PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN:
SIR WALTER RALEIGH (RALEGH, RAWLEIGH)
As for gentlemen, travel is accounted an excellent ornament to them; and therefore many of them coming to their lands sooner than to their wits, adventure themselves to see the fashions of other countries, where their souls and bodies find temptations to a twofold HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: SIR WALTER RALEIGH PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
whoredom, whence they see the world as Adam had knowledge of good and evil, with the loss or lessening of their estate in this English (and perhaps also in the heavenly) Paradise and bring home a few smattering terms, flattering garbs, apish cringes, foppish fantasies, foolish guises and disguises, the vanities of neighbor nations ... without furthering their knowledge of God, the world, or themselves.
1554
Walter Raleigh was born (Thoreau would be told he had been born in 1552).
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1565
John Hawkins introduced tobacco seeds into England from Florida, but smoking would not spread until dashing Walter Raleigh, who was at this point only eleven years of age, would help it become fashionable in the court in the mid-1570s.
Chronological observations of America to the year of Christ 1673.
Tobacco first brought into England by Sir John Hawkins, but it was first brought into use by Sir Walter Rawleigh many years after.
From the year of World BY John Josselyn Gent.
(Although there have been popular reports that John Hawkins may have introduced potatoes into Ireland in this year, we don’t have an actual confirmation of potatoes in Ireland prior to the year 1586.) PLANTS
1569
March 13, Saturday (1568, Old Style): Walter Raleigh had been fighting on the Huguenot side in France, in what were known at the time for some reason as “Wars of Religion.”1 On this day the Huguenots were defeated at Jarnac.
1. “Golly, Mom, whassa religious war? –After God wins will we hafter obey His commandments again?”
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1580
There are reports that Walter Raleigh was having potatoes planted on his estates in western Ireland. (But by this point these edible tubers from the New World had already become a kitchen staple in Seville, Spain, and we don’t have an actual confirmation of potatoes in Ireland prior to the year 1586.)
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The colonists of Sir Walter’s settlement on Roanoke Island off the coast of what has become North Carolina, not to be outdone, sent samples of the American ground-nut to Queen Elizabeth I.
(Did the English queen try to eat them? –Thoreau would consider them to taste better boiled than baked.)
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Francis Drake introduced smoking to Walter Raleigh. Cultivation of tobacco intended for European consumption began at this point on the island of Cuba. Tobacco was at this point being introduced into Turkey and into Poland. Chronological observations of America to the year of Christ 1673. From Nova Albion he fell with Ternate, one of the Isles of Molucco, being courteously entertained of the King, and from thence he came upon the Isles of Calebes, to Java Major, to Cape buone speranza, and fell with the coasts of Guinea, where crossing again the line, he came to the height of the Azores, and thence to England upon the third of November 1580. after three years lacking twelve days, and was Knighted, and his Ship laid up at Deptford as a monument of his fame. From the year of World
BY John Josselyn Gent.
1582
By this date Walter Raleigh had become the reigning favorite of the court of Queen Elizabeth I.
1583
Sir Humphrey Gilbert sailed into a crowded harbor in Newfoundland and took possession in the name of the British. For the nonce, this worked. The British would however fail in their attempt to settle Newfoundland, for the same reasons as the Jacques Cartier effort of 1541 had failed: starvation and bitter cold.
CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE
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However, the result of these failures would be that both Britain (John Cabot and Gilbert) and France (Giovanni da Verrazano and Cartier) would be laying claim to the Maritimes and its cod by right of discovery. THE FROZEN NORTH
Chronological observations of America to the year of Christ 1673.
Sir Walter Rawleigh in Ireland.
Sir Humphrey Gilbert attempted a plantation in some remote parts in New-England.
He perished in his return from New-found-land.
From the year of World BY John Josselyn Gent.
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1584
The Reverend Richard Hakluyt’s confidential report to Queen Elizabeth I entitled THE DISCOURSE ON THE WESTERN PLANTING included the materials indicated on the several following screens:2
[see following]
March 25, Wednesday (1583, Old Style): Queen Elizabeth I of England granted a charter to Walter Raleigh to search and discover “remote and heathen lands.” In this year he would found the unsuccessful colony of Roanoke on an island off the coast of what has become North Carolina. READ THE FULL TEXT
April 27, Monday (Old Style): Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe departed on a journey to the Virginia coast of the New World sponsored by Walter Raleigh. They would reach the North Carolina coast near Roanoke Island on July 13, 1584, claim the island, and return to England during September.
July 13m Monday (Old Style): Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe arrived on the Virginia coast of the New World in their expedition sponsored by Walter Raleigh (the entire coast was then considered to be Virginia; nowadays we would say that what they were sighting the was coast of North Carolina).
