Annie Russell Marble

“ In outlining his development as naturalist, Thoreau applies these progressive steps to the average youth in his relations with nature;—"He goes thither at first as a hunter and fisher, until at last, if he has the seeds of a better life in him, he distinguishes his proper objects as a poet or a naturalist it may be, and leaves the gun and fish-pole behind." Thus did Thoreau transform himself from the boy-hunter and angler into the student, poet, and philosopher of nature. ”

“ To this feast, which lasted for three days or more, came ninety-one Indians bringing five deer which they had killed and dressed. These were a great boon to the women who must prepare meals for one hundred and forty people. Wild turkeys, ducks, fish and clams were procured by the colonists and cooked, perhaps with some marchpanes also, by the more expert cooks. The serious prayers and psalms of the Pilgrims were as amazing to the Indians as were the strange whoops, dances, beads and feathers of the savages marvellous to the women and children of Plymouth Colony. ”

“ As he once hinted, it was a grief to him that a man, fitted to be a leader of men in thought and action, should be content to become merely "a leader of huckle-berry parties of young people." In the Concord circle of his day, and in the wider world of public opinion since, Emerson, with his balanced judgment, his broad and cautious respect for custom and affairs of state, his serene yet no less magnetic aspirations for a gradual, sure adjustment of conditions that would effect a more simple, sincere civilization, has gained greater honor than his more radical pupil-friend, Thoreau. ”

“ Enter ye that have leisure and a quiet mind, who earnestly seek the right road. A blue-robed man, whose fittest roof is the over arching sky which reflects his serenity. I do not see how he can ever die; nature cannot spare him.'"
At one time Thoreau quoted Alcott as saying were he and Ellery Channing to live in the same house, they "would soon sit with their backs to each other." Both these poet-philosophers, diverse in temperament, united in a common devotion to Thoreau, and, in time, gained that mutual sympathy which ended in firm friendship for each other. ”

“ With their children and guests they visited the haunts about Concord, collected specimens of plants, rocks, and insects, little realizing that their son was to become America's greatest nature-poet.
Thus the complex inheritance of the four Thoreau children mingled reserve and gayety, dogged and practical industry with lofty ideals, love of nature and of books, interest in all reform agitations, and delight in refined, domestic life. All the children were keen in mind, strong and individual in character. All sought to attain that "higher end" with which Henry accredits his father. ”

“ Nature and life in their varied phases, especially in their homely and simple aspects, formed his subjects for study and reflection. As if in answer to this very point, he wrote,—"It is wise to write on many themes, that so you may find the right and inspiring one." In his volumes are gathered practical economy, morality, philosophy, upon the lower levels of thought, while on the hilltops are the poetic and sympathetic vistas and songs. ”

“ Without any offensive details intime, how fully these comments reveal the dignity and lofty uprightness, the delicacy and nobleness of Thoreau's heart and soul!
To a casual thinker, it might seem as if a man who had such cerulean ideals for friendship, who mingled a supersensitiveness and severity in his demands, would find few practical friends who could approximate his standards. On the contrary, Thoreau was a friend, deeply loved and eagerly sought by men and women of diverse natures. ”

“ Emerson, no less than Thoreau, allowed his serenity to be displaced by irritation and anxiety during this excitement. He called Brown "that new saint"; he endured calmly the hisses of a Boston mob as he eulogized, with rare feeling, Lovejoy the Abolitionist, whose tragic death in the west had been prophetic of later martyrdom. He eagerly advocated war rather than any compromise which should be "an unjust peace." The three Concord philosophers, turning from nebulous ideals to practical politics, displayed unsurpassed energy and courage. ”

“ Burroughs shows scanty insight into a deep, silent nature like Thoreau's when he says of this self-abnegation,—"It doubtless cost him less effort than the same act would have cost his more human brother." I have seen a photograph of this woman, loved so tenderly by both John and Henry; in later life, the face had retained matchless beauty and serenity. Sophia's letters to her, too sacred to print, witness her affectionate interest in the entire family as long as any member survived. ”

“ Why should our lives be in any respect provincial? Let the reports of all the learned societies come to us and we will see if they know anything. New England can hire all the wise men in the world to come and teach her, and board them round the while, and not be provincial at all." Perchance it is not strange that some of Thoreau's contemporaries, failing to recognize in this aspiration an outgrowth of pride and love for Concord and America, which she symbolized to him, resented such bald accusations of provincialism. ”

“ It may not be superfluous to recall a few of his suggestions in the third chapter of "Walden";—"It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. It is time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure—if they are indeed so well off—to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives. Shall the world be confined to one Paris or one Oxford forever? Cannot students be boarded here and get a liberal education under the skies of Concord? ”

