The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862

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His determination on Natural History was organic. He confessed that he
sometimes felt like a hound or a panther, and, if born among Indians,
would have been a fell hunter. But, restrained by his Massachusetts
culture, he played out the game in this mild form of botany and
ichthyology. His intimacy with animals suggested what Thomas Fuller
records of Butler the apiologist, that "either he had told the bees
things or the bees had told him." Snakes coiled round his leg; the
fishes swam into his hand, and he took them out of the water; he
pulled the woodchuck out of its hole by the tail, and took the foxes
under his protection from the hunters. Our naturalist had perfect
magnanimity; he had no secrets: he would carry you to the heron's
haunt, or even to his most prized botanical swamp,--possibly knowing
that you could never find it again, yet willing to take his risks.

No college ever offered him a diploma, or a professor's chair; no
academy made him its corresponding secretary, its discoverer, or even
its member. Whether these learned bodies feared the satire of his
presence. Yet so much knowledge of Nature's secret and genius few
others possessed, none in a more large and religious synthesis. For
not a particle of respect had he to the opinions of any man or body of
men, but homage solely to the truth itself; and as he discovered
everywhere among doctors some leaning of courtesy, it discredited
them. He grew to be revered and admired by his townsmen, who had at
first known him only as an oddity. The farmers who employed him as a
surveyor soon discovered his rare accuracy and skill, his knowledge of
their lands, of trees, of birds, of Indian remains, and the like,
which enabled him to tell every farmer more than he knew before of his
own farm; so that he began to feel a little as if Mr. Thoreau had
better rights in his land than he. They felt, too, the superiority of
character which addressed all men with a native authority.

Indian relics abound in Concord,--arrow-heads, stone chisels, pestles,
and fragments of pottery; and on the river-bank, large heaps of
clam-shells and ashes mark spots which the savages frequented. These,
and every circumstance touching the Indian, were important in his
eyes. His visits to Maine were chiefly for love of the Indian. He had
the satisfaction of seeing the manufacture of the bark-canoe, as well
as of trying his hand in its management on the rapids. He was
inquisitive about the making of the stone arrow-head, and in his last
days charged a youth setting out for the Rocky Mountains to find an
Indian who could tell him that: "It was well worth a visit to
California to learn it." Occasionally, a small party of Penobscot
Indians would visit Concord, and pitch their tents for a few weeks in
summer on the river-bank. He failed not to make acquaintance with the
best of them; though he well knew that asking questions of Indians is
like catechizing beavers and rabbits. In his last visit to Maine he
had great satisfaction from Joseph Polis, an intelligent Indian of
Oldtown, who was his guide for some weeks.

He was equally interested in every natural fact. The depth of his
perception found likeness of law throughout Nature, and I know not any
genius who so swiftly inferred universal law from the single fact. He
was no pedant of a department. His eye was open to beauty, and his
ear to music. He found these, not in rare conditions, but wheresoever
he went. He thought the best of music was in single strains; and he
found poetic suggestion in the humming of the telegraph-wire.

His poetry might be bad or good; he no doubt wanted a lyric facility
and technical skill; but he had the source of poetry in his spiritual
perception. He was a good reader and critic, and his judgment on
poetry was to the ground of it. He could not be deceived as to the
presence or absence of the poetic element in any composition, and his
thirst for this made him negligent and perhaps scornful of superficial
graces. He would pass by many delicate rhythms, but he would have
detected every live stanza or line in a volume, and knew very well
where to find an equal poetic charm in prose. He was so enamored of
the spiritual beauty that he held all actual written poems in very
light esteem in the comparison. He admired Aeschylus and Pindar; but,
when some one was commending them, he said that "Aeschylus and the
Greeks, in describing Apollo and Orpheus, had given no song, or no
good one. They ought not to have moved trees, but to have chanted to
the gods such a hymn as would have sung all their old ideas out of
their heads, and new ones in." His own verses are often rude and
defective. The gold does not yet run pure, is drossy and crude. The
thyme and marjoram are not yet honey. But if he want lyric fineness
and technical merits, if he have not the poetic temperament, he never
lacks the causal thought, that his genius was better than his
talent. He knew the worth of the Imagination for the uplifting and
consolation of human life, and liked to throw every thought into a
symbol. The fact you tell is of no value, but only the impression.
For this reason his presence was poetic, always piqued the curiosity
to know more deeply the secrets of his mind. He had many reserves, an
unwillingness to exhibit to profane eyes what was still sacred in his
own, and knew well how to throw a poetic veil over his experience.
All readers of "Walden" will remember his mythical record of his
disappointments:--

"I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still
on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them,
describing their tracks, and what calls they answered to. I have met
one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and
even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud; and they seemed as
anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves."
[_Walden_, p. 20.]