September: Having stood on the soil of North Carolina’s Roanoke Island while perpetrating their little ceremony of ownership in the name of Queen Elizabeth I and Walter Raleigh, Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe headed back toward England.
2. Such materials would not be available to Thoreau since the veil of secrecy would not be lifted from this document until 1877.
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Topics covered in Richard Hakluyt’s DISCOURSE OF WESTERN PLANTING:
13. That hereby the Revenewes and customes of her Majestie bothe outwardes and inwardes shall mightely be inlarged by the toll, excises, and other dueties which without oppression may be raised. 14. That this action will be greately for the increase, mayneteynaunce and safetie of our Navye, and especially of greate shippinge which is the strengthe of our Realme, and for the supportation of all those occupacions that depende upon the same. 15. That spedie plantinge in divers fitt places is moste necessarie upon these luckye westerne discoveries for feare of the daunger of being prevented by other nations which have the like intentions, with the order thereof and other reasons therewithall alleaged. 16. Meanes to kepe this enterprise from overthrowe and the enterprisers from shame and dishonor. 17. That by these Colonies the Northwest passage to Cathaio and China may easely quickly and perfectly be searched oute aswell by river and overlande, as by sea, for proofe whereof here are quoted and alleaged divers rare Testymonies oute of the three volumes of voyadges gathered by Ramusius and other grave authors. 18. That the Queene of Englande title to all the west Indies, or at the leaste to as moche as is from Florida to the Circle articke, is more lawfull and righte then the Spaniardes or any other Christian Princes. 19. An aunswer to the Bull of the Donacion of all the west Indies graunted to the kinges of Spaine by Pope Alexander the VI whoe was himselfe a Spaniarde borne. 20. A brefe collection of certaine reasons to induce her Majestie and the state to take in hande the westerne voyadge and the plantinge there. 21. A note of some thinges to be prepared for the voyadge which is sett downe rather to drawe the takers of the voyadge in hande to the presente consideracion then for any other reason for that divers thinges require preparation longe before the voyadge, without which the voyadge is maymed.
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Topics covered in Richard Hakluyt’s DISCOURSE OF WESTERN PLANTING:
1. That this westerne discoverie will be greately for the inlargement of the gospell of Christe whereunto the Princes of the refourmed relligion are chefely bounde amongest whome her Majestie is principall. 2. That all other englishe Trades are growen beggerly or daungerous, especially in all the kinge of Spaine his Domynions, where our men are dryven to flinge their Bibles and prayer Bokes into the sea, and to forsweare and renownce their relligion and conscience and consequently theyr obedience to her Majestie. 3. That this westerne voyadge will yelde unto us all the commodities of Europe, Affrica, and Asia, as far as wee were wonte to travell, and supply the wantes of all our decayed trades. 4. That this enterprise will be for the manifolde imploymente of nombers of idle men, and for bredinge of many sufficient, and for utterance of the greate quantitie of the commodities of our Realme. 5. That this voyage will be a great bridle to the Indies of the kinge of Spaine and a means that wee may arreste at our pleasure for the space of teime weekes or three monethes every yere, one or twoo hundred saile of his subjectes shippes at the fysshinge in Newfounde Lande. 6. That the rischesse that the Indian Threasure wrought in time of Charles the late Emperor father to the Spanishe kinge, is to be had in consideracion of the Q. moste excellent Majestie, leaste the contynuall commynge of the like threasure from thence to his sonne, worke the unrecoverable annoye of this Realme, whereof already wee have had very dangerous experience. 7. What speciall meanes may bringe kinge Phillippe from his high Throne, and make him equal to the Princes his neighbours, wherewithall is shewed his weakenes in the west Indies. 8. That the limites of the kinge of Spaines domynions in the west Indies be nothinge so large as is generally imagined and surmised, neither those partes which he holdeth be of any such forces as is falsely geven oute by the popishe Clergye and others his suitors, to terrffie the Princes of the Relligion and to abuse and blinde them. 9. The Names of the riche Townes lienge alonge the sea coaste on the northe side from the equinoctiall of the mayne lande of America under the kinge of Spaine. 10. A Brefe declaracion of the chefe Ilands in the Bay of Mexico beinge under the kinge of Spaine, with their havens and fortes, and what commodities they yeide. 11. That the Spaniardes have executed most outragious and more then Turkishe cruelties in all the west Indies, whereby they are every where there, become moste odious unto them, whoe woulde joyne with us or any other moste willingly to shake of their moste intollerable yoke, and have begonne to doo it already in dyvers places where they were Lordes heretofore. 12. That the passage in this voyadge is easie and shorte, that it cutteth not nere the trade of any other mightie Princes, nor nere their Contries, 10 that it is to be perfourmedCopyright at 2013all tymesAustin Meredithof the yere, and nedeth but one kinde of winde, that Ireland beinge full of goodd havens on the southe and west sides, is the nerest parte of Europe to it, which by this trade shall be in more securitie, and the sooner drawen to more Civilitie. HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: SIR WALTER RALEIGH PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
