His food during his twenty-six months of residence there cost him twenty-seven cents a week. "I learned," he says, "from my two years' experience that it would cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one's necessary food, even in this latitude; that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain health and strength…. I am convinced both by faith and experience that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship, but a pastime." This book has, directly or indirectly, caused more to desire the simple life and a return to nature than any other work in American literature.
In Walden he speaks of himself as a "self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms." His companionship with nature became so intimate as to cause him to say, "Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me." When a sparrow alighted upon his shoulder, he exclaimed, "I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn." When nature had some special celebration with the trees, such as decking them with snow or ice or the first buds of spring, he frequently tramped eight or ten miles "to keep an appointment with a beech-tree or a yellow-birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines." It is amusing to read how on such a walk he disturbed the daytime slumbers of a large owl, how the bird opened its eyes wide, "but their lids soon fell again, and he began to nod," and how a sympathetic hypnotization began to take effect on Thoreau. "I too," he says, "felt a slumberous influence after watching him half an hour, as he sat thus with his eyes half open, like a cat, winged brother of the cat."
In spite of some Utopian philosophy and too much insistence on the self-sufficiency of the individual, Walden has proved a regenerative force in the lives of many readers who have not passed the plastic stage. The book develops a love for even commonplace natural objects, and, like poetry, discloses a new world of enjoyment. Walden is Thoreau's most vital combination of his poetic apprehension of wild nature with his philosophy and aggressive individualism.
Almost all of his work is autobiographical, a record of actual experience. The Maine Woods (1864), Cape Cod (1865), and A Yankee in Canada (1866) are records of his tramps in the places named in the titles-, but these works do not possess the interest of Walden.
His voluminous manuscript Journal is an almost daily record of his observations of nature, mingled with his thoughts, from the time when he left college until his last sickness. At periods for nearly fifty years after his death, various works have been compiled from this Journal. The volumes published under the titles, Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881), Summer (1884), Winter (1887), Autumn (1892), and Notes on New England Birds (1910) were not arranged by him in their present form. Editors searched his Journal for entries dealing with the same season or type of life, and put these in the same volume. Sometimes, as, for instance, in Winter, paragraphs separated by an interval of nineteen years in composition become neighbors. In spite of the somewhat fragmentary nature of these works, lovers of Thoreau become intensely interested in them. His Journal in the form in which he left it was finally published in 1906, in fourteen volumes containing 6811 printed pages. He differs from the majority of writers because the interest in his work increases with the passing of the years.
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.—Thoreau's object was to discover how to live a rich, full life with a broad margin of leisure. Intimate companionship with nature brought this secret to him, and he has taught others to increase the joys of life from sympathetic observation of everyday occurrences.
A mere unimaginative naturalist may be a bore; but Thoreau regarded nature with the eyes of a poet. His ear was thrilled with the vesper song of the whippoorwill, the lisping of the chickadee among the evergreens, and the slumber call of the toads. For him the bluebird "carries the sky on its back." The linnets come to him "bearing summer in their natures." When he asks, "Who shall stand godfather at the christening of the wild apples?" his reply shows rare poetic appreciation of nature's work:—
"We should have to call in the sunrise and the sunset, the rainbow and the autumn woods and the wild flowers, and the woodpecker and the purple finch and the squirrel and the jay and the butterfly, the November traveler and the truant boy, to our aid."
He is not only a poet-naturalist, but also a philosopher, who shows the influence of the transcendental school, particularly of Emerson. Some of Thoreau's philosophy is impractical and too unsocial, but it aims to discover the underlying basis of enchantment. He thus sums up the philosophy which his life at Walden taught him:—
"I learned this at least by my experiment—that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours…. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."