It was along the same road and down this hill, passing by the town "poor-farm" and poor-house,—the last retreat of these straggling soldiers of fortune,—that Thoreau went toward the village jail from his hermitage, that day in 1846, when the town constable carried him off from the shoemaker's to whose shop he had gone to get a cobbled shoe. His room-mate in jail for the single night he slept there, was introduced to him by the jailer, Mr. Staples (a real name), as "a first-rate fellow and a clever man," and on being asked by Thoreau why he was in prison, replied, "Why, they accuse me of burning a barn, but I never did it." As near as Thoreau could make out, he had gone to bed in a barn when drunk, and smoked his pipe there. Such were the former denizens of the Walden woods—votaries of Bacchus and Apollo, and extremely liable to take fire upon small occasion,—like Giordano Bruno's sonneteer, who, addressing the Arabian Phenix, says,—
"Tu bruci 'n un, ed io in ogni loco,
Io da Cupido, hai tu da Febo il foco."
It seems by the letter of Margaret Fuller in 1841 (cited in chapter [VI].), that Thoreau had for years meditated a withdrawal to a solitary life. The retreat he then had in view was, doubtless, the Hollowell Farm, a place, as he says, "of complete retirement, being about two miles from the village, half a mile from the nearest neighbor, and separated from the highway by a broad field." The house stood apart from the road to Nine-Acre Corner, fronting the Musketaquid on a green hill-side, and was first seen by Thoreau as a boy, in his earliest voyages up the river to Fairhaven Bay, "concealed behind a dense grove of red maples, through which I heard the house-dog bark." This place Thoreau once bought, but released it to the owner, whose wife refused to sign the deed of sale. In his Walden venture he was a squatter, using for his house-lot a woodland of Mr. Emerson's, who, for the sake of his walks and his wood-fire, had bought land on both sides of Walden Pond.
How early Thoreau formed his plan of retiring to a hut among these woods, I have not learned; but in a letter written to him March 5, 1845, by his friend Channing, a passage occurs concerning it; and it was in the latter part of the same month that Thoreau borrowed Mr. Alcott's axe and went across the fields to cut the timber for his cabin. Channing writes:—
"I see nothing for you in this earth but that field which I once christened 'Briars;' go out upon that, build yourself a hut, and there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no alternative, no other hope for you. Eat yourself up; you will eat nobody else, nor anything else. Concord is just as good a place as any other; there are, indeed, more people in the streets of that village than in the streets of this." [He was writing from the Tribune Office, in New York.] "This is a singularly muddy town; muddy, solitary, and silent. I saw Teufelsdröckh a few days since; he said a few words to me about you. Says he, 'That fellow Thoreau might be something, if he would only take a journey through the Everlasting No, thence for the North Pole. By G—,' said the old clothes-bag, warming up, 'I should like to take that fellow out into the Everlasting No, and explode him like a bombshell; he would make a loud report; it would be fun to see him pick himself up. He needs the Blumine flower business; that would be his salvation. He is too dry, too composed, too chalky, too concrete. Does that execrable compound of sawdust and stagnation L. still prose about nothing? and that nutmeg-grater of a Z. yet shriek about nothing? Does anybody still think of coming to Concord to live? I mean new people? If they do, let them beware of you philosophers.'"
Of course, this imaginary Teufelsdröckh, like Carlyle's, was the satirical man in the writer himself, suggesting the humorous and contradictory side of things, and glancing at the coolness of Thoreau, which his friends sometimes found provoking. In his own person Channing adds:—
"I should be pleased to hear from Kamchatka occasionally; my last advices from the Polar Bear are getting stale. In addition to this I find that my corresponding members at Van Diemen's Land have wandered into limbo. I hear occasionally from the World; everything seems to be promising in that quarter; business is flourishing, and the people are in good spirits. I feel convinced that the Earth has less claims to our regard than formerly; these mild winters deserve severe censure. But I am well aware that the Earth will talk about the necessity of routine, taxes, etc. On the whole it is best not to complain without necessity."
It is well to read this shrewd humor, uttered in the opposite sense from Thoreau's paradoxical wit in his "Walden," as an introduction or motto to that book. For Thoreau has been falsely judged from the wit and the paradox of "Walden," as if he were a hater of men, or foolishly desired all mankind to retire to the woods. As Channing said, soon after his friend's death,—
"The fact that our author lived for a while alone in a shanty, near a pond, and named one of his books after the place where it stood, has led some to say he was a barbarian or a misanthrope. It was a writing-case; here in this wooden inkstand he wrote a good part of his famous 'Walden,' and this solitary woodland pool was more to his Muse than all oceans of the planet, by the force of imagination. Some have fancied, because he moved to Walden, he left his family. He bivouacked there and really lived at home, where he went every day."