henry david thoreau nature essay

Henry David Thoreau online

Major essays, major essays by henry d. thoreau:.

• A Walk to Wachusett » An essay about a journey Thoreau took with Richard Fuller, from Concord to the summit of Mount Wachusett located in Princeton, Massachusetts. (10 pages)
• A Winter Walk » An essay that deals with relationship with nature. It describes a walk taken by Thoreau during the winter. (10 pages)
• Autumnal Tints » Thoreau's classic essay about nature. Autumnal Tints eloquenty describes the colors of New England fall. (20 pages)
• Civil Disobedience » An essay, also known as Resistance to Civil Government, about the relationships between individual citizens and their government. (16 pages)
• Life Without Principle » An essay in which Thoreau condemns the American social system and lays out his program for righteous living. (13 pages)
• Natural History of Massachusetts » Natural History of Massachusetts is a half book review, half natural history essay, consisting of revised passages from Thoreau's journal. (14 pages)
• Slavery in Massachusetts » An essay based on a speech Thoreau gave at an anti-slavery rally at on July 4, 1854, after the reenslavement in Boston, Massachusetts of fugitive slave Anthony Burns. (10 pages)
• The Succession of Forest Trees » An essay in which Thoreau analyzes aspects of forest ecology and urges farmers to plant trees in natural patterns of succession. (10 pages)
• Walking » Walking is an essay on experiencing the natural world, focusing on relationship between nature and civilization. (21 pages)
• Wild Apples » An essay about history and variations of the wild apple species. Thoreau's love letter to wild apples. (16 pages)
• Other Essays » A Plea for Captain John Brown, Paradise (to be) Regained, Reform and the Reformers, Sir Walter Raleigh, The Highland Light, Aulus Persius Flaccus, Dark Ages, Herald of Freedom, Night and Moonlight...

Thoreau on Nature and Human Nature, the Tonic of Wildness, and the Value of the Unexplored

By maria popova.

Those of us who visit wild places the way others visit churches and concert halls visit because we return transfigured, recomposed, exalted and humbled at the same time, enlarged and dissolved in something larger at the same time. We visit because there we undergo some essential self-composition in the poetry of existence, though its essence rarely lends itself to words.

That ineffable essence is what Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817–May 6, 1862) — who saw nature as a form of prayer — articulated with uncommon lucidity and splendor of sentiment in the final pages of Walden ( public library | public domain ), the record of the radical experiment in living he undertook a week before he turned twenty-eight.

We need the tonic of wildness, — to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.

A century before Rachel Carson observed that because “our origins are of the earth… there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity,” Thoreau adds:

We can never have enough of Nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and Titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

We can never have enough of Nature because Nature is not something to have — it is something we are. Epochs after Thoreau, when we wade into the wilderness with our bodies and our minds, with a walking stick or a poem, we witness more than our limits transgressed. We witness our boundaries dissolved, in turn dissolving that most limited and damaging foundational falsehood upon which the whole of the consumerist-extractionist complex is built: that the rest of the living world is a parallel world, a place to visit and mine for experiences and resources with which to adorn and enrich our separate human world.

It is naïve and impracticable to insist that course-correcting our presently catastrophic trajectory of nature-destruction — that is, of self-destruction — requires reverting to the rugged naturalistic self-reliance that even Thoreau himself could not sustain beyond his short-lived experiment at Walden Pond, a life without consumption or companionship. Whatever it does require must begin with the elemental recognition that these are not separate worlds existing in parallel, that there is no “environment” surrounding the centrality of the human animal in nature, that there is nothing that can be bad for nature yet good for us — an elemental fact rendered achingly countercultural every time I walk into my local grocery store and see the organic produce, the good-for-us stuff, plastic-wrapped over styrofoam trays that will take tens of thousands of years to decompose in the landfill, leeching unfathomable toxicity in the process. It is a small act of resistance to contact store management with an appeal for change — small but not negligible, and certainly not naïve. As Thoreau himself put it in the conclusion of Walden :

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.

Complement with Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s lyrical illustrated rewilding of our relationship to nature , ornithologist and wildlife ecologist J. Drew Lanham on the spirituality of science , and poet Diane Ackerman’s lovely notion of the “Earth ecstatic,” then revisit Thoreau on the true value of a tree , the long cycles of social change , and how to use civil disobedience as an instrument of change .

— Published May 25, 2021 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2021/05/25/thoreau-walden-nature/ —

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Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau by Ben Shattuck (Tin House, 2022)

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David rompf, more online by david rompf.

• Once More to the Pond

Walking with Thoreau: A Review Essay

By david rompf.

The longest single walkable distance on Earth is a little more than fourteen thousand miles, between Cape Town, South Africa, and the Russian port city of Magadan on the Sea of Okhotsk. Google Maps has confirmed this pedestrian possibility. It is not an officially recognized path like, for example, the Trans Canada Trail, a network of pathways that twist and turn across ten provinces and three territories, but rather an intercontinental route that can be traversed without the help of a car, train, or boat. If you walked eight hours a day, the trip could be completed in five hundred days. Near the halfway point, you could eat one of your knapsack lunches at the Great Pyramid of Giza; after the triumphant last step, you might write a book about your adventure. Why did you take that walk? Was it a spiritual pilgrimage? Did you do it for the sheer physical challenge, for a deep and thrilling sense of accomplishment? For the anticipation of discovering something new about the world, about yourself?

If those fourteen thousand miles were lined with bookshelves, a good number might be stocked with the many existing volumes related, in one way or another, to walking and walkers—narratives that meanderingly explore nature, the soul, philosophy, religion, history, love, mystery, addiction, grief, joy, aches and pains, vexing and dangerous interferences, and countless other dimensions of human experience. Books about walking published in the past two decades alone are plentiful. Rebecca Solnit threw her ample intellectual net around the history of walking in Wanderlust , a robust guide to the evolutionary, philosophical, literary, religious, and political underpinnings of her subject (which, as she points out, is one that is always straying). In the aftermath of a breakup, Olivia Laing packed her oatcakes and cheese for an excursion on foot along the Ouse River, where Virginia Woolf, stones in her pockets, drowned herself. Lucky for us, Laing doesn’t follow suit, instead delivering alluring and crystalline prose in To The River . Robert Macfarlane follows ancient paths in The Old Ways , which, he stresses in a note, could not have been written standing still. In Flâneuse , Lauren Elkin charts the course of famous literary and artistic women walking the streets of Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London, while Edmund White, in The Flaneur , ambles exclusively through the City of Lights. Speaking of straying, I would be remiss not to mention Wild , Cheryl Strayed’s memoir of trekking the Pacific Crest Trail alone, more than one thousand miles from the Mojave Desert to Washington; it may be the only New York Times bestseller and Oprah’s Book Club pick with a long, hard hike as its narrative spine. The list goes on, including books on the lost art of walking, the philosophy of walking, the science and literature of pedestrianism, walking through biblical lands, across deserts high and low, walking—improbably enough—around the notoriously unwalkable Los Angeles.

In Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau , Ben Shattuck embarks on his own version of this walking-and-writing tradition—which, if not a genuine “tradition,” has been a recurring obsession among an illustrious roster of writers and thinkers going back to the peripatetic philosophers. With that well-beaten track behind him, Shattuck walks with hefty literary baggage on his shoulders, not to mention the personal baggage he seeks to lighten. As if walking and writing aren’t hard enough, his particular walks demand emotional fortitude for mining past pain and present vulnerabilities, and also require a certain literary gumption, owing to their weighty associations with Thoreau—his extensive journals, his essays about walking, Walden , Civil Disobedience , and books about his expeditions to Cape Cod and the Maine woods. Shattuck, by implication, mingles with all the pilgrims who ever lived, all the nature writers and self-seeking walkers who have ventured out with purposes big and small.

What is Shattuck’s purpose? In the first few pages of Six Walks , we learn that he first came up with the idea to follow one of Thoreau’s walks when he was haunted by dreams of an ex-girlfriend. “This was years ago, in my early thirties,” he writes, “when I couldn’t find a way out of the doubt, fear, shame, and sadness that had arranged a constellation of grief around me.”  Walking, then, is a way of throwing off that burden. While showering at dawn, Shattuck envisions a young, bearded man standing on a beach, “wind whipping his coattails, the ocean pounding in front of him.” Unlike the author, that man is happy. In his mind’s eye, Shattuck also observes him writing in a journal and wading through dune grass. The fellow glimpsed through the mists of shower and imagination is Henry David Thoreau. Shattuck, while living on the southern coast of Massachusetts, has been reading Cape Cod every night for a week when, suddenly, impulse and inspiration take hold. He puts on a bathing suit and sweater, downs a cup of coffee, fills a backpack with bread, cheese, apples, and carrots, and sets out for the Cape by foot. “I would walk the outer beaches, from the elbow to Provincetown’s fingertips,” he writes, “as Henry had done.”

Thus begins Shattuck’s journey: not just with a footstep but also with the decision to refer to Thoreau as Henry throughout these chronicles. The choice seems, at first, unusual, and it takes some getting used to. “Henry” is quaint, and perhaps a bit precious, but as we travel along with Shattuck this first-name basis humanizes the literary giant, yanks him down from the pantheon to the fertile, buggy earth he once trod, reminding us that he was a man who drank from the pond he bathed in. “Henry,” on the page, also has the inexplicable effect of suggesting that Shattuck might find what he’s looking for on these six walks, discoveries that could soothe and surprise the twenty-first-century acolyte—and maybe the reader, too. Henry is like a sage old friend who, though long gone in body, still walks among us as a companion.

Shattuck’s initial three walks, in Part One of the book, take us to Cape Cod, Mount Katahdin in Maine, and Wachusett Mountain in Massachusetts. Before setting out for the Cape, he puts a notebook in his backpack, “not because I ever journaled or made sketches, but because Henry had, and I wanted to try someone’s habits for a few days.” Part Two spans new geographical and emotional terrain, with a sixteen-mile pilgrimage from the author’s childhood home on a saltwater river to a peninsula isolated by the sea in Sakonnet, Rhode Island, where his great-great-great-grandparents summered away from their home in Chicago. This is Shattuck’s version of the southwest walk that Thoreau discusses in his famous essay “Walking.” The Sakonnet outing is followed by a journey to The Allagash in Maine, and the final walk is a do-over to Cape Cod, this time accompanied by his fiancée, whom he refers to only as “Jenny” but who is identifiable as Jenny Slate, the actress, author, and former cast member of Saturday Night Live . Both parts include off-trail interludes that allow Shattuck to wander without walking and to provide the backstory behind his quest for self-understanding. In the first of these, he visits a hypnotist in an effort to halt the nightmares that end up propelling him to take these walks. In the second, he visits Walden Pond.

Six Walks contains no map of Shattuck’s—or Thoreau’s—travels, as one might expect. Unfamiliar with much of the terrain, I began to toggle between the book and Google Maps in a mostly futile effort to visualize Shattuck’s routes. I soon gave up this disjointed exercise when I realized that the omission of maps—like calling Thoreau “Henry”—was probably a deliberate choice. After all, this book isn’t really about tracing the land journeys. It isn’t a guide for planning your own walks in the footsteps of Henry David Thoreau. The itinerary here is a circuitous one to Shattuck’s interior, a compass of the soul. Eschewing maps, I was happy to find, in these pages, some of the simple but exquisite black-and-white drawings that Shattuck, an artist and curator as well as a writer, made during his walks. Many, like “A Stone on the Beach,” “Light in the Grass,” and “Bullfrog on River Path,” reflect, even in their titles, a Zen aesthetic of understated elegance.

An intense yearning to get close to Henry is palpable at every turn. Shattuck’s goal on day one of his first Cape Cod walk is to visit the oysterman’s house in Wellfleet where Henry slept for a night. When he finds it, finally, with the help of a local couple, he peers through the windows. Our hearts sink even before Shattuck reveals his own reaction, because by now we recognize the tenacious grip of his sadness. “I felt no connection, no insight, no sudden power,” he writes. Henry’s spirit is nowhere to be found. Continuing on his walk toward Provincetown, Shattuck picks up a wedge of red clay that has tumbled down to the beach from the cliffs of Truro. It’s as big as a slice of wedding cake, he tells us, and he gives in to the urge to take a bite. “The chunk dissolved, milk-chocolate like, when I massaged it with my tongue into the roof of my mouth.” Denied even a morsel of fulfillment at the oysterman’s digs, he can, as consolation, consume a helping of earth once touched by Henry. It is a poignant moment that shows the depth of Shattuck’s hunger.

The hankering for Henry—as an ideal, a symbol, a literary mirror—recurs. After Shattuck is swarmed by blackflies in Maine, he quotes Thoreau’s Maine Woods : “I now first began to be seriously molested by the blackfly!” Shattuck applies DEET while Henry dabs on his own compound of turpentine, spearmint, and camphor oil. Shattuck is awakened by loons singing to each other, a sound he exquisitely describes as being “like a flute somehow played underwater”; Henry, too, hears the voice of the loon in the middle of the night. Shattuck sees a rainbow and we are offered a rainbow from Henry’s journal. In less talented hands, this one-to-one correspondence might come off as gimmicky: a writer dipping into Thoreau to pluck out tidbits of look-alike experience. Here the symmetry seems natural, organic even—there’s no pretense of seeing himself in Thoreau, or Henry in himself.

In the Walden Pond interlude, Shattuck’s pursuit of Henry and all that his walks stood for—happiness, freedom, truth of the soul, a return to childhood—takes a brief, engrossing detour into the realm of paradox. He enters the replica of Thoreau’s cabin and sits in the replica rocking chair next to the replica woodstove. Soon a tourist walks in with her young son. “Oh, look, there he is,” she says to the boy. “Ask him a question.” Shattuck, too, has become a replica, a realization that seems to stun him. “No,” he says to them. What have they encroached on—an image of Henry? A communion with Thoreau on sacred ground? He abruptly gets up and leaves. Reflecting on this discomfiting interaction, Shattuck speculates that “maybe my leaving was in character.” He means Thoreau’s character, of course, and specifically his overblown reputation as a recluse who shunned society. But maybe his leaving also revealed a sharp sliver of Shattuck’s own character, or a hybrid of his and Henry’s. Though he balks at the idea of playing along with the mistaken identity—that of reenactor—his walks are essentially, and self-admittedly, reenactments, for that is what it means, in part, to follow in someone else’s footsteps.

Is Shattuck questioning his mission, recognizing a certain futility in the walks? His self-doubt prompts an ongoing interrogation of his very being, which is what makes this book so relatable and compelling. It is not the trudges along the New England seaboard or up a mountain, but rather Shattuck’s probing odyssey, however it might unfold, into despair and his search for a way out that grips us as readers. A wise cliché tells us that it is the journey, not the destination, that counts. Shattuck’s particular journey—inward and outward—avoids self-absorption. As the French philosopher Frédéric Gros argued in A Philosophy of Walking , “By walking, you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history.” Perhaps this explains the unnerving brush at Walden Pond. Shattuck bristles at being ascribed an identity—Thoreau in the boy’s mind, a reenactor for the mother. The attempt at shedding his identity, if just for a few days, is under threat. The tiny cabin and its trespassers are too close for comfort.

On his walk to Wachusett Mountain, Shattuck takes MDMA, which is in the last stages of clinical trials for the treatment of PTSD. “I’d wanted to feel some of the transcendence in nature that Henry felt,” he writes, “and which I hadn’t really yet experienced in the walking, and thought the pills might help.” Shattuck goes on to describe Henry’s own drug experience when he was thirty-four, citing an entry in Thoreau’s journal documenting the effects:

By taking the ether the other day I was convinced how far asunder a man could be separated from his senses. You expand like a seed in the ground. You exist in your roots, like a tree in the winter. If you have an inclination to travel, take the ether: you go beyond the further star.

