and Oprah’s Book Club pick with a long, hard hike as its narrative spine. The list goes on, including books on the lost art of walking, the philosophy of walking, the science and literature of pedestrianism, walking through biblical lands, across deserts high and low, walking—improbably enough—around the notoriously unwalkable Los Angeles.

In Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau , Ben Shattuck embarks on his own version of this walking-and-writing tradition—which, if not a genuine “tradition,” has been a recurring obsession among an illustrious roster of writers and thinkers going back to the peripatetic philosophers. With that well-beaten track behind him, Shattuck walks with hefty literary baggage on his shoulders, not to mention the personal baggage he seeks to lighten. As if walking and writing aren’t hard enough, his particular walks demand emotional fortitude for mining past pain and present vulnerabilities, and also require a certain literary gumption, owing to their weighty associations with Thoreau—his extensive journals, his essays about walking, Walden , Civil Disobedience , and books about his expeditions to Cape Cod and the Maine woods. Shattuck, by implication, mingles with all the pilgrims who ever lived, all the nature writers and self-seeking walkers who have ventured out with purposes big and small.

What is Shattuck’s purpose? In the first few pages of Six Walks , we learn that he first came up with the idea to follow one of Thoreau’s walks when he was haunted by dreams of an ex-girlfriend. “This was years ago, in my early thirties,” he writes, “when I couldn’t find a way out of the doubt, fear, shame, and sadness that had arranged a constellation of grief around me.”  Walking, then, is a way of throwing off that burden. While showering at dawn, Shattuck envisions a young, bearded man standing on a beach, “wind whipping his coattails, the ocean pounding in front of him.” Unlike the author, that man is happy. In his mind’s eye, Shattuck also observes him writing in a journal and wading through dune grass. The fellow glimpsed through the mists of shower and imagination is Henry David Thoreau. Shattuck, while living on the southern coast of Massachusetts, has been reading Cape Cod every night for a week when, suddenly, impulse and inspiration take hold. He puts on a bathing suit and sweater, downs a cup of coffee, fills a backpack with bread, cheese, apples, and carrots, and sets out for the Cape by foot. “I would walk the outer beaches, from the elbow to Provincetown’s fingertips,” he writes, “as Henry had done.”

Thus begins Shattuck’s journey: not just with a footstep but also with the decision to refer to Thoreau as Henry throughout these chronicles. The choice seems, at first, unusual, and it takes some getting used to. “Henry” is quaint, and perhaps a bit precious, but as we travel along with Shattuck this first-name basis humanizes the literary giant, yanks him down from the pantheon to the fertile, buggy earth he once trod, reminding us that he was a man who drank from the pond he bathed in. “Henry,” on the page, also has the inexplicable effect of suggesting that Shattuck might find what he’s looking for on these six walks, discoveries that could soothe and surprise the twenty-first-century acolyte—and maybe the reader, too. Henry is like a sage old friend who, though long gone in body, still walks among us as a companion.

Shattuck’s initial three walks, in Part One of the book, take us to Cape Cod, Mount Katahdin in Maine, and Wachusett Mountain in Massachusetts. Before setting out for the Cape, he puts a notebook in his backpack, “not because I ever journaled or made sketches, but because Henry had, and I wanted to try someone’s habits for a few days.” Part Two spans new geographical and emotional terrain, with a sixteen-mile pilgrimage from the author’s childhood home on a saltwater river to a peninsula isolated by the sea in Sakonnet, Rhode Island, where his great-great-great-grandparents summered away from their home in Chicago. This is Shattuck’s version of the southwest walk that Thoreau discusses in his famous essay “Walking.” The Sakonnet outing is followed by a journey to The Allagash in Maine, and the final walk is a do-over to Cape Cod, this time accompanied by his fiancée, whom he refers to only as “Jenny” but who is identifiable as Jenny Slate, the actress, author, and former cast member of Saturday Night Live . Both parts include off-trail interludes that allow Shattuck to wander without walking and to provide the backstory behind his quest for self-understanding. In the first of these, he visits a hypnotist in an effort to halt the nightmares that end up propelling him to take these walks. In the second, he visits Walden Pond.

Six Walks contains no map of Shattuck’s—or Thoreau’s—travels, as one might expect. Unfamiliar with much of the terrain, I began to toggle between the book and Google Maps in a mostly futile effort to visualize Shattuck’s routes. I soon gave up this disjointed exercise when I realized that the omission of maps—like calling Thoreau “Henry”—was probably a deliberate choice. After all, this book isn’t really about tracing the land journeys. It isn’t a guide for planning your own walks in the footsteps of Henry David Thoreau. The itinerary here is a circuitous one to Shattuck’s interior, a compass of the soul. Eschewing maps, I was happy to find, in these pages, some of the simple but exquisite black-and-white drawings that Shattuck, an artist and curator as well as a writer, made during his walks. Many, like “A Stone on the Beach,” “Light in the Grass,” and “Bullfrog on River Path,” reflect, even in their titles, a Zen aesthetic of understated elegance.

An intense yearning to get close to Henry is palpable at every turn. Shattuck’s goal on day one of his first Cape Cod walk is to visit the oysterman’s house in Wellfleet where Henry slept for a night. When he finds it, finally, with the help of a local couple, he peers through the windows. Our hearts sink even before Shattuck reveals his own reaction, because by now we recognize the tenacious grip of his sadness. “I felt no connection, no insight, no sudden power,” he writes. Henry’s spirit is nowhere to be found. Continuing on his walk toward Provincetown, Shattuck picks up a wedge of red clay that has tumbled down to the beach from the cliffs of Truro. It’s as big as a slice of wedding cake, he tells us, and he gives in to the urge to take a bite. “The chunk dissolved, milk-chocolate like, when I massaged it with my tongue into the roof of my mouth.” Denied even a morsel of fulfillment at the oysterman’s digs, he can, as consolation, consume a helping of earth once touched by Henry. It is a poignant moment that shows the depth of Shattuck’s hunger.

The hankering for Henry—as an ideal, a symbol, a literary mirror—recurs. After Shattuck is swarmed by blackflies in Maine, he quotes Thoreau’s Maine Woods : “I now first began to be seriously molested by the blackfly!” Shattuck applies DEET while Henry dabs on his own compound of turpentine, spearmint, and camphor oil. Shattuck is awakened by loons singing to each other, a sound he exquisitely describes as being “like a flute somehow played underwater”; Henry, too, hears the voice of the loon in the middle of the night. Shattuck sees a rainbow and we are offered a rainbow from Henry’s journal. In less talented hands, this one-to-one correspondence might come off as gimmicky: a writer dipping into Thoreau to pluck out tidbits of look-alike experience. Here the symmetry seems natural, organic even—there’s no pretense of seeing himself in Thoreau, or Henry in himself.

In the Walden Pond interlude, Shattuck’s pursuit of Henry and all that his walks stood for—happiness, freedom, truth of the soul, a return to childhood—takes a brief, engrossing detour into the realm of paradox. He enters the replica of Thoreau’s cabin and sits in the replica rocking chair next to the replica woodstove. Soon a tourist walks in with her young son. “Oh, look, there he is,” she says to the boy. “Ask him a question.” Shattuck, too, has become a replica, a realization that seems to stun him. “No,” he says to them. What have they encroached on—an image of Henry? A communion with Thoreau on sacred ground? He abruptly gets up and leaves. Reflecting on this discomfiting interaction, Shattuck speculates that “maybe my leaving was in character.” He means Thoreau’s character, of course, and specifically his overblown reputation as a recluse who shunned society. But maybe his leaving also revealed a sharp sliver of Shattuck’s own character, or a hybrid of his and Henry’s. Though he balks at the idea of playing along with the mistaken identity—that of reenactor—his walks are essentially, and self-admittedly, reenactments, for that is what it means, in part, to follow in someone else’s footsteps.

Is Shattuck questioning his mission, recognizing a certain futility in the walks? His self-doubt prompts an ongoing interrogation of his very being, which is what makes this book so relatable and compelling. It is not the trudges along the New England seaboard or up a mountain, but rather Shattuck’s probing odyssey, however it might unfold, into despair and his search for a way out that grips us as readers. A wise cliché tells us that it is the journey, not the destination, that counts. Shattuck’s particular journey—inward and outward—avoids self-absorption. As the French philosopher Frédéric Gros argued in A Philosophy of Walking , “By walking, you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history.” Perhaps this explains the unnerving brush at Walden Pond. Shattuck bristles at being ascribed an identity—Thoreau in the boy’s mind, a reenactor for the mother. The attempt at shedding his identity, if just for a few days, is under threat. The tiny cabin and its trespassers are too close for comfort.

On his walk to Wachusett Mountain, Shattuck takes MDMA, which is in the last stages of clinical trials for the treatment of PTSD. “I’d wanted to feel some of the transcendence in nature that Henry felt,” he writes, “and which I hadn’t really yet experienced in the walking, and thought the pills might help.” Shattuck goes on to describe Henry’s own drug experience when he was thirty-four, citing an entry in Thoreau’s journal documenting the effects:

By taking the ether the other day I was convinced how far asunder a man could be separated from his senses. You expand like a seed in the ground. You exist in your roots, like a tree in the winter. If you have an inclination to travel, take the ether: you go beyond the further star.

Thoreau, however, didn’t get high on ether as a means of enhancing his walks or achieving transcendence; his dentist administered it—once—before extracting some bad teeth. In his account of ascending Wachusett Mountain, Shattuck intersperses several Thoreau quotations describing the same walk, allowing the reader to mistakenly infer that Henry, too, was under the influence at the time. But Thoreau’s three-day walk to the mountain summit occurred in 1842 and his essay, “A Walk to Wachusett,” was published in The Boston Miscellany in January 1843; his dentist gave him ether in 1851. A clarification could have cleared up the confusion and, in turn, spotlighted a more salient, ironic link between the author and Henry: both have taken a drug in order to suppress an ache, and to make an experience more pleasant.

Throughout Six Walks , and especially in Part One, Shattuck’s anguish seems stubbornly intractable. While a drug might offer only a temporary transcendence, it’s easy to sympathize with Shattuck’s desire for relief. We feel for him when he asks himself whether Henry, whose brother John died six months before Thoreau’s Wachusett walk, was “doing the same thing I was doing? Walking to husk the dead skin of grief? Looking up to feel the comfort of one’s own smallness in the world, to displace bulging selfhood, under the shadow of such urgent beauty as the night sky?”

Ten years pass before Shattuck begins the walks and the writing of Part Two, and a lot has happened in that time. His anxiety and distress have subsided. He gets engaged to Jenny. He no longer feels the urgency to leave home. Reading Thoreau, however, has been a constant, and in this new era of love, maturity, and greater perspective, he still feels the impulse to replicate some of Henry’s journeys. If there’s one thing he’s learned from reading Thoreau’s journals, “It’s that stepping out your front door gives you an offering in all seasons and moods. Something would come from continuing to follow him.”

In the first summer of the pandemic, Shattuck heads on foot from the house where he grew up to an ancestral home in Rhode Island, a route marked by reminders of his childhood: “Past the pond where I used to go duck hunting with my dad. Past the bushes of wild hazelnuts my mom and I picked when I was boy—the memory of which so quietly imprinted itself in my mind that I had forgotten we’d done that until I walked past them one day, saw their frilled encasings dropping by the footpath, and thought of my mom.” And then: “To the beach where my grandmother, mother, and I all played as kids in our own times, the beach surrounding the farmland my great-grandfather bought in the early 1900s. The outgoing tide had left a trim of folded particulate—seaweed and flecks of stone—that looked like a line of drawing of distant mountains.” In the fuguelike passages of this “Southwest” walk, Shattuck hits a Proustian stride. The prose is lilting and graceful here in a book of already lush prose.