1585
Walter Raleigh became Sir Walter. His fleet of seven vessels under Sir Richard Grenville and Ralph Lane, with 108 men, reached North Carolina’s Roanoke Island on the Virginia coast in June (he had also sent a fleet to South America). With the expedition was Thomas Hariot, who in 1588 would publish an account of Virginia
in which he would comment on its many exotic plants and animals (he had assisted in the design of the ships and was serving as Sir Walter’s accountant and provided navigational expertise, while learning the Algonquian language). Neither the North American fleet nor the South American fleet would find any gold whatever, which was a major disappointment. Asked by Sir Walter to find the most efficient way to stack cannon balls on deck, Hariot whipped up a mathematical analysis of the close-packing of spheres that is remarkably prescient in regard not only to atomism but also to modern atomic theory (later he would stand accused of a
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belief in atomism, which of course was an unholy materialism and entirely unsafe). BOTANIZING Chronological observations of America
Cautionary Towns and Forts in the low-Countries delivered unto Queen Elizabeths hands.
Sir Richard Greenville was sent by Sir Walter Rawleigh April the Ninth, with a Fleet of 7 sail to to the year of Christ 1673. Virginia, and was stiled the General of Virginia. He landed in the Island of St. John de porto Rico May the Twelfth, and there fortified themselves and built a Pinnasse, &C. In Virginia they left 100 men under the Government of Mr. Ralph Lane, and others.
Sir Francis Drake’s voyage to the West-Indies, wherein were taken the Cities of St. Jago, St. Domingo Cartagena, and the Town of St. From the year of World Augustine in Florida.
Now (say some) Tobacco was first brought into England by Mr. Ralph Lane out of Virginia.
BY John Josselyn Gent.
FLORIDA TOBACCO
READ ABOUT VIRGINIA
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Chronological observations of America
Mr. Thomas Candish of Trimely, in the County of Suffolk Esq. began his voyage in the Ship called the Desire, and two ships more to the South-Sea through the Streights of Magellan (and from thence round about the circumference of the whole earth) burnt and ransack’d in the entrance of Chile, Peru, and New-Spain, near the great Island of California in the South-Sea; and to the year of Christ 1673. returned to Plimouth with a pretious booty 1588. September the Eighth, being the Third since Magellan, that circuited the earth, our English voyagers were never out-stript by any.
The Natives of Virginia conspired against the English.
The same year Sir Richard Greenville General of
From the year of World Virginia arrived there with three ships, bringing relief from Sir Walter Rawleigh to the Colony.
Mr. John Davies second voyage to discover the North-west passage.
BY John Josselyn Gent.
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1586
Ralph Lane, 1st governor of Virginia, introduced Sir Walter Raleigh to a device apparently of his own devising, a long-stemmed clay pipe for the smoking of tobacco. In Germany, DE PLANTIS EPITOME UTILISSIMA offered one of the 1st cautions against indiscriminate use of this “violent herb.”
(man smoking clay pipe)
Upon Thomas Hariot’s return to England from the Virginia coast, his patron having fallen into disfavor at the court, he entered the service of Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland. At Syon House, which was run by the earl’s 2d cousin Thomas Percy, he would become a prolific mathematician and astronomer. He has credit for the theory of refraction.
Gunung Api (4.525°S, 129.871°E; summit elevation 640 meters), the volcano on the island of Banda Api that towers over the spice island of Neira in the Banda Sea, erupted. Gunung Api is the most northeasterly volcano in the Sunda-Banda arc, now part of Indonesia. The island of Banda Api is part of a 6-mile-wide caldera, mostly submerged, that is the northernmost of a chain of volcanos. Gunung Api forms a conical peak at the center of this island. At least two episodes of caldera formation are thought to have occurred, with the arcuate islands of Lonthor and Neira considered to be remnants of the pre-caldera volcanoes. (Historical eruptions have mostly consisted of Strombolian eruptions from the summit crater, but larger explosive eruptions have also occurred and, occasionally, lava flows have reached the coast.)