“ His aim throughout life was to teach the value and messages of Nature, in her full meaning. The long walks, in which he delighted to include the children of the village no less than of his school, were really matchless lessons in nature-observation. To each individual child he would give some special attention or rouse some specific enthusiasm in flower or habits of bird and insect. Not alone in personal experiment, as a means of teaching, but also in the use of the story, as the most potent educative method, Thoreau was a prophet and example to these later decades. ”

“ THERE are few subjects of broad interest in America that have shown more radical changes of view-point during the last half-century than those pertaining to the aims and influence of college education. When Thoreau entered Harvard the older conviction prevailed, that college must be a stepping-stone to some one of "the gentlemanly professions." The broader sentiment of to-day, that college is preparation for life in any vocation,—profession, trade, society, philanthropy, statescraft,—was then but an embryonic and feeble vision of a few minds. ”

“ Like Ruskin and his pupil, William Morris, Thoreau always accentuated the poetic relation between the workman and his work. In "A Week" he wrote with poetic thought,—"Behind every man's busyness there should be a level of undisturbed serenity and industry, as within the reef encircling a coral isle there is always an expanse of still water, where the depositions are going on which will finally raise it above the surface." With despair, to-day, one recalls his maxim,—"Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love and pay him well." ”

“ He had assimilated much of the philosophy of Kant and his school, of Rousseau, of Coleridge, of Carlyle and of Emerson. The friendship of such men as Brownson, Alcott and Lane, contact and discussions with varied scholars, authors, and men of simple agrarian tastes,—all such influences gave him nucleus for many thoughts which his lucid and propulsive mind could amplify, combine, and apply. He would test these principles as creed for daily life. ”

“ With a temperament at once fine and strong, with a dauntless will trained by years of simple, courageous life, he lived his philosophy to the last day of his life. His simple tastes, his sincere words, his constant industry, his needful leisure, his unswerving contentment and joy, his perfect faith in the future,—these tenets were maintained, even exampled, to the finish of the brave life. ”

“ Until very recent years it has been the honest opinion of the general world of readers that Thoreau was a stoic and a hermit. Critics have sacrificed justice to cleverness, they have delighted to picture him as an American Diogenes, sitting in his tub of Walden sunlight and roused, if at all, to warn all outsiders away from the rays of his special possession, Nature. The much-exploited incident of his Walden life, which we shall regard as an experiment, as he called it, represented only two years and a half of his forty-five years. ”

“ With extremes of heat and cold, lacking the luxuries of modern houses, the people developed that sturdy, self-reliant endurance which characterized the best New England communities. If the sheets froze about their faces on cold nights, as Thoreau related, and a drop of water from the pitcher at once congealed upon the floor, yet they possessed that vigor of body and soul which is fostered by hardihood, not indulgence. ”

“ The burden of his plea as naturalist and poet was the renunciation of the superfluous and time-stealing luxuries of a "hothouse existence," the substitution, for these baneful temptations, of a devotion to nature which, in brief time would satisfy all the faculties, would bring comradeship, would ensure health and peace. Finally, to the listening soul, filled with true love for nature, she would utter her messages of religious truth and contentment. "God did not make this world in jest, no, nor in indifference. Those migratory swallows all bear messages that concern my life." ”

“ THE YEARS OF EXPRESSION
IT is not difficult to assert, with seeming evidence of proof, that Thoreau's life, brief and unique, consisted entirely of years of preparation for the expression which never came. His mere life-incidents, read by a casual eye, seem trivial, vacillating experiments while his life has often been accounted a failure in achievement of any definite aims. One may, however, well recall the lesson of "Rabbi Ben Ezra,"—
"For thence,—a paradox
Which comforts while it mocks,—
Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail." ”

“ Henry Thoreau we all remember as a man of genius and of marked character, known to our farmers as the most skilful of surveyors, and indeed better acquainted with their forests and meadows and trees than themselves, but more widely known as the writer of some of the best books which have been written in this country and which, I am persuaded, have not yet gathered half their fame. He too, was an excellent reader. No man would have rejoiced more than he in the event of this day. ”

“ No expansion of this thought could equal his own admirable conclusion in "Walden":—"He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. ”

“ It has been so overemphasized that "the hermit of Walden" has become his world-wide sobriquet; to many, as to Dr. Japp, Thoreau seemed "an odd, unaccountable kind of person." No one would assert that the motives of critics and biographers have been due, in the main, to intentional injustice to Thoreau; rather has there been a desire to picture, in the most dramatic light, one of the most unique and romantic episodes of modern literary history. A mystical charm always encircles the lives of hermits and ascetics, from John the Baptist and the early Essenes to Tristram and Roger Crab. ”