Thoreau, in his seminal essay, “Walking”—published in the Atlantic Monthly a few weeks after his death in 1862—declared that when he left his house for a walk, he inevitably headed southwest, “toward some particular wood or meadow or deserted pasture or hill in that direction. [ … ] The future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side.” In Part Two, one key to Shattuck’s future is found not by heading southwest but by recounting the uncomplicated pleasures of his youth. Therein lies one of the most striking affinities with Henry and his walks—a craving for an infinity of childhood freedom. While Thoreau’s obsessive, hours-long walks and his essays on the subject are often automatically associated with Nature—with all that the word has come to signify: ecological awareness, preservation, a romantic return to the pastoral, and “nature writing,” to name a few—or with a supposed rejection of society, the expression of his true purpose in sauntering can be found in his journal entry of July 21, 1851, three years after abandoning his Walden Pond cabin and eleven years before succumbing to tuberculosis. That long, rhapsodic entry, shortened here, can be read as a manifesto for Shattuck:

Now I yearn for one of those old, meandering, dry, uninhabited roads, which lead away from towns, which lead us away from temptation, which conduct to the outside of earth, over its uppermost crust, where you may forget in what country you are travelling; where no farmer can complain that you are treading down his grass [ … ] along which you may travel like a pilgrim, going nowhither; where travellers are not too often to be met; where my spirit is free; where the walls and fences are not cared for; where your head is more in heaven than your feet are on earth [ … ] where travellers have no occasion to stop, but pass along and leave you to your thoughts; where it makes no odds which way you face, whether you are going or coming, whether it is morning or evening, mid-noon or midnight [ … ] where you can walk and think with the least obstruction, there being nothing to measure progress by; where you can pace when your breast is full, and cherish your moodiness [ … ] by which you may go to the uttermost parts of the earth. [ … ] There I can walk and stalk and pace and plod. [ … ] That’s a road I can travel [ … ] There I can walk, and recover the lost child that I am without any ringing of a bell [ … ] There I have freedom in my thought, and in my soul am free.

On his last walk—his second to the Cape—Shattuck and his fiancée, Jenny, stay in an old shack in Provincetown. Fitted out with a hand pump for water, an outhouse, and lanterns, the shelter seems more like Thoreau’s original cabin than its replica at Walden Pond. Shattuck doesn’t make this explicit comparison; he doesn’t need to. His masterful approach to past and present evokes a place that no longer exists and the profound satisfaction he takes in the night’s ramshackle accommodations. No reenactments required. In speaking with someone he loves, Shattuck has found the real thing. “I didn’t want to walk anymore,” he writes. “I didn’t want to sleep in a stranger’s house. I didn’t want to wake up before dawn to hike up Mount Katahdin or take MDMA under a chairlift or empty my breath and be pressed by the weight of Walden Pond.” Transcendence, then, is felt when it’s least expected—when we aren’t looking for it or following someone else’s lead.

The epigraph for Six Walks is a definition: “Footstep (‘fóot, step): A step taken by a person in walking, especially as heard by another.” In these pages we hear an echo across time, terrain, and imagination: Thoreau rustling in the distance as Shattuck moves forward with his life. You might read this book because you’re a fan of Thoreau, or because you’re an ardent walker and nature-lover. Or you might just read it to wander in the generous presence of Shattuck. You might cross the finish line, as I did, thinking of him as Ben.

Published on June 30, 2022

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ENGL405: The American Renaissance

Essay on henry david thoreau and "walden".

You have already been introduced to Thoreau as a writer. Read this short essay on get a better sense of him as an activist.

On July 4, 1845, Henry David Thoreau took up residence in a cabin he had constructed on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson on the shores of Walden Pond, just outside of Concord, Massachusetts. For the next 27 months, Thoreau would live there, contemplating nineteenth-century American life and the world as a whole as it passed by, compiling notes and thoughts that would eventually form the basis of what has been considered his masterpiece , Walden . Organized around the calendar year, Walden consolidates Thoreau's two-year experience into one calendrical cycle, but it is far more than a memoir or a naturalist's report, moving from philosophical and political considerations to short sketches of the people and animals that move in and out of his life to rhapsodic celebrations of the pond and its environs to scientific data on its depth and its climate. To an extent none of his other writings do, Walden balances Thoreau's various interests and themes – understanding nature from a scientific and spiritual perspective, criticizing nineteenth-century U. S. materialism and inequality on the basis of natural laws and spiritual truth, and experimenting with language as a way of conveying those laws and truths in order to transform himself and his society.

Thoreau was born in 1817 in Concord, where he lived almost the entirety of his life. His family was fairly well off economically, as they owned one of the premier pencil-making factories in the nation. This financial security allowed Thoreau to attend Harvard, from which he graduated in 1837, in the midst of one of the worst financial panics of the nineteenth century. After resigning from his first job as a teacher because he refused to inflict corporal punishment, he opened a school with his brother John in Concord, which they ran together until 1841, when John became ill. After John's death in 1842, which would leave him without one of his closest companions, Thoreau took a teaching position in Staten Island as a way of gaining a foothold in the New York literary market. However, he would soon return to Concord. Following his experiment on Walden Pond, Thoreau continued in Concord, first living with the Emerson family for a short time, before returning to his family home, where he lived as a boarder until his death in 1862.

Early on, Thoreau came under the influence of Emerson and the transcendentalist circle, publishing essays and poetry in The Dial edited by Emerson and Margaret Fuller in the early 1840s, and living with Emerson from 1841 to 1843. While Emerson's influence can be felt in many of Thoreau's writings, their relationship was not always easy and Thoreau departs from Emerson in significant ways. Thoreau's time at Walden Pond and the experience he records of being jailed for not paying taxes in "Resistance to Civil Government" ("Civil Disobedience") can be readily understood as putting Emerson's philosophy of self-reliance into material practice. But as significant as that philosophical basis is to Thoreau's activity, the material nature of his activity may be more important. For Thoreau, the material world and his interaction with it become central in a way that the world never seems to be quite so real in Emerson's writings. While many of Emerson's essays and lectures tend to focus on abstract ideas, principles, and social positions as indicated by their very titles – "Self-Reliance", "Compensation", and "The Poet" – Thoreau's writings ground themselves in specific experience and particular locales, as indicated by the two books he published during his life time: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and Walden .

Also unlike Emerson, who would achieve great fame as a lecturer and essayist, Thoreau would remain relatively obscure during his lifetime, even as he circulated among the most important literary circles of his age. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers was an infamous publishing failure – fewer than 300 of the original edition of 1000 books sold – but it helped to establish Thoreau's ability to weave philosophical insights and meditations, commentary on nature and history, into a narrative structure. Written during his time at Walden Pond, the book ostensibly chronicles the trip Thoreau and his brother John took in 1839. But Thoreau uses their journey both to mourn and remember his brother and to explore the philosophical and social questions at the core of his thought, the relationship between the self and nature, the history of Euro-American exploitation of American nature and its native inhabitants, and the connection between specific locales and times and the eternal and the universal.

During the same year of the publication A Week , Thoreau produced his most famous essay, "Resistance to Civil Government", better known now by the title "Civil Disobedience". "Resistance to Civil Government", with its argument that the individual conscience trumps man-made laws when those laws become the machinery of injustice, has influenced a number of important political activists, most famously Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. The essay uses Thoreau's experience of being imprisoned for one night in 1846 (during his sojourn at Walden Pond) for not paying his poll tax in protest of American policies, most importantly the U.S.-Mexican War and the continuation of slavery. In defending and explaining his conduct, Thoreau produces an individualistic, transcendentalist politics based on the inviolability of the individual conscience, a conscience or moral sense that potentially grants each of us access to a higher truth. This faith in the individual's ability to conduct himself properly through the use of an inner moral sense provides the foundation for the fundamentally anarchistic position Thoreau articulates at the beginning of the essay – "'That government is best which governs not at all;' and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have". Thoreau returns to his hope for a state that will all but cease to exist at the end of the essay and describes his ability and desire to escape contact with the government as much as possible, concluding his inserted history of his night in prison by recounting a huckleberry picking expedition that led him into nature where "the State was nowhere to be seen".

Yet much of the essay takes a more practical approach to the realities of the government in the antebellum U. S., with Thoreau even recognizing it as doing some good, as when he acknowledges paying the "highway tax:" "to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government". As much as Thoreau bases his radical individualism and anarchist tendencies in his transcendentalist philosophy, then, he is most concerned with the specific American government of his time and its policies. The fundamental problem with government is that it takes on a life of its own, becoming, in Thoreau's central metaphor in the essay, a machine that then attempts to treat individual men as machines lacking in thought or conscience. In articulating his more specific focus, he grounds his critique in American political thought, recalling the Revolution in order to contend that "All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable". While he seems to suggest that any violation of one's sense of justice by the government would validate resisting the state by withholding one's allegiance or by refusing to pay taxes, his argument largely relegates such extreme acts to only the most severe violation of right. He advises us to let certain injustices go: "If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go". And he makes it clear that he is not calling upon his fellow citizens to engage in a crusade to eliminate all evil: "It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong". Thoreau's point is not that slavery and what he – and many others – saw as an imperialistic war are wrong. There's much evil in the world, and it is beyond our capacity to eliminate it all.

What goads Thoreau to action is that the government that asks for his allegiance and support has created machinery for unjust purposes, as "oppression and robbery are organized" to support war and slavery. While Thoreau does not see it as his duty to oppose all injustice, he argues that "it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it . . . not to give it practically his support. . . . . I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue [my pursuits] sitting upon another man's shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too". Much of his critique is aimed at his many neighbors who ostensibly oppose slavery and the U. S.-Mexican War but do little in actuality to stop the federal government from continuing as it has and, in supporting the government, actually further the injustices they claim to oppose, thus "practically" giving their support. It is here that he dismisses voting as an empty gesture because the voter does not fully invest himself in the outcome of the vote. This is where civil disobedience becomes necessary, for the individual must make his "life a counter friction to stop the machine" of injustice by attempting to clog up the wheels of the government's machinery: "Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence". If each person who thought slavery or the U.S.-Mexican War was wrong withheld support for the government, Thoreau contends, the government would have to relent rather than jailing thousands of citizens. While this idea of nonviolent resistance became one of the most influential parts of Thoreau's political thought, he moved away from this position as the nation stumbled closer and closer to Civil War. Specifically, in his eulogistic essays on John Brown, following his failed attempt at provoking a slave rebellion in Virginia, Thoreau celebrated Brown's ability to stir Northerners from their slumber, as "He has liberated many thousands of slaves, both North and South". This figuring of his fellow Northerners as slaves – as enslaved to the system of slavery specifically and to social norms more broadly – connects this later apology for violence to "Resistance" where he similarly opines that slavery could only be abolished by voting when society has become "indifferent" to it and the voters themselves "will then be the only slaves".

As his more explicitly political writings frequently speak of his fellow citizens as slaves for their continuing support of slavery, Walden similarly equates those who "lead lives of quiet desperation" in which they have "no time to be any thing but a machine" to being "slave-driver[s]" of themselves. If slavery and industrialization provide the most prominent contexts for Thoreau's critique, Nature provides the antidote for these moral and social ailments. Most pronouncedly, he announces his social project in terms of his fellow Americans being asleep: "I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up". For Thoreau, especially in the second chapter of Walden , "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For", morning becomes a figure for the ever-present possibility of waking to "a poetic or divine life" through both the imaginative constitution of the world and direct contact with its material reality.

