From "Walden," by courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Company
FURNITURE USED IN THE WALDEN HOUSE, MADE BY
THOREAU
Theodore Winthrop's "Life in the Open Air," and other books, have a similar quality; nor must we forget N.P. Willis, T.W. Higginson, Starr King, and particularly Wilson Flagg, whose "Forest and Field Studies" came out in 1857. Flagg added later a delightful book, "Birds and Seasons in New England," and had the singular fortune to popularize for a familiar sparrow the name "vesper-bird" in place of its earlier and very commonplace name.
Wilson Flagg was one of that circle of writers and thinkers who have made New England, and particularly Concord, so memorable. All of them felt strongly the influence of their rural surroundings. Emerson exhibits it—may be said to have lived "close to Nature" in the sublimest sense of the phrase; one realizes it more distinctly, perhaps, in his poems, but it is to be felt everywhere in his discourses. The same is true of Channing, of Hawthorne, Lowell, and the other essayists and poets in that brilliant company. All loved things out of doors, and communicated to their readers the gracious inspirations they received.
Henry D. Thoreau
Photograph by George R. King
JOHN MUIR AND A PINE TREE FRIEND
Among these New Englanders one stands preeminent to our view—Henry D. Thoreau, whom Channing so happily called the poet-naturalist. In him the observation of Nature took the foremost place as a life-pursuit; but it reflected more than the science of Nature alone, though that was there, too, as it must be to make any out-door book of real and living interest. Let some, if they choose, belittle "solid information," and extol "insight"; nevertheless the inner meaning, the imaginative perception of the value of a fact, cannot be expressed in any useful way unless the fact itself is truly and accurately stated and understood, and a reader who trusts altogether to a literary or artistic presentation of out-door life is likely to get some very distorted notions.
Thoreau's books stand at the foundation of what we now call American out-door literature. It is probable that anybody who reads a single one will be eager to read the others, but this might not happen if he began, for instance, with the "Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers." With "Walden" as an introduction to Thoreau, you get the man really in place, for this is the story of his camp life on the shore of Walden Pond, and has the least of those eccentric meditations which elsewhere sometimes puzzle, if they do not bore, the ordinary reader. "Excursions" is somewhat more discursive but equally delightful. "I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil," he declares; and these essays are memoranda of the author's wonderful walks—wonder-full they were. "It was a pleasure and a privilege," wrote Emerson, "to talk with him. He knew the country like a fox or bird, and passed through it freely by paths of his own."