His riddles were worth the reading, and I confide, that, if at any
time I do not understand the expression, it is yet just. Such was the
wealth of his truth that it was not worth his while to use words in
vain. His poem entitled "Sympathy" reveals the tenderness under that
triple steel of stoicism, and the intellectual subtilty it could
animate. His classic poem on "Smoke" suggests Simonides, but is better
than any poem of Simonides. His biography is in his verses. His
habitual thought makes all his poetry a hymn to the Cause of causes,

"I hearing get, who had but ears,
And sight, who had but eyes before;
I moments live, who lived but years,
And truth discern, who knew but learning's lore."

And still more in these religious lines:--

"Now chiefly is my natal hour,
And only now my prime of life;
I will not doubt the love untold,
Which not my worth or want hath bought,
Which wooed me young, and wooes me old,
And to this evening hath me brought."

Whilst he used in his writings a certain petulance of remark in
reference to churches or churchmen, he was a person of a rare, tender,
and absolute religion, a person incapable of any profanation, by act
or by thought. Of course, the same isolation which belonged to his
original thinking and living detached him from the social religious
forms. This is neither to be censured nor regretted. Aristotle long
ago explained it, when he said, "One who surpasses his fellow-citizens
in virtue is no longer a part of the city. Their law is not for him,
since he is a law to himself."

Thoreau was sincerity itself, and might fortify the convictions of
prophets in the ethical laws by his holy living. It was an affirmative
experience which refused to be set aside. A truth-speaker he, capable
of the most deep and strict conversation; a physician to the wounds of
any soul; a friend, knowing not only the secret of friendship, but
almost worshipped by those few persons who resorted to him as their
confessor and prophet, and knew the deep value of his mind and great
heart. He thought that without religion or devotion of some kind
nothing great was ever accomplished: and he thought that the bigoted
sectarian had better bear this in mind.

His virtues, of course, sometimes ran into extremes. It was easy to
trace to the inexorable demand on all for exact truth that austerity
which made this willing hermit more solitary even than he
wished. Himself of a perfect probity, he required not less of
others. He had a disgust at crime, and no worldly success would cover
it. He detected paltering as readily in dignified and prosperous
persons as in beggars, and with equal scorn. Such dangerous frankness
was in his dealing that his admirers called him "that terrible
Thoreau," as if he spoke when silent, and was still present when he
had departed. I think the severity of his ideal interfered to deprive
him of a healthy sufficiency of human society.

The habit of a realist to find things the reverse of their appearance
inclined him to put every statement in a paradox. A certain habit of
antagonism defaced his earlier writings,--a trick of rhetoric not
quite outgrown in his later, of substituting for the obvious word and
thought its diametrical opposite. He praised wild mountains and winter
forests for their domestic air, in snow and ice he would find
sultriness, and commended the wilderness for resembling Rome and
Paris. "It was so dry, that you might call it wet."

The tendency to magnify the moment, to read all the laws of Nature in
the one object or one combination under your eye, is of course comic
to those who do not share the philosopher's perception of identity. To
him there was no such thing as size. The pond was a small ocean; the
Atlantic, a large Walden Pond. He referred every minute fact to
cosmical laws. Though he meant to be just, he seemed haunted by a
certain chronic assumption that the science of the day pretended
completeness, and he had just found out that the _savans_ had
neglected to discriminate a particular botanical variety, had failed
to describe the seeds or count the sepals. "That is to say," we
replied, "the blockheads were not born in Concord; but who said they
were? It was their unspeakable misfortune to be born in London, or
Paris, or Rome; but, poor fellows, they did what they could,
considering that they never saw Bateman's Pond, or Nine-Acre Corner,
or Becky-Stow's Swamp. Besides, what were you sent into the world for,
but to add this observation?"