Much of Walden consists of Thoreau's meditations on his experiment in Spartan living, an experiment based in an attempt at discovering exactly what a man needs to live, materially and spiritually, and his focus is largely on discerning his place within nature and, through it, within the universe. Yet running through these more philosophical and, at times, scientific threads is a steady critique of American society – "this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century" – for having misplaced priorities due to a failure of imagination and perspective. While not as explicitly political as "Resistance" or his essays and lectures on slavery, Walden takes aim both at specific injustices and at the broader social and ideological underpinnings of those injustices. Among other things, Thoreau, for example, attacks industrialized labor for merely seeking "that the corporations may be enriched" and repeatedly gestures to the travesty of Southern slavery. But the basis for these critiques lies in his returning to nature and a world that exists outside the nineteenth century and its narrow interests, allowing him the perspective to see the limitations of his time.

It is through his deeper engagement, his "closest acquaintance with Nature", that Thoreau discovers the higher laws that guide his critique of American society. In particular, in the chapter "Higher Laws", Thoreau attempts to link the higher "spiritual life" with "a primitive", more "rank hold on life", even as he recognizes these instincts as quite distinct. He argues that it is through his experiences in the wild, that he gains access to "the most original part of himself", through a kind of "clarifying process". In "Spring", he famously describes such a clarifying process within nature itself through his description of the thawing of the railroad bank. As with his depiction of morning as reflecting the awakening of the self to the world, so with "Spring" he offers an account of the world coming back to life. Viewing the bank, he feels as if he "stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me". This experience leads him to meditate on the connections between various material phenomena and language, captured in the repeated form of leaves, as he concludes that "it seemed that this one hillside illustrated the principle of all the operations of Nature". "Spring" concludes with images that suggest the unimportance of human or any specific animal's existence within nature, as Thoreau defends and celebrates nature's extravagance, the fact that "Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed" – "tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the world". Yet nature also provides the springboard for transforming human life – both in general, in a particular society, and for the individual – for it enables us to recognize that this earth and "the institutions upon it, are plastic" and to see "our own limits transgressed" by its "inexhaustible vigor, vast and Titanic features". It is this emphasis on continually transgressing our limits as our experience with nature repeatedly reminds us that leads Thoreau to leave Walden Pond. As he famously puts it, "I had several more lives to live", and during his time at Walden he had already made "a beaten track" between his cabin and the pond and a similar path "which the mind travels". Nature, Thoreau suggests, helps to correct our tendency to fall into the same paths, the same routines, and as such it can help to reorient ourselves as individual and as a society.

Suggested Additional Reading

Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Cavell, Stanley. The Senses of Walden. Expanded ed. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981.

Milder, Robert. Reimagining Thoreau. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Myerson, Joel, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Richardson, Robert D., Jr. Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986

Robinson, David M. Natural Life: Thoreau's Worldly Transcendentalism. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004.

Walls, Laura Dassow. Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.

On The Site

• literary collections

A Fully Annotated Edition

by Henry David Thoreau

Edited by Jeffrey S. Cramer

• Request Print Exam/Desk Copy

480 Pages , 7.50 x 9.25 in , 1 b-w illus.

• 9780300216806
• Published: Tuesday, 27 Oct 2015
• 9780300165623
• Published: Tuesday, 21 May 2013

Also Available At:

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• Description

This new selection of Thoreau’s essays traces his trajectory as a writer for the outlets of his day—the periodical press, newspapers, and compendiums—and as a frequent presenter on the local lecture circuit. By arranging the writings chronologically, the volume re-creates the experience of Thoreau’s readers as they followed his developing ideas over time.

Jeffrey S. Cramer, award-winning editor of six previous volumes of works by Thoreau, offers the most accurate text available for each essay and provides convenient on-page annotations. He establishes context and guides the reader through unfamiliar allusions and references, plumbing the depths of Thoreau’s writings with unprecedented insight.

Among the essays in this book: · The Last Days of John Brown · Resistance to Civil Government [Civil Disobedience] · Thomas Carlyle and His Works · Natural History of Massachusetts · and many more

Jeffrey S. Cramer is curator of collections, The Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods, and editor of six previous volumes by Henry D. Thoreau.  

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The writer extols the virtues of immersing oneself in nature and laments the inevitable encroachment of private ownership upon the wilderness.

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil, — to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care of that.

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, — who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going à la Sainte Terre ,” to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer ,” a Saunterer, — a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.

It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearthside from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return, — prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again, — if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.

To come down to my own experience, my companion and I, for I sometimes have a companion, take pleasure in fancying ourselves knights of a new, or rather an old, order, — not Equestrians or Chevaliers, not Ritters or Riders, but Walkers, a still more ancient and honorable class, I trust. The Chivalric and heroic spirit which once belonged to the Rider seems now to reside in, or perchance to have subsided into, the Walker, — not the Knight, but Walker Errant. He is a sort of fourth estate, outside of Church and State and People.

We have felt that we almost alone hereabouts practiced this noble art; though, to tell the truth, at least if their own assertions are to be received, most of my townsmen would fain walk sometimes, as I do, but they cannot. No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom, and independence which are the capital in this profession. It comes only by the grace of God. It requires a direct dispensation from Heaven to become a walker. You must be born into the family of the Walkers. Ambulator nascitur, non fit . Some of my townsmen, it is true, can remember and have described to me some walks which they took ten years ago, in which they were so blessed as to lose themselves for half an hour in the woods; but I know very well that they have confined themselves to the highway ever since, whatever pretensions they may make to belong to this select class. No doubt they were elevated for a moment as by the reminiscence of a previous state of existence, when even they were foresters and outlaws.

“When he came to grene wode, In a mery mornynge, There he herde the notes small Of byrdes mery syngynge. “It is ferre gone, sayd Robyn, That I was last here; Me Lyste a lytell for to shote At the donne dere.”

I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least — and it is commonly more than that — sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements. You may safely say, A penny for your thoughts, or a thousand pounds. When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many of them, — as if the legs were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk upon, — I think that they deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago. I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some rust, and when sometimes I have stolen forth for a walk at the eleventh hour, or four o’clock in the afternoon, too late to redeem the day, when the shades of night were already beginning to be mingled with the daylight, have felt as if I had committed some sin to be atoned for, — I confess that I am astonished at the power of endurance, to say nothing of the moral insensibility, of my neighbors who confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months, aye, and years almost together. I know not what manner of stuff they are of, — sitting there now at three o’clock in the afternoon, as if it were three o’clock in the morning. Bonaparte may talk of the three-o’clock-in-the-morning courage, but it is nothing to the courage which can sit down cheerfully at this hour in the afternoon over against one’s self whom you have known all the morning, to starve out a garrison to whom you are bound by such strong ties of sympathy. I wonder that about this time, or say between four and five o’clock in the afternoon, too late for the morning papers and too early for the evening ones, there is not a general explosion heard up and down the street, scattering a legion of antiquated and house-bred notions and whims to the four winds for an airing, — and so the evil cure itself.

How womankind, who are confined to the house still more than men, stand it I do not know; but I have ground to suspect that most of them do not stand it at all. When, early in a summer afternoon, we have been shaking the dust of the village from the skirts of our garments, making haste past those houses with purely Doric or Gothic fronts, which have such an air of repose about them, my companion whispers that probably about these times their occupants are all gone to bed. Then it is that I appreciate the beauty and the glory of architecture, which itself never turns in, but forever stands out and erect, keeping watch over the slumberers.

No doubt temperament, and, above all, age, have a good deal to do with it. As a man grows older, his ability to sit still and follow indoor occupations increases. He grows vespertinal in his habits as the evening of life approaches, till at last he comes forth only just before sundown, and gets all the walk that he requires in half an hour.

But the walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours, — as the swinging of dumbbells or chairs; but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day. If you would get exercise, go in search of the springs of life. Think of a man’s swinging dumbbells for his health, when those springs are bubbling up in far-off pastures unsought by him!

Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking. When a traveller asked Wordsworth’s servant to show him her master’s study, she answered, “Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.”

Living much out of doors, in the sun and wind, will no doubt produce a certain roughness of character, — will cause a thicker cuticle to grow over some of the finer qualities of our nature, as on the face and hands, or as severe manual labor robs the hands of some of their delicacy of touch. So staying in the house, on the other hand, may produce a softness and smoothness, not to say thinness of skin, accompanied by an increased sensibility to certain impressions. Perhaps we should be more susceptible to some influences important to our intellectual and moral growth, if the sun had shone and the wind blown on us a little less; and no doubt it is a nice matter to proportion rightly the thick and thin skin. But methinks that is a scurf that will fall off fast enough, — that the natural remedy is to be found in the proportion which the night bears to the day, the winter to the summer, thought to experience. There will be so much the more air and sunshine in our thoughts. The callous palms of the laborer are conversant with finer tissues of self-respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the heart, than the languid fingers of idleness. That is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself white, far from the tan and callus of experience.

When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall? Even some sects of philosophers have felt the necessity of importing the woods to themselves, since they did not go to the woods. “They planted groves and walks of Platanes,” where they took subdiales ambulationes in porticos open to the air. Of course it is of no use to direct our steps to the woods, if they do not carry us thither. I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is, — I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods? I suspect myself, and cannot help a shudder when I find myself so implicated even in what are called good works, — for this may sometimes happen.

My vicinity affords many good walks; and though for so many years I have walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together, I have not yet exhausted them. An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles’ radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you.

Nowadays almost all man’s improvements, so called, as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap. A people who would begin by burning the fences and let the forest stand! I saw the fences half consumed, their ends lost in the middle of the prairie, and some worldly miser with a surveyor looking after his bounds, while heaven had taken place around him, and he did not see the angels going to and fro, but was looking for an old post-hole in the midst of paradise. I looked again, and saw him standing in the middle of a boggy stygian fen, surrounded by devils, and he had found his bounds without a doubt, three little stones, where a stake had been driven, and looking nearer, I saw that the Prince of Darkness was his surveyor.

I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing at my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do: first along by the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and the woodside. There are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant. From many a hill I can see civilization and the abodes of man afar. The farmers and their works are scarcely more obvious than woodchucks and their burrows. Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture even politics, the most alarming of them all, — I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape. Politics is but a narrow field, and that still narrower highway yonder leads to it. I sometimes direct the traveller thither. If you would go to the political world, follow the great road, — follow that market-man, keep his dust in your eyes, and it will lead you straight to it; for it, too, has its place merely, and does not occupy all space. I pass from it as from a bean field into the forest, and it is forgotten. In one half-hour I can walk off to some portion of the earth’s surface where a man does not stand from one year’s end to another, and there, consequently, politics are not, for they are but as the cigar-smoke of a man.

The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion of the highway, as a lake of a river. It is the body of which roads are the arms and legs, — a trivial or quadrivial place, the thoroughfare and ordinary of travellers. The word is from the Latin villa which together with via , a way, or more anciently ved and vella , Varro derives from veho , to carry, because the villa is the place to and from which things are carried. They who got their living by teaming were said vellaturam facere . Hence, too, the Latin word vilis and our vile, also villain . This suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel that goes by and over them, without travelling themselves.

Some do not walk at all; others walk in the highways; a few walk across lots. Roads are made for horses and men of business. I do not travel in them much, comparatively, because I am not in a hurry to get to any tavern or grocery or livery-stable or depot to which they lead. I am a good horse to travel, but not from choice a roadster. The landscape-painter uses the figures of men to mark a road. He would not make that use of my figure. I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America; neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer amount of it in mythology than in any history of America, so called, that I have seen.

However, there are a few old roads that may be trodden with profit, as if they led somewhere now that they are nearly discontinued. There is the Old Marlborough Road, which does not go to Marlborough now, methinks, unless that is Marlborough where it carries me. I am the bolder to speak of it here, because I presume that there are one or two such roads in every town.