Thoreau, however, didn’t get high on ether as a means of enhancing his walks or achieving transcendence; his dentist administered it—once—before extracting some bad teeth. In his account of ascending Wachusett Mountain, Shattuck intersperses several Thoreau quotations describing the same walk, allowing the reader to mistakenly infer that Henry, too, was under the influence at the time. But Thoreau’s three-day walk to the mountain summit occurred in 1842 and his essay, “A Walk to Wachusett,” was published in The Boston Miscellany in January 1843; his dentist gave him ether in 1851. A clarification could have cleared up the confusion and, in turn, spotlighted a more salient, ironic link between the author and Henry: both have taken a drug in order to suppress an ache, and to make an experience more pleasant.

Throughout Six Walks , and especially in Part One, Shattuck’s anguish seems stubbornly intractable. While a drug might offer only a temporary transcendence, it’s easy to sympathize with Shattuck’s desire for relief. We feel for him when he asks himself whether Henry, whose brother John died six months before Thoreau’s Wachusett walk, was “doing the same thing I was doing? Walking to husk the dead skin of grief? Looking up to feel the comfort of one’s own smallness in the world, to displace bulging selfhood, under the shadow of such urgent beauty as the night sky?”

Ten years pass before Shattuck begins the walks and the writing of Part Two, and a lot has happened in that time. His anxiety and distress have subsided. He gets engaged to Jenny. He no longer feels the urgency to leave home. Reading Thoreau, however, has been a constant, and in this new era of love, maturity, and greater perspective, he still feels the impulse to replicate some of Henry’s journeys. If there’s one thing he’s learned from reading Thoreau’s journals, “It’s that stepping out your front door gives you an offering in all seasons and moods. Something would come from continuing to follow him.”

In the first summer of the pandemic, Shattuck heads on foot from the house where he grew up to an ancestral home in Rhode Island, a route marked by reminders of his childhood: “Past the pond where I used to go duck hunting with my dad. Past the bushes of wild hazelnuts my mom and I picked when I was boy—the memory of which so quietly imprinted itself in my mind that I had forgotten we’d done that until I walked past them one day, saw their frilled encasings dropping by the footpath, and thought of my mom.” And then: “To the beach where my grandmother, mother, and I all played as kids in our own times, the beach surrounding the farmland my great-grandfather bought in the early 1900s. The outgoing tide had left a trim of folded particulate—seaweed and flecks of stone—that looked like a line of drawing of distant mountains.” In the fuguelike passages of this “Southwest” walk, Shattuck hits a Proustian stride. The prose is lilting and graceful here in a book of already lush prose.

Thoreau, in his seminal essay, “Walking”—published in the Atlantic Monthly a few weeks after his death in 1862—declared that when he left his house for a walk, he inevitably headed southwest, “toward some particular wood or meadow or deserted pasture or hill in that direction. [ … ] The future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side.” In Part Two, one key to Shattuck’s future is found not by heading southwest but by recounting the uncomplicated pleasures of his youth. Therein lies one of the most striking affinities with Henry and his walks—a craving for an infinity of childhood freedom. While Thoreau’s obsessive, hours-long walks and his essays on the subject are often automatically associated with Nature—with all that the word has come to signify: ecological awareness, preservation, a romantic return to the pastoral, and “nature writing,” to name a few—or with a supposed rejection of society, the expression of his true purpose in sauntering can be found in his journal entry of July 21, 1851, three years after abandoning his Walden Pond cabin and eleven years before succumbing to tuberculosis. That long, rhapsodic entry, shortened here, can be read as a manifesto for Shattuck:

Now I yearn for one of those old, meandering, dry, uninhabited roads, which lead away from towns, which lead us away from temptation, which conduct to the outside of earth, over its uppermost crust, where you may forget in what country you are travelling; where no farmer can complain that you are treading down his grass [ … ] along which you may travel like a pilgrim, going nowhither; where travellers are not too often to be met; where my spirit is free; where the walls and fences are not cared for; where your head is more in heaven than your feet are on earth [ … ] where travellers have no occasion to stop, but pass along and leave you to your thoughts; where it makes no odds which way you face, whether you are going or coming, whether it is morning or evening, mid-noon or midnight [ … ] where you can walk and think with the least obstruction, there being nothing to measure progress by; where you can pace when your breast is full, and cherish your moodiness [ … ] by which you may go to the uttermost parts of the earth. [ … ] There I can walk and stalk and pace and plod. [ … ] That’s a road I can travel [ … ] There I can walk, and recover the lost child that I am without any ringing of a bell [ … ] There I have freedom in my thought, and in my soul am free.

On his last walk—his second to the Cape—Shattuck and his fiancée, Jenny, stay in an old shack in Provincetown. Fitted out with a hand pump for water, an outhouse, and lanterns, the shelter seems more like Thoreau’s original cabin than its replica at Walden Pond. Shattuck doesn’t make this explicit comparison; he doesn’t need to. His masterful approach to past and present evokes a place that no longer exists and the profound satisfaction he takes in the night’s ramshackle accommodations. No reenactments required. In speaking with someone he loves, Shattuck has found the real thing. “I didn’t want to walk anymore,” he writes. “I didn’t want to sleep in a stranger’s house. I didn’t want to wake up before dawn to hike up Mount Katahdin or take MDMA under a chairlift or empty my breath and be pressed by the weight of Walden Pond.” Transcendence, then, is felt when it’s least expected—when we aren’t looking for it or following someone else’s lead.

The epigraph for Six Walks is a definition: “Footstep (‘fóot, step): A step taken by a person in walking, especially as heard by another.” In these pages we hear an echo across time, terrain, and imagination: Thoreau rustling in the distance as Shattuck moves forward with his life. You might read this book because you’re a fan of Thoreau, or because you’re an ardent walker and nature-lover. Or you might just read it to wander in the generous presence of Shattuck. You might cross the finish line, as I did, thinking of him as Ben.

Published on June 30, 2022

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ENGL405: The American Renaissance

Essay on henry david thoreau and "walden".

You have already been introduced to Thoreau as a writer. Read this short essay on get a better sense of him as an activist.

On July 4, 1845, Henry David Thoreau took up residence in a cabin he had constructed on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson on the shores of Walden Pond, just outside of Concord, Massachusetts. For the next 27 months, Thoreau would live there, contemplating nineteenth-century American life and the world as a whole as it passed by, compiling notes and thoughts that would eventually form the basis of what has been considered his masterpiece , Walden . Organized around the calendar year, Walden consolidates Thoreau's two-year experience into one calendrical cycle, but it is far more than a memoir or a naturalist's report, moving from philosophical and political considerations to short sketches of the people and animals that move in and out of his life to rhapsodic celebrations of the pond and its environs to scientific data on its depth and its climate. To an extent none of his other writings do, Walden balances Thoreau's various interests and themes – understanding nature from a scientific and spiritual perspective, criticizing nineteenth-century U. S. materialism and inequality on the basis of natural laws and spiritual truth, and experimenting with language as a way of conveying those laws and truths in order to transform himself and his society.

Thoreau was born in 1817 in Concord, where he lived almost the entirety of his life. His family was fairly well off economically, as they owned one of the premier pencil-making factories in the nation. This financial security allowed Thoreau to attend Harvard, from which he graduated in 1837, in the midst of one of the worst financial panics of the nineteenth century. After resigning from his first job as a teacher because he refused to inflict corporal punishment, he opened a school with his brother John in Concord, which they ran together until 1841, when John became ill. After John's death in 1842, which would leave him without one of his closest companions, Thoreau took a teaching position in Staten Island as a way of gaining a foothold in the New York literary market. However, he would soon return to Concord. Following his experiment on Walden Pond, Thoreau continued in Concord, first living with the Emerson family for a short time, before returning to his family home, where he lived as a boarder until his death in 1862.

Early on, Thoreau came under the influence of Emerson and the transcendentalist circle, publishing essays and poetry in The Dial edited by Emerson and Margaret Fuller in the early 1840s, and living with Emerson from 1841 to 1843. While Emerson's influence can be felt in many of Thoreau's writings, their relationship was not always easy and Thoreau departs from Emerson in significant ways. Thoreau's time at Walden Pond and the experience he records of being jailed for not paying taxes in "Resistance to Civil Government" ("Civil Disobedience") can be readily understood as putting Emerson's philosophy of self-reliance into material practice. But as significant as that philosophical basis is to Thoreau's activity, the material nature of his activity may be more important. For Thoreau, the material world and his interaction with it become central in a way that the world never seems to be quite so real in Emerson's writings. While many of Emerson's essays and lectures tend to focus on abstract ideas, principles, and social positions as indicated by their very titles – "Self-Reliance", "Compensation", and "The Poet" – Thoreau's writings ground themselves in specific experience and particular locales, as indicated by the two books he published during his life time: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and Walden .

Also unlike Emerson, who would achieve great fame as a lecturer and essayist, Thoreau would remain relatively obscure during his lifetime, even as he circulated among the most important literary circles of his age. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers was an infamous publishing failure – fewer than 300 of the original edition of 1000 books sold – but it helped to establish Thoreau's ability to weave philosophical insights and meditations, commentary on nature and history, into a narrative structure. Written during his time at Walden Pond, the book ostensibly chronicles the trip Thoreau and his brother John took in 1839. But Thoreau uses their journey both to mourn and remember his brother and to explore the philosophical and social questions at the core of his thought, the relationship between the self and nature, the history of Euro-American exploitation of American nature and its native inhabitants, and the connection between specific locales and times and the eternal and the universal.

During the same year of the publication A Week , Thoreau produced his most famous essay, "Resistance to Civil Government", better known now by the title "Civil Disobedience". "Resistance to Civil Government", with its argument that the individual conscience trumps man-made laws when those laws become the machinery of injustice, has influenced a number of important political activists, most famously Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. The essay uses Thoreau's experience of being imprisoned for one night in 1846 (during his sojourn at Walden Pond) for not paying his poll tax in protest of American policies, most importantly the U.S.-Mexican War and the continuation of slavery. In defending and explaining his conduct, Thoreau produces an individualistic, transcendentalist politics based on the inviolability of the individual conscience, a conscience or moral sense that potentially grants each of us access to a higher truth. This faith in the individual's ability to conduct himself properly through the use of an inner moral sense provides the foundation for the fundamentally anarchistic position Thoreau articulates at the beginning of the essay – "'That government is best which governs not at all;' and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have". Thoreau returns to his hope for a state that will all but cease to exist at the end of the essay and describes his ability and desire to escape contact with the government as much as possible, concluding his inserted history of his night in prison by recounting a huckleberry picking expedition that led him into nature where "the State was nowhere to be seen".

Yet much of the essay takes a more practical approach to the realities of the government in the antebellum U. S., with Thoreau even recognizing it as doing some good, as when he acknowledges paying the "highway tax:" "to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government". As much as Thoreau bases his radical individualism and anarchist tendencies in his transcendentalist philosophy, then, he is most concerned with the specific American government of his time and its policies. The fundamental problem with government is that it takes on a life of its own, becoming, in Thoreau's central metaphor in the essay, a machine that then attempts to treat individual men as machines lacking in thought or conscience. In articulating his more specific focus, he grounds his critique in American political thought, recalling the Revolution in order to contend that "All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable". While he seems to suggest that any violation of one's sense of justice by the government would validate resisting the state by withholding one's allegiance or by refusing to pay taxes, his argument largely relegates such extreme acts to only the most severe violation of right. He advises us to let certain injustices go: "If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go". And he makes it clear that he is not calling upon his fellow citizens to engage in a crusade to eliminate all evil: "It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong". Thoreau's point is not that slavery and what he – and many others – saw as an imperialistic war are wrong. There's much evil in the world, and it is beyond our capacity to eliminate it all.

What goads Thoreau to action is that the government that asks for his allegiance and support has created machinery for unjust purposes, as "oppression and robbery are organized" to support war and slavery. While Thoreau does not see it as his duty to oppose all injustice, he argues that "it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it . . . not to give it practically his support. . . . . I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue [my pursuits] sitting upon another man's shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too". Much of his critique is aimed at his many neighbors who ostensibly oppose slavery and the U. S.-Mexican War but do little in actuality to stop the federal government from continuing as it has and, in supporting the government, actually further the injustices they claim to oppose, thus "practically" giving their support. It is here that he dismisses voting as an empty gesture because the voter does not fully invest himself in the outcome of the vote. This is where civil disobedience becomes necessary, for the individual must make his "life a counter friction to stop the machine" of injustice by attempting to clog up the wheels of the government's machinery: "Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence". If each person who thought slavery or the U.S.-Mexican War was wrong withheld support for the government, Thoreau contends, the government would have to relent rather than jailing thousands of citizens. While this idea of nonviolent resistance became one of the most influential parts of Thoreau's political thought, he moved away from this position as the nation stumbled closer and closer to Civil War. Specifically, in his eulogistic essays on John Brown, following his failed attempt at provoking a slave rebellion in Virginia, Thoreau celebrated Brown's ability to stir Northerners from their slumber, as "He has liberated many thousands of slaves, both North and South". This figuring of his fellow Northerners as slaves – as enslaved to the system of slavery specifically and to social norms more broadly – connects this later apology for violence to "Resistance" where he similarly opines that slavery could only be abolished by voting when society has become "indifferent" to it and the voters themselves "will then be the only slaves".

As his more explicitly political writings frequently speak of his fellow citizens as slaves for their continuing support of slavery, Walden similarly equates those who "lead lives of quiet desperation" in which they have "no time to be any thing but a machine" to being "slave-driver[s]" of themselves. If slavery and industrialization provide the most prominent contexts for Thoreau's critique, Nature provides the antidote for these moral and social ailments. Most pronouncedly, he announces his social project in terms of his fellow Americans being asleep: "I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up". For Thoreau, especially in the second chapter of Walden , "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For", morning becomes a figure for the ever-present possibility of waking to "a poetic or divine life" through both the imaginative constitution of the world and direct contact with its material reality.

Much of Walden consists of Thoreau's meditations on his experiment in Spartan living, an experiment based in an attempt at discovering exactly what a man needs to live, materially and spiritually, and his focus is largely on discerning his place within nature and, through it, within the universe. Yet running through these more philosophical and, at times, scientific threads is a steady critique of American society – "this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century" – for having misplaced priorities due to a failure of imagination and perspective. While not as explicitly political as "Resistance" or his essays and lectures on slavery, Walden takes aim both at specific injustices and at the broader social and ideological underpinnings of those injustices. Among other things, Thoreau, for example, attacks industrialized labor for merely seeking "that the corporations may be enriched" and repeatedly gestures to the travesty of Southern slavery. But the basis for these critiques lies in his returning to nature and a world that exists outside the nineteenth century and its narrow interests, allowing him the perspective to see the limitations of his time.

It is through his deeper engagement, his "closest acquaintance with Nature", that Thoreau discovers the higher laws that guide his critique of American society. In particular, in the chapter "Higher Laws", Thoreau attempts to link the higher "spiritual life" with "a primitive", more "rank hold on life", even as he recognizes these instincts as quite distinct. He argues that it is through his experiences in the wild, that he gains access to "the most original part of himself", through a kind of "clarifying process". In "Spring", he famously describes such a clarifying process within nature itself through his description of the thawing of the railroad bank. As with his depiction of morning as reflecting the awakening of the self to the world, so with "Spring" he offers an account of the world coming back to life. Viewing the bank, he feels as if he "stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me". This experience leads him to meditate on the connections between various material phenomena and language, captured in the repeated form of leaves, as he concludes that "it seemed that this one hillside illustrated the principle of all the operations of Nature". "Spring" concludes with images that suggest the unimportance of human or any specific animal's existence within nature, as Thoreau defends and celebrates nature's extravagance, the fact that "Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed" – "tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the world". Yet nature also provides the springboard for transforming human life – both in general, in a particular society, and for the individual – for it enables us to recognize that this earth and "the institutions upon it, are plastic" and to see "our own limits transgressed" by its "inexhaustible vigor, vast and Titanic features". It is this emphasis on continually transgressing our limits as our experience with nature repeatedly reminds us that leads Thoreau to leave Walden Pond. As he famously puts it, "I had several more lives to live", and during his time at Walden he had already made "a beaten track" between his cabin and the pond and a similar path "which the mind travels". Nature, Thoreau suggests, helps to correct our tendency to fall into the same paths, the same routines, and as such it can help to reorient ourselves as individual and as a society.

