Henry D. Thoreau

by F. B. Sanborn

"I see Rudolpho cross our honest fields
Collapsed with thought, and as the Stagyrite
At intellectual problems, mastering
Day after day part of the world's concern.
Nor welcome dawns nor shrinking nights him menace,
Still adding to his list beetle and bee,—
Of what the vireo builds a pensile nest,
And why the peetweet drops her giant egg
In wheezing meadows, odorous with sweet brake.
Who wonders that the flesh declines to grow
Along his sallow pits? or that his life,
To social pleasure careless, pines away
In dry seclusion and unfruitful shade?
I must admire thy brave apprenticeship
To those dry forages, although the worldling
Laugh in his sleeve at thy compelled devotion.
So shalt thou learn, Rudolpho, as thou walk'st,
More from the winding lanes where Nature leaves
Her unaspiring creatures, and surpass
In some fine saunter her acclivity."

The hint here given that Thoreau injured his once robust health by his habits of out-door study and the hardships he imposed on himself, had too much truth in it. Growing up with great strength of body and limb, and having cultivated his physical advantages by a temperate youth much exercised with manual labor, in which he took pleasure, Thoreau could not learn the lesson of moderation in those pursuits to which his nature inclined. He exposed himself in his journeys and night encampments to cold and hunger, and changes of weather, which the strongest cannot brave with impunity. Mr. Edward Hoar, who traveled with him in the Maine woods in 1857,—a journey of three hundred and twenty-five miles with a canoe and an Indian, among the head-waters of the Kennebec, Penobscot, and St. John's rivers,—and who in 1858 visited the White Mountains with him, remembers, with a shiver to this day, the rigor of a night spent on the bare rocks of Mount Washington, with insufficient blankets,—Thoreau sleeping from habit, but himself lying wakeful all night, and gazing at the coldest of full moons. It was after such an experience as this on Monadnoc, whither Thoreau and Channing went to camp out for a week in August, 1860, that the latter wrote:—

"With the night,
Reserved companion, cool and sparsely clad,
Dream, till the threefold hour with lowly voice
Steals whispering in thy frame, 'Rise, valiant youth!
The dawn draws on apace, envious of thee,
And polar in his gait; advance thy limbs,
Nor strive to heat the stones.'"

Thoreau had much scorn for weakness like this, and said of his comrade, "I fear that he did not improve all the night as he might have done, to sleep." This was his last excursion, and he died within less than two years afterward. The account of it which Channing has given may therefore be read with interest:—

"He ascended such hills as Monadnoc by his own path; would lay down his map on the summit and draw a line to the point he proposed to visit below,—perhaps forty miles away on the landscape, and set off bravely to make the 'shortcut.' The lowland people wondered to see him scaling the heights as if he had lost his way, or at his jumping over their cow-yard fences,—asking if he had fallen from the clouds. In a walk like this he always carried his umbrella; and on this Monadnoc trip, when about a mile from the station (in Troy, N. H.), a torrent of rain came down; without the umbrella his books, blankets, maps, and provisions would all have been spoiled, or the morning lost by delay. On the mountain there being a thick soaking fog, the first object was to camp and make tea.[13] He spent five nights in camp, having built another hut, to get varied views. Flowers, birds, lichens, and the rocks were carefully examined, all parts of the mountain were visited, and as accurate a map as could be made by pocket compass was carefully sketched and drawn out, in the five days spent there,—with notes of the striking aerial phenomena, incidents of travel and natural history. The fatigue, the blazing sun, the face getting broiled, the pint-cup never scoured, shaving unutterable, your stockings dreary, having taken to peat,—not all the books in the world, as Sancho says, could contain the adventures of a week in camping. The wild, free life, the open air, the new and strange sounds by night and day, the odd and bewildering rocks, amid which a person can be lost within a rod of camp; the strange cries of visitors to the summit; the great valley over to Wachusett, with its thunder-storms and battles in the cloud; the farmers' backyards in Jaffrey, where the family cotton can be seen bleaching on the grass, but no trace of the pigmy family; the dry, soft air all night, the lack of dew in the morning; the want of water,—a pint being a good deal,—these, and similar things make up some part of such an excursion."

These excursions were common with Thoreau, but less so with Channing, who therefore, notes down many things that his friend would not think worth recording, except as a part of that calendar of Nature which he set himself to keep, and of which his journals, for more than twenty years, are the record. From these he made up his printed volumes, and there may be read the details that he registered. He had gauges for the height of the river, noted the temperature of springs and ponds, the tints of the morning and evening sky, the flowering and fruit of plants, all the habits of birds and animals, and every aspect of nature from the smallest to the greatest. Much of this is the dryest detail, but everywhere you come upon strokes of beauty, in a single word-picture, or in a page of idyllic description, like this of the Concord heifer, which might be a poem of Theocritus, or one of the lost bucolics of Moschus:—

"One more confiding heifer, the fairest of the herd, did by degrees approach, as if to take some morsel from our hands, while our hearts leaped to our mouths with expectation and delight. She by degrees drew near with her fair limbs progressive, making pretense of browsing; nearer and nearer till there was wafted to us the bovine fragrance,—cream of all the dairies that ever were or will be,—and then she raised her gentle muzzle toward us, and snuffed an honest recognition within hand's reach. I saw it was possible for his herd to inspire with love the herdsman. She was as delicately featured as a hind; her hide was mingled white and fawn color; on her muzzle's tip there was a white spot not bigger than a daisy; and on her side turned toward me the map of Asia plain to see. Farewell, dear heifer! though thou forgettest me, my prayer to heaven shall be that thou may'st not forget thyself.

"I saw her name was Sumach. And by the kindred spots I knew her mother, more sedate and matronly, with full-grown bag, and on her sides was Asia, great and small, the plains of Tartary, even to the pole, while on her daughter's was Asia Minor. She was not disposed to wanton with the herdsman. As I walked the heifer followed me, and took an apple from my hand, and seemed to care more for the hand than the apple. So innocent a face I have rarely seen on any creature, and I have looked in the face of many heifers; and as she took the apple from my hand, I caught the apple of her eye. There was no sinister expression. She smelled as sweet as the clethra blossom. For horns, though she had them, they were so well disposed in the right place, but neither up nor down, that I do not now remember she had any."

Or take this apostrophe to the "Queen of Night, the Huntress Diana," which is not a translation from some Greek worshipper, but the sincere ascription of a New England hunter of the noblest deer:—