Had his genius been only contemplative, he had been fitted to his
life, but with his energy and practical ability he seemed born for
great enterprise and for command; and I so much regret the loss of his
rare powers of action, that I cannot help counting it a fault in him
that he had no ambition. Wanting this, instead of engineering for all
America, he was the captain of a huckleberry-party. Pounding beans is
good to the end of pounding empires one of these days; but if, at the
end of years, it is still only beans!

But these foibles, real or apparent, were fast vanishing in the
incessant growth of a spirit so robust and wise, and which effaced its
defeats with new triumphs. His study of Nature was a perpetual
ornament to him, and inspired his friends with curiosity to see the
world through his eyes, and to hear his adventures. They possessed
every kind of interest.

He had many elegances of his own, whilst he scoffed at conventional
elegance. Thus, he could not bear to hear the sound of his own steps,
the grit of gravel; and therefore never willingly walked in the road,
but in the grass, on mountains and in woods. His senses were acute,
and he remarked that by night every dwelling-house gives out bad air,
like a slaughter-house. He liked the pure fragrance of melilot. He
honored certain plants with special regard, and, over all, the
pond-lily,--then, the gentian, and the _Mikania scondens_, and
"life-everlasting," and a bass-tree which he visited every year, when
it bloomed, in the middle of July. He thought the scent a more
oracular inquisition than the sight,--more oracular and
trustworthy. The scent, of course, reveals what is concealed from the
other senses. By it he detected earthiness. He delighted in echoes,
and said they were almost the only kind of kindred voices that he
heard. He loved Nature so well, was so happy in her solitude, that he
became very jealous of cities, and the sad work which their
refinements and artifices made with man and his dwelling.

The axe was always destroying his forest. "Thank God," he said, "they
cannot cut down the clouds!" "All kinds of figures are drawn on the
blue ground with this fibrous white paint."

I subjoin a few sentences taken from his unpublished manuscripts, not
only as records of his thought and feeling, but for their power of
description and literary excellence.

"Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout
in the milk."

"The chub is a soft fish, and tastes like boiled brown paper salted."

"The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon,
or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and at length the
middle-aged man concludes to build a wood-shed with them."

"The locust z-ing."

"Devil's-needles zigzagging along the Nut-Meadow brook."

"Sugar is not so sweet to the palate as sound to the healthy ear."

"I put on some hemlock-boughs, and the rich salt crackling of their
leaves was like mustard to the ear, the crackling of uncountable
regiments. Dead trees love the fire."

"The bluebird carries the sky on his back."

"The tanager flies through the green foliage as if it would ignite the
leaves."

"If I wish for a horse-hair for my compass-sight, I must go to the
stable; but the hair-bird, with her sharp eyes, goes to the road."

"Immortal water, alive even to the superficies."

"Fire is the most tolerable third party."

"Nature made ferns for pure leaves, to show what she could do in that
line."

"No tree has so fair a bole and so handsome an instep as the beech."

"How did these beautiful rainbow-tints get into the shell of the
fresh-water clam, buried in the mud at the bottom of our dark river?"

"Hard are the times when the infant's shoes are second-foot."

"We are strictly confined to our men to whom we give liberty."

"Nothing is so much to be feared as fear. Atheism may comparatively be
popular with God himself."

"Of what significance the things you can forget? A little thought is
sexton to all the world."

"How can we expect a harvest of thought who have not had a seed-time
of character?"

"Only he can be trusted with gifts who can present a face of bronze to
expectations."

"I ask to be melted. You can only ask of the metals that they be
tender to the fire that melts them. To nought else can they be
tender."

There is a flower known to botanists, one of the same genus with our
summer plant called "Life-Everlasting," a _Gnaphalium_ like that,
which grows on the most inaccessible cliffs of the Tyrolese mountains,
where the chamois dare hardly venture, and which the hunter, tempted
by its beauty, and by his love, (for it is immensely valued by the
Swiss maidens,) climbs the cliffs to gather, and is sometimes found
dead at the foot, with the flower in his hand. It is called by
botanists the _Gnaphalium leontopodium_, but by the Swiss
_Edelweisse_, which signifies _Noble Purity_. Thoreau seemed
to me living in the hope to gather this plant, which belonged to him
of right. The scale on which his studies proceeded was so large as to
require longevity, and we were the less prepared for his sudden
disappearance. The country knows not yet, or in the least part, how
great a son it has lost. It seems an injury that he should leave in
the midst his broken task, which none else can finish,--a kind of
indignity to so noble a soul, that it should depart out of Nature
before yet he has been really shown to his peers for what be is. But
he, at least, is content. His soul was made for the noblest society;
he had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of this world;
wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there
is beauty, he will find a home.