Suggested Additional Reading

Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Cavell, Stanley. The Senses of Walden. Expanded ed. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981.

Milder, Robert. Reimagining Thoreau. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Myerson, Joel, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Richardson, Robert D., Jr. Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986

Robinson, David M. Natural Life: Thoreau's Worldly Transcendentalism. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004.

Walls, Laura Dassow. Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.

The writer extols the virtues of immersing oneself in nature and laments the inevitable encroachment of private ownership upon the wilderness.

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil, — to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care of that.

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, — who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going à la Sainte Terre ,” to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer ,” a Saunterer, — a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.

It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearthside from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return, — prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again, — if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.

To come down to my own experience, my companion and I, for I sometimes have a companion, take pleasure in fancying ourselves knights of a new, or rather an old, order, — not Equestrians or Chevaliers, not Ritters or Riders, but Walkers, a still more ancient and honorable class, I trust. The Chivalric and heroic spirit which once belonged to the Rider seems now to reside in, or perchance to have subsided into, the Walker, — not the Knight, but Walker Errant. He is a sort of fourth estate, outside of Church and State and People.

We have felt that we almost alone hereabouts practiced this noble art; though, to tell the truth, at least if their own assertions are to be received, most of my townsmen would fain walk sometimes, as I do, but they cannot. No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom, and independence which are the capital in this profession. It comes only by the grace of God. It requires a direct dispensation from Heaven to become a walker. You must be born into the family of the Walkers. Ambulator nascitur, non fit . Some of my townsmen, it is true, can remember and have described to me some walks which they took ten years ago, in which they were so blessed as to lose themselves for half an hour in the woods; but I know very well that they have confined themselves to the highway ever since, whatever pretensions they may make to belong to this select class. No doubt they were elevated for a moment as by the reminiscence of a previous state of existence, when even they were foresters and outlaws.

“When he came to grene wode, In a mery mornynge, There he herde the notes small Of byrdes mery syngynge. “It is ferre gone, sayd Robyn, That I was last here; Me Lyste a lytell for to shote At the donne dere.”

I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least — and it is commonly more than that — sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements. You may safely say, A penny for your thoughts, or a thousand pounds. When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many of them, — as if the legs were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk upon, — I think that they deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago. I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some rust, and when sometimes I have stolen forth for a walk at the eleventh hour, or four o’clock in the afternoon, too late to redeem the day, when the shades of night were already beginning to be mingled with the daylight, have felt as if I had committed some sin to be atoned for, — I confess that I am astonished at the power of endurance, to say nothing of the moral insensibility, of my neighbors who confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months, aye, and years almost together. I know not what manner of stuff they are of, — sitting there now at three o’clock in the afternoon, as if it were three o’clock in the morning. Bonaparte may talk of the three-o’clock-in-the-morning courage, but it is nothing to the courage which can sit down cheerfully at this hour in the afternoon over against one’s self whom you have known all the morning, to starve out a garrison to whom you are bound by such strong ties of sympathy. I wonder that about this time, or say between four and five o’clock in the afternoon, too late for the morning papers and too early for the evening ones, there is not a general explosion heard up and down the street, scattering a legion of antiquated and house-bred notions and whims to the four winds for an airing, — and so the evil cure itself.

How womankind, who are confined to the house still more than men, stand it I do not know; but I have ground to suspect that most of them do not stand it at all. When, early in a summer afternoon, we have been shaking the dust of the village from the skirts of our garments, making haste past those houses with purely Doric or Gothic fronts, which have such an air of repose about them, my companion whispers that probably about these times their occupants are all gone to bed. Then it is that I appreciate the beauty and the glory of architecture, which itself never turns in, but forever stands out and erect, keeping watch over the slumberers.

No doubt temperament, and, above all, age, have a good deal to do with it. As a man grows older, his ability to sit still and follow indoor occupations increases. He grows vespertinal in his habits as the evening of life approaches, till at last he comes forth only just before sundown, and gets all the walk that he requires in half an hour.

But the walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours, — as the swinging of dumbbells or chairs; but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day. If you would get exercise, go in search of the springs of life. Think of a man’s swinging dumbbells for his health, when those springs are bubbling up in far-off pastures unsought by him!

Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking. When a traveller asked Wordsworth’s servant to show him her master’s study, she answered, “Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.”

Living much out of doors, in the sun and wind, will no doubt produce a certain roughness of character, — will cause a thicker cuticle to grow over some of the finer qualities of our nature, as on the face and hands, or as severe manual labor robs the hands of some of their delicacy of touch. So staying in the house, on the other hand, may produce a softness and smoothness, not to say thinness of skin, accompanied by an increased sensibility to certain impressions. Perhaps we should be more susceptible to some influences important to our intellectual and moral growth, if the sun had shone and the wind blown on us a little less; and no doubt it is a nice matter to proportion rightly the thick and thin skin. But methinks that is a scurf that will fall off fast enough, — that the natural remedy is to be found in the proportion which the night bears to the day, the winter to the summer, thought to experience. There will be so much the more air and sunshine in our thoughts. The callous palms of the laborer are conversant with finer tissues of self-respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the heart, than the languid fingers of idleness. That is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself white, far from the tan and callus of experience.

When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall? Even some sects of philosophers have felt the necessity of importing the woods to themselves, since they did not go to the woods. “They planted groves and walks of Platanes,” where they took subdiales ambulationes in porticos open to the air. Of course it is of no use to direct our steps to the woods, if they do not carry us thither. I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is, — I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods? I suspect myself, and cannot help a shudder when I find myself so implicated even in what are called good works, — for this may sometimes happen.

My vicinity affords many good walks; and though for so many years I have walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together, I have not yet exhausted them. An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles’ radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you.

Nowadays almost all man’s improvements, so called, as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap. A people who would begin by burning the fences and let the forest stand! I saw the fences half consumed, their ends lost in the middle of the prairie, and some worldly miser with a surveyor looking after his bounds, while heaven had taken place around him, and he did not see the angels going to and fro, but was looking for an old post-hole in the midst of paradise. I looked again, and saw him standing in the middle of a boggy stygian fen, surrounded by devils, and he had found his bounds without a doubt, three little stones, where a stake had been driven, and looking nearer, I saw that the Prince of Darkness was his surveyor.

I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing at my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do: first along by the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and the woodside. There are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant. From many a hill I can see civilization and the abodes of man afar. The farmers and their works are scarcely more obvious than woodchucks and their burrows. Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture even politics, the most alarming of them all, — I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape. Politics is but a narrow field, and that still narrower highway yonder leads to it. I sometimes direct the traveller thither. If you would go to the political world, follow the great road, — follow that market-man, keep his dust in your eyes, and it will lead you straight to it; for it, too, has its place merely, and does not occupy all space. I pass from it as from a bean field into the forest, and it is forgotten. In one half-hour I can walk off to some portion of the earth’s surface where a man does not stand from one year’s end to another, and there, consequently, politics are not, for they are but as the cigar-smoke of a man.

The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion of the highway, as a lake of a river. It is the body of which roads are the arms and legs, — a trivial or quadrivial place, the thoroughfare and ordinary of travellers. The word is from the Latin villa which together with via , a way, or more anciently ved and vella , Varro derives from veho , to carry, because the villa is the place to and from which things are carried. They who got their living by teaming were said vellaturam facere . Hence, too, the Latin word vilis and our vile, also villain . This suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel that goes by and over them, without travelling themselves.

Some do not walk at all; others walk in the highways; a few walk across lots. Roads are made for horses and men of business. I do not travel in them much, comparatively, because I am not in a hurry to get to any tavern or grocery or livery-stable or depot to which they lead. I am a good horse to travel, but not from choice a roadster. The landscape-painter uses the figures of men to mark a road. He would not make that use of my figure. I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America; neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer amount of it in mythology than in any history of America, so called, that I have seen.

However, there are a few old roads that may be trodden with profit, as if they led somewhere now that they are nearly discontinued. There is the Old Marlborough Road, which does not go to Marlborough now, methinks, unless that is Marlborough where it carries me. I am the bolder to speak of it here, because I presume that there are one or two such roads in every town.

The Old Marlborough Road . Where they once dug for money, But never found any; Where sometimes Martial Miles Singly files, And Elijah Wood, I fear for no good: No other man, Save Elisha Dugan— O man of wild habits, Partridges and rabbits Who hast no cares Only to set snares, Who liv’st all alone, Close to the bone And where life is sweetest Constantly eatest. When the spring stirs my blood With the instinct to travel, I can get enough gravel On the Old Marlborough Road. Nobody repairs it, For nobody wears it; It is a living way, As the Christians say. Not many there be Who enter therein, Only the guests of the Irishman Quin. What is it, what is it But a direction out there, And the bare possibility Of going somewhere? Great guide-boards of stone, But travellers none; Cenotaphs of the towns Named on their crowns. It is worth going to see Where you might be. What king Did the thing, I am still wondering; Set up how or when, By what selectmen, Gourgas or Lee, Clark or Darby? They’re a great endeavor To be something forever; Blank tablets of stone, Where a traveller might groan, And in one sentence Grave all that is known Which another might read, In his extreme need. I know one or two Lines that would do, Literature that might stand All over the land Which a man could remember Till next December, And read again in the spring, After the thawing. If with fancy unfurled You leave your abode You may go round the world By the Old Marlborough Road.

At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only, — when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road, and walking over the surface of God’s earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman’s grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come.

What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither we will walk? I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. It is not indifferent to us which way we walk. There is a right way; but we are very liable from heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one. We would fain take that walk, never yet taken by us through this actual world, which is perfectly symbolical of the path which we love to travel in the interior and ideal world; and sometimes, no doubt, we find it difficult to choose our direction, because it does not yet exist distinctly in our idea.

When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will bend my steps, and submit myself to my instinct to decide for me, I find, strange and whimsical as it may seem, that I finally and inevitably settle southwest, toward some particular wood or meadow or deserted pasture or hill in that direction. My needle is slow to settle, — varies a few degrees, and does not always point due southwest, it is true, and it has good authority for this variation, but it always settles between west and south-southwest. The future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side. The outline which would bound my walks would be, not a circle, but a parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits which have been thought to be non-returning curves, in this case opening westward, in which my house occupies the place of the sun. I turn round and round irresolute sometimes for a quarter of an hour, until I decide, for a thousandth time, that I will walk into the southwest or west. Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free. Thither no business leads me. It is hard for me to believe that I shall find fair landscapes or sufficient wildness and freedom behind the eastern horizon. I am not excited by the prospect of a walk thither; but I believe that the forest which I see in the western horizon stretches uninterruptedly toward the setting sun, and there are no towns nor cities in it of enough consequence to disturb me. Let me live where I will, on this side is the city, on that the wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and more, and withdrawing into the wilderness. I should not lay so much stress on this fact, if I did not believe that something like this is the prevailing tendency of my countrymen. I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west. Within a few years we have witnessed the phenomenon of a southeastward migration, in the settlement of Australia; but this affects us as a retrograde movement, and, judging from the moral and physical character of the first generation of Australians, has not yet proved a successful experiment. The eastern Tartars think that there is nothing west beyond Thibet. “The world ends there,” say they; “beyond there is nothing but a shoreless sea.” It is unmitigated East where they live.

We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure. The Atlantic is a Lethean stream, in our passage over which we have had an opportunity to forget the Old World and its institutions. If we do not succeed this time, there is perhaps one more chance for the race left before it arrives on the banks of the Styx; and that is in the Lethe of the Pacific, which is three times as wide.

I know not how significant it is, or how far it is an evidence of singularity, that an individual should thus consent in his pettiest walk with the general movement of the race; but I know that something akin to the migratory instinct in birds and quadrupeds, — which, in some instances, is known to have affected the squirrel tribe, impelling them to a general and mysterious movement, in which they were seen, say some, crossing the broadest rivers, each on its particular chip, with its tail raised for a sail, and bridging narrower streams with their dead, — that something like the furor which affects the domestic cattle in the spring, and which is referred to a worm in their tails, — affects both nations and individuals, either perennially or from time to time. Not a flock of wild geese cackles over our town, but it to some extent unsettles the value of real estate here, and, if I were a broker, I should probably take that disturbance into account.

“Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages, And palmeres for to seken strange strondes.”

Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a West as distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes down. He appears to migrate westward daily, and tempt us to follow him. He is the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow. We dream all night of those mountain-ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapor only, which were last gilded by his rays. The island of Atlantis, and the islands and gardens of the Hesperides, a sort of terrestrial paradise, appear to have been the Great West of the ancients, enveloped in mystery and poetry. Who has not seen in imagination, when looking into the sunset sky, the gardens of the Hesperides, and the foundation of all those fables?

Columbus felt the westward tendency more strongly than any before. He obeyed it, and found a New World for Castile and Leon. The herd of men in those days scented fresh pastures from afar,

“And now the sun had stretched out all the hills, And now was dropped into the western bay; At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue; Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.”

Where on the globe can there be found an area of equal extent with that occupied by the bulk of our States, so fertile and so rich and varied in its productions, and at the same time so habitable by the European, as this is? Michaux, who knew but part of them, says that “the species of large trees are much more numerous in North America than in Europe; in the United States there are more than one hundred and forty species that exceed thirty feet in height; in France there are but thirty that attain this size.” Later botanists more than confirm his observations. Humboldt came to America to realize his youthful dreams of a tropical vegetation, and he beheld it in its greatest perfection in the primitive forests of the Amazon, the most gigantic wilderness on the earth, which he has so eloquently described. The geographer Guyot, himself a European, goes farther, — farther than I am ready to follow him; yet not when he says, — “As the plant is made for the animal, as the vegetable world is made for the animal world, America is made for the man of the Old World.... The man of the Old World sets out upon his way. Leaving the highlands of Asia, he descends from station to station towards Europe. Each of his steps is marked by a new civilization superior to the preceding, by a greater power of development. Arrived at the Atlantic, he pauses on the shore of this unknown ocean, the bounds of which he knows not, and turns upon his footprints for an instant.” When he has exhausted the rich soil of Europe, and reinvigorated himself, “then recommences his adventurous career westward as in the earliest ages.” So far Guyot.

From this western impulse coming in contact with the barrier of the Atlantic sprang the commerce and enterprise of modern times. The younger Michaux, in his “Travels West of the Alleghanies in 1802,” says that the common inquiry in the newly settled West was, “‘From what part of the world have you come?’ As if these vast and fertile regions would naturally be the place of meeting and common country of all the inhabitants of the globe.”

To use an obsolete Latin word, I might say, Ex Oriente lux; ex Occidente FRUX . From the East light; from the West fruit.

Sir Francis Head, an English traveller and a Governor-General of Canada, tells us that “in both the northern and southern hemispheres of the New World, Nature has not only outlined her works on a larger scale, but has painted the whole picture with brighter and more costly colors than she used in delineating and in beautifying the Old World.... The heavens of America appear infinitely higher, the sky is bluer, the air is fresher, the cold is intenser, the moon looks larger, the stars are brighter the thunder is louder, the lightning is vivider, the wind is stronger, the rain is heavier, the mountains are higher, the rivers longer, the forests bigger, the plains broader.” This statement will do at least to set against Buffon’s account of this part of the world and its productions.

Linnaeus said long ago, “Nescio quae facies laeta, glabra plantis Americanis: I know not what there is of joyous and smooth in the aspect of American plants”; and I think that in this country there are no, or at most very few, Africanae bestiae , African beasts, as the Romans called them, and that in this respect also it is peculiarly fitted for the habitation of man. We are told that within three miles of the center of the East-Indian city of Singapore, some of the inhabitants are annually carried off by tigers; but the traveller can lie down in the woods at night almost anywhere in North America without fear of wild beasts.