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Sir Francis Drake, on landing at Roanoke off the coast of what is now North Carolina, heard tales of colonists who had survived on soup made from Sassafras albidum. When he returned to England he took with him what may have been the 1st shipment of this plant. (In 1602 Bartholomew Gosnold would bring more material from the plant to England, and by 1607 it would be in great demand both in English coffeehouses and on the street. The tea was said to cure a wide range of diseases, while the wood was thought to repel insect attack. Today we know that oil of sassafras (once used to flavor root beer but out of use since the early 1960s) is substantially the chemical safrole, now regarded as a definite carcinogen. The most significant commercial use for sassafras today is the manufacture of filé, a powder made from young, dried leaves (they do not contain any safrole) used in the making of gumbo. PLANTS
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1587
In this year Sir Walter Raleigh named his colony near Roanoke Island by the name “Virginia” in honor of his virginal monarch, and was declared the captain of her guard. This 2nd British attempt on Roanoke Island would fail within three years with all settlers disappearing, and eventually would become known as “The Lost Colony.” Readings from the annual growth rings of bald cypress trees (the longest-lived species on the East coast, which can reach an age of 1,700 years) in the area indicate that the English colonists were attempting to create their settlement during the worst year of the worst drought of the last 800 years along that part of the Virginia coast of North America. In all likelihood the local natives were at this point living off roots and berries and had little surplus food to offer in trade. When the relief expedition would arrive from England in 1590, all they would find would be the word “Croatoan,” carved into a tree. Chronological observations of America to the year of Christ 1673. Sir Walter Rawleigh sent another Colony of 150 persons under the Government of Mr. John White.
Mr. John Davies third voyage to discover the North-west passage.
Sir Francis Drake, with four ships took from the Spaniards one million, 189200 Ducats in one voyage. From the year of World BY John Josselyn Gent.
FRANCIS DRAKE
READ ABOUT VIRGINIA
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Henry Hudson may have sailed with John Davis on his voyage to discover a northwest passage, for Davis had in 1585 planned an attempt to find a Northwest passage in the home of a Thomas Hudson in Limehouse (now in the docks area of London’s east end), and this Thomas may have been one of Henry’s brothers. On that voyage, Davis would name the raging waters now known as Hudson Strait, as the “Furious Overfall.” The following fantasy of what he saw as he sailed in the Hudson Strait would be produced by George Back in 1840:
Arctic Explorations
Date Explorer Nation Discovery
1501 Gaspar Corte Real Portuguese Newfoundland
1536 Jacques Cartier French St. Lawrence River, Gaspe Peninsula
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Date Explorer Nation Discovery
1553 Richard Chancellor English White Sea
1556 Stephen Burrough English Kara Sea
1576 Martin Frobisher English Frobisher Bay
1582 Humphrey Gilbert English Newfoundland
1587 John Davis English Davis Strait
1597 Willem Barents Dutch Spitsbergen, Novaya Zemyla
1611 Henry Hudson English Hudson Bay
1616 William Baffin English Ellesmere and Devon Islands
1632 Thomas James English James Bay
1741 Vitus Bering Russian Alaska
1772 Samuel Hearne English Coppermine River to the Arctic Ocean
1779 James Cook British Vancouver Island, Nootka Sound
1793 Alexander Mackenzie English Bella Coola River to the Pacific
1825 Edward Parry British Cornwallis, Bathurst, Melville Islands
1833 John Ross British North Magnetic Pole
1845 John Franklin British King William Island
1854 Robert McClure British Banks Island, Viscount Melville Sound
THE FROZEN NORTH
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July 22, Wednesday (Old Style): John White (1540-1606), sent by Sir Walter Raleigh with 150 men, women, and children to create the Cittie of Raleigh, landed on one of the islands of the barrier chain off present-day North Carolina, named Hatorask Island. Sir Walter and Captain Bartholomew Gosnold had wanted him to settle these colonists at the mouth of the James River in present-day Virginia, but he chose to settle them on nearby Roanoke Island just inside this barrier chain. James River
Roanoke Hatorask
Probably during this year in England, Thomas Hariot was writing up his account of his 1585/1586 visit to Roanoke Island on the Virginia coast.
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1588
William Hunnis’s wife died at Ilford. He would no longer be associated with the Company of Grocers of London.