The Old Marlborough Road . Where they once dug for money, But never found any; Where sometimes Martial Miles Singly files, And Elijah Wood, I fear for no good: No other man, Save Elisha Dugan— O man of wild habits, Partridges and rabbits Who hast no cares Only to set snares, Who liv’st all alone, Close to the bone And where life is sweetest Constantly eatest. When the spring stirs my blood With the instinct to travel, I can get enough gravel On the Old Marlborough Road. Nobody repairs it, For nobody wears it; It is a living way, As the Christians say. Not many there be Who enter therein, Only the guests of the Irishman Quin. What is it, what is it But a direction out there, And the bare possibility Of going somewhere? Great guide-boards of stone, But travellers none; Cenotaphs of the towns Named on their crowns. It is worth going to see Where you might be. What king Did the thing, I am still wondering; Set up how or when, By what selectmen, Gourgas or Lee, Clark or Darby? They’re a great endeavor To be something forever; Blank tablets of stone, Where a traveller might groan, And in one sentence Grave all that is known Which another might read, In his extreme need. I know one or two Lines that would do, Literature that might stand All over the land Which a man could remember Till next December, And read again in the spring, After the thawing. If with fancy unfurled You leave your abode You may go round the world By the Old Marlborough Road.

At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only, — when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road, and walking over the surface of God’s earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman’s grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come.

What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither we will walk? I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. It is not indifferent to us which way we walk. There is a right way; but we are very liable from heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one. We would fain take that walk, never yet taken by us through this actual world, which is perfectly symbolical of the path which we love to travel in the interior and ideal world; and sometimes, no doubt, we find it difficult to choose our direction, because it does not yet exist distinctly in our idea.

When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will bend my steps, and submit myself to my instinct to decide for me, I find, strange and whimsical as it may seem, that I finally and inevitably settle southwest, toward some particular wood or meadow or deserted pasture or hill in that direction. My needle is slow to settle, — varies a few degrees, and does not always point due southwest, it is true, and it has good authority for this variation, but it always settles between west and south-southwest. The future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side. The outline which would bound my walks would be, not a circle, but a parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits which have been thought to be non-returning curves, in this case opening westward, in which my house occupies the place of the sun. I turn round and round irresolute sometimes for a quarter of an hour, until I decide, for a thousandth time, that I will walk into the southwest or west. Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free. Thither no business leads me. It is hard for me to believe that I shall find fair landscapes or sufficient wildness and freedom behind the eastern horizon. I am not excited by the prospect of a walk thither; but I believe that the forest which I see in the western horizon stretches uninterruptedly toward the setting sun, and there are no towns nor cities in it of enough consequence to disturb me. Let me live where I will, on this side is the city, on that the wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and more, and withdrawing into the wilderness. I should not lay so much stress on this fact, if I did not believe that something like this is the prevailing tendency of my countrymen. I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west. Within a few years we have witnessed the phenomenon of a southeastward migration, in the settlement of Australia; but this affects us as a retrograde movement, and, judging from the moral and physical character of the first generation of Australians, has not yet proved a successful experiment. The eastern Tartars think that there is nothing west beyond Thibet. “The world ends there,” say they; “beyond there is nothing but a shoreless sea.” It is unmitigated East where they live.

We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure. The Atlantic is a Lethean stream, in our passage over which we have had an opportunity to forget the Old World and its institutions. If we do not succeed this time, there is perhaps one more chance for the race left before it arrives on the banks of the Styx; and that is in the Lethe of the Pacific, which is three times as wide.

I know not how significant it is, or how far it is an evidence of singularity, that an individual should thus consent in his pettiest walk with the general movement of the race; but I know that something akin to the migratory instinct in birds and quadrupeds, — which, in some instances, is known to have affected the squirrel tribe, impelling them to a general and mysterious movement, in which they were seen, say some, crossing the broadest rivers, each on its particular chip, with its tail raised for a sail, and bridging narrower streams with their dead, — that something like the furor which affects the domestic cattle in the spring, and which is referred to a worm in their tails, — affects both nations and individuals, either perennially or from time to time. Not a flock of wild geese cackles over our town, but it to some extent unsettles the value of real estate here, and, if I were a broker, I should probably take that disturbance into account.

“Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages, And palmeres for to seken strange strondes.”

Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a West as distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes down. He appears to migrate westward daily, and tempt us to follow him. He is the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow. We dream all night of those mountain-ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapor only, which were last gilded by his rays. The island of Atlantis, and the islands and gardens of the Hesperides, a sort of terrestrial paradise, appear to have been the Great West of the ancients, enveloped in mystery and poetry. Who has not seen in imagination, when looking into the sunset sky, the gardens of the Hesperides, and the foundation of all those fables?

Columbus felt the westward tendency more strongly than any before. He obeyed it, and found a New World for Castile and Leon. The herd of men in those days scented fresh pastures from afar,

“And now the sun had stretched out all the hills, And now was dropped into the western bay; At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue; Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.”

Where on the globe can there be found an area of equal extent with that occupied by the bulk of our States, so fertile and so rich and varied in its productions, and at the same time so habitable by the European, as this is? Michaux, who knew but part of them, says that “the species of large trees are much more numerous in North America than in Europe; in the United States there are more than one hundred and forty species that exceed thirty feet in height; in France there are but thirty that attain this size.” Later botanists more than confirm his observations. Humboldt came to America to realize his youthful dreams of a tropical vegetation, and he beheld it in its greatest perfection in the primitive forests of the Amazon, the most gigantic wilderness on the earth, which he has so eloquently described. The geographer Guyot, himself a European, goes farther, — farther than I am ready to follow him; yet not when he says, — “As the plant is made for the animal, as the vegetable world is made for the animal world, America is made for the man of the Old World.... The man of the Old World sets out upon his way. Leaving the highlands of Asia, he descends from station to station towards Europe. Each of his steps is marked by a new civilization superior to the preceding, by a greater power of development. Arrived at the Atlantic, he pauses on the shore of this unknown ocean, the bounds of which he knows not, and turns upon his footprints for an instant.” When he has exhausted the rich soil of Europe, and reinvigorated himself, “then recommences his adventurous career westward as in the earliest ages.” So far Guyot.

From this western impulse coming in contact with the barrier of the Atlantic sprang the commerce and enterprise of modern times. The younger Michaux, in his “Travels West of the Alleghanies in 1802,” says that the common inquiry in the newly settled West was, “‘From what part of the world have you come?’ As if these vast and fertile regions would naturally be the place of meeting and common country of all the inhabitants of the globe.”

To use an obsolete Latin word, I might say, Ex Oriente lux; ex Occidente FRUX . From the East light; from the West fruit.

Sir Francis Head, an English traveller and a Governor-General of Canada, tells us that “in both the northern and southern hemispheres of the New World, Nature has not only outlined her works on a larger scale, but has painted the whole picture with brighter and more costly colors than she used in delineating and in beautifying the Old World.... The heavens of America appear infinitely higher, the sky is bluer, the air is fresher, the cold is intenser, the moon looks larger, the stars are brighter the thunder is louder, the lightning is vivider, the wind is stronger, the rain is heavier, the mountains are higher, the rivers longer, the forests bigger, the plains broader.” This statement will do at least to set against Buffon’s account of this part of the world and its productions.

Linnaeus said long ago, “Nescio quae facies laeta, glabra plantis Americanis: I know not what there is of joyous and smooth in the aspect of American plants”; and I think that in this country there are no, or at most very few, Africanae bestiae , African beasts, as the Romans called them, and that in this respect also it is peculiarly fitted for the habitation of man. We are told that within three miles of the center of the East-Indian city of Singapore, some of the inhabitants are annually carried off by tigers; but the traveller can lie down in the woods at night almost anywhere in North America without fear of wild beasts.

These are encouraging testimonies. If the moon looks larger here than in Europe, probably the sun looks larger also. If the heavens of America appear infinitely higher, and the stars brighter, I trust that these facts are symbolical of the height to which the philosophy and poetry and religion of her inhabitants may one day soar. At length, perchance, the immaterial heaven will appear as much higher to the American mind, and the intimations that star it as much brighter. For I believe that climate does thus react on man, — as there is something in the mountain air that feeds the spirit and inspires. Will not man grow to greater perfection intellectually as well as physically under these influences? Or is it unimportant how many foggy days there are in his life? I trust that we shall be more imaginative, that our thoughts will be clearer, fresher, and more ethereal, as our sky, — our understanding more comprehensive and broader, like our plains, — our intellect generally on a grander scale, like our thunder and lightning, our rivers and mountains and forests, — and our hearts shall even correspond in breadth and depth and grandeur to our inland seas. Perchance there will appear to the traveller something, he knows not what, of laeta and glabra , of joyous and serene, in our very faces. Else to what end does the world go on, and why was America discovered?

To Americans I hardly need to say, —

“Westward the star of empire takes its way.”

As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to think that Adam in paradise was more favorably situated on the whole than the backwoodsman in this country.

Our sympathies in Massachusetts are not confined to New England; though we may be estranged from the South, we sympathize with the West. There is the home of the younger sons, as among the Scandinavians they took to the sea for their inheritance. It is too late to be studying Hebrew; it is more important to understand even the slang of today.

Some months ago I went to see a panorama of the Rhine. It was like a dream of the Middle Ages. I floated down its historic stream in something more than imagination, under bridges built by the Romans, and repaired by later heroes, past cities and castles whose very names were music to my ears, and each of which was the subject of a legend. There were Ehrenbreitstein and Rolandseck and Coblentz, which I knew only in history. They were ruins that interested me chiefly. There seemed to come up from its waters and its vine-clad hills and valleys a hushed music as of Crusaders departing for the Holy Land. I floated along under the spell of enchantment, as if I had been transported to an heroic age, and breathed an atmosphere of chivalry.

Soon after, I went to see a panorama of the Mississippi, and as I worked my way up the river in the light of today, and saw the steamboats wooding up, counted the rising cities, gazed on the fresh ruins of Nauvoo, beheld the Indians moving west across the stream, and, as before I had looked up the Moselle, now looked up the Ohio and the Missouri and heard the legends of Dubuque and of Wenona’s Cliff, — still thinking more of the future than of the past or present , — I saw that this was a Rhine stream of a different kind; that the foundations of castles were yet to be laid, and the famous bridges were yet to be thrown over the river; and I felt that this was the heroic age itself , though we know it not, for the hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men.

The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World. Every tree sends its fibers forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind. Our ancestors were savages. The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every state which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source. It was because the children of the Empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the northern forests who were.

I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows. We require an infusion of hemlock, spruce or arbor vitae in our tea. There is a difference between eating and drinking for strength and from mere gluttony. The Hottentots eagerly devour the marrow of the koodoo and other antelopes raw, as a matter of course. Some of our northern Indians eat raw the marrow of the Arctic reindeer, as well as various other parts, including the summits of the antlers, as long as they are soft. And herein, perchance, they have stolen a march on the cooks of Paris. They get what usually goes to feed the fire. This is probably better than stall-fed beef and slaughterhouse pork to make a man of. Give me a wildness whose glance no civilization can endure, — as if we lived on the marrow of koodoos devoured raw.

There are some intervals which border the strain of the wood thrush, to which I would migrate, — wild lands where no settler has squatted; to which, methinks, I am already acclimated.

The African hunter Cummings tells us that the skin of the eland, as well as that of most other antelopes just killed, emits the most delicious perfume of trees and grass. I would have every man so much like a wild antelope, so much a part and parcel of nature, that his very person should thus sweetly advertise our senses of his presence, and remind us of those parts of nature which he most haunts. I feel no disposition to be satirical, when the trapper’s coat emits the odor of musquash even; it is a sweeter scent to me than that which commonly exhales from the merchant’s or the scholar’s garments. When I go into their wardrobes and handle their vestments, I am reminded of no grassy plains and flowery meads which they have frequented, but of dusty merchants’ exchanges and libraries rather.

