The hermit would hardly know the place now; his young pines are grown into giants that allow but glimpses of the shimmering lake; even the "potato hole" he dug under his cabin, whence the squirrels chirped at him from beneath the floor as he sat to write, and where he kept his winter store,—the "beans with the weevil in them" and the "potatoes with every third one nibbled by chipmunks,"—is obliterated and overgrown with the glabrous sumach. His near-by field, where he learned to "know beans" and gathered relics of a previous and aboriginal race of bean-hoers, is covered by a growth of pines and dwarf oaks, in places so dense as to be almost impassable.
Some one has said, "Thoreau experienced Nature as other men experience religion." Certainly the life at Walden, which he depicted in one of the most fascinating of books, was in all its details—whether he was ecstatically hoeing beans in his field or dreaming on his door-step, floating on the lake or rambling in forest and field—that of an ascetic and devout worshipper of Nature in all her moods. Thoreau "built himself in Walden woods a den" in 1845,—after his return from tutoring in the family of Emerson's brother at Staten Island; here he wrote most of "Walden" and the "Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers," and much more that has been posthumously published; from here he went to jail for refusing to pay a tax on his poll, from here he made the excursion described in "The Maine Woods."
He finally removed from Walden in the autumn of 1847, to reside in the house of Emerson during that sage's absence in Europe. An old neighbor of Thoreau's, who had often watched his "stumpy" figure as he hoed the beans, and had even once or twice assisted him in that celestial agriculture, tells us that Thoreau's hut was removed by a gardener to the middle of the bean-field and there occupied for some years. Later it was purchased by a farmer, who set it upon wheels and conveyed it to his farm some miles distant, where it has decayed and gone to pieces.
In Concord it is not difficult to identify the personages associated with Thoreau's life at Walden Pond and referred to in his book. The "landlord and waterlord" of the domain, on which Thoreau was "a squatter," was Waldo Emerson; the owner of the axe which the hermit borrowed to hew the frame of his hut was Bronson Alcott; the "honorable raisers" of the structure were Emerson, Curtis the Nile "Howadji," Alcott, Hosmer, and others; the lady who made the sketch of the hermitage which appears on the title-page of "Walden" was the author's sister Sophia. Of the hermit's visitors here, "the one who came oftenest" was Emerson; "the one who came farthest" was also the poet whom the hermit "took to board for a fortnight," Ellery Channing; the "long-headed farmer," who had "donned a frock instead of a professor's gown," was Thoreau's neighbor and life-long friend Edmund Hosmer, who is celebrated in the poetry of Emerson and Channing; the "last of the philosophers," the "Great Looker—great Expecter," who "first peddled wares and then his own brains," was Bronson Alcott, who spent long evenings here in converse with the hermit, or in listening to chapters from his manuscript. Here came Hawthorne to talk with his "cast-iron man" about trees and arrow-heads; here came George Hilliard and James T. Fields, and others,—sometimes so many that the hut would scarce contain them; the only complaint heard from Thoreau anent the narrowness of his quarters being that there was not room for the words to ricochet between him and his guests. Here, too, came humbler visitors, hunted slaves, who were never denied the shelter of the hermitage nor the sympathy and aid of the hermit.
Another generation of visitors comes now to this spot,—pilgrims from far, like ourselves, to the shrine of a "stoic greater than Zeno or Xenophanes,"—a man whose "breath and core was conscience." We linger till the twilight, for the genius of this shrine seems very near us as we muse in the place where he dwelt incarnate alone with Nature, and there is for us a hint of his healthful spirit in the odor of his pines and of the wild flowers beside his path,—a vague whisper of his earnest, honest thought in the murmur of the clustering boughs and in the lapping of the wavelets upon the mimic strand.
We bring from the shore a stone—the whitest we can find—for his cairn, and place with it a bright leaf, like those his callers in other days left for visiting cards upon his door-step, and then, through the wondrous half-lights of the summer evening, we walk silently away.
VIII
THE HILL-TOP HEARSED WITH PINES