A SUMMER DAY.

At daybreak, in the fresh light, joyfully
The fishermen drew in their laden net;
The shore shone rosy purple, and the sea
Was streaked with violet,

And, pink with sunrise, many a shadowy sail
Lay southward, lighting up the sleeping bay,
And in the west the white moon, still and pale,
Faded before the day.

Silence was everywhere. The rising tide
Slowly filled every cove and inlet small:
A musical low whisper, multiplied,
You heard, and that was all.

No clouds at dawn,--but, as the sun climbed higher,
White columns, thunderous, splendid, up the sky
Floated and stood, heaped in the sun's clear fire,
A stately company.

Stealing along the coast from cape to cape,
The weird mirage crept tremulously on,
In many a magic change and wondrous shape,
Throbbing beneath the sun.

At noon the wind rose,--swept the glassy sea
To sudden ripple,--thrust against the clouds
A strenuous shoulder,--gathering steadily,
Drove them before in crowds,

Till all the west was dark, and inky black
The level ruffled water underneath,
And up the wind-cloud tossed, a ghostly rack,
In many a ragged wreath.

Then sudden roared the thunder, a great peal
Magnificent, that broke and rolled away;
And down the wind plunged, like a furious keel
Cleaving the sea to spray,

And brought the rain, sweeping o'er land and sea.
And then was tumult! Lightning, sharp and keen,
Thunder, wind, rain,--a mighty jubilee
The heaven and earth between!

And loud the ocean sang,--a chorus grand,--
A solemn music sung in undertone
Of waves that broke about, on either hand,
The little island lone,

Where, joyful in His tempest as His calm,
Held in the hollow of that hand of His,
I joined with heart and soul in God's great psalm,
Thrilled with a nameless bliss.

Soon lulled the wind,-the summer storm soon died;
The shattered clouds went eastward, drifting slow;
From the low sun the rain-fringe swept aside,
Bright in his rosy glow,

And wide a splendor streamed through all the sky
O'er land and sea one soft, delicious blush,
That touched the gray rocks lightly, tenderly,
A transitory flush.

Warm, odorous gusts came off the distant land,
With spice of pine-woods, breath of hay new-mown,
O'er miles of waves and sea-scents cool and bland,
Full in our faces blown.

Slow faded the sweet light, and peacefully
The quiet stars came out, one after one,--
The holy twilight deepened silently,
The summer day was done.

Such unalloyed delight its hours had given,
Musing, this thought rose in my grateful mind,
That God, who watches all things, up in heaven,
With patient eyes and kind,

Saw and was pleased, perhaps, one child of His
Dared to be happy like the little birds,
Because He gave His children days like this,
Rejoicing beyond words,--

Dared, lifting up to Him untroubled eyes
In gratitude that worship is, and prayer,
Sing and be glad with ever new surprise
He made His world so fair!

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES

_Ravenshoe_. By HENRY KINGSLEY, Author of "Geoffry Hamlyn."
Boston: Ticknor & Fields.

This novel belongs to that class which has been most in favor of late
years, in which the incidents and characters are drawn from the daily
life that is going on around us, and the sources of interest are
sought in the acts, struggles, and sufferings of the world that lies
at our feet, discarding the idealizing charm which arises from
distance in space or remoteness in time. The novels of Disraeli,
Bulwer, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Miss Bronte, Mrs. Gaskell, Miss
Muloch, and Miss Evans, differing as they do so widely in style,
treatment, and spirit, all come under this general division.
Fictitious compositions of this class have difficulties
peculiar to themselves, but success, when attained, is proportionally
great; and from the sympathetic element in man they can secure the
interest of their readers, though their plots may be improbable and
their characters unnatural. The scene of "Ravenshoe" is laid in
England, the time is the present, and the men and women are such as
may be seen at a flower-show at Chiswick or on the race-course at
Epsom on a Derby day. The plot is ingenious, thickly strewn with
sudden and startling incidents, though very improbable; but the story
flows on in so rapid and animated a current that the reader can never
pause long enough for criticism, and it is not till he lays the volume
down, and recalls the ground he has been over, that he has leisure to
remark that the close has been reached by such stepping-stones as are
never laid down in the path of real life.