A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is a fitter color than white for a man, — a denizen of the woods. “The pale white man!” I do not wonder that the African pitied him. Darwin the naturalist says, “A white man bathing by the side of a Tahitian was like a plant bleached by the gardener’s art, compared with a fine, dark green one, growing vigorously in the open fields.”

Ben Jonson exclaims, —

“How near to good is what is fair!”

So I would say, —

“How near to good is what is wild ! ”

Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him. One who pressed forward incessantly and never rested from his labors, who grew fast and made infinite demands on life, would always find himself in a new country or wilderness, and surrounded by the raw material of life. He would be climbing over the prostrate stems of primitive forest-trees.

Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps. When, formerly, I have analyzed my partiality for some farm which I had contemplated purchasing, I have frequently found that I was attracted solely by a few square rods of impermeable and unfathomable bog, — a natural sink in one corner of it. That was the jewel which dazzled me. I derive more of my subsistence from the swamps which surround my native town than from the cultivated gardens in the village. There are no richer parterres to my eyes than the dense beds of dwarf andromeda ( Cassandra calyculata ) which cover these tender places on the earth’s surface. Botany cannot go farther than tell me the names of the shrubs which grow there, — the high-blueberry, panicled andromeda, lamb-kill, azalea, and rhodora, — all standing in the quaking sphagnum. I often think that I should like to have my house front on this mass of dull red bushes, omitting other flower plots and borders, transplanted spruce and trim box, even gravelled walks, — to have this fertile spot under my windows, not a few imported barrow-fulls of soil only to cover the sand which was thrown out in digging the cellar. Why not put my house, my parlor, behind this plot, instead of behind that meager assemblage of curiosities, that poor apology for a Nature and Art, which I call my front yard? It is an effort to clear up and make a decent appearance when the carpenter and mason have departed, though done as much for the passer-by as the dweller within. The most tasteful front-yard fence was never an agreeable object of study to me; the most elaborate ornaments, acorn tops, or what not, soon wearied and disgusted me. Bring your sills up to the very edge of the swamp, then (though it may not be the best place for a dry cellar), so that there be no access on that side to citizens. Front yards are not made to walk in, but, at most, through, and you could go in the back way.

Yes, though you may think me perverse, if it were proposed to me to dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human art contrived, or else of a dismal swamp, I should certainly decide for the swamp. How vain, then, have been all your labors, citizens, for me!

My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness. Give me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness! In the desert, pure air and solitude compensate for want of moisture and fertility. The traveller Burton says of it, — “Your morale improves; you become frank and cordial, hospitable and single-minded.... In the desert, spirituous liquors excite only disgust. There is a keen enjoyment in a mere animal existence.” They who have been travelling long on the steppes of Tartary say, — “On re-entering cultivated lands, the agitation, perplexity, and turmoil of civilization oppressed and suffocated us; the air seemed to fail us, and we felt every moment as if about to die of asphyxia.” When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest woods the thickest and most interminable and, to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum . There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature. The wildwood covers the virgin mould, — and the same soil is good for men and for trees. A man’s health requires as many acres of meadow to his prospect as his farm does loads of muck. There are the strong meats on which he feeds. A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it. A township where one primitive forest waves above while another primitive forest rots below, — such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey.

To preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of a forest for them to dwell in or resort to. So it is with man. A hundred years ago they sold bark in our streets peeled from our own woods. In the very aspect of those primitive and rugged trees there was, methinks, a tanning principle which hardened and consolidated the fibers of men’s thoughts. Ah! already I shudder for these comparatively degenerate days of my native village, when you cannot collect a load of bark of good thickness, — and we no longer produce tar and turpentine.

The civilized nations — Greece, Rome, England — have been sustained by the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They survive as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture! little is to be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is exhausted, and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its fathers. There the poet sustains himself merely by his own superfluous fat, and the philosopher comes down on his marrow-bones.

It is said to be the task of the American “to work the virgin soil,” and that “agriculture here already assumes proportions unknown everywhere else.” I think that the farmer displaces the Indian even because he redeems the meadow, and so makes himself stronger and in some respects more natural. I was surveying for a man the other day a single straight line one hundred and thirty-two rods long, through a swamp at whose entrance might have been written the words which Dante read over the entrance to the infernal regions, — “Leave all hope, ye that enter,” — that is, of ever getting out again; where at one time I saw my employer actually up to his neck and swimming for his life in his property, though it was still winter. He had another similar swamp which I could not survey at all, because it was completely under water, and nevertheless, with regard to a third swamp, which I did survey from a distance, he remarked to me, true to his instincts, that he would not part with it for any consideration, on account of the mud which it contained. And that man intends to put a girdling ditch round the whole in the course of forty months, and so redeem it by the magic of his spade. I refer to him only as the type of a class.

The weapons with which we have gained our most important victories, which should be handed down as heirlooms from father to son, are not the sword and the lance, but the bush-whack, the turf-cutter, the spade, and the bog-hoe, rusted with the blood of many a meadow, and begrimed with the dust of many a hard-fought field. The very winds blew the Indian’s cornfield into the meadow, and pointed out the way which he had not the skill to follow. He had no better implement with which to intrench himself in the land than a clam-shell. But the farmer is armed with plow and spade.

In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dulness is but another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in “Hamlet” and the “Iliad,” in all the Scriptures and Mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us. As the wild duck is more swift and beautiful than the tame, so is the wild — the mallard — thought, which ’mid falling dews wings its way above the fens. A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning’s flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself, — and not a taper lighted at the hearth-stone of the race, which pales before the light of common day.

English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets, — Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakspeare, included, — breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wilderness is a green-wood, — her wild man a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of Nature, but not so much of Nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not when the wild man in her, became extinct.

The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing. The poet today, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science, and the accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer.

Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature? He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved; who derived his words as often as he used them, — transplanted them to his page with earth adhering to their roots; whose words were so true and fresh and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the approach of spring, though they lay half-smothered between two musty leaves in a library, — ay, to bloom and bear fruit there, after their kind, annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with surrounding Nature.

I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this yearning for the Wild. Approached from this side, the best poetry is tame. I do not know where to find in any literature, ancient or modern, any account which contents me of that Nature with which even I am acquainted. You will perceive that I demand something which no Augustan nor Elizabethan age, which no culture, in short, can give. Mythology comes nearer to it than anything. How much more fertile a Nature, at least, has Grecian mythology its root in than English literature! Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted, before the fancy and imagination were affected with blight; and which it still bears, wherever its pristine vigor is unabated. All other literatures endure only as the elms which overshadow our houses; but this is like the great dragon-tree of the Western Isles, as old as mankind, and, whether that does or not, will endure as long; for the decay of other literatures makes the soil in which it thrives.

The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine having yielded their crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate, the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce. Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past, — as it is to some extent a fiction of the present, — the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology.

The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not the less true, though they may not recommend themselves to the sense which is most common among Englishmen and Americans to-day. It is not every truth that recommends itself to the common sense. Nature has a place for the wild clematis as well as for the cabbage. Some expressions of truth are reminiscent, — others merely sensible , as the phrase is, — others prophetic. Some forms of disease, even, may prophesy forms of health. The geologist has discovered that the figures of serpents, griffins, flying dragons, and other fanciful embellishments of heraldry, have their prototypes in the forms of fossil species which were extinct before man was created, and hence “indicate a faint and shadowy knowledge of a previous state of organic existence.” The Hindus dreamed that the earth rested on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent; and though it may be an unimportant coincidence, it will not be out of place here to state, that a fossil tortoise has lately been discovered in Asia large enough to support an elephant. I confess that I am partial to these wild fancies, which transcend the order of time and development. They are the sublimest recreation of the intellect. The partridge loves peas, but not those that go with her into the pot.

In short, all good things are wild and free. There is something in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the human voice, — take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance, — which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so much of their wildness as I can understand. Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones. The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet.

I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights, — any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor’s cow breaks out of her pasture early in the spring and boldly swims the river, a cold, gray tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It is the buffalo crossing the Mississippi. This exploit confers some dignity on the herd in my eyes, — already dignified. The seeds of instinct are preserved under the thick hides of cattle and horses, like seeds in the bowels of the earth, an indefinite period.

Any sportiveness in cattle is unexpected. I saw one day a herd of a dozen bullocks and cows running about and frisking in unwieldy sport, like huge rats, even like kittens. They shook their heads, raised their tails, and rushed up and down a hill, and I perceived by their horns, as well as by their activity, their relation to the deer tribe. But, alas! a sudden loud Whoa! would have damped their ardor at once, reduced them from venison to beef, and stiffened their sides and sinews like the locomotive. Who but the Evil One has cried, “Whoa!” to mankind? Indeed, the life of cattle, like that of many men, is but a sort of locomotiveness; they move a side at a time, and man, by his machinery, is meeting the horse and the ox half-way. Whatever part the whip has touched is thenceforth palsied. Who would ever think of a side of any of the supple cat tribe, as we speak of a side of beef?

I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats still left to sow before they become submissive members of society. Undoubtedly, all men are not equally fit subjects for civilization; and because the majority, like dogs and sheep, are tame by inherited disposition, this is no reason why the others should have their natures broken that they may be reduced to the same level. Men are in the main alike, but they were made several in order that they might be various. If a low use is to be served, one man will do nearly or quite as well as another; if a high one, individual excellence is to be regarded. Any man can stop a hole to keep the wind away, but no other man could serve so rare a use as the author of this illustration did. Confucius says, — “The skins of the tiger and the leopard, when they are tanned, are as the skins of the dog and the sheep tanned.” But it is not the part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious; and tanning their skins for shoes is not the best use to which they can be put.

When looking over a list of men’s names in a foreign language, as of military officers, or of authors who have written on a particular subject, I am reminded once more that there is nothing in a name. The name Menschikoff, for instance, has nothing in it to my ears more human than a whisker, and it may belong to a rat. As the names of the Poles and Russians are to us, so are ours to them. It is as if they had been named by the child’s rigmarole, — Iery wiery ichery van, tittle-tol-tan . I see in my mind a herd of wild creatures swarming over the earth, and to each the herdsman has affixed some barbarous sound in his own dialect. The names of men are, of course, as cheap and meaningless as Bose and Tray , the names of dogs.

Methinks it would be some advantage to philosophy, if men were named merely in the gross, as they are known. It would be necessary only to know the genus and perhaps the race or variety, to know the individual. We are not prepared to believe that every private soldier in a Roman army had a name of his own, — because we have not supposed that he had a character of his own.

At present our only true names are nicknames. I knew a boy who, from his peculiar energy, was called “Buster” by his playmates, and this rightly supplanted his Christian name. Some travellers tell us that an Indian had no name given him at first, but earned it, and his name was his fame; and among some tribes he acquired a new name with every new exploit. It is pitiful when a man bears a name for convenience merely, who has earned neither name nor fame.

I will not allow mere names to make distinctions for me, but still see men in herds for all them. A familiar name cannot make a man less strange to me. It may be given to a savage who retains in secret his own wild title earned in the woods. We have a wild savage in us, and a savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as ours. I see that my neighbor, who bears the familiar epithet William, or Edwin, takes it off with his jacket. It does not adhere to him when asleep or in anger, or aroused by any passion or inspiration. I seem to hear pronounced by some of his kin at such a time his original wild name in some jaw-breaking or else melodious tongue.

Here is this vast, savage, hovering mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man, — a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.

In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the soil, — not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements and modes of culture only!

Many a poor sore-eyed student that I have heard of would grow faster, both intellectually and physically, if, instead of sitting up so very late, he honestly slumbered a fool’s allowance.