These are encouraging testimonies. If the moon looks larger here than in Europe, probably the sun looks larger also. If the heavens of America appear infinitely higher, and the stars brighter, I trust that these facts are symbolical of the height to which the philosophy and poetry and religion of her inhabitants may one day soar. At length, perchance, the immaterial heaven will appear as much higher to the American mind, and the intimations that star it as much brighter. For I believe that climate does thus react on man, — as there is something in the mountain air that feeds the spirit and inspires. Will not man grow to greater perfection intellectually as well as physically under these influences? Or is it unimportant how many foggy days there are in his life? I trust that we shall be more imaginative, that our thoughts will be clearer, fresher, and more ethereal, as our sky, — our understanding more comprehensive and broader, like our plains, — our intellect generally on a grander scale, like our thunder and lightning, our rivers and mountains and forests, — and our hearts shall even correspond in breadth and depth and grandeur to our inland seas. Perchance there will appear to the traveller something, he knows not what, of laeta and glabra , of joyous and serene, in our very faces. Else to what end does the world go on, and why was America discovered?

To Americans I hardly need to say, —

“Westward the star of empire takes its way.”

As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to think that Adam in paradise was more favorably situated on the whole than the backwoodsman in this country.

Our sympathies in Massachusetts are not confined to New England; though we may be estranged from the South, we sympathize with the West. There is the home of the younger sons, as among the Scandinavians they took to the sea for their inheritance. It is too late to be studying Hebrew; it is more important to understand even the slang of today.

Some months ago I went to see a panorama of the Rhine. It was like a dream of the Middle Ages. I floated down its historic stream in something more than imagination, under bridges built by the Romans, and repaired by later heroes, past cities and castles whose very names were music to my ears, and each of which was the subject of a legend. There were Ehrenbreitstein and Rolandseck and Coblentz, which I knew only in history. They were ruins that interested me chiefly. There seemed to come up from its waters and its vine-clad hills and valleys a hushed music as of Crusaders departing for the Holy Land. I floated along under the spell of enchantment, as if I had been transported to an heroic age, and breathed an atmosphere of chivalry.

Soon after, I went to see a panorama of the Mississippi, and as I worked my way up the river in the light of today, and saw the steamboats wooding up, counted the rising cities, gazed on the fresh ruins of Nauvoo, beheld the Indians moving west across the stream, and, as before I had looked up the Moselle, now looked up the Ohio and the Missouri and heard the legends of Dubuque and of Wenona’s Cliff, — still thinking more of the future than of the past or present , — I saw that this was a Rhine stream of a different kind; that the foundations of castles were yet to be laid, and the famous bridges were yet to be thrown over the river; and I felt that this was the heroic age itself , though we know it not, for the hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men.

The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World. Every tree sends its fibers forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind. Our ancestors were savages. The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every state which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source. It was because the children of the Empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the northern forests who were.

I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows. We require an infusion of hemlock, spruce or arbor vitae in our tea. There is a difference between eating and drinking for strength and from mere gluttony. The Hottentots eagerly devour the marrow of the koodoo and other antelopes raw, as a matter of course. Some of our northern Indians eat raw the marrow of the Arctic reindeer, as well as various other parts, including the summits of the antlers, as long as they are soft. And herein, perchance, they have stolen a march on the cooks of Paris. They get what usually goes to feed the fire. This is probably better than stall-fed beef and slaughterhouse pork to make a man of. Give me a wildness whose glance no civilization can endure, — as if we lived on the marrow of koodoos devoured raw.

There are some intervals which border the strain of the wood thrush, to which I would migrate, — wild lands where no settler has squatted; to which, methinks, I am already acclimated.

The African hunter Cummings tells us that the skin of the eland, as well as that of most other antelopes just killed, emits the most delicious perfume of trees and grass. I would have every man so much like a wild antelope, so much a part and parcel of nature, that his very person should thus sweetly advertise our senses of his presence, and remind us of those parts of nature which he most haunts. I feel no disposition to be satirical, when the trapper’s coat emits the odor of musquash even; it is a sweeter scent to me than that which commonly exhales from the merchant’s or the scholar’s garments. When I go into their wardrobes and handle their vestments, I am reminded of no grassy plains and flowery meads which they have frequented, but of dusty merchants’ exchanges and libraries rather.

A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is a fitter color than white for a man, — a denizen of the woods. “The pale white man!” I do not wonder that the African pitied him. Darwin the naturalist says, “A white man bathing by the side of a Tahitian was like a plant bleached by the gardener’s art, compared with a fine, dark green one, growing vigorously in the open fields.”

Ben Jonson exclaims, —

“How near to good is what is fair!”

So I would say, —

“How near to good is what is wild ! ”

Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him. One who pressed forward incessantly and never rested from his labors, who grew fast and made infinite demands on life, would always find himself in a new country or wilderness, and surrounded by the raw material of life. He would be climbing over the prostrate stems of primitive forest-trees.

Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps. When, formerly, I have analyzed my partiality for some farm which I had contemplated purchasing, I have frequently found that I was attracted solely by a few square rods of impermeable and unfathomable bog, — a natural sink in one corner of it. That was the jewel which dazzled me. I derive more of my subsistence from the swamps which surround my native town than from the cultivated gardens in the village. There are no richer parterres to my eyes than the dense beds of dwarf andromeda ( Cassandra calyculata ) which cover these tender places on the earth’s surface. Botany cannot go farther than tell me the names of the shrubs which grow there, — the high-blueberry, panicled andromeda, lamb-kill, azalea, and rhodora, — all standing in the quaking sphagnum. I often think that I should like to have my house front on this mass of dull red bushes, omitting other flower plots and borders, transplanted spruce and trim box, even gravelled walks, — to have this fertile spot under my windows, not a few imported barrow-fulls of soil only to cover the sand which was thrown out in digging the cellar. Why not put my house, my parlor, behind this plot, instead of behind that meager assemblage of curiosities, that poor apology for a Nature and Art, which I call my front yard? It is an effort to clear up and make a decent appearance when the carpenter and mason have departed, though done as much for the passer-by as the dweller within. The most tasteful front-yard fence was never an agreeable object of study to me; the most elaborate ornaments, acorn tops, or what not, soon wearied and disgusted me. Bring your sills up to the very edge of the swamp, then (though it may not be the best place for a dry cellar), so that there be no access on that side to citizens. Front yards are not made to walk in, but, at most, through, and you could go in the back way.

Yes, though you may think me perverse, if it were proposed to me to dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human art contrived, or else of a dismal swamp, I should certainly decide for the swamp. How vain, then, have been all your labors, citizens, for me!

My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness. Give me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness! In the desert, pure air and solitude compensate for want of moisture and fertility. The traveller Burton says of it, — “Your morale improves; you become frank and cordial, hospitable and single-minded.... In the desert, spirituous liquors excite only disgust. There is a keen enjoyment in a mere animal existence.” They who have been travelling long on the steppes of Tartary say, — “On re-entering cultivated lands, the agitation, perplexity, and turmoil of civilization oppressed and suffocated us; the air seemed to fail us, and we felt every moment as if about to die of asphyxia.” When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest woods the thickest and most interminable and, to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum . There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature. The wildwood covers the virgin mould, — and the same soil is good for men and for trees. A man’s health requires as many acres of meadow to his prospect as his farm does loads of muck. There are the strong meats on which he feeds. A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it. A township where one primitive forest waves above while another primitive forest rots below, — such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey.

To preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of a forest for them to dwell in or resort to. So it is with man. A hundred years ago they sold bark in our streets peeled from our own woods. In the very aspect of those primitive and rugged trees there was, methinks, a tanning principle which hardened and consolidated the fibers of men’s thoughts. Ah! already I shudder for these comparatively degenerate days of my native village, when you cannot collect a load of bark of good thickness, — and we no longer produce tar and turpentine.

The civilized nations — Greece, Rome, England — have been sustained by the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They survive as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture! little is to be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is exhausted, and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its fathers. There the poet sustains himself merely by his own superfluous fat, and the philosopher comes down on his marrow-bones.

It is said to be the task of the American “to work the virgin soil,” and that “agriculture here already assumes proportions unknown everywhere else.” I think that the farmer displaces the Indian even because he redeems the meadow, and so makes himself stronger and in some respects more natural. I was surveying for a man the other day a single straight line one hundred and thirty-two rods long, through a swamp at whose entrance might have been written the words which Dante read over the entrance to the infernal regions, — “Leave all hope, ye that enter,” — that is, of ever getting out again; where at one time I saw my employer actually up to his neck and swimming for his life in his property, though it was still winter. He had another similar swamp which I could not survey at all, because it was completely under water, and nevertheless, with regard to a third swamp, which I did survey from a distance, he remarked to me, true to his instincts, that he would not part with it for any consideration, on account of the mud which it contained. And that man intends to put a girdling ditch round the whole in the course of forty months, and so redeem it by the magic of his spade. I refer to him only as the type of a class.

The weapons with which we have gained our most important victories, which should be handed down as heirlooms from father to son, are not the sword and the lance, but the bush-whack, the turf-cutter, the spade, and the bog-hoe, rusted with the blood of many a meadow, and begrimed with the dust of many a hard-fought field. The very winds blew the Indian’s cornfield into the meadow, and pointed out the way which he had not the skill to follow. He had no better implement with which to intrench himself in the land than a clam-shell. But the farmer is armed with plow and spade.

In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dulness is but another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in “Hamlet” and the “Iliad,” in all the Scriptures and Mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us. As the wild duck is more swift and beautiful than the tame, so is the wild — the mallard — thought, which ’mid falling dews wings its way above the fens. A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning’s flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself, — and not a taper lighted at the hearth-stone of the race, which pales before the light of common day.

English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets, — Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakspeare, included, — breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wilderness is a green-wood, — her wild man a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of Nature, but not so much of Nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not when the wild man in her, became extinct.

The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing. The poet today, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science, and the accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer.

Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature? He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved; who derived his words as often as he used them, — transplanted them to his page with earth adhering to their roots; whose words were so true and fresh and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the approach of spring, though they lay half-smothered between two musty leaves in a library, — ay, to bloom and bear fruit there, after their kind, annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with surrounding Nature.

I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this yearning for the Wild. Approached from this side, the best poetry is tame. I do not know where to find in any literature, ancient or modern, any account which contents me of that Nature with which even I am acquainted. You will perceive that I demand something which no Augustan nor Elizabethan age, which no culture, in short, can give. Mythology comes nearer to it than anything. How much more fertile a Nature, at least, has Grecian mythology its root in than English literature! Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted, before the fancy and imagination were affected with blight; and which it still bears, wherever its pristine vigor is unabated. All other literatures endure only as the elms which overshadow our houses; but this is like the great dragon-tree of the Western Isles, as old as mankind, and, whether that does or not, will endure as long; for the decay of other literatures makes the soil in which it thrives.

The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine having yielded their crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate, the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce. Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past, — as it is to some extent a fiction of the present, — the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology.

The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not the less true, though they may not recommend themselves to the sense which is most common among Englishmen and Americans to-day. It is not every truth that recommends itself to the common sense. Nature has a place for the wild clematis as well as for the cabbage. Some expressions of truth are reminiscent, — others merely sensible , as the phrase is, — others prophetic. Some forms of disease, even, may prophesy forms of health. The geologist has discovered that the figures of serpents, griffins, flying dragons, and other fanciful embellishments of heraldry, have their prototypes in the forms of fossil species which were extinct before man was created, and hence “indicate a faint and shadowy knowledge of a previous state of organic existence.” The Hindus dreamed that the earth rested on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent; and though it may be an unimportant coincidence, it will not be out of place here to state, that a fossil tortoise has lately been discovered in Asia large enough to support an elephant. I confess that I am partial to these wild fancies, which transcend the order of time and development. They are the sublimest recreation of the intellect. The partridge loves peas, but not those that go with her into the pot.

In short, all good things are wild and free. There is something in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the human voice, — take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance, — which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so much of their wildness as I can understand. Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones. The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet.

I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights, — any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor’s cow breaks out of her pasture early in the spring and boldly swims the river, a cold, gray tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It is the buffalo crossing the Mississippi. This exploit confers some dignity on the herd in my eyes, — already dignified. The seeds of instinct are preserved under the thick hides of cattle and horses, like seeds in the bowels of the earth, an indefinite period.

Any sportiveness in cattle is unexpected. I saw one day a herd of a dozen bullocks and cows running about and frisking in unwieldy sport, like huge rats, even like kittens. They shook their heads, raised their tails, and rushed up and down a hill, and I perceived by their horns, as well as by their activity, their relation to the deer tribe. But, alas! a sudden loud Whoa! would have damped their ardor at once, reduced them from venison to beef, and stiffened their sides and sinews like the locomotive. Who but the Evil One has cried, “Whoa!” to mankind? Indeed, the life of cattle, like that of many men, is but a sort of locomotiveness; they move a side at a time, and man, by his machinery, is meeting the horse and the ox half-way. Whatever part the whip has touched is thenceforth palsied. Who would ever think of a side of any of the supple cat tribe, as we speak of a side of beef?

I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats still left to sow before they become submissive members of society. Undoubtedly, all men are not equally fit subjects for civilization; and because the majority, like dogs and sheep, are tame by inherited disposition, this is no reason why the others should have their natures broken that they may be reduced to the same level. Men are in the main alike, but they were made several in order that they might be various. If a low use is to be served, one man will do nearly or quite as well as another; if a high one, individual excellence is to be regarded. Any man can stop a hole to keep the wind away, but no other man could serve so rare a use as the author of this illustration did. Confucius says, — “The skins of the tiger and the leopard, when they are tanned, are as the skins of the dog and the sheep tanned.” But it is not the part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious; and tanning their skins for shoes is not the best use to which they can be put.

When looking over a list of men’s names in a foreign language, as of military officers, or of authors who have written on a particular subject, I am reminded once more that there is nothing in a name. The name Menschikoff, for instance, has nothing in it to my ears more human than a whisker, and it may belong to a rat. As the names of the Poles and Russians are to us, so are ours to them. It is as if they had been named by the child’s rigmarole, — Iery wiery ichery van, tittle-tol-tan . I see in my mind a herd of wild creatures swarming over the earth, and to each the herdsman has affixed some barbarous sound in his own dialect. The names of men are, of course, as cheap and meaningless as Bose and Tray , the names of dogs.

Methinks it would be some advantage to philosophy, if men were named merely in the gross, as they are known. It would be necessary only to know the genus and perhaps the race or variety, to know the individual. We are not prepared to believe that every private soldier in a Roman army had a name of his own, — because we have not supposed that he had a character of his own.

At present our only true names are nicknames. I knew a boy who, from his peculiar energy, was called “Buster” by his playmates, and this rightly supplanted his Christian name. Some travellers tell us that an Indian had no name given him at first, but earned it, and his name was his fame; and among some tribes he acquired a new name with every new exploit. It is pitiful when a man bears a name for convenience merely, who has earned neither name nor fame.

I will not allow mere names to make distinctions for me, but still see men in herds for all them. A familiar name cannot make a man less strange to me. It may be given to a savage who retains in secret his own wild title earned in the woods. We have a wild savage in us, and a savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as ours. I see that my neighbor, who bears the familiar epithet William, or Edwin, takes it off with his jacket. It does not adhere to him when asleep or in anger, or aroused by any passion or inspiration. I seem to hear pronounced by some of his kin at such a time his original wild name in some jaw-breaking or else melodious tongue.

Here is this vast, savage, hovering mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man, — a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.

In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the soil, — not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements and modes of culture only!

Many a poor sore-eyed student that I have heard of would grow faster, both intellectually and physically, if, instead of sitting up so very late, he honestly slumbered a fool’s allowance.

There may be an excess even of informing light. Niépce, a Frenchman, discovered “actinism,” that power in the sun’s rays which produces a chemical effect, — that granite rocks, and stone structures, and statues of metal, “are all alike destructively acted upon during the hours of sunshine, and, but for provisions of Nature no less wonderful, would soon perish under the delicate touch of the most subtile of the agencies of the universe.” But he observed that “those bodies which underwent this change during the daylight possessed the power of restoring themselves to their original conditions during the hours of night, when this excitement was no longer influencing them.” Hence it has been inferred that “the hours of darkness are as necessary to the inorganic creation as we know night and sleep are to the organic kingdom.” Not even does the moon shine every night, but gives place to darkness.

I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serving an immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the annual decay of the vegetation which it supports.

There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus invented. The Spaniards have a good term to express this wild and dusky knowledge, — Gramática parda , tawny grammar, — a kind of mother-wit derived from that same leopard to which I have referred.

