Rebels and Reformers: Biographies for Young People

by Baron Arthur Ponsonby Ponsonby; Dorothea Ponsonby

But people trouble themselves nowadays very little about the quiet, retiring souls, and so “Walden,” the book Thoreau wrote on his Experiment—as he called his period of retirement in the woods, is not so well known as it ought to be; for it seems to stand alone in its beauty and originality; no other book is like it. As we hurry and scurry through this mechanical century, we might do well to turn to its quiet pages, and if we do we may wonder if Thoreau was not the wise one and we the cranks after all.

Henry Thoreau’s childhood was a calm and happy one. He was brought up under the best possible conditions for forming a steadfast and unworldly character. Concord was a large, quiet village of plain white houses and shady elm-trees—a specially good example of a New England village community. There were no very rich people and no very poor: the inhabitants managed all their little affairs for themselves, and were perfectly capable of so doing. They were shrewd, honest, good people, and friendly towards one another. They seemed to have few worldly ambitions and were naturally inclined to be simple and democratic. They had simple occupations and amusements and did not crave for excitement, as we do now. Concord produced a very fine race of people and a few remarkable individuals—Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau himself; there were others less well known, but equally stalwart in character. Emerson, the poet and philosopher, no doubt helped his neighbors to become more cultivated and ideal: he brought them into touch with all the enlightened thought of that day, for it was the period when Carlyle and Wordsworth and Coleridge were living in England, and when the civilized world was beginning to wake up to many problems it had never thought about before, or had accepted as dispensations of Providence.

H. D. THOREAU, 1861

In this safe and peaceful atmosphere of good-will and honest endeavor the Thoreaus lived. They were poor and had no worldly advantages; but they had what was far better, the position which comes from having qualities of independence and courage, and they were respected and looked up to by their neighbors. Henry Thoreau’s father made lead pencils for a living, and Henry learnt to make them too—very skilfully, it is said. He had two sisters and a brother, but even as a child Henry Thoreau showed the most marked character of the lot. He was always determined to go his own way, and was quite sure of what he liked and disliked. But he was also very like other children, for when he was told that he would one day go to heaven, he said he did not want to, because he would not be allowed to take his sled with him. He had heard that only very grand things were allowed in heaven, and his sled was quite common and had been made at home.

Thoreau went to college—to Harvard—like any other young man, and did nothing very brilliant while he was there; when he left, he took to teaching and to writing, which was his great talent. He had always written from quite early days, keeping a diary about all the things he observed in nature—the tints of morning and evening skies, the songs of birds, the habits of animals, and the flowering and growth of plants and trees. He had extraordinary powers of observation and was a very remarkable naturalist; his understanding of animals was almost uncanny—they seemed to realize how akin he was to them. Hunted foxes would come to him for protection, and wild squirrels would nestle in his coat; he could thrust his hand into a pool and pull out a fish, which seemed to trust him and show no objection! Thoreau was absolutely at home in the open air; he could skate and swim and row and sail. He thought that every boy between the ages of ten and fourteen should shoulder a gun, but that it should only be wild shooting, limitless, and not enclosed like the shooting of English noblemen. Fishermen and hunters, he observed, seemed to get into peculiar touch with nature in the intervals of their sport. But Thoreau himself gave up shooting entirely as he grew older, and studied the habits of birds with a spy-glass; he learnt to remain absolutely motionless, as still as the wall or ground he rested on. From earliest childhood he made collections of Indian relics and of turtles and fishes. He liked to take immense journeys in search of interesting new plants and animals; once he went three hundred and twenty-five miles in a canoe with an Indian. He would camp out and be exposed to all weathers; often he was cold and hungry. A friend describes with a shiver how he slept out with Thoreau on the bare rocks of a mountain without enough blankets; but Thoreau, if he loved a thing, could not do it moderately, and, though he was so hardy, he ended by hurting himself and destroying his health.

From living so much with nature and animals, Thoreau got to look rather like a “wise wild beast”; this was how his friends described him. His face was ruddy and weather-beaten and very honest-looking; his nose was large and somewhat like a beak; his brows overhanging—but every one agreed that his eyes were the most attractive part of his face. They were sometimes blue and sometimes gray, and full of kindness and thought. He hated fine clothes and dressing up, so he always wore strong things, like corduroy (which no gentleman at that period would think of wearing), in order that he could make his way through the wood and climb rocks without tearing anything. His sisters and relations said he was simply delightful at home. He was a sort of household treasure, because he was always kind and useful and obliging. He would grow melons and plant the orchard, act as a mechanic—in fact, he was clever at any odd job with his hands—and he would attend to the animals and flowers. He was happy with children, and invented all sorts of games to amuse them and himself. He had no false pride, and was not ashamed to be seen in an old coat whitewashing the house or mending the gates. He was a great traveler in a small circle, but he never until the year before he died saw Niagara, or ever crossed the ocean. “I have a real genius for staying at home,” he said.

When he was twenty-five, Thoreau went to live with Emerson and a circle of friends on a farm near his own village of Concord. Emerson being older than Thoreau, was regarded by him as his teacher. There is no doubt that Emerson had a good deal of influence over the younger man and they thought alike about many things; but they were very different in temperament. Emerson was perhaps the more human, and he certainly had more personal charm, but Thoreau was the more original of the two. Emerson persuaded his young friend to join a sect of people formed with the object of improving the outlook of mankind; they wished to simplify living and to combine leisure for study with manual labor. Every member of the community had to do his or her share of the work to keep the house and farm going. They would plow, milk, make hay, cultivate the garden, and the women would wash up the dishes in the intervals of discussing how best to equalize the lots of rich and poor, how to simplify education so that every one might be educated, and how to destroy class differences. They were more like anarchists than socialists, because they did not believe in governments and had nothing to do with politics. Hawthorne, one of the members of this Brook Farm society, wrote a novel about them which gives a very vivid picture of their lives. They were not, except for a few members, particularly brilliant people, and their society cannot be called very successful if it is judged by renown, or by the amount of attention it got from fashionable people. This may have been because it avoided eccentricities and had very few rules—no sect could have had less—and indeed they were particularly keen on not interfering with a person’s liberty or private life. Idealism and Economy were the two principal articles of their faith. They were kind, simple, hopeful people, and were known as the Transcendentalists.

Thoreau lived with them for three years. The digging and outdoor work were easy congenial tasks to him, but Emerson, on the contrary, found that digging interfered with his writing, and after he left the sect he never again attempted to combine the two.

Thoreau was twenty-eight when he decided to go away and live by himself. It was not a sudden wish, for he had been thinking of it for some years. It was not because he was a hater of men that he wanted to get away, but he wished to find the answer to certain questions which had been bothering him. He was anxious to find out what real life could teach him, stripped of all its stupid complications and conventions. He wished also to study and to satisfy himself that he could be an author, and he went, too, because he hoped to draw strength and purpose from his experiment.