There may be an excess even of informing light. Niépce, a Frenchman, discovered “actinism,” that power in the sun’s rays which produces a chemical effect, — that granite rocks, and stone structures, and statues of metal, “are all alike destructively acted upon during the hours of sunshine, and, but for provisions of Nature no less wonderful, would soon perish under the delicate touch of the most subtile of the agencies of the universe.” But he observed that “those bodies which underwent this change during the daylight possessed the power of restoring themselves to their original conditions during the hours of night, when this excitement was no longer influencing them.” Hence it has been inferred that “the hours of darkness are as necessary to the inorganic creation as we know night and sleep are to the organic kingdom.” Not even does the moon shine every night, but gives place to darkness.

I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serving an immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the annual decay of the vegetation which it supports.

There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus invented. The Spaniards have a good term to express this wild and dusky knowledge, — Gramática parda , tawny grammar, — a kind of mother-wit derived from that same leopard to which I have referred.

We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It is said that knowledge is power; and the like. Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance? What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge. By long years of patient industry and reading of the newspapers — for what are the libraries of science but files of newspapers? — a man accumulates a myriad facts, lays them up in his memory, and then when in some spring of his life he saunters abroad into the Great Fields of thought, he, as it were, goes to grass like a horse and leaves all his harness behind in the stable. I would say to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, sometimes, — Go to grass. You have eaten hay long enough. The spring has come with its green crop. The very cows are driven to their country pastures before the end of May; though I have heard of one unnatural farmer who kept his cow in the barn and fed her on hay all the year round. So, frequently, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge treats its cattle.

A man’s ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful, — while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly. Which is the best man to deal with, — he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all?

My desire for knowledge is intermittent, but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before, — a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun. Man cannot know in any higher sense than this, any more than he can look serenely and with impunity in the face of the sun: ‘Ως τì νοών, ου κείνον νοήσεις , — “You will not perceive that, as perceiving a particular thing,” say the Chaldean Oracles.

There is something servile in the habit of seeking after a law which we may obey. We may study the laws of matter at and for our convenience, but a successful life knows no law. It is an unfortunate discovery certainly, that of a law which binds us where we did not know before that we were bound. Live free, child of the mist, — and with respect to knowledge we are all children of the mist. The man who takes the liberty to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of his relation to the law-maker. “That is active duty,” says the Vishnu Purana, “which is not for our bondage; that is knowledge which is for our liberation: all other duty is good only unto weariness; all other knowledge is only the cleverness of an artist.”

It is remarkable how few events or crises there are in our histories, how little exercised we have been in our minds, how few experiences we have had. I would fain be assured that I am growing apace and rankly, though my very growth disturb this dull equanimity—though it be with struggle through long, dark, muggy nights or seasons of gloom. It would be well if all our lives were a divine tragedy even, instead of this trivial comedy or farce. Dante, Bunyan, and others, appear to have been exercised in their minds more than we: they were subjected to a kind of culture such as our district schools and colleges do not contemplate. Even Mahomet, though many may scream at his name, had a good deal more to to live for, ay, and to die for, than they have commonly.

When, at rare intervals, some thought visits one, as perchance he is walking on a railroad, then, indeed, the cars go by without his hearing them. But soon, by some inexorable law, our life goes by and the cars return.

“Gentle breeze, that wanderest unseen, And bendest the thistles round Loira of storms, Traveller of the windy glens, Why hast thou left my ear so soon?”

While almost all men feel an attraction drawing them to society, few are attracted strongly to Nature. In their reaction to Nature men appear to me for the most part, notwithstanding their arts, lower than the animals. It is not often a beautiful relation, as in the case of the animals. How little appreciation of the beauty of the landscape there is among us! We have to be told that the Greeks called the world K όσμος , Beauty, or Order, but we do not see clearly why they did so, and we esteem it at best only a curious philological fact.

For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border life, on the confines of a world into which I make occasional and transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the state into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper. Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o’-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon nor fire-fly has shown me the causeway to it. Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features. The walker in the familiar fields which stretch around my native town sometimes finds himself in another land than is described in their owners’ deeds, as it were in some faraway field on the confines of the actual Concord, where her jurisdiction ceases, and the idea which the word Concord suggests ceases to be suggested. These farms which I have myself surveyed, these bounds which I have set up, appear dimly still as through a mist; but they have no chemistry to fix them; they fade from the surface of the glass, and the picture which the painter painted stands out dimly from beneath. The world with which we are commonly acquainted leaves no trace, and it will have no anniversary.

I took a walk on Spaulding’s Farm the other afternoon. I saw the setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its golden rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into some noble hall. I was impressed as if some ancient and altogether admirable and shining family had settled there in that part of the land called Concord, unknown to me, — to whom the sun was servant, — who had not gone into society in the village, — who had not been called on. I saw their park, their pleasure-ground, beyond through the wood, in Spaulding’s cranberry-meadow. The pines furnished them with gables as they grew. Their house was not obvious to vision; the trees grew through it. I do not know whether I heard the sounds of a suppressed hilarity or not. They seemed to recline on the sunbeams. They have sons and daughters. They are quite well. The farmer’s cart-path, which leads directly through their hall, does not in the least put them out, as the muddy bottom of a pool is sometimes seen through the reflected skies. They never heard of Spaulding, and do not know that he is their neighbor, — notwithstanding I heard him whistle as he drove his team through the house. Nothing can equal the serenity of their lives. Their coat-of-arms is simply a lichen. I saw it painted on the pines and oaks. Their attics were in the tops of the trees. They are of no politics. There was no noise of labor. I did not perceive that they were weaving or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and hearing was done away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum, — as of a distant hive in May, which perchance was the sound of their thinking. They had no idle thoughts, and no one without could see their work, for their industry was not as in knots and excrescences embayed.

But I find it difficult to remember them. They fade irrevocably out of my mind even now while I speak, and endeavor to recall them and recollect myself. It is only after a long and serious effort to recollect my best thoughts that I become again aware of their cohabitancy. If it were not for such families as this, I think I should move out of Concord.

We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons visit us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is laid waste, — sold to feed unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent to mill, and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on. They no longer build nor breed with us. In some more genial season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the landscape of the mind, cast by the wings of some thought in its vernal or autumnal migration, but, looking up, we are unable to detect the substance of the thought itself. Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry. They no longer soar, and they attain only to a Shanghai and Cochin-China grandeur. Those gra-a-ate thoughts , those gra-a-ate men you hear of!

We hug the earth, — how rarely we mount! Methinks we might elevate ourselves a little more. We might climb a tree, at least. I found my account in climbing a tree once. It was a tall white pine, on the top of a hill; and though I got well pitched, I was well paid for it, for I discovered new mountains in the horizon which I had never seen before, — so much more of the earth and the heavens. I might have walked about the foot of the tree for threescore years and ten, and yet I certainly should never have seen them. But, above all, I discovered around me, — it was near the end of June, — on the ends of the topmost branches only, a few minute and delicate red cone-like blossoms, the fertile flower of the white pine looking heavenward. I carried straightway to the village the topmost spire, and showed it to stranger jurymen who walked the streets, — for it was court-week, — and to farmers and lumber-dealers and wood-choppers and hunters, and not one had ever seen the like before, but they wondered as at a star dropped down. Tell of ancient architects finishing their works on the tops of columns as perfectly as on the lower and more visible parts! Nature has from the first expanded the minute blossoms of the forest only toward the heavens, above men’s heads and unobserved by them. We see only the flowers that are under our feet in the meadows. The pines have developed their delicate blossoms on the highest twigs of the wood every summer for ages, as well over the heads of Nature’s red children as of her white ones; yet scarcely a farmer or hunter in the land has ever seen them.

Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past. Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barnyard within our horizon, it is belated. That sound commonly reminds us that we are growing rusty and antique in our employments and habits of thoughts. His philosophy comes down to a more recent time than ours. There is something suggested by it that is a newer testament, — the gospel according to this moment. He has not fallen astern; he has got up early, and kept up early, and to be where he is is to be in season, in the foremost rank of time. It is an expression of the health and soundness of Nature, a brag for all the world, — healthiness as of a spring burst forth, a new fountain of the Muses, to celebrate this last instant of time. Where he lives no fugitive slave laws are passed. Who has not betrayed his master many times since last he heard that note?

The merit of this bird’s strain is in its freedom from all plaintiveness. The singer can easily move us to tears or to laughter, but where is he who can excite in us a pure morning joy? When, in doleful dumps, breaking the awful stillness of our wooden sidewalk on a Sunday, or, perchance, a watcher in the house of mourning, I hear a cockerel crow far or near, I think to myself, “There is one of us well, at any rate,” — and with a sudden gush return to my senses.

We had a remarkable sunset one day last November. I was walking in a meadow, the source of a small brook, when the sun at last, just before setting, after a cold, gray day, reached a clear stratum in the horizon, and the softest, brightest morning sunlight fell on the dry grass and on the stems of the trees in the opposite horizon and on the leaves of the shrub-oaks on the hill-side, while our shadows stretched long over the meadow eastward, as if we were the only motes in its beams. It was such a light as we could not have imagined a moment before, and the air also was so warm and serene that nothing was wanting to make a paradise of that meadow. When we reflected that this was not a solitary phenomenon, never to happen again, but that it would happen forever and ever, an infinite number of evenings, and cheer and reassure the latest child that walked there, it was more glorious still.

The sun sets on some retired meadow, where no house is visible, with all the glory and splendor that it lavishes on cities, and perchance as it has never set before, — where there is but a solitary marsh hawk to have his wings gilded by it, or only a musquash looks out from his cabin, and there is some little black-veined brook in the midst of the marsh, just beginning to meander, winding slowly round a decaying stump. We walked in so pure and bright a light, gilding the withered grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright, I thought I had never bathed in such a golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of Elysium, and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman driving us home at evening.

So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bank-side in autumn.

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The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau Paperback – May 5, 2002

Thoreau's major essays annotated and introduced by one of our most vital intellectuals. With The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau , Lewis Hyde gathers thirteen of Thoreau's finest short prose works and, for the first time in 150 years, presents them fully annotated and arranged in the order of their composition. This definitive edition includes Thoreau's most famous essays, "Civil Disobedience" and "Walking," along with lesser-known masterpieces such as "Wild Apples," "The Last Days of John Brown," and an account of his 1846 journey into the Maine wilderness to climb Mount Katahdin, an essay that ends on a unique note of sublimity and terror. Hyde diverges from the long-standing and dubious editorial custom of separating Thoreau's politics from his interest in nature, a division that has always obscured the ways in which the two are constantly entwined. "Natural History of Massachusetts" begins not with fish and birds but with a dismissal of the political world, and "Slavery in Massachusetts" ends with a meditation on the water lilies blooming on the Concord River. Thoreau's ideal reader was expected to be well versed in Greek and Latin, poetry and travel narrative, and politically engaged in current affairs. Hyde's detailed annotations clarify many of Thoreau's references and re-create the contemporary context wherein the nation's westward expansion was bringing to a head the racial tensions that would result in the Civil War.