We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It is said that knowledge is power; and the like. Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance? What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge. By long years of patient industry and reading of the newspapers — for what are the libraries of science but files of newspapers? — a man accumulates a myriad facts, lays them up in his memory, and then when in some spring of his life he saunters abroad into the Great Fields of thought, he, as it were, goes to grass like a horse and leaves all his harness behind in the stable. I would say to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, sometimes, — Go to grass. You have eaten hay long enough. The spring has come with its green crop. The very cows are driven to their country pastures before the end of May; though I have heard of one unnatural farmer who kept his cow in the barn and fed her on hay all the year round. So, frequently, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge treats its cattle.

A man’s ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful, — while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly. Which is the best man to deal with, — he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all?

My desire for knowledge is intermittent, but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before, — a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun. Man cannot know in any higher sense than this, any more than he can look serenely and with impunity in the face of the sun: ‘Ως τì νοών, ου κείνον νοήσεις , — “You will not perceive that, as perceiving a particular thing,” say the Chaldean Oracles.

There is something servile in the habit of seeking after a law which we may obey. We may study the laws of matter at and for our convenience, but a successful life knows no law. It is an unfortunate discovery certainly, that of a law which binds us where we did not know before that we were bound. Live free, child of the mist, — and with respect to knowledge we are all children of the mist. The man who takes the liberty to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of his relation to the law-maker. “That is active duty,” says the Vishnu Purana, “which is not for our bondage; that is knowledge which is for our liberation: all other duty is good only unto weariness; all other knowledge is only the cleverness of an artist.”

It is remarkable how few events or crises there are in our histories, how little exercised we have been in our minds, how few experiences we have had. I would fain be assured that I am growing apace and rankly, though my very growth disturb this dull equanimity—though it be with struggle through long, dark, muggy nights or seasons of gloom. It would be well if all our lives were a divine tragedy even, instead of this trivial comedy or farce. Dante, Bunyan, and others, appear to have been exercised in their minds more than we: they were subjected to a kind of culture such as our district schools and colleges do not contemplate. Even Mahomet, though many may scream at his name, had a good deal more to to live for, ay, and to die for, than they have commonly.

When, at rare intervals, some thought visits one, as perchance he is walking on a railroad, then, indeed, the cars go by without his hearing them. But soon, by some inexorable law, our life goes by and the cars return.

“Gentle breeze, that wanderest unseen, And bendest the thistles round Loira of storms, Traveller of the windy glens, Why hast thou left my ear so soon?”

While almost all men feel an attraction drawing them to society, few are attracted strongly to Nature. In their reaction to Nature men appear to me for the most part, notwithstanding their arts, lower than the animals. It is not often a beautiful relation, as in the case of the animals. How little appreciation of the beauty of the landscape there is among us! We have to be told that the Greeks called the world K όσμος , Beauty, or Order, but we do not see clearly why they did so, and we esteem it at best only a curious philological fact.

For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border life, on the confines of a world into which I make occasional and transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the state into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper. Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o’-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon nor fire-fly has shown me the causeway to it. Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features. The walker in the familiar fields which stretch around my native town sometimes finds himself in another land than is described in their owners’ deeds, as it were in some faraway field on the confines of the actual Concord, where her jurisdiction ceases, and the idea which the word Concord suggests ceases to be suggested. These farms which I have myself surveyed, these bounds which I have set up, appear dimly still as through a mist; but they have no chemistry to fix them; they fade from the surface of the glass, and the picture which the painter painted stands out dimly from beneath. The world with which we are commonly acquainted leaves no trace, and it will have no anniversary.

I took a walk on Spaulding’s Farm the other afternoon. I saw the setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its golden rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into some noble hall. I was impressed as if some ancient and altogether admirable and shining family had settled there in that part of the land called Concord, unknown to me, — to whom the sun was servant, — who had not gone into society in the village, — who had not been called on. I saw their park, their pleasure-ground, beyond through the wood, in Spaulding’s cranberry-meadow. The pines furnished them with gables as they grew. Their house was not obvious to vision; the trees grew through it. I do not know whether I heard the sounds of a suppressed hilarity or not. They seemed to recline on the sunbeams. They have sons and daughters. They are quite well. The farmer’s cart-path, which leads directly through their hall, does not in the least put them out, as the muddy bottom of a pool is sometimes seen through the reflected skies. They never heard of Spaulding, and do not know that he is their neighbor, — notwithstanding I heard him whistle as he drove his team through the house. Nothing can equal the serenity of their lives. Their coat-of-arms is simply a lichen. I saw it painted on the pines and oaks. Their attics were in the tops of the trees. They are of no politics. There was no noise of labor. I did not perceive that they were weaving or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and hearing was done away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum, — as of a distant hive in May, which perchance was the sound of their thinking. They had no idle thoughts, and no one without could see their work, for their industry was not as in knots and excrescences embayed.

But I find it difficult to remember them. They fade irrevocably out of my mind even now while I speak, and endeavor to recall them and recollect myself. It is only after a long and serious effort to recollect my best thoughts that I become again aware of their cohabitancy. If it were not for such families as this, I think I should move out of Concord.

We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons visit us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is laid waste, — sold to feed unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent to mill, and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on. They no longer build nor breed with us. In some more genial season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the landscape of the mind, cast by the wings of some thought in its vernal or autumnal migration, but, looking up, we are unable to detect the substance of the thought itself. Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry. They no longer soar, and they attain only to a Shanghai and Cochin-China grandeur. Those gra-a-ate thoughts , those gra-a-ate men you hear of!

We hug the earth, — how rarely we mount! Methinks we might elevate ourselves a little more. We might climb a tree, at least. I found my account in climbing a tree once. It was a tall white pine, on the top of a hill; and though I got well pitched, I was well paid for it, for I discovered new mountains in the horizon which I had never seen before, — so much more of the earth and the heavens. I might have walked about the foot of the tree for threescore years and ten, and yet I certainly should never have seen them. But, above all, I discovered around me, — it was near the end of June, — on the ends of the topmost branches only, a few minute and delicate red cone-like blossoms, the fertile flower of the white pine looking heavenward. I carried straightway to the village the topmost spire, and showed it to stranger jurymen who walked the streets, — for it was court-week, — and to farmers and lumber-dealers and wood-choppers and hunters, and not one had ever seen the like before, but they wondered as at a star dropped down. Tell of ancient architects finishing their works on the tops of columns as perfectly as on the lower and more visible parts! Nature has from the first expanded the minute blossoms of the forest only toward the heavens, above men’s heads and unobserved by them. We see only the flowers that are under our feet in the meadows. The pines have developed their delicate blossoms on the highest twigs of the wood every summer for ages, as well over the heads of Nature’s red children as of her white ones; yet scarcely a farmer or hunter in the land has ever seen them.

Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past. Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barnyard within our horizon, it is belated. That sound commonly reminds us that we are growing rusty and antique in our employments and habits of thoughts. His philosophy comes down to a more recent time than ours. There is something suggested by it that is a newer testament, — the gospel according to this moment. He has not fallen astern; he has got up early, and kept up early, and to be where he is is to be in season, in the foremost rank of time. It is an expression of the health and soundness of Nature, a brag for all the world, — healthiness as of a spring burst forth, a new fountain of the Muses, to celebrate this last instant of time. Where he lives no fugitive slave laws are passed. Who has not betrayed his master many times since last he heard that note?

The merit of this bird’s strain is in its freedom from all plaintiveness. The singer can easily move us to tears or to laughter, but where is he who can excite in us a pure morning joy? When, in doleful dumps, breaking the awful stillness of our wooden sidewalk on a Sunday, or, perchance, a watcher in the house of mourning, I hear a cockerel crow far or near, I think to myself, “There is one of us well, at any rate,” — and with a sudden gush return to my senses.

We had a remarkable sunset one day last November. I was walking in a meadow, the source of a small brook, when the sun at last, just before setting, after a cold, gray day, reached a clear stratum in the horizon, and the softest, brightest morning sunlight fell on the dry grass and on the stems of the trees in the opposite horizon and on the leaves of the shrub-oaks on the hill-side, while our shadows stretched long over the meadow eastward, as if we were the only motes in its beams. It was such a light as we could not have imagined a moment before, and the air also was so warm and serene that nothing was wanting to make a paradise of that meadow. When we reflected that this was not a solitary phenomenon, never to happen again, but that it would happen forever and ever, an infinite number of evenings, and cheer and reassure the latest child that walked there, it was more glorious still.

The sun sets on some retired meadow, where no house is visible, with all the glory and splendor that it lavishes on cities, and perchance as it has never set before, — where there is but a solitary marsh hawk to have his wings gilded by it, or only a musquash looks out from his cabin, and there is some little black-veined brook in the midst of the marsh, just beginning to meander, winding slowly round a decaying stump. We walked in so pure and bright a light, gilding the withered grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright, I thought I had never bathed in such a golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of Elysium, and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman driving us home at evening.

So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bank-side in autumn.

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At Walden, Thoreau Wasn’t Really Alone With Nature

By John Kaag and Clancy Martin

• July 10, 2017

He lived on an acre just above Walden Pond. He had a small garden, survived off the land, and enjoyed the wild apples that still grew around Concord, Mass., in the 19th century. He stayed near Walden because it was here that he could be most free.

His name was not Henry David Thoreau.

Brister Freeman was a black man, one of the original inhabitants of Walden Woods. As Laura Walls tells us in her new biography of Thoreau , Freeman fought in the Revolution, and afterward “declared his independence through his surname,” but “unable to prove his freedom outside of Concord, he bought an acre on the hill north of Walden Pond, Brister’s Hill.” Today, Walden is preserved as a state park, and is a Registered National Historic Landmark, and so long as visitors can find parking, they come and go as they please — as did Thoreau — but many of his neighbors couldn’t.

On Thoreau’s 200th birthday this July he might want us to remember the men and women, largely unacknowledged by history, who were confined to this paradisiacal corner of the earth. It was, indeed, a sanctuary, but for many of Thoreau’s companions freedom was narrowly circumscribed. Their world was, according to the historian Elise Lemire, the “ Black Walden ,” a place of not-so-quiet desperation.

For consumers of conventional history, it is easy enough to fall into the impression that Thoreau was the only person at Walden, that the pond was a pristine tract of wilderness. It wasn’t. Walden was just beyond the bounds of civilized convention — which meant that it was a place for outcasts. Thoreau knew this, and willingly lived among them, those who had been barred from the inner life of many wealthy suburbs of Boston.

The self-imposed austerity that we often associate with Thoreau’s tree-hugging ways was, in fact, a means of understanding those individuals who had to eke out a meager existence on the outskirts of society. This does not make Thoreau a saint, but it does suggest an intimate connection between Thoreau’s retreat to the woods and his ability to understand those suffering under the conditions of oppression.

So who exactly were Thoreau’s neighbors?

As Lemire and Walls discovered in researching Thoreau, these individuals embodied the fraught history of race in the Americas. Brister Freeman’s sister, Zilpah White, was also a freed slave. After the Declaration of Independence was defended, she lived on the edge of Thoreau’s famous bean field, the place where he toiled for two years in the hopes of realizing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” the rare and difficult act of supporting oneself.

Lemire explains that Zilpah White did it without fanfare. She wove linen and made brooms for a living. Arsonists burned her house down in 1813. She managed to escape the fire, but her dog, cat and chickens died. She rebuilt her home. But her life — and life for women like her — didn’t have much in common with Rousseau’s Romantic ideal of the state of nature.

And then there were the pale-faced, redheaded citizens of Walden Woods who didn’t quite get to be white, the Irish. The Irish immigrants who came to the United States in the first half of the 19th century were, for the most part, ghettoized in the borderlands of society. Thoreau, however, sustained long and meaningful relationships with the many Irish immigrants who came to live and work on the railroad line near Walden.

Walls discovered that Thoreau met an ailing Irish ditchdigger named Hugh Coyle and offered to show him a clean spring that ran near Brister’s Hill. But the old man was too sick to make the short trip. He, like so many Irish near slaves, drank himself to death in abject poverty.

By the time Thoreau came to Walden on July 4, 1845, most of America’s untouchables were gone, but the traces of former slaves, squatters, immigrants and day laborers were everywhere. John Breed, another impoverished worker on the outskirts of Concord life, lived in a small house just a stone’s throw from the pond. In Walls’s words, “Local boys burned it down in 1841.” At the age of 24, Thoreau raced from Concord to watch the fire, and conversed with Breed’s distraught son the next day. By that time, Breed himself was already dead: he too died drunk on Walden Road in 1824.

Thoreau was aware of the proverbial “nobodies” who occupied, and in many cases laid claim to, the land that he would later inhabit. Ralph Waldo Emerson purchased the cheap, mostly unoccupied and abandoned land around Walden where Thoreau would make his famous home from Thomas Wyman, a potter. Emerson would soon after invite Thoreau to build his writer’s retreat on this acreage. But before he did so, in April 1845, Thoreau bought the shanty of James Collins, a man who, Walls says, was an “Irish railroad worker moving up the line.” Thoreau paid $4.25 for the house (about $150 today). At dawn, the Collinses moved out, all of their belongings wrapped tidily in a small single parcel. Thoreau disassembled their shanty, bleached the boards, and used them to construct his cabin in the woods.

“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity” — Thoreau embraced Spartan living as a matter of choice, but the irony of him tearing down a shed in pursuit of his much-celebrated modest way of life is a bit painful. It’s easy for us to judge Thoreau today; the privileged white man who plays at living austerely (choosing some “alternative way of life” that has been imposed on others) is a familiar target. But Thoreau himself was aware of this. Walls, for example, believes that Thoreau was probably helping the Collins family escape a lien on their house.

Thoreau recognized that he had every advantage; he also knew that the disadvantaged went, generally speaking, unnoticed by people of privilege. Social justice was in no small part a matter of counteracting this myopia, of recognizing suffering of others hidden in plain sight.

For Thoreau, what keeps the rich from understanding the plight of the poor is, in part, the fact of their richness, their stuff: not just metaphorically or conceptually, but literally. It’s hard to understand the inner lives of others if you’re always going shopping or looking after your household business or rushing off to parties. To “live deliberately,” in Thoreau’s words, was to wrest oneself from the diversions of this rat race, to understand the difference between the seemingly urgent matters of spending and acquiring and the truly significant ones of caring and thinking.

“Do not trouble yourself much to get new things,” Thoreau instructs us. “Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.” To be free from the distractions of modern life — of the endlessly diverting display of the ordinary, social world of stuff, stuff and more stuff — allowed a person to focus and think. What could we think if worldly possessions didn’t occupy our thoughts? What and whom could we attend to if we stopped attending only to ourselves?

Thoreau is often portrayed as a hermit, a lonely individual who rejected all forms of community. He was, in truth, happy enough to abandon the formalities and luxuries of conventional life, but only in an attempt to participate in a wider natural and social order.

This was a man who communed with the trees, spoke to bean fields, and conspired with the rain and sunshine that fed his crops. Yes, he had woodland friends. Many of his human companions were equally unusual: John Breed’s son, a day laborer, who lamented the destruction of his boyhood home; Perez Blood, the eccentric astronomer who Thoreau visited repeatedly on the outskirts of town; Sophia Foord, the brilliant spinster who fell in love with the one man, Thoreau, who rivaled her in peculiarity; the unnamed fugitive slave whom Thoreau escorted to the railroad station so that he could make safe passage to Canada. Countless others.

Part of embracing Thoreauvian wilderness is to open ourselves to individuals and groups who exist beyond the town limits. These were outsiders, unknowns, even outcasts, and Thoreau acquainted himself with them, came to understand them and spent part of his life caring for them. Thoreau entreats us to open our eyes to everyone. If he appears reclusive perhaps it is because we fail to see the significance of his companions — it is perhaps because we are not ourselves reclusive enough, or, for that matter, social enough in the Thoreau’s peculiarly intimate way.

