Thoreau, Henry David

tho'ro, Henry David (1817-1862), a New England naturalist. He was born at Concord, Massachusetts, July 12, 1817, and died there May 6, 1862. His father was of Huguenot descent, a man of character, skillful pencil maker. Thoreau was graduated at Harvard in 1837. He declined his diploma on the ground that it was not worth the customary fee of five dollars. He taught a few terms of school at Concord and Staten Island, New York, but found the business irksome, and settled down at Concord. He worked in a desultory way at surveying, carpentering, and making pencils. He was a skillful mechanic and he could seize an even dozen of pencils unerringly, but he had a theory that one should work as little as possible, and live the rest of his time. He was an odd genius. Emerson, his literary patron and companion on many a ramble, said of him, "He was bred to no profession. He was never married. He lived alone. He never went to church; he never voted. He refused to pay a tax to the state. He ate no flesh; he drank no wine. He never knew the use of tobacco, and, though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun."

In some respects, Thoreau appears to have had a mulish disposition. His friends tried, as they thought, to make something of him, but he resisted at every step. He protested against fine houses, rich clothing, rich food, and expensive habits, maintaining with a grim sort of obstinacy that the business of life was to live, not to make a living. He was a man of simple tastes and hardy habits. It cost him no effort to do without what others considered the comforts of life. He chose to be rich by making his wants few. Freedom, time to think, leisure to ramble through the woods, to sit on a log, to watch the birds, insects, animals, and fishes, to study the flowers, and to jot down his observations in notebooks, were the things he liked.

In 1845 he squatted in a pine grove, on the shore of Walden Pond. Here he built himself a frame hut. This he shingled and plastered. He dug a cellar, making himself a light, airy, comfortable den in which he lived for two or three years. He planted a field of beans and raised some potatoes. His shack cost him twenty-eight dollars and twelve and one-half cents,--less, he said, than the rent he paid each year at Harvard for a stuffy student's room. His living cost him almost nothing.

He claimed with pride that six weeks' work in the year was quite sufficient to provide for his maintenance, leaving him free to observe and think forty-six weeks in the year. This was his theory of life. There is much in his doctrine. Without doubt, too large a part of human effort goes to keep up appearances and to provide luxuries which each thinks he must have because others deem them necessary; but, after all, Thoreau did not reason fairly. He borrowed his tools. He rented books that others provided. He was made welcome in the best homes of Concord and enjoyed intellectual society that represented a large expenditure both of time and money, to which he did not contribute a fair proportion. Moreover, his six weeks of labor represented the support of himself only. He did nothing for wife, child, or parent.

Nevertheless, his Robinson Crusoe life must have been in many ways a delightful one. He was a short, firmly knit man with a light complexion and serious blue eyes. His face had a grim look. He was a nervous, active walker, with great endurance. "He knew the country like a fox or a bird. . . . . He knew every track in the snow or on the ground. . . . Under his arm he carrie an old music-book to press plants; in his pocket, his diary and pencil, a spy-glass for birds, microscope, jackknife, and twine. He wore a straw hat, stout shoes, strong gray trousers to brave scrub-oaks and smilax, and to climb a tree for a hawk's or a squirrel's nest. He waded into the pool for the waterplants." He knew to a day when each flower should bloom, and was wont to declare that if waked from a trance he could tell the day of the month. The Merrimac River was his companion and confidant, the guardian of his animals and plants. "The fishes, and their spawning and nests, their manners, their food; the shad-flies; . . the birds which frequent the streams,--heron, duck, sheldrake, loon, osprey; the snake, muskrat, otter, woodchuck, and fox on the banks; the turtle, frog, hyla and cricket, which make the banks vocal,--were all known to him, and, as it were, townsmen and fellow-creatures."

Thoreau began a diary the year he left college, and kept it up all his life. He lectured occasionally at Concord, in various towns of massachusetts, and in the West. In this he was encouraged by Emerson,who felt that if people would not listen to Thoreau, they, at least, ought to do so. Thy only public movement in which he showed an interest was that of freeing the slaves. He wrote a number of articles for various periodicals. He enjoyed taking jaunts, and wrote most enteratainingly of what he saw. His principal volumes, some of which were made up from his journals and magazine articles after death, are A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, 1849; Walden, or Life in the Woods, 1854; Excursions in Field and Forest, 1863; The Maine Woods, 1864; Capecod, 1865; and A Yankee in Canada, 1866. Walden is his best volume. Next come his Essay on Wild Apples and The Succession of Forest Trees, his most noted short papers. His works are a curious combination of observations on nature and society. No one else has written more appreciatively of the evergreens, the moose, the song sparrow of our northern woods. A volume of his writings is an excellent companion in camp. Thoreau's books did not sell well in his lifetime. He had 1,000 copies of Week on the Concord printed. Eight hundred were returned to him as unsalable. It was a standing joke with him that he had a fine private library of eight hundred volumes.

Thoreau was a very peculiar man in social matters. It was easy for him to say "No," but hard to say "Yes." He was a man of intellectual sympathies, but he was not affectionate. "I love Henry," said a friend, "but I cannot like him, and as for taking his arm, I should as soon think of taking the arm of an elm tree." He accepted invitations to dine with apparent reluctance, seeming to think the time wasted. He was glad to have Emerson or some congenial person with him, on a tramp. Though a man of infinite leisure, he seemed to think that he could not afford to spend time on ordinary people. When on a lecture tour in the West, his Minneapolis admirers undertook to give a reception in his honor. The reception was held, but Thoreau was not present. he had heard of a rare plant on the bank of Lake Harriet. About train time he appeared, clutching his specimen, well pleased with him self and his walk.

Thoreau's Concord home, near what is now Thoreau Street, may still be seen. In life, he was intimate with Hawthorne, Emerson, and the Alcotts. In death, his remains rest near theirs in the shady village burying ground.

See Concord; Emerson; Hawthorne, etc.