• Print length 448 pages
• Language English
• Publication date May 5, 2002
• Dimensions 6 x 1 x 9 inches
• ISBN-10 0865476462
• ISBN-13 978-0865476462
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

“Hyde's volume is a well-chosen, handsome collection of essays with a splendid introduction. Everyone will want to use it--it's a real contribution.” ― Robert D. Richardson, author of Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind “This thoughtfully-edited gathering of Thoreau's essays will surely be of great interest both to Thoreauvians and to readers approaching his work for the first time.” ― Lawrence Buell, Harvard University, author of The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture “[This book is] much enhanced by Hyde's intelligent and entertaining introduction. He has collected thirteen of Thoreau's essays but has chosen to depart from the customary practice of separating 'nature' essays from 'political' essays, instead arranging them in the order of their composition. In so doing, Hyde reminds us that the two worlds were indivisible even in the mind of Thoreau. To separate what we call 'human nature' from what we call 'the natural world' has always been the work of sophistry, never a reflection of the truth.” ― The Newark Star Ledger “The first fully annotated edition of Thoreau's major essays, here presented in the order Thoreau wrote them: 'Natural History of Massachusetts,' 'A Winter Walk,' 'Paradise (To Be) Regained,' 'Ktaadn,' 'Civil Disobedience,' 'Walking,' 'Slavery in Massachusetts,' 'Life without Principle,' 'Autumnal Tints,' 'The Succession of Forest Trees,' 'A Plea for Captain John Brown,' 'The Last Days of John Brown,' and 'Wild Apples.' Includes 'A Note on the Selection' of the essays, a bibliography, thirteen illustrations, a map to accompany 'Ktaadn,' and a detailed index. After the excellent, often fascinating annotations, which are presented in the back of the volume (the essays appear in clear-text form), the most valuable component of the volume is Hyde's insightful forty-three-page introduction, titled 'Prophetic Excursions.' By far the most useful, most informative single collection of Thoreau's short prose we have had.” ― Bradley Dean, The Thoreau Society Bulletin

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Product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ North Point Press; First Edition (May 5, 2002)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 448 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0865476462
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0865476462
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.35 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1 x 9 inches
• #1,031 in Nature Writing & Essays
• #1,411 in American Fiction Anthologies
• #3,552 in Essays (Books)

About the author

Henry david thoreau.

David Thoreau, better known as Henry David Thoreau, was an American essayist, poet, philosopher, and naturalist. He was born on July 12, 1817, in Concord, Massachusetts, and was the third of four children. Thoreau grew up in a family of modest means but received a good education, attending Harvard University from 1833 to 1837.

After graduating from college, Thoreau began teaching at a public school in Concord, but he soon became disillusioned with the education system and left after only two weeks. He then turned to writing, and in 1845, he published his best-known work, “Walden; or, Life in the Woods,” which chronicled his experiences living alone in a cabin he had built on the shores of Walden Pond. To read Walden: https://amzn.to/3J3QYyV

Thoreau was deeply influenced by the transcendentalist movement, which emphasized individualism, self-reliance, and a close relationship with nature. He also became involved in the abolitionist movement and was a strong advocate for civil disobedience as a means of protesting unjust laws.

Thoreau’s other notable works include “Civil Disobedience,” an essay in which he argues that individuals have a moral obligation to resist unjust laws, and “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” a travelogue that he wrote with his brother, John Thoreau.

Thoreau’s health began to decline in the 1850s, and he died on May 6, 1862, at the age of 44, of tuberculosis. Despite his relatively short life, Thoreau’s influence has been enormous, and he is considered one of the most important figures in American literature and philosophy.

Biography and Preface written by Frédéric Deltour, French Author and Spiritual Guide.

He shares with us his ideas about Thoreau's writings:

"Some of the benefits that readers can expect from reading “Walden” include a greater sense of inner peace, a deeper connection with nature, and an increased appreciation for the simple things in life. By adopting Thoreau’s philosophy of simplicity and detachment, readers can learn to let go of the things that hold them back and live a more fulfilling and meaningful life.

“Walden” is a call to simplicity, environmentalism, and spirituality. It is an important read for those seeking to better understand the importance of nature in our daily lives and how our relationship with it can help us find greater meaning and inner peace."

"Civil disobedience" is a revolutionary call to action. It is a call to reject the status quo, to rise up and reclaim our rights, autonomy, and dignity. It is a manifesto for civil disobedience and the rejection of unjust laws.

This book is an invitation to rebel against the status quo and to create a better world for all. It is a call to put our principles before our fears and to stand up for what is right. Civil disobedience is the path to a better future and this book will show you how to take that path."

Photo by Benjamin D. Maxham active 1848 - 1858 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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8.2: Henry David Thoreau, “Walden,” 1854

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Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) was an American essayist, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, and historian. A leading transcendentalist, Thoreau is best known for his book Walden , a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay “Civil Disobedience” (originally published as “Resistance to Civil Government”), an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.

Thoreau’s books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry amount to more than 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions are his writings on natural history and philosophy, in which he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern-day environmentalism. His literary style interweaves close observation of nature, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore, while displaying a poetic sensibility, philosophical austerity, and Yankee attention to practical detail. He was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay; at the same time he advocated abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life’s true essential needs.

Contributors and Attributions

• Biography of Henry David Thoreau. Provided by : Wikipedia. Located at : https://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau . License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike
• Walden. Authored by : Henry David Thoreau. Located at : http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/205 . License : Public Domain: No Known Copyright

Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience & Why it Matters Today KPFA - Letters and Politics

Mitch Jeserich reads from Thoreau’s Essay Civil Disobedience. Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) was an American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher. A leading transcendentalist, he is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay “Civil Disobedience” (originally published as “Resistance to Civil Government”), an argument in favor of citizen disobedience against an unjust state.   Thank-you gifts: On Thoreau: Nature & Duty Pack $180 Includes: The American Transcendentalists by Lawrence Buell and The Daily Henry David Thoreau by Laura Dassow Walls – The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings Edited by the scholar Lawrence Buell $100 – The Daily Henry David Thoreau: A Year of Quotes from the Man Who Lived in Season Foreword by Laura Dassow Walls $100 The post Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience & Why it Matters Today appeared first on KPFA.

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Civil Disobedience: a Powerful Tool for Social Change

This essay is about civil disobedience, defined as the intentional act of breaking or refusing to comply with laws to bring about social or political change. Popularized by Henry David Thoreau, civil disobedience is rooted in moral conviction and nonviolent protest. The essay highlights historical examples, such as the American Civil Rights Movement and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, to illustrate how civil disobedience has been used effectively to challenge injustice. It also addresses the criticisms and risks associated with this form of protest but emphasizes its importance as a tool for mobilizing public opinion and achieving social change.

How it works

Rebellious action, a notion popularized by Henry David Thoreau in his 1849 treatise “Civil Disobedience,” denotes the deliberate defiance or rejection of statutes, ordinances, or decrees enacted by a governance body or occupying authority in order to instigate societal or political transformation. This mode of resistance typically shuns violence and seeks to spotlight the perceived inequity of certain statutes or governmental edicts. Civil disobedience has been a pivotal instrument in myriad social movements throughout the annals, emerging as a potent conduit for marginalized factions to articulate their dissent and advocate for change.

At its nucleus, civil disobedience is an act propelled by conscience. Practitioners of civil disobedience believe that the statutes or policies they oppose are ethically flawed or unjust. By declining compliance with these statutes, they endeavor to attract public scrutiny to the issue at hand and foment dialogue and discourse. This mode of dissent rests on the premise that individuals harbor a moral obligation to act in accordance with their conscience, even at the expense of contravening legal statutes. Thoreau himself embraced civil disobedience by withholding tax payments in protest against slavery and the Mexican-American War, both of which he deemed morally reprehensible.

Among the most renowned exemplars of civil disobedience is the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. championed nonviolent resistance against segregation and discrimination. King’s ethos drew profound inspiration from Thoreau and Mahatma Gandhi, both of whom adeptly wielded civil disobedience in the quest for Indian emancipation from British dominion. Through orchestrated sit-ins, boycotts, and marches, civil rights advocates endeavored to lay bare the inherent injustice of segregationist statutes and incite legislative reform. The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Selma to Montgomery marches epitomize how civil disobedience can catalyze public sentiment and precipitate substantive policy revisions.

Another salient facet of civil disobedience is its tactical deployment to precipitate a crisis scenario that compels authorities to respond. When a substantial contingent engages in nonviolent resistance, it can disrupt the prevailing order and render it arduous for the government to disregard the entreaties of the protesters. This phenomenon was palpable in the anti-apartheid crusade in South Africa, where civil disobedience assumed a pivotal role in contesting and eventually dismantling the system of racial segregation and subjugation. Through the serene defiance of apartheid statutes, activists succeeded in attracting international attention and exerting pressure on the South African administration.

Nevertheless, civil disobedience is not devoid of censure and hazards. Critics posit that it undermines the sanctity of the legal framework and can precipitate anarchy and turmoil. Moreover, there exists the prospect of coercive reprisal by authorities, as evidenced by myriad historical episodes wherein peaceful demonstrators were met with force. Additionally, adherents of civil disobedience must be prepared to confront the legal repercussions of their actions, which may entail apprehension, incarceration, and monetary penalties. This readiness to endure retribution is oft regarded as a testament to the genuineness and moral steadfastness of the demonstrators.

Despite these exigencies, civil disobedience endures as a indispensable means of articulating dissent and advocating for societal transformation. It emboldens individuals to repudiate injustice and holds governance entities answerable for their deeds. The efficacy of civil disobedience lies in its capacity to mobilize public sentiment and instill a sense of exigency surrounding pressing societal dilemmas. By underscoring the ethical dimensions of political and societal quandaries, civil disobedience can engender a more equitable and righteous social order.

In summation, civil disobedience constitutes a deliberate and principled form of protest against statutes or policies deemed unjust. Rooted in moral conviction and nonviolent action, it has emerged as a propulsive force behind numerous momentous societal and political upheavals throughout history. Albeit fraught with certain perils and challenges, its efficacy in mobilizing public opinion and effecting change renders it an indispensable instrument in the protracted endeavor for justice and human rights.

Remember, this treatise serves as a catalyst for reflection and further exploration. For tailored guidance and assurance of adherence to academic standards, contemplate engaging with professionals at EduBirdie.

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Civil Disobedience: A Powerful Tool for Social Change. (2024, May 28). Retrieved from https://papersowl.com/examples/civil-disobedience-a-powerful-tool-for-social-change/

"Civil Disobedience: A Powerful Tool for Social Change." PapersOwl.com , 28 May 2024, https://papersowl.com/examples/civil-disobedience-a-powerful-tool-for-social-change/

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Top 50+ Henry David Thoreau quotes that will get you thinking

Henry David Thoreau, a prominent 19th-century American transcendentalist, writer, philosopher, and naturalist, left a lasting legacy with his profound reflections on life, society, and nature. His writings continue to inspire readers globally. Explore the best Henry David Thoreau quotes on life, nature, success, and civil disobedience.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Henry david thoreau's quotes about life, henry david thoreau's famous quotes, henry david thoreau's quotes about success, henry david thoreau's civil disobedience quotes, henry david thoreau's fishing quotes, henry david thoreau's quotes about nature, what is henry david thoreau most famous for, what is henry david thoreau's dream quote, what is thoreau's most famous poem.

Henry David Thoreau is known for his book Walden , which details his two-year stay in a cottage on Walden Pond in Massachusetts. His writings, including poems, essays, and journals, profoundly impacted American literature and philosophy. Here are the most thought-provoking and inspiring Henry David Thoreau quotes.

Top Henry David Thoreau quotes

Henry David Thoreau was a lifelong abolitionist, a supporter of civil disobedience against unjust or corrupt governments, and a proponent of rejecting illusory issues in favour of simple living to find life's authentic vital necessities. Here is a list of his quotes on various subject matters.

50+ Emily Dickinson quotes about love, life and death

As a transcendentalist, Henry David Thoreau believed in the value of living a simple, self-sufficient life and the importance of the present moment. Here are some of his most inspiring quotes about life and human experiences.

• I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
• And the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life, which is required to be exchanged for it immediately or in the long run.
• To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.
• You must live within yourself and depend upon yourself, always tucked up and ready for a start, and not have many affairs.
• The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
• A slight sound at evening lifts me up by the ears and makes life seem inexpressibly serene and grand. It may be Uranus, or it may be in the shutter.
• Our life is frittered away by detail. … simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million, count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumbnail. … Simplify, simplify.
• What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.
• Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

Top 50 Charles Bukowski quotes that will challenge your mind

Thoreau's reflections on life, simplicity, truth, and nature resonate with timeless wisdom. But what was Henry David Thoreau's most famous quote? Here are his most famous quotes .

• Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
• There is no remedy for love but to love more.
• If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now, put the foundations under them.
• Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.
• Men have become the tools of their tools.
• Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
• Every generation laughs at the old fashions but follows religiously the new.
• The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
• Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.
• This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

60 most inspiring Mary Oliver quotes about love and life

A transcendentalist's definition of success differs from the average person's. Thoreau believed that a person's success was more about self-fulfilment than achievements. Here are his thought-provoking quotes on dreams and success.

• Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.
• The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.
• I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
• It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?
• Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.
• You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.
• You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.
• What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.
• Success is not in what you have, but who you are.
• What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can.

50 best Vincent van Gogh quotes about the beauty of art and life

Thoreau constantly wrote about citizens' responsibility to uphold justice, even when their government did not reciprocate. Here are his most inspirational quotes about civil disobedience.

• I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.
• How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.
• I heartily accept the motto, — ‘That government is best which governs least’; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically.
• The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.
• But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it.
• Oh for a man who is a man, and, as my neighbour says, has a bone in his back which you cannot pass your hand through!
• The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way.
• A man has not everything to do, but something; and because he cannot do everything, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong.
• Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
• What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.
• Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
• The only way to deal with an unjust world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
• I am too high-born to be propertied, to be a second at control, or useful serving-man and instrument to any sovereign state throughout the world.

50 Insightful accountability quotes to keep you in check

Thoreau's views on fishing transcend beyond the act itself, delving into profound insights about life, nature, and the human condition. Here are some fishing quotes that will provoke you to think deeply about various elements of life.

• Some men fish all their lives without realising it’s not the fish they’re after.
• Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.
• He who hears the rippling of rivers in these degenerate days will not utterly despair.

Thoreau's time at Walden Pond helped him connect with nature, the changing seasons, and the intricacies of the day. He documented his thoughts on his most popular book, Walden . Here are some of Henry David Thoreau's Walden quotes about nature.

30 inspiring Frederick Douglass' quotes you should know about

• I took a walk in the woods and came out taller than the trees.
• In wildness is the preservation of the world.
• I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.
• The bluebird carries the sky on his back.
• We need the tonic of wildness—to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk.
• Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.
• Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf and take an insect view of its plain.
• A lake is a landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.
• Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.

Top 25 Genghis Khan quotes that will inspire and motivate you

Henry David Thoreau is best known for living the transcendental ideas outlined in his masterwork, Walden (1854). He also advocated for civil freedoms, as evidenced by his essay Civil Disobedience (1849).

Thoreau's dream quote is: "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined." This quote captures his belief in the power of dreams and the importance of pursuing them confidently.

Thoreau's most renowned poem is probably Smoke , which highlights his observations of nature and the fleeting beauty of the natural world . Thoreau is better known for his prose than his poetry.

Henry David Thoreau's quotes encourage readers to think profoundly, live intentionally, and be true to themselves. Whether you seek peace in nature, simplicity, or truth and justice, Thoreau's reflections provide timeless wisdom.

The most famous John Brown quotes on history, slavery, and freedom

Yen.com.gh recently published an article on cheating captions , quotes, and messages for Instagram. Being cheated on breaks people's trust shatters hearts, and leaves behind scars that might take a long to heal.

Navigating the consequences of betrayal due to infidelity can be an emotionally challenging journey. If you want ideas to manage your emotions, explore these thought-provoking and funny cheating captions for your Instagram captions or bios.

Source: YEN.com.gh

Racheal Murimi (Lifestyle writer) Racheal Murimi is a content creator who joined Yen in 2022. She has over four years of experience in creating content. Racheal graduated from Dedan Kimathi University of Technology with a bachelor's degree in BCom, Finance. She has amassed sufficient knowledge working on various topics, including biographies, fashion and lifestyles, guides, and more. In 2023, Racheal finished the AFP course on Digital Investigation Techniques. You can reach her at [email protected]

Lookout Santa Cruz

2024 Breaking News Pulitzer Prize winner

In the Public Interest: Housing harbinger: Is the community ready for more projects like Santa Cruz’s Food Bin redevelopment?

Housing harbinger: Is the community ready for more projects like Santa Cruz’s Food Bin redevelopment?

In 1969, singer Edwin Starr belted a question heard round the world, “War, what is it good for?” and then followed it up with the definitive answer, “Absolutely nothing.” 

While reporting an article published Tuesday about the Food Bin redevelopment in the city of Santa Cruz, the new powers of developers to get what they want, and the diminished influence of project-by-project politics, I found myself regularly humming Starr’s refrain, albeit with my own spin, “ Public hearings on developments at city council and planning commission meetings : what are they good for in California’s new housing landscape? Absolutely nothing. (?)” 

These hearings mean much less in deciding the fate of a new development than they once did in California communities. Developers know it, but the community and elected officials are still catching up. “Absolutely nothing” may ultimately prove to be an extreme answer to the question, but we are in a moment where everyone is still trying to figure it out. 

The Food Bin redevelopment, a five-story, 59-unit apartment project proposed by Workbench, will be a reset for the Mission Street corridor, where buildings hardly rise above two stories, and none over three; that’s to say nothing of the density. It may also prove to be a reset for the public’s understanding of their influence in killing or drastically minimizing a proposed development. The Santa Cruz City Council will take a final vote on the project Tuesday. As I report in my story, the vote will be somewhat of a proxy: The proposal aligns with state law and the city’s general plan, which makes it nearly impossible for the city council to deny, despite neighbor objections. 

As Jamileh Cannon, Workbench’s co-founder and head architect, told me, it’s an “exciting time” to be a housing developer, but there are new challenges to balance; namely, continuing to pursue ambitious, slam-dunk housing projects while making the community feel considered despite its diminished power. 

A power struggle at the board of supervisors: “Dire,” “debt,” “cuts” and “layoffs” are not the words the public wants to hear from the elected officials responsible for managing their tax dollars and services. All four were thrown around last week as tempers flared during the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors’ 2024-25 budget discussion.

Opening up the discussions last week, the county’s chief executive, Carlos Palacios, emphasized the difficulty in shaping a budget that did not propose program cuts or layoffs at a time when the county is desperate for financial wiggle room. However, that requires trade-offs, and Palacios decided to not put any local tax revenue toward regular road maintenance. 

District 1 Supervisor Manu Koenig rejected that proposal, saying roads were among the most basic services offered by a government. He proposed directing Palacios to put $4 million of the county’s tax revenue into roads, and $6 million from the county’s new sales tax increase that voters approved in March through Measure K . “We cannot go on like this,” Koenig said of the county’s lack of road investment. 

Palacios jumped on the defensive, reminding Koenig that the money he sought would require cuts to another department’s budget or programs. 

“That’s going to be very painful,” Palacios said. “If we’re going to blow up the budget, we can do that, I can do that, and we can have 300 people [at the next budget hearing on June 4 ] and have a massive food fight, and I don’t think anything is going to change. Every cent is allocated. There is no new funding.” 

Koenig said he didn’t see an easier way to do it. At one point, District 4 Supervisor Felipe Hernandez supported Koenig’s motion to send Palacios back to propose cuts in the name of road maintenance; however, the vote would have fallen at a 2-2 tie, because in the middle of the discussion, District 2 Supervisor Zach Friend left the dais without explanation and did not return. Friend later told me he had a leak at his house and scheduled a plumber to come out at that time. 

When I asked him why he didn’t say anything about his departure to the public he’s accountable to, despite the supervisors having more votes to cast, he defended his reason for leaving but said, “I can see where you’re coming from.” 

The four remaining supervisors ultimately decided on a compromise, led by District 3 Supervisor Justin Cummings, that directs Palacios to come back in September with options for how the county might better invest in road infrastructure. 

Looking Ahead

Clarity on the Watsonville Airport: I’ve written about local governments, in some form, across the country for the past decade, and this week I’ve run into a first. The Watsonville City Council will vote to clarify a decision from more than two months ago regarding the closure of a runway at Watsonville Municipal Airport . The resolution emphasizes that the city council voted only to explore a runway closure, not definitively close it. The city council in March narrowly supported a closure as a way to unlock land around the airport for housing development, but the Federal Aviation Administration will first have to greenlight the plan. 

A vote clarifying the intention of a prior decision is not too uncommon, but the resolution before the Watsonville City Council cites specific moments, with video timestamps , from that initial March 19 meeting to make its point. It reads more like an evidentiary document you’d find in a court filing, and that’s likely because the city is facing an active lawsuit from the Watsonville Pilots Association, which claims the city council voted to shut down the runway, not simply explore its closure. 

Cannabis overhaul in South County: It seems that eight years after California legalized recreational cannabis, communities are rethinking how to regulate the market. Watsonville, the City of Santa Cruz, and Santa Cruz County governments have all weighed significant changes to their cannabis rules, and Tuesday, the Watsonville City Council will take the first swing at codifying some of those changes. Among them is increasing the maximum grow area for cultivation permits by 340%, from 5,000 to 22,000 square feet. The city will also look to expand its cannabis manufacturing permits from nine to 15 citywide. 

Independent police audit recommends changes: The City of Santa Cruz’s independent police auditor, OIR Group, released its annual audit of the Santa Cruz Police Department and will present its report to the Santa Cruz City Council on Tuesday. OIR Group listed 14 recommended changes for the city’s law enforcement, several of which deal with managing the officers who witness an officer-involved shooting, and changing a policy that allows officers to review their body-worn camera footage before making an official witness statement. 

Weekly News Diet

Local: After some pressure, the community finally received clarity last week on when the Sheriff’s Office might begin allowing Santa Cruz County Jail inmates to hug their families again. The jail’s contact visits program has been on hold since 2020. Sheriff Jim Hart said contact visits could resume by the end of summer, but will depend on hiring. 

Golden State: Graduate student workers at UC Santa Cruz went on strike last week, protesting campus police’s treatment of pro-Palestinian protestors. On Tuesday, graduate student workers at UCLA and UC Davis followed UCSC’s lead , walking out on their jobs and demanding amnesty for protestors. The strikes come at a critical time for the campuses, where students are preparing to take their end-of-quarter finals. The university system’s president said the protests are a violation of the workers’ labor contract. 

National: How does one push for the vice presidency without coming off like they want it too badly? Republican Sen. Marco Rubio is attempting to walk that line as the 2024 election draws closer and the window for Donald Trump to pick a running mate narrows. 

One Great Vintage Read

Walking by Henry David Thoreau , for The Atlantic (1862)

I spent the holiday weekend hiking in Big Sur, surprised that my favorite trails remain somewhat of a secret to the throngs of Memorial Day Weekend visitors. Hey, you all enjoy the concrete majesty of Bixby Bridge, I will go lose myself among the redwoods, deep into the landscape’s canyons and ridges. 

It’s difficult to spend the weekend walking through some of the country’s finest stretches of wilderness without thinking of Henry David Thoreau, the 19th-century naturalist who urged us to get out of the office, the home, the chair, and engage directly with the natural world. Among the best examples of this work is his essay, “Walking,” the only piece of literature you’ll ever need to inspire you to get up and move around. 

After re-reading the essay this weekend, I was surprised by Thoreau’s clairvoyance.

“At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only, — when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road, and walking over the surface of God’s earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman’s grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come.”

Christopher Neely Politics and Policy Correspondent

Over the past decade, Christopher Neely has built a diverse journalism résumé, spanning from the East Coast to Texas and, most recently, California’s Central Coast.Chris reported from Capitol Hill... More by Christopher Neely

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