In 1945, a century after Thoreau made his home on the banks of Walden Pond, Ralph Ellison began to write “Invisible Man.” “I am an invisible man,” Ellison’s black narrator explains. “I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids — and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”

This refusal, whether conscious or not, is nonetheless, strategic: a way to superficially erase the injustice that silently underpins progress and affluence. The Native Americans of the Merrimack Valley vanished first to make way for the settlers — then the workers and slaves who supported the nation and the even-then-affluent Concord. What remains is the myth of the rugged, forward-looking individual fitted precisely to a country that would rather not retrace its questionable history. This, however, was never Thoreau.

“There are few things “in this world as dangerous as sleepwalkers,” Ellison wrote. Eyes closed, oblivious to the world, they proceed at their own peril, but more tragically, the peril of invisible others. If you rise before the sun and travel to Walden Pond, it is easy to understand the advantages of keeping your eyes open. We must, according to Thoreau, “reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us even in our soundest sleep.”

To take Thoreau’s example, however, is not simply a matter of appreciating the natural world, of taking careful note of every woodchuck and birch. It also involves looking into the trees, into the near darkness, to discern the hidden, human figures who silently abide there. And slowly disappear.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Walden Pond as a national park. It is a Massachusetts state park and a Registered National Historic Landmark.

How we handle corrections

John Kaag is a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and the author of “ American Philosophy: A Love Story .” Clancy Martin is a professor of philosophy at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.

Now in print : “ The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments ,” an anthology of essays from The Times’s philosophy series, edited by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter , and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter .

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80 Henry David Thoreau, Self-Improvement, and Nature Writing

One of the most recognizable passages from Henry David Thoreau is from the earliest section of Walden , “Where I lived, and what I lived for”:

Most students of American literature recognize Thoreau’s “simplicity!” language, but it’s rare to focus on how that language is counter-posed to the nation’s “so-called internal improvements.” In this passage (and throughout Walden ), Thoreau is proposing a counter-economy with its own version of “improvements,” exactly opposite the nation’s.

Beginning in the late 1810s and picking up in the 1820s, U.S. federal and state governments began undertaking an increasing amount of “internal improvement” projects. These provided a basic infrastructure for further growth, such as building better roads. The biggest and most visible project that cut across many states was the Eerie Canal (Fig. 1), completed in 1825. Today, it’s hard for us to appreciate the impact of the Eerie Canal on the public’s imagination. At the time, it was seen as a highly impressive feat of civil engineering that completely transformed the American economy–by first transforming “nature.”

Read in  this  light, many of Thoreau’s famous compositions can be seen as a response to national expansion in the antebellum (pre-Civil War) America. He did so within a network of intellectuals and artists that was primarily located in Concord, MA, centered around Ralph Waldo Emerson and his transcendentalist philosophy. Emerson’s transcendentalism journal, The Dial , provided Thoreau with an outlet for his early literary work.

He published a rather terrible poem, “Stanzas,” in 1841.

In 1842 he published “ Natural History of Massachusetts ,” which now showed off his talents in non-fiction prose. In these prose texts on “natural history” we can start to see his keen eye for natural, his familiarity with biological taxonomies and his sensitivity to the seasons and environmental effects on local flora/fauna. As a naturalist, he interweaves dense descriptions of nature with his own subjective impressions. This mix of observation and lyricism would become a hallmark of his work.

Before looking more closely at  Walden , it will help to see how modern popular readers tend to respond to him now.

Here are some key points:

• In 1845, Thoreau decamped to a plot of land owned by Emerson, near Walden pond
• He spent 2 years in a cabin that he built there
• Walden was published in 1854
• Thoreau proposed that we need very little to live happily
• Like Emerson, he valued self-reliance and economic independence
• The task of life of is practice becoming a companion to oneself
• Changing the world begins with the self
• Nature is central to this project–it has spiritual significance for individuals
• We’re “nature looking into nature,” not a master of it
• Self-reliance involves introspection and self-discovery
• His project encourages individuals to push against immoral laws, especially those related to unjust wars and slavery
• “Civil Disobedience” has inspired protesters ranging from Ghandi to MLK

These points are mainly focused on the themes and major ideas of Walden.  The rest of this lesson will offer more context for appreciating the genre and form of that work.

Walden as “environmental lit”

Thoreau’s  Walden is considered one of–if not the first–explicitly environmental works of literature in the U.S. What counts as an environmental text has been greatly complicated by literary scholars, but Lawrence Buell’s  The Future of Environmental Criticism (2003) offers a few pointers.

Buell suggests that Emerson’s Nature  essay, from 1836, was the “first canonical work of U.S. literature to unfold a theory of nature with special reference to poetics.” In other words, Emerson was the first to clearly link an appreciation for nature with the practice of poetry, literature, and art more generally. Eco-critics (including Buell himself) tend to focus on this link between poetics and nature; or, since “nature” is freighted with a lot of conceptual baggage, eco-critics tend to focus on the relationship between “text” and “world.” Of course, that relationship tends to always be latent in literary texts, but Buell and other eco-critics tend to focus on works that tend to draw attention to the “environmental ground,” the “landscape,” or other aspects of what literature usually terms the “setting.” Eco-critics point out that some authors and works transform environment as setting to environment/nature/ground as a central focus, even a character at times.

In his earlier book,  The Environmental Imagination (1996), Buell dedicated major sections to focus on the legacy of Thoreau’s  Walden in establishing an entire mode of “nature writing.” Texts that tend to fit this category are precisely those that consider nature/the environment as a central character rather than mere setting.

If Emerson’s  Nature argued that nature was central to poetics, Thoreau’s Walden demonstrated how to do poetics “with” nature.

Walden  as georgic

Readers tend to associate “nature writing” with the pastoral mode, but, keener readers differentiate between the georgic and the pastoral. As the chapter on William Cullen Bryant explains:

This pastoral/georgic distinction is important to keep in mind when reading Thoreau’s  Walden because, contrary to the expectations of the pastoral, this “nature essay” does not attempt to idealize nature–at least not in the conventional sense. Thoreau is careful to present a more granular view of what’s happening around him; it’s not just a mirror for his own lyrical self. He’s also more than eager to work with the earth, to hoe and plant seeds, and to protect his small farm from intrusion. In fact, central to his poetics is a form of labor that experiences some level of resistance from what’s being labored upon. The georgic is more fitting for these explorations than the pastoral.

More than a “transparent eyeball”

Thoreau is clearly building on the conceptual framework laid down by Emerson’s  Nature poetics. He’s presenting a nature full of “hieroglyphics” and “emblems” to be contemplated. It’s certainly useful for read this landmark nature writing after becoming familiar with Emerson.

However, Thoreau’s  Walden doesn’t just confirm Emerson’s transcendentalism. If Emerson proposes that a transcendentalist become a “transparent eyeball” in  Nature , this level of passivity quickly disappears in Thoreau. Why? Perhaps one way to think about the difference is between Emerson’s “pastoral” approach to nature poetics and Thoreau’s “georgic” approach. But the question would then be: why does Thoreau adopt a more georgic approach to uncovering meaning in nature?

This long nature essay offers a meditation on the kind of labor and careful observation that’s required for living a meaningful life, and it does so in a way that both critiques the “internal improvement projects” of the emerging industrial nation and also slightly corrects Emerson’s transcendentalist poetics.

Henry David Thoreau, Self-Improvement, and Nature Writing Copyright © by Joel Gladd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was an American philosopher, poet, and environmental scientist whose major work, Walden , draws upon each of these identities in meditating on the concrete problems of living in the world as a human being. He sought to revive a conception of philosophy as a way of life, not only a mode of reflective thought and discourse. Thoreau's work was informed by an eclectic variety of sources. He was well-versed in classical Greek and Roman philosophy, ranging from the pre-Socratics through the Hellenistic schools, and was also an avid student of the ancient scriptures and wisdom literature of various Asian traditions. He was familiar with modern philosophy ranging from Descartes, Locke and the Cambridge Platonists through Emerson, Coleridge, and the German Idealists, all of whom are influential on Thoreau's philosophy. He discussed his own scientific findings with leading naturalists of the day, and read the latest work of Humboldt and Darwin with interest and admiration. His philosophical explorations of self and world led him to develop an epistemology of embodied perception and a non-dualistic account of mental and material life. In addition to his focus on ethics in an existential spirit, Thoreau also makes unique contributions to ontology, the philosophy of science, and radical political thought. Although his political essays have become justly famous, his works on natural science were not even published until the late twentieth century, and they help to give us a more complete picture of him as a thinker. Among the texts he left unfinished was a set of manuscript volumes filled with information on Native American religion and culture. Thoreau's work anticipates certain later developments in pragmatism, phenomenology, and environmental philosophy, and poses a perennially valuable challenge to our conception of the methods and intentions of philosophy itself.

1. Life and Writings

2. nature and human existence, 3. the ethics of perception, 4. friendship and politics, 5. locating thoreau, bibliography, other internet resources, related entries.

Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817 and died there in 1862, at the age of forty-four. Like that of his near-contemporary Søren Kierkegaard, Thoreau's intellectual career unfolded in a close and polemical relation to the town in which he spent most of his life. After graduating from Harvard in 1837, he struck up a friendship with fellow Concord resident Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose essay “Nature” he had first encountered earlier that year. Although the two American thinkers had a turbulent relationship due to serious philosophical and personal differences, they had a profound and lasting effect upon one another. It was in the fall of 1837 that Thoreau, aged twenty, made his first entries in the multivolume journal he would keep for the rest of his life. Most of his published writings were developed from notes that first appeared on these pages, and Thoreau subsequently revised many entries, so his journal can be considered a finished work in itself. During his lifetime he published only two books, along with numerous shorter essays that were first delivered as lectures. He lived a simple and relatively quiet life, making his living briefly as a teacher and pencil maker but mostly as a land surveyor. Thoreau had intimate bonds with his family and friends, and remained unmarried although he was deeply in love at least twice. His first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers , was still a work in progress in 1845, when he went to live in the woods by Walden Pond for two years. This “experiment” in living on the outskirts of town was an intensive time of examination for Thoreau, as he drew close to nature and contemplated the final ends of his own life, which was otherwise at risk of ending in quiet desperation. Thoreau viewed his existential quest as a venture in philosophy, in the ancient Greek sense of the word, because it was motivated by an urgent need to find a reflective understanding of reality that could inform a life of wisdom.

His experience bore fruit in the 1854 publication of his literary masterpiece Walden , a work that almost defies categorization: it is a work of narrative prose which often soars to poetic heights, combining philosophical speculation with close observation of a concrete place. It is a rousing summons to the examined life and to the realization of one's potential, while at the same time it develops what might be described as a religious vision of the human being and the universe. Walden has been admired by a larger world audience than any other book written by an American author, and—whether or not it ought to be called a work of philosophy—it contains a substantial amount of philosophical content, which deserves to be better appreciated than it has been. Stanley Cavell has argued that Thoreau is an embarrassment to “what we have learned to call philosophy,” since his work embodies “a mode of conceptual accuracy” that is “based on an idea of rigor” foreign to the academic establishment (Cavell 1988, 14). One of the difficulties in coming to terms with Thoreau is that his philosophy, like Nietzsche's, has the character of “a system in aphorisms,” whose form is entirely appropriate to their content (Löwith 1997, 11). The challenge to the reader is to see the coherence of the whole philosophical outlook that is articulated in so many pithy fragments. Accordingly, this entry attempts to sort out and delineate the main themes of Thoreau's project, in the hope of serving as an aid and stimulus to further study. It draws upon Thoreau's entire corpus, including the works he left in manuscript which were published after his death.

In his essay “Nature,” Emerson asserts that there can be found in the natural world “a sanctity which shames our religions.” Thoreau would agree completely with this statement. But in the same essay Emerson also inclines toward Platonism, claiming that nature is “emblematic” of higher truths, and suggesting that the material world has value by virtue of being a subsidiary product of mental reality: each natural object is therefore “a symbol of some spiritual fact.” For the most part, Thoreau recoils from the idea that we could find some kind of higher reality by looking beyond nature: in the “Friday” chapter of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers , he asks: “Is not Nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol merely?” As he sees it, the realm of spirit is the physical world, which has a sacred meaning that can be directly perceived. Accordingly, he seeks “to be always on the alert to find God in nature” ( Journal , 9/7/51), and to hear “the language which all things and events speak without metaphor” ( Walden , IV). Thoreau's metaphysical convictions compel him to “defend nature's intrinsic value and to explore immanent conceptions of deity—positions far removed from Emerson and most transcendentalists” (Cafaro 2004, 132–133).

To say that nature is inherently significant is to say that natural facts are neither inert nor value-free. Thoreau urges his reader not to “underrate the value of a fact,” since each concrete detail of the world may contain a meaningful truth (“Natural History of Massachusetts”). Note the phrase: the value of a fact . Thoreau does not distinguish between facts and values, or between primary and secondary qualities, since he understands the universe as an organic whole in which mind and matter are inseparable. When we perceive sights, sounds, and textures, we are not standing as disembodied consciousness apart from a world of inanimate mechanisms; rather, we are sentient beings immersed in the sensory world, learning the “essential facts of life” only through “the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us” ( Walden , II). The philosopher who seeks knowledge through experience should therefore not be surprised to discover beauty and order in natural phenomena. However, these axiological properties are not introduced from without, from the top down—rather, they emerge from within the various self-maintaining processes of organic life. And the entire environment, the “living earth” itself, has something like a life of its own, containing but not reducible to the biotic existence of animals and plants ( Walden , XVII). This is what he elsewhere describes as the “slumbering subterranean fire in nature which never goes out” (“A Winter Walk”).

Thoreau remarks upon the “much grander significance” of any natural phenomenon “when not referred to man and his needs but viewed absolutely” ( Journal , 11/10/51). The world is rich with value that is not of our making, and “whatever we have perceived to be in the slightest degree beautiful is of infinitely more value to us than what we have only as yet discovered to be useful and to serve our purpose” ( Faith in a Seed , 144). It is when we are not guilty of imposing our own purposes onto the world that we are able to view it on its own terms. One of the things we then discover is that we are involved in a pluralistic universe, containing many different points of view other than our own. And when we begin to realize “the infinite extent of our relations” ( Walden , VIII), we can see that even what does not at first seem to be good for us may have some positive value when considered from a broader perspective. Rather than dismissing squirrels as rodents, for instance, we should see them as “planters of forests,” and be grateful for the role they play in the distribution of seeds ( Journal , 10/22/60). Likewise, the “gentle rain which waters my beans and keeps me in the house to-day is not drear and melancholy, but good for me too. Though it prevents my hoeing them, it is of far more worth than my hoeing. If it should continue so long as to cause the seeds to rot in the ground and destroy the potatoes in the low lands, it would still be good for the grass on the uplands, and, being good for the grass, it would be good for me” ( Walden , V). Our limited view often keeps us from appreciating the harmonious interdependence of all parts of the natural world: this is not due to “any confusion or irregularity in Nature,” but because of our own incomplete knowledge ( Walden , XVI). Thoreau declares that he would be happy “if all the meadows on the earth were left in a wild state,” since in tampering with nature we know not what we do and sometimes end up doing harm as a result ( Walden , X). In many cases we find that “unhandselled nature is worth more even by our modes of valuation than our improvements are” ( Journal , 11/10/60).

In nature we have access to real value, which can be used as a standard against which to measure our conventional evaluations. An example of the latter is the value that is “arbitrarily attached” to gold, which has nothing to do with its “intrinsic beauty or value” ( Journal , 10/13/60). So it is a mistake to rush to California “as if the true gold were to be found in that direction,” when one has failed to appreciate the inherent worth of one's native soil ( Journal , 10/18/55). In the economy of nature, a seed is more precious than a diamond, for it contains “the principle of growth, or life,” and has the ability to become a specific plant or tree ( Journal , 3/22/61). The seed not only provides evidence that nature is filled with “creative genius” ( Journal , 1/5/56), but it also reminds us that a spark of divinity is present in each human being as well. One of Thoreau's favorite analogies—not only a metaphor, as he sees it—is that between the ripening of a seed and the development of human potential. “The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling” ( Walden , I). What he calls “wildness” is not located only in the nonhuman world; the same creative force is also active in human nature, so that even a literary work of art can reasonably be praised as a manifestation of wildness (see “Walking”). There is “a perfect analogy between the life of the human being and that of the vegetable” ( Journal , 5/20/51), and thoughts “spring in man's brain” in just the same way that “a plant springs and grows by its own vitality” ( Journal , 11/8/50 & 4/3/58). Thoreau's exhortations to follow the promptings of one's genius are based on the idea that by obeying our own wild nature we are aligning ourselves with a sacred power. What inspires us to realize our highest potential is “the primitive vigor of Nature in us” ( Journal , 8/30/56), and this influence is something we are able neither to predict nor to comprehend: as he describes it in the “Ktaadn” chapter of The Maine Woods , nature is “primeval, untamed, and forever untamable,” a godlike force but not always a kind one.