Thomas Hariot, who in later years would be recognized as a preeminent natural philosopher (scientist), had been part of a group sent by Sir Walter Raleigh to establish the first English colony in the New World. During 1585-1586 on Roanoke Island, while most of his party had fitfully searched for gold while bitching at how there were not “in Virginia any English cities, or fine houses, or their accustomed dainty food, or any soft beds of down or feathers,” he had been taking accurate stock of the land and its bounties. It is he who is reputed to have carried back home on Sir Francis Drake’s ship two strange plants: the tobacco and the potato. At this point he had returned to London and issued A BRIEF AND TRUE REPORT OF THE NEW FOUND LAND OF VIRGINIA, DIRECTED TO THE INVESTORS, FARMERS, AND WELL-WISHERS OF THE PROJECT OF COLONIZING AND PLANTING THERE: There is an herb called uppówoc, which sows itself. In the West Indies it has several names, according to the different places where it grows and is used, but the Spaniards generally call it tobacco. Its leaves are dried, made into powder, and then smoked by being sucked through clay pipes into the stomach and head. The fumes purge superfluous phlegm and gross humors from the body by opening all the pores and passages. Thus its use not only preserves the body, but if there are any obstructions it breaks them up. By this means the natives keep in excellent health, without many of the grievous diseases which often afflict us in England. This uppówoc is so highly valued by them that they think their gods are delighted with it. Sometimes they make holy fires and cast the powder into them as a sacrifice. If there is a storm on the waters, they throw it up into the air and into the water to pacify their gods. Also, when they set up a new weir for fish, they pour uppówoc into it. And if they escape from danger, they also throw the powder up into the air. This is always done with strange gestures and stamping, sometimes dancing, clapping of hands, holding hands up, and staring up into the heavens. During this performance they chatter strange words and utter meaningless noises. While we were there we used to suck in the smoke as they did, and now that we are back in England we still do so. We have found many rare and wonderful proofs of the uppówoc’s virtues, which would themselves require a volume to relate. There is sufficient evidence in the fact that it is used by so many men and women of great calling, as well as by some learned physicians.
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The above was part of a compendium of “commodities” he intended to help maintain interest in Sir Walter Raleigh’s doomed attempts to make money out of his commercial explorations to the New World. In providing a list pertaining to the “Virginia” coast, this has amounted to the 1st book in English to mention the flora and fauna of any part of what is now the United States. After Hariot’s return to England, he would meet and become buddies with Raleigh and would be his main contact with the outside world during the 13 years of residence in the Tower of London (where, in fact, Raleigh was able to grow his own tobacco as well as set up his own little distillery).3 BOTANIZING
READ ABOUT VIRGINIA
3. Sir Walter Raleigh reportedly would have a pipe of his home-grown for solace while on his way to have his head surgically excised in 1618. Hariot, on the other hand, would be during that same period suffering terribly from a “cancerous ulcer of the nose,” presumably inoperable and caused one may suspect by tobacco, till his death at the age of 61 in 1621. Life just ain’t fair.
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1595
Four Dutch ships under the command of Cornelius de Houtman reached Java by way of the Cape of Good Hope. The Dutch began exploration of the East Indies.
In the 16th century, the cross staff had been a European version of the kamal used by Arab navigators. The kamal was a square table which had a string with knots threaded through it. Each knot represented a different port:
The navigator would select the port he was trying to reach, and hold the knot in his teeth to tighten the string, while he held the table to his eye. Altitude was found when the horizon was at the lower edge of the table and the Pole Star at the upper edge. This device, and the cross staff, helped determine a ship’s latitude by making solar observations. A European navigator would place one end of the staff against his eye and slide the horizontal stick along the staff until one end lined up with the horizon and the other end with the sun. A scale written along the staff provided the angle between the two. To use such a device, one was forced to squint into the sun for a period of time. The back staff, invented at about this point in time, was an improved version which allowed the European navigator to stand with his back toward the sun. While observing the horizon through a
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slit, he would slide the upright arm until the edge of its shadow met the slit.
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Chronological observations of America
The voyage of Sir Amias Preston, & Capt. George Sommers to the West-Indies, where they took, sackt, spoiled and abandoned the Island of to the year of Christ 1673. Puerto Santo, the Island of Cock near Margarita, the Fort and Town of Coro, the stately City of St. Jago de leon, and the Town of Cumana ransomed, and Jamaica entered.
Sir Walter Rawleigh’s voyage now to Guiana, discovered by him. In which voyage he took St. Joseph a Town upon Trinidado.
From the year of World The Sabbatarian doctrine published by the Brethren.
BY John Josselyn Gent.
WALTER RALEIGH
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1596
George Chapman’s poem in praise of Sir Walter Raleigh, DE GUIANA, CARMEN EPICUM.
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1597
John Donne participated in Robert Devereux, 2d earl of Essex’s naval expedition against the Azores.
Chronological observations of America to the year of Christ 1673.
The voyage to the Azores, Sir Walter Rawleigh Capt. of the Queens Guard Rere-Admiral.
Porto Rico, taken by the Earl of Cumberland.
From the year of World BY John Josselyn Gent.
WALTER RALEIGH
1600
Sir Walter Raleigh was appointed the governor of the Isle of Jersey in the English Channel. This may have something to do with Thoreau’s becoming intrigued by the man, and it is therefore offered that some scholar might fruitfully dig in Raleigh’s administration of Jersey or his involvement with the port of St. Hélier to find out more in this regard. (If this has ever been researched, I haven’t found out about it.)