The characters are various, drawn with the greatest spirit, but not
all of them natural. Lord Saltire, for instance, is a portrait with
which the author has evidently taken much pains; but the elements we
see in him are such as never were, never could be, combined in any
living and breathing man. Father Mackworth is elaborately drawn, but
the sketch wants vitality and unity. Adelaide and Ellen present
essentially the same type, modified by difference of position and
circumstances, and, in the latter, by the infusion of a fanatical
religious element. Charles Ravenshoe, the hero, is well conceived and
consistently carried; and the same may be said of Cuthbert. But the
best character in the book is old Lady Ascot. She is quite original,
and yet quite natural; and we guess that some of her peculiarities are
drawn from life.

The descriptions of scenery are admirable,--so admirable that we
pardon the author for introducing them a little too frequently. He is
evidently one of those few men who love Nature with a manly and
healthy love,--by whom the outward world is not sought as a shelter
against invading cares, or as balm for a wounded spirit, but who find
in the sunshine, the play of the breeze, and the dance of the waves, a
cheerful, enduring, and satisfying companionship. The scenery is
English, and South English too: the author's pictures are drawn from
memory, and not from imagination. And the whole tone and spirit of the
book are thoroughly English. It represents the best aspects of English
life, character, and manners as they are to-day. Whatever is most
generous, heroic, tender, and true in the men and women of England is
here to be seen, and not drawn in colors any more flattering than it
is the right of fiction to use. We think the author carries us too
much into the stable and the kennel; but this, we need not say, is
also English.

But we have yet to mention what we consider the highest charm of this
charming book, and that is the combination which we find in it of
healthiness of tone and earnestness of purpose. A healthier book we
have never read. Earnestness of purpose is apt to be attended with
something of excess or extravagance; but in "Ravenshoe" there is
nothing morbid, nothing cynical, nothing querulous, nothing ascetic.
The doctrine of the book is a reasonable enjoyment of all that is good
in the world, with a firm purpose of improving the world in all
possible ways. It is one of the many books which have appeared in
England of late years which show the influence of the life and labors
of the late Dr. Arnold. It is as inspiriting in its influence as a
gallop over one of the breezy downs of Mr. Kingsley's own Devonshire.

It is, in short, a delightful book, in which all defects of structure
and form are atoned for by a wonderful amount of energy, geniality,
freshness, poetical feeling, and moral elevation. And furthermore, we
think, no one can read it without saying to himself that he would like
to see and know the writer. Long may he live to write new novels!

_Vanity Fair._ Volumes I.-V. New York: Louis H. Stephens,
Publisher for the Proprietors.

The American is often considered to be by nature unadapted for
jollity, if not positively averse to it. This supposition is not
without some reasonable foundation, and the stranger may be readily
excused for adopting it as an axiomatic truth. Busy calculation and
restless labor appear at first to be the grand elements of American
life; mirth is apparently excluded, as the superfluous members of his
equations are eliminated by the algebraist. Fun is not practical
enough for the American, and subserves none of his profitable
projects; it provokes to idle laughter, and militates against the
unresting career of industry which he has prescribed, and his
utilitarian spirit thinks it were as well abolished. His recreations
are akin to his toil. If he give to study such hours as business
spares, fates first claim his attention, and then philosophy or
ethics: he cannot resign himself to lighter topics. When he reads in
his Horace, "_Dulce est desipere in loco_," he grants the
proposition, with the commentary that he, at least, has very rarely
been "_in loco_." He reads tragedies, and perhaps writes one; but
he does not affect comedies, and he could have no sympathy with an
uproarious burlesque or side-shaking Christmas pantomime. His brethren
who seek the theatre for amusement are of similar opinion, and so are
they who stand behind the foot-lights. Therefore it is, that, for
every passable comedian, America can produce a whole batch of very
fair tragic actors.

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