Needless to say, Thoreau is not the type of idealist who encourages us to go around “rejecting the evidence of our senses” ( Walden , XIV). On the other hand, he has nothing but scorn for the sort of materialism that fails to penetrate the inner mystery of things, discovering “nothing but surface” in its mechanistic observations ( Journal , 3/7/59). Instead, we must approach the world as “nature looking into nature,” aware of the relation between the form of our own perception and what we are able to perceive ( Correspondence , 7/21/41). There are reasons for classifying Thoreau as both a naturalist and a romantic, although both of these categories are perhaps too broad to be very helpful. His conception of nature is informed by a syncretic appropriation of Greek, Roman, Indian, and other sources, and the result is an eclectic vision that is uniquely his own. For this reason it is difficult to situate Thoreau within the history of modern philosophy, but he might be described as articulating a version of transcendental idealism. If Thoreau is indeed “the American heir to Kant's critical philosophy,” as he has been called (Oelschlaeger 1991, 136), it is because his investigation of “the relation between the subject of knowledge and its object” builds upon a Kantian insight that Emerson, who viewed the senses as illusory, arguably did not grasp (see Cavell 1992, 94–95). In order to understand why this might be an accurate categorization, we must proceed from Thoreau's metaphysics to his epistemology.

If one were asked to name the cardinal virtue of Thoreau's philosophy, it would be hard to identify a better candidate than awareness . He attests to the importance of “being forever on the alert,” and of “the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen” ( Walden , IV). This exercise may enable one to create remarkably minute descriptions of a sunset, a battle between red and black ants, or the shapes taken by thawing clay on a sand bank: but its primary value lies in the way it affects the quality of our experience. “It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look” ( Walden , II). Awareness cannot be classified as exclusively a moral or an intellectual virtue, either, since knowing is an inescapably practical and evaluative activity. Thoreau has been interpreted as offering an original response to the major problem of modern philosophy, since he recognizes that knowledge is “dependent on the individual's ability to see,” and that “the world as known is thus radically dependent on character” (Tauber 2001, 4–5).

One of the common tenets of ancient philosophy which was abandoned in the period beginning with Descartes is that a person “could not have access to the truth” without undertaking a process of self-purification that would render him “susceptible to knowing the truth” (Foucault 1997, 278–279). For Thoreau, it was the work of a lifetime to cultivate one's receptivity to the beauty of the universe. Believing that “the perception of beauty is a moral test” ( Journal , 6/21/52), Thoreau frequently chastises himself or humanity in general for failing in this respect. “How much of beauty—of color, as well as form—on which our eyes daily rest goes unperceived by us,” he laments ( Journal , 8/1/60); and he worries that “Nature has no human inhabitant who appreciates her” ( Walden , IX). Noticing that his sensory awareness has grown less acute since the time of his youth, he speculates that “the child plucks its first flower with an insight into its beauty and significance which the subsequent botanist never retains” ( Journal , 7/16/51 & 2/5/52). In order to attain a clear and truthful view of things, we must refine all the perceptual faculties of our embodied consciousness, and become emotionally attuned to all the concrete features of the place in which we are located. We fully know only those facts that are “warm, moist, incarnated,” and palpably felt: “A man has not seen a thing who has not felt it” ( Journal , 2/23/60).

Since our ability to appreciate the significance of phenomena is so easily dulled, it requires a certain discipline in order to become and remain a reliable knower of the world. Like Aristotle, Thoreau believes that the perception of truth “produces a pleasurable sensation”; and he adds that a “healthy and refined nature would always derive pleasure from the landscape” ( Journal , 9/24/54 & 6/27/52). Nature will reward the most careful attention paid by a person who is appropriately disposed, but there is only “as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate,—not a grain more. The actual objects which one person will see from a particular hilltop are just as different from those which another will see as the persons are different” ( Journal , 11/4/58). One who is in the right state to be capable of giving a “poetic and lively description” of things will find himself “in a living and beautiful world” ( Journal , 10/13/60 & 12/31/59). Beauty, like color, does not lie only in the eye of the beholder: flowers, for example, are indeed beautiful and brightly colored. Nevertheless, beauty—and color, for that matter—can exist only where there is a beholder to perceive it ( Journal , 6/15/52 & 1/21/38). From his experience in the field making observations of natural phenomena, Thoreau gained the insight “that he, the supposedly neutral observer, was always and unavoidably in the center of the observation” (McGregor 1997, 113). Because all perception of objects has a subjective aspect, the world can be defined as a sphere centered around each conscious perceiver: wherever we are located, “the universe is built around us, and we are central still” ( Journal , 8/24/41). This does not mean that we are trapped inside of our own consciousness; rather, the point is that it is only through the lens of our own subjectivity that we have access to the external world.

What we are able to perceive, then, depends not only upon where we are physically situated: it is also contingent upon who we are and what we value, or how our attention is focused. “Objects are concealed from our view, not so much because they are out of the course of our visual ray as because we do not bring our minds and eyes to bear on them…. A man sees only what concerns him” (“Autumnal Tints”). In other words, there is “no such thing as pure objective observation. Your observation, to be interesting, i.e. to be significant, must be subjective ” ( Journal , 5/6/54). Subjectivity is not an obstacle to truth, according to Thoreau. After all, he says, “the truest description, and that by which another living man can most readily recognize a flower, is the unmeasured and eloquent one which the sight of it inspires” ( Journal , 10/13/60). A true account of the world must do justice to all the familiar properties of objects that the human mind is capable of perceiving. Whether this could be done by a scientific description is a vexing question for Thoreau, and one about which he shows considerable ambivalence. One of his concerns is that the scientist “discovers no world for the mind of man with all its faculties to inhabit”; by contrast, there is “more humanity” in “the unscientific man's knowledge,” since the latter can explain how certain facts pertain to life ( Journal , 9/5/51, 2/13/52). He accuses the naturalist of failing to understand color, much less beauty, and asks: “What sort of science is that which enriches the understanding, but robs the imagination?” ( Journal , 10/5/61 & 12/25/51)

Thoreau sometimes characterizes science as an ideal discipline that will enrich our knowledge and experience: “The true man of science will know nature better by his finer organization; he will smell, taste, see, hear, feel, better than other men. His will be a deeper and finer experience” (“Natural History of Massachusetts”). Yet he also gives voice to the fear that by weighing and measuring things and collecting quantitative data he may actually be narrowing his vision. The scientist “studies nature as a dead language,” and would rather study a dead fish preserved in a jar than a living one in its native element ( Journal , 5/10/53 & 11/30/58). In these same journal entries, Thoreau claims that he seeks to experience the significance of nature, and that “the beauty of the fish” is what is most worthy of being measured. On the other hand, when he finds a dead fish in the water, he brings it home to weigh and measure, covering several pages with his statistical findings ( Journal , 8/20/54). This is only one of many examples of Thoreau's fascination with data-gathering, and yet he repeatedly questions its value, as if he does not know what to make of his own penchant for naturalistic research. At the very least, scientific investigations run the risk of being “trivial and petty,” so perhaps what one should do is “learn science and then forget it” ( Journal , 1/21/53 & 4/22/52). But Thoreau is more deeply troubled by the possibility that “science is inhuman,” since objects “seen with a microscope begin to be insignificant,” and this is “not the means of acquiring true knowledge” ( Journal , 5/1/59 & 5/28/54). Overall, his position is not that a mystical or imaginative awareness of the world is incompatible with knowledge of measurable facts, but that an exclusive focus on the latter would blind us to whatever aspects of reality fall outside the scope of our measurement.

One thing we can learn from all of Thoreau's comments on scientific inquiry is that he cares very much about the following question: what can we know about the world, and how are we able to know it? Although he admires the precision of scientific information, he wonders if what it delivers is always bound to be “something less than the vague poetic” ( Journal , 1/5/50). In principle, a naturalistic approach to reality should be able to capture its beauty and significance; in practice, however, it may be “impossible for the same person to see things from the poet's point of view and that of the man of science” ( Journal , 2/18/52). In that case, the best we can do is try to convey our intimations of the truth about the universe, and be willing to err on the side of obscurity and excess: “I desire to speak somewhere without bounds; like a man in his waking moment, to men in their waking moments; for I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression… . The words which express our faith and piety are not definite; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior natures” ( Walden , XVIII). We should not arbitrarily limit our awareness to that which can be described with mathematical exactitude: perhaps the highest knowledge available to us, Thoreau suggests, consists in “a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before … it is the lighting up of the mist by the sun” (“Walking”). And perhaps this is not a regrettable fact: “At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable” ( Walden , XVII). By acknowledging the limits of what we can know with certainty, we open ourselves up to a wider horizon of experience.

As one commentator points out, Thoreau's categories are more dynamic than Kant's, since they are constantly being redefined by what we perceive, even as they shape our way of seeing (Peck 1990, 84–85). Every now and then “something will occur which my philosophy has not dreamed of,” Thoreau says, which demonstrates that the “boundaries of the actual are no more fixed and rigid than the elasticity of our imaginations” ( Journal , 5/31/53). Since the thoughts of each knowing subject are “part of the meaning of the world,” it is legitimate to ask: “Who can say what is ? He can only say how he sees ” (11/4/52 & 12/2/46). Truth is radically perspective-dependent, which means that insofar as we are different people we can only be expected to perceive different worlds (Walls 1995, 213). Thoreau's position might be described as perspectival realism, since he does not conclude that truth is relative but celebrates the diversity of the multifaceted reality that each of us knows in his own distinctive way. “How novel and original must be each new man's view of the universe!” he exclaims; “How sweet is the perception of a new natural fact,” for it suggests to us “what worlds remain to be unveiled” ( Journal , 4/2/52 & 4/19/52). We may never comprehend the intimate relation between a significant fact and the perceiver who appreciates it, but we should trust that it is not in vain to view nature with “humane affections” ( Journal , 2/20/57 & 6/30/52). With respect to any given phenomenon, the “point of interest” that concerns us lies neither in the coolly independent object nor in the subject alone, but somewhere in between ( Journal , 11/5/57). Witnessing the rise of positivism and its ideal of complete objectivity, Thoreau attempts “to preserve an enchanted world and to place the passionate observer in the center of his or her universe” (Tauber 2001, 20). It is a noble goal, and one that remains quite relevant in the philosophical climate of the present day.

Thoreau's ethic of personal flourishing is focused upon the problem of how to align one's daily life in accordance with one's ultimate ideals. What was enthusiasm in the youth, he argues, must become temperament in the mature person: the “mere vision is little compared with the steady corresponding endeavor thitherward” ( Journal , 11/1/51 & 11/24/57). Much of our time ought to be spent “in carrying out deliberately and faithfully the hundred little purposes which every man's genius must have suggested to him… . The wisely conscious life springs out of an unconscious suggestion” ( Wild Fruits , 166). Character, then, can be defined as “genius settled”—the promptings of conscience in themselves are not yet moral, until we have integrated them into the fabric of our existence and begun to hold ourselves responsible for living up to them ( Journal , 3/2/42). Hence, we need to cherish and nurture our capability to discern the difference between the idea and the reality, between what is and what ought to be . It is when we experience dissatisfaction with ourselves or with external circumstances that we are stimulated to act in the interest of making things better.

It follows that the greatest compliment we can pay to another person is to say that he or she enhances our life by inciting us to realize our highest aspirations. So Thoreau views it as deplorable that “we may love and not elevate one another”; the “love that takes us as it finds us, degrades us” (“Chastity and Sensuality”). He speaks of “love” and “friendship” as closely related terms which are tainted by the “trivial dualism” which assumes that the one must exclude the other ( Journal , undated 1839 entry). Clearly, what he is concerned about is the kind of love the Greeks called philia —and in his sustained consideration of friendship, as in so many other respects, Thoreau is “squarely in the virtue ethics tradition” (Cafaro 2004, 127). In his ethical writings, the notion of wishing good on behalf of another person is often taken to a severe extreme, as if he does not think it possible to ask too much of love and friendship. In A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers , he says: “I value and trust those who love and praise my aspiration rather than my performance” ( A Week , “Wednesday”). This is fair enough, but Thoreau may be going too far when he proclaims that a friend should be approached “with sacred love and awe,” and that we profane one another if we do not always meet on religious terms; it is no wonder that he finds himself doubting whether his “idea of a friend” will ever actually be instantiated ( Journal , 6/26/40). Nonetheless, Thoreau's discussion of love and friendship provokes us to reflect upon what we can and cannot expect from our closest human relationships, and on their role in a good life.

Thoreau is only half-joking when he tells us that, after becoming frustrated with society, he turned “more exclusively than ever to the woods, where I was better known” ( Walden , I). Not only is it true that a degree of solitude and distance from our neighbors may actually improve our relations with them, but by moving away from the center of town we liberate ourselves from a slavish adherence to prevailing attitudes. “The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad,” Thoreau claims, and he provides this kind of example: “If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen” ( Walden , I & “Life Without Principle”). This warped sense of value is all too common amidst the fragmentation and desperation of modern life, in its “restless, nervous, bustling, trivial” activity ( Walden , XVIII). Thoreau builds a critique of American culture upon his conviction that “the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality” (“Life Without Principle”): his polemic aims at consumerism, philistinism, mass entertainment, vacuous applications of technology, and the herd mentality that bows down before an anonymous “They” ( Walden , I). During his life he spoke out against the Mexican War and the subjugation of Native America, and campaigned in favor of bioregionalism and the protection of animals and wild areas, but the political issue that roused his indignation more than any other was slavery.

Thoreau was an activist involved in the abolitionist movement on many fronts: he participated in the Underground Railroad, protested against the Fugitive Slave Law, and gave support to John Brown and his party. Most importantly, he provides a justification for principled revolt and a method of nonviolent resistance, both of which would have a considerable influence on revolutionary movements in the twentieth century. In his essay on “Civil Disobedience,” originally published as “Resistance to Civil Government,” he defends the validity of conscientious objection to unjust laws, which ought to be transgressed at once. Although at times it sounds as if Thoreau is advocating anarchy, what he demands is a better government, and what he refuses to acknowledge is the authority of one that has become so morally corrupt as to lose the consent of those governed. “There will never be a really free and enlightened State,” he argues, “until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly” (“Civil Disobedience”). There are simply more sacred laws to obey than the laws of society, and a just government—should there ever be such a thing, he says—would not be in conflict with the individual conscience.

Political institutions as such are regarded by Thoreau with distrust, and although he probably overestimates the extent to which it is possible to disassociate oneself from them, he convincingly insists that social consensus is not a guarantee of rectitude or truth. One of the most valuable points he makes against the critics of John Brown is that a person should not be dismissed as “insane” by virtue of dissenting from the majority: his anger is grounded upon an awareness of the fact that slavery is a violation of human rights, and the law-abiding citizens of Massachusetts are not excused for turning away from this reality (“A Plea for Captain John Brown”). Passively allowing an unjust practice to go on is tantamount to collaborating with evil. Unfortunately, Thoreau seems to assume that all of Brown's actions were justified because he was an inspired reformer with a sacred vocation. But he does succeed at pointing out the stupidity of certain knee-jerk responses to Brown's raid, and in this respect his essay has a more general pertinence to debates about the individual's relation to community norms. It also raises the issue of whether political violence can be justified as the lesser of evils, or in cases where it may be the only way of instigating reform.