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In Italy, the 1st import monopolies over tobacco were established. In France, despite high prices, smoking was spreading among the lower classes; snuffing would be more prevalent among the nobility, who consider this a more dignified and aristocratic mode of use. In the Italian and French courts and clergy, the use of tobacco was spreading, and from there throughout the populace (the habit was being spread also by sailors returning from the New World). Tobacco was selling in London for its weight in silver shillings. Cultivation for Europe began in Brazil, while in England, Sir Walter Raleigh persuaded Queen Elizabeth I to try some. The 17th Century would be the great age of the pipe. Popes would need to ban smoking or even the taking of snuff in holy places, under threat of excommunication. Tobacco would come into use as “Country Money” or “Country Pay,” and would continue to be used as a monetary standard —literally a “cash crop”— throughout the 18th Century, lasting as a standard of exchange twice as long as would the metal gold.
Increasingly, medicinal use in England would decline and smoking would become primarily a pleasurable pastime. The government eventually would come to rely on tobacco duties as a main source of revenue. By the 1630s, smoking would have overcome most opposition in England, and use would continue to spread as tobacco prices declined markedly.
In England, coffee was introduced as a luxury, medicament, and panacea; its use was encouraged as a cure for widespread drunkenness. In Arabia and Turkey, another brief attempt to shut down coffee houses as centers of sedition failed.
From the founding of the English colonies in America, drunkenness was so prevalent that it simply was not a stigmatized behavior. As in England the consumption of beers and wines, particularly home-brews, was integrated into every aspect of colonial family life. Abuse was condemned and temperance advocated, but alcohol itself is highly esteemed as in England as the Good Creature of God, a beneficial gift to man. England. During the reign of James I, numerous writers describe widespread drunkenness from beer and wine among all classes. Alcohol use was tied to every endeavor and phase of life, a condition that would continue well into the 18th Century.
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1602
Sir Walter Raleigh sent Samuel Mace of Weymouth to the Virginia coast (North Carolina) to seek survivors of the Lost Colony of Roanoke.
John Josselyn would in 1674 summarize the founding of New-England in the manner depicted on a following screen:
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AN ACCOUNT OF TWO VOYAGES TO NEW-ENGLAND.
New-England was first discovered by John Cabota 1514 and his son Sebastian in Anno Dom. 1514. A further discovery afterwards was made by the honourable Sir Walter Rawleigh Knight in Anno 1584. when as Virginia was discovered, which together with 1584 Maryland, New-England, Nova Scotia was known by
one common name to the Indians, Wingandicoa, and to the year of Christ 1673. by Sir Walter Rawleigh in honour of our Virgin Queen, in whose name he took possession of it, Virginia. In King James his Reign it was divided into Provinces as is before named. In 1602 these north parts were further discovered by Capt. Bartholomew 1602 Gosnold. The first English that planted there, set down not far from the Narragansets-Bay, and called their Colony Plimouth, since old Plimouth, An. Dom. 1602. Sir John Popham Lord chief Justice authorized by his Majesty, King James, sent a colony of English to Sagadehock, An. 1606. Newfound-land was discovered by one Andrew Thorn an English man in From the year of World Anno 1527. Sir Humphrey Gilbert a west Countrey 1606 Knight took possession of it in the Queens name, Anno 1582. The first two Colonies in New-England 1527 failing, there was a fresh supply of English who set down in other parts of the Countrey, and have 1582 continued in a flourishing condition to this day.
BY John Josselyn Gent.
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1603
The 13th-Century Mont Orgueil Castle having been quite obsoleted by increases in the power of naval cannon, by this year Sir Walter Raleigh had relocated the main defense of the Isle of Jersey to another site, which he denominated “Elizabeth Castle.”
Construction began on Audley End, one of the largest houses in England, at Saffron Walden for the Earl of Suffolk, Thomas Howard, Treasurer to King James I. Work on this structure would be going on until 1616. Then this magnificent edifice would prove to be much too large to maintain, and eventually some 2/3ds would be demolished. When during the 18th Century it would be reconstructed, this would be only in part, and its present magnificence gives only a suggestion of how gargantuan this pile had been in its beginnings.
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July 25, Friday: Queen Elizabeth I having died on March 23rd, on this day King James VI of Scotland was crowned in
London (he was, not incidentally, alleging his Stuarts to be descended from the King Arthur of British fakelore). In his service Francis Bacon would flourish. On this day of the new king’s coronation Bacon was knighted, becoming Sir Francis. He would rise to become Baron Verulam, Viscount St. Albans and Lord Chancellor of England. His fall would come about in the course of a struggle between King and Parliament. He would be accused of having taken a bribe while a judge, and found guilty as charged. He thus would lose his personal honor, as well as his fortune and his place at court.
By the coronation of James VI of Scotland as James I, King of England (1603-1625), the idea that the educated, informed, and sometimes conflicting and confused voices of esquires, merchants, lawyers, and
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clergymen might be tolerated and even encouraged had received the sanction of decades of experience.
JAMES I
(The portrait above does not reveal a couple of significant things about the person of this scholarly monarch. His tongue was too large for his mouth, and he had some sort of neurological condition in his legs that was causing numerous stumbles, and injuries.)
This monarch would extend and modify the Lieutenant’s house at the Tower of London, which had been built in the 1540s and now is referred to as the Queen’s House. He would relocate his royal lions to better dens in the west gate barbican. He would come to refer to his kingdom as “Great Britain.”
Sir Walter Raleigh, accused of treason against him (“him” = James, not “him” = Arthur), was imprisoned in the Tower. King James’s efforts to suppress dissent would alienate many of his citizen-subjects, and then his son, ruling as Charles I, would attempt even greater rigour, reasserting censorship with a comprehensiveness not before experienced in England. Thus, after the English civil war, it would be due not to John Milton’s AEROPAGITICA but rather to a Hobbesian pragmatism, that the need to inform the general public, if only in a rudimentary manner, would be becoming accepted as an integral part of English politics. AN INFORMED CITIZENRY
But perhaps at this point we should not be speaking of “a Hobbesian pragmatism,” for at this point Master Thomas Hobbes, barely 15 years of age, was just beginning his studies at Magdalen Hall in Oxford: It is not to be forgotten that before he went to the University,
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he had turned Euripides’ MEDEA out of Greek into Latin iambics.
Michael Drayton, who had gotten along well with the court of Queen Elizabeth, would address a poem of compliment to James on his accession as King of England — but his effort would be ridiculed and this court would rudely reject his services.
With James Stuart (I and VI) coming to the throne, with a single crown for England and Scotland, with the Treaty of Mellifont in which O’Neill surrendered, with the end of the Elizabethan Wars and the enforcement of English law, with the municipality of Belfast being founded upon the former estate of late Earl of Donegall in order to recover his debts, there began in Ireland, particularly in Ulster, the period of the English encroachment by plantation, which would endure until 1641.
1610
William Seymour, 2nd Duke Somerset, became a resident of St. Thomas’s Tower at the Tower of London (he would escape).
From the Tower of London, Sir Walter Raleigh sent a message to Queen Anne, hoping she would intercede for him with King James: “I long since presumed to offer your Majestie my service in Virginia, with a short repetitio of the commoditie, honor, and safetye which the King’s Majestie might reape by that [Jamestown] Plantation, if it were followed to effect.”
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1614
Sir William Alexander published DOOMES-DAY, OR, THE GREAT DAY OF THE LORDS JUDGEMENT (at least by this point, as is indicated by the “Sir,” he had been knighted). In this year he began to serve as “master of requests for Scotland,” interfacing with needy Scotsmen in such manner as to deflect any actual importuning of royal personages.
Sir Walter Raleigh was producing, out of the Tower of London (a central and prestigious literary address), his THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD, from which eventually Henry Thoreau would be quoting:
WALDEN: It is said that Deucalion and Pyrrha created men DEUCALION by throwing stones over their heads behind them:– PYRRHA Inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborum, OVID Et documenta damus quâ simus origine nati. Or, as Raleigh rhymes it in his sonorous way,– “From thence our kind hard-hearted is, enduring pain and care, PEOPLE OF Approving that our bodies of a stony nature are.” WALDEN So much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, throwing the stones over their heads behind them, and not seeing where they fell.
WALTER RALEIGH
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On the following screen is the very questionable title-page of Sir Walter’s book. The prisoner’s foes suggested to King James I that the face of the female figure that is upholding the globe was intended as a caricature of his own, and the monarch would order every copy to be destroyed. (For comparison purposes, to the left is the face of the monarch.) Only a few copies of this engraving would survive. The image is of course a blend of Rosicrucian and Masonic symbols, and the figures on the columns in all likelihood some sort of cryptogram:
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1616
Sir Walter Raleigh was paroled from the Tower of London and began another expedition to the Orinoco, but remained still under sentence of death should he again displease the monarch.