Thoreau has somewhat misleadingly been classified as a New England transcendentalist, and—even though he never rejected this label—it does not really fit. Some of his major differences from Emerson have already been discussed, and further differences appear when Thoreau is compared to such figures as Orestes Brownson, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott. A history of transcendentalism in New England which appeared in the late nineteenth century mentions Thoreau only once, in passing (Frothingham 1886, 133). And a more recent history of the movement concludes that Thoreau had little in common with this group of thinkers, who were for the most part committed to some version of Christianity, to a dualistic understanding of mind and matter, and to the related idea that sense experience is unreliable (Boller 1974, 29–35 & 176). It was suggested above that a better way of situating Thoreau within the Western philosophical tradition is to consider him a kind of transcendental idealist, in the true Kantian spirit. For reasons that ought to be obvious by now, he should be of interest to students of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling—all of whom he studied at first or second hand—and possibly Schopenhauer. Thoreau was a literate and enthusiastic classicist, whose study of ancient Greek and Roman authors convinced him that philosophy ought to be a lived practice: so he can profitably be grouped with other nineteenth-century thinkers, such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who pointed out the limitations of the abstract philosophy of the early modern period. Yet he also has the distinction of being among the first Western philosophers to be significantly influenced by ancient Chinese and Indian thought. He anticipates Bergson and Merleau-Ponty in his attention to the dynamics of the embodied mind, and shares with Peirce and James a concern for problems of knowledge as they arise within the horizon of practical experience.

Ever so gradually, contemporary philosophers are discovering how much Thoreau has to teach—especially, in the areas of knowledge and perception, and in ethical debates about the value of land and life. His affinities with the pragmatic and phenomenological traditions, and the enormous resources he offers for environmental philosophy, have also started to receive more attention. Still, it remains true that the political aspect of Thoreau's philosophy has come closer to receiving its due than any of these others: whether or not this is because such prominent figures as Gandhi and Martin Luther King cited Thoreau as an inspiration, it has resulted in a disproportionate focus on what is only one part of an integral philosophy, a part that can hardly be understood in isolation from the others. Even if it is a sign of Thoreau's peculiar greatness that subsequent American philosophy has not known what to make of him, it is a shame if his exclusion from the mainstream philosophical canon has kept his voice from being heard by some of those who might be in a position to appreciate it. Then again, it is never too late to give up our prejudices. Recent and forthcoming work seems to indicate that Thoreau's influence is starting to show up more noticeably on the American philosophical landscape.

Works By Thoreau

• Walden; or, Life in the Woods , ed. Jeffrey Cramer, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Originally published in 1854. Parenthetical citations indicate with roman numerals which of Walden 's 18 chapters is the source of each quotation.
• The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau , 14 volumes, ed. B. Torrey and F. Allen, New York: Dover, 1962. Originally published in 1906. Parenthetical citations give the date of each entry.
• The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau , ed. Walter Harding and Carl Bode, New York: New York University Press, 1958. Citations give the date of the letter quoted.
• Consciousness in Concord: The Text of Thoreau's Hitherto “Lost Journal” (1840–1841) , ed. Perry Miller, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958. Citations give the date of each entry.
• The Indians of Thoreau: Selections from the Indian Notebooks , ed. Richard Fleck, Albuquerque: Hummingbird Press, 1974.
• Early Essays and Miscellanies , ed. Joseph Moldenhauer et al ., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975.
• A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers , ed. C. Hovde et al ., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Originally published in 1849.
• The Maine Woods , New York: Penguin Books, 1988. Originally published in 1864.
• Cape Cod , ed. J. Moldenhauer, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Originally published in 1865.
• Faith in a Seed: The Dispersion of Seeds and Other Late Natural History Writings , ed. Bradley Dean, Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993.
• Wild Fruits , ed. Bradley Dean, New York: W. W. Norton, 2000.
• Collected Essays and Poems , ed. Elizabeth Hall Witherell, New York: Penguin / Library of America, 2001. Contains “Natural History of Massachusetts” (originally published in 1842), “A Winter Walk” (1843), “Civil Disobedience” (1849), “A Plea for Captain John Brown” (1860), “Walking” (1862), “Autumnal Tints” (1862), “Life Without Principle” (1863), and “Chastity and Sensuality” (1865).

Biography of Henry David Thoreau, American Essayist

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Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817-May 6, 1862) was an American essayist, philosopher, and poet. Thoreau’s writing is heavily influenced by his own life, in particular his time living at Walden Pond. He has a lasting and celebrated reputation for embracing non-conformity, the virtues of a life lived for leisure and contemplation, and the dignity of the individual.

Fast Facts: Henry David Thoreau

• Known For: His involvement in transcendentalism and his book Walden
• Born: July 12, 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts
• Parents: John Thoreau and Cynthia Dunbar
• Died: May 6, 1862 in Concord, Massachusetts
• Education: Harvard College
• Selected Published Works: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), “Civil Disobedience” (1849), Walden (1854), “Slavery in Massachusetts” (1854), “Walking" (1864)
• Notable Quote : “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” (From Walden)

Early Life and Education (1817-1838)

Henry David Thoreau was born on July 12, 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts, the son of John Thoreau and his wife, Cynthia Dunbar. The New England family was modest: Thoreau’s father was involved with the Concord fire department and ran a pencil factory, while his mother rented out parts of their house to boarders and cared for the children. Actually named David Henry at birth in honor of his late uncle David Thoreau, he was always known as Henry, although he never had his name changed officially. The third of four children, Thoreau spent a peaceful childhood in Concord, celebrating especially the natural beauty of the village. When he was 11, his parents sent him to Concord Academy, where he did so well that he was encouraged to apply to college.

In 1833, when he was 16 years old, Thoreau began his studies at Harvard College, following in the steps of his grandfather. His older siblings, Helen and John Jr., helped pay his tuition from their salaries. He was a strong student, but was ambivalent to the college’s ranking system, preferring to pursue his own projects and interests. This independent spirit also saw him taking a brief absence from the college in 1835 to teach at a school in Canton, Massachusetts, and was an attribute that would define the rest of his life.

Early Career Changes (1835-1838)

When he graduated in 1837 in the middle of his class, Thoreau was uncertain what to do next. Uninterested in a career in medicine, law, or ministry, as was common for educated men, Thoreau decided to continue working in education. He secured a place at a school in Concord, but he found he could not administer corporal punishment. After two weeks, he quit.

Thoreau went to work for his father’s pencil factory for a short time. In June of 1838 he set up a school with his brother John, though when John became ill just three years later, they shut it down. In 1838, however, he and John took a life-changing canoe trip along the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and Thoreau began considering a career as a poet of nature.

Friendship With Emerson (1839-1844)

In 1837, when Thoreau was a sophomore at Harvard, Ralph Waldo Emerson settled in Concord. Thoreau had already encountered Emerson’s writing in the book Nature. By autumn that year, the two kindred spirits had become friends, brought together by similar outlooks: both trusted staunchly in self-reliance, the dignity of the individual, and the metaphysical power of nature. Although they would have a somewhat tumultuous relationship, Thoreau ultimately found both a father and a friend in Emerson. It was Emerson who asked his protégé if he kept a journal (a lifelong habit of the older poet’s), prompting Thoreau to begin his own journal in late 1837, a habit which he, too, maintained for almost his entire life up until two months before his death. The journal spans thousands of pages, and many of Thoreau’s writings were originally developed from notes in this journal.

In 1840, Thoreau met and fell in love with a young woman visiting Concord by the name of Ellen Sewall. Although she accepted his proposal, her parents objected to the match and she immediately broke off the engagement. Thoreau would never make a proposal again, and never married.

Thoreau moved in with the Emersons for a time in 1841. Emerson encouraged the young man to pursue his literary leanings, and Thoreau embraced the profession of poet, producing many poems as well as essays. While living with the Emersons, Thoreau served as a tutor for the children, a repairman, a gardener, and ultimately an editor of Emerson’s works. In 1840, Emerson’s literary group, the transcendentalists, began the literary journal The Dial. The first issue published Thoreau’s poem “Sympathy” and his essay “Aulus Persius Flaccus,” on the Roman poet, and Thoreau continued contributing his poetry and prose to the magazine, including in 1842 with the first of his many nature essays, “Natural History of Massachusetts.” He continued publishing with The Dial until its shuttering in 1844 due to financial troubles.

Thoreau became restless while living with the Emersons. In 1842 his brother John had died a traumatic death in Thoreau’s arms, having contracted tetanus from cutting his finger while shaving, and Thoreau was struggling with the grief. Ultimately, Thoreau decided to move to New York, living with Emerson’s brother William on Staten Island, tutoring his children, and attempting to make connections among the New York literary market. Although he felt he was unsuccessful and he despised city life, it was in New York that Thoreau met Horace Greeley , who was to become his literary agent and a promoter of his work. He left New York in 1843 and returned to Concord. He worked partly at his father’s business, making pencils and working with graphite.

Within two years he felt he needed another change, and wanted to finish the book he had begun, inspired by his river canoe trip in 1838. Taken by the idea of a Harvard classmate, who had once built a hut by the water in which to read and think, Thoreau decided to take part in a similar experiment.

Walden Pond (1845-1847)

Emerson bequeathed to him the land he owned by Walden Pond, a small lake two miles south of Concord. In early 1845, at the age of 27, Thoreau started chopping down trees and building himself a small cabin on the shores of the lake. On July 4, 1845, he officially moved into the house in which he would live for two years, two months, and two days, officially beginning his famous experiment. These were to be some of the most satisfying years of Thoreau’s life.

His lifestyle at Walden was ascetic, informed by his desire to live a life as basic and self-sufficient as possible. While he would often walk into Concord, two miles away, and ate with his family once a week, Thoreau spent almost every night in his cottage on the banks of the lake. His diet consisted mostly of the food he found growing wild in the general area, although he also planted and harvested his own beans. Remaining active with gardening, fishing, rowing, and swimming, Thoreau also spent lots of time documenting the local flora and fauna. When he was not busy with the cultivation of his food, Thoreau turned to his inner cultivation, mainly through meditation. Most significantly, Thoreau spent his time in contemplation, reading and writing. His writing focused mainly on the book he had already begun, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), which chronicled the trip he spent canoeing with his older brother that ultimately inspired him to be become a poet of nature.

Thoreau also maintained a fastidious journal of this time of simplicity and satisfying contemplation. He was to return to his experience on the shore of that lake in just a few years to write the literary classic known as Walden (1854) , arguably Thoreau’s greatest work.

After Walden and “Civil Disobedience” (1847-1850)

• A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)
• "Civil Disobedience" (1849)

In the summer of 1847, Emerson decided to travel to Europe, and invited Thoreau to reside once more at his house and continue tutoring the children. Thoreau, having completed his experiment and finished his book, lived at Emerson’s for two more years and continued his writing. Because he could not find a publisher for A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau published it at his own expense, and made little money off of its meager success.

During this time Thoreau also published "Civil Disobedience." Halfway through his time at Walden in 1846, Thoreau had been met by the local tax collector, Sam Staples, who had asked him to pay the poll tax that he had ignored for multiple years. Thoreau refused on the basis that he would not pay his taxes to a government which supported enslavement and which was waging the war against Mexico (which lasted from 1846-1848). Staples put Thoreau in jail, until the next morning when an unidentified woman, perhaps Thoreau’s aunt, paid the tax and Thoreau—reluctantly—went free. Thoreau defended his actions in an essay published in 1849 under the name “Resistance to Civil Government” and now known as his famous “Civil Disobedience.” In the essay, Thoreau defends individual conscience against the law of the masses. He explains that there is a higher law than civil law, and just because the majority believes something to be right does not make it so. It follows then, he explained, that when an individual intuits a higher law to which civil law does not accord, he must still follow the higher law—no matter what the civil consequences be, in his case, even spending time in jail. As he writes: “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”

“Civil Disobedience” is one of Thoreau’s most lasting and influential works. It has inspired many leaders to begin their own protests, and has been particularly persuasive to non-violent protesters, including such figures as Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi . 

Later Years: Nature Writing and Abolitionism (1850-1860)

• "Slavery in Massachusetts" (1854)
• Walden (1854)

Ultimately, Thoreau moved back into his family home in Concord, working occasionally at his father’s pencil factory as well as a surveyor to support himself while composing multiple drafts of Walden and finally publishing it in 1854. After his father’s death, Thoreau took over the pencil factory.

By the 1850s, Thoreau was less interested in transcendentalism, as the movement was already splitting apart. He continued, however, to explore his ideas about nature, traveling to the Maine Woods, Cape Cod, and to Canada. These adventures found their places in articles, “Ktaadn, and the Maine Woods,” (1848), which was later to make up the beginning of his book The Maine Woods (published posthumously in 1864) , “Excursion to Canada” (1853), and “Cape Cod” (1855).

With such works, Thoreau is now seen as one of the founders of the genre of American nature writing. Also published posthumously (in Excursions , 1863) is the lecture he developed from 1851 to 1860 and which was ultimately known as the essay "Walking" (1864), in which he outlined his thinking on mankind's relationship to nature and the spiritual importance of leaving society for a time. Thoreau thought of the piece as one of his seminal pieces and it is one of the definitive works of the transcendental movement.

In response to growing national unrest regarding the abolition of enslavement, Thoreau found himself adopting a more stringently abolitionist stance. In 1854 he delivered a scathing lecture called “Slavery in Massachusetts,” in which he indicted the whole country for the evils of enslavement, even the free states where enslavement was outlawed—including, as the title suggested, his own Massachusetts. This essay is one of his most celebrated achievements, with an argument both stirring and elegant.

Illness and Death (1860-1862)

In 1835, Thoreau contracted tuberculosis and suffered from it periodically over the course of his life. In 1860 he caught bronchitis and from then on his health began to decline. Aware of his impending death, Thoreau showed remarkable tranquility, revising his unpublished works (including The Maine Woods and Excursions) and concluding his journal. He died in 1862, at the age of 44, of tuberculosis. His funeral was planned and attended by the Concord literary set, including Amos Bronson Alcott and William Ellery Channing; his old and great friend Emerson delivered his eulogy.

Thoreau did not see the huge successes in his lifetime that Emerson saw in his. If he was known, it was as a naturalist, not as a political or philosophical thinker. He only published two books in his lifetime, and he had to publish A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers himself, while Walden was hardly a bestseller.

Thoreau is now, however, known as one of the greatest American writers. His thinking has exerted a massive worldwide influence, in particular on the leaders of non-violent liberation movements such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., both of whom cited "Civil Disobedience" as a major influence on them. Like Emerson, Thoreau's work in transcendentalism responded to and reaffirmed an American cultural identity of individualism and hard work that is still recognizable today. Thoreau's philosophy of nature is one of the touchstones of the American nature-writing tradition. But his legacy is not only literary, academic, or political, but also personal and individual: Thoreau is a cultural hero for the way he lived his life as a work of art, championing his ideals down to the most everyday of choices, whether it be in solitude on the banks of Walden or in behind the bars of the Concord jail.

• Furtak, Rick Anthony, "Henry David Thoreau", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/thoreau/ .
• Harding, Walter. The Days of Henry David Thoreau. Princeton University Press, 2016.
• Packer, Barbara. The Transcendentalists. University of Georgia Press, 2007.
• Thoreau, Henry David. Walden . Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg, 1995. Retrieved November 21, 2019 from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/205/205-h/205-h.htm .
• Biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Essayist
• Ralph Waldo Emerson: American Transcendentalist Writer and Speaker
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• The Conservation Movement in America
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• Top 5 Books about Social Protest
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• Must Reads If You Like 'Walden'
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O Nature! I do not aspire To be the highest in thy quire,— To be a meteor in the sky, Or comet that may range on high; Only a zephyr that may blow Among the reeds by the river low; Give me thy most privy place Where to run my airy race.

In some withdrawn, unpublic mead Let me sigh upon a reed, Or in the woods, with leafy din, Whisper the still evening in: Some still work give me to do,— Only—be it near to you!

For I’d rather be thy child And pupil, in the forest wild, Than be the king of men elsewhere, And most sovereign slave of care: To have one moment of thy dawn, Than share the city’s year forlorn.

This poem is in the public domain.

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