Later Traitor
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June 3, Monday (Old Style): John Rolfe and Pocahontas arrived in London. With them was their one child, Thomas Rolfe.4
Each of them had been married before, although this factoid somewhat spoils the illusion. Despite King James I’s disapproval of the Jamestown colony’s dependence on a crop he despised,5 the very survival of the colony could be in Rolfe’s hands, and, of course, James could not ignore the enormous import duties Rolfe’s Virginia tobacco, termed “Orinoco,”6 brought to the royal treasury — Londoners and others around the world liked its taste and had begun to demand it. Since all sales had to be made through London, the English treasury was growing with every transaction. Rolfe’s trip was a success despite the English king’s fury at the idea that Rolfe, a mere commoner, had managed to marry a princess, and his fury at the thought
4. Rolfe’s English wife and child had died after leaving with him for the New World, and young Pocahontas already had a native husband before she was kidnapped and took up housekeeping with this white widower. On an unknown date Thomas Rolfe would remarry a 3d time, with Jane Poythress. Their only child, date of birth unknown, would be given the name of Jane. Jane Rolfe married Colonel Robert Bolling in 1675, gave birth to a child in 1676 which was named John Bolling, and died either during or shortly after childbirth. This child grew up to be a Colonel like his father, was married to Mary Kennon, and left six children when he died in 1729: John Bolling, Jane Bolling Randolph, Mary Bolling Fleming, Elizabeth Bolling Gay, Martha Bolling Eldridge, and Anne Bolling Murray. These six children have descendants in at least the following families: Alfriend, Allen, Ambler, Archer, Austin, Bannister, Baskerville, Bentley, Berkeley, Bernard, Berry, Bland, Bolling, Bolton, Bott, Botts, Bradford, Branch, Brown, Buchanan, Buford, Burton, Byrd, Cabell, Carr, Cary, Catlett, Chalmers, Clarke, Cobbs, Coleman, Covington, Cross, Dandridge, Davies, Deane, Dixon, Doswell, Douglass, Duval, Eggleston, Elam, Eldridge, Ellett, Feing, Flood, Fox, Friend, Garrett, Gay, Gifford, Glover, Goode, Gordon, Grattan, Graves, Grayson, Green, Gregg, Griffin, Hackley, Hamilton, Hamlin, Hardaway, Harris, Harrison, Hereford, Houston, Hubbard, Irving, James, Jeffrey, Jones, Kincaid, Knox, Lea, Lewis, Logan, McRae, Macon, Markham, Maury, May, Meade, Megginson, Meredith, Mewburn, Michaux, Morris, Morrison, Murray, Page, Paulett, Perkins, Pleasants, Powell, Randolph, Rawlins, Robertson, Robinson, Roper, Ruffin, Russell, Scott, Shield, Skein, Skipwith, Southall, Stanard, Stockdell, Strange, Tazewell, Thornton, Throckmorton, Tucker, Vaughn, Walke, Wallace, Watkins, Watson, Webber, Weisiger, West, White, Whittle, Wiley, Willard, Williams, Winston, Woodlief, Woodridge, Yates, and Yuilee. (If any of your early Colonial family relatives are listed above, then you may conceivably be a descendant of Pocahontas, and you may consider that it is currently considered socially acceptable to be the descendant of an “Indian Princess” (in case you haven’t noticed, race contamination applies primarily, in the public mentation, to the offspring of male nonwhites upon female whites — rather than vice versa). If you believe you have found an honorable ancestry, you should write to The Pocahontas Trails Genealogical Society, 3628 Cherokee Lane, Modesto CA 95356, for, should you be able to establish to these people’s satisfaction that you are of blood descent from Pocahontas, you may be invited to pay dues. (Incidentally, as a point of information, are there any black Americans who take pride in descent from such an Indian Princess? Are there any red Americans who take pride in descent from such an Indian Princess? Or would this sort of thing be exclusively a pride mode of the white Americans?) 5. He had authored what many consider the 1st anti-smoking tract, “De abusu tobacci” (“A Counterblaste to Tobacco”) in 1603. 6. John Rolfe had named his brand of tobacco “Orinoco” in order to evoke the mystery and exotic adventure of tobacco-popularizer Sir Walter Raleigh’s expeditions up the Orinoco river in Guiana in search of the legendary City of Gold, El Dorado.
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that, should Powhattan die, Rolfe would become in the New World a king on a par with himself.7
JAMES I
The princess, Pocahontas, encountered John Smith once again in London, but because of their newly created class difference they were unable to rekindle their old relationship.
7. In a ceremony he had ordered a few years earlier, James had actually had a reluctant Powhatan crowned “King of Virginia.” Powhattan would die in April 1618 but King James I’s trepidations would not be realized. Note carefully that James’s objection was not that Rolfe had married outside his race, down, to a person of color, but that, a mere commoner, he had married up, outside his class.
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1618
The period 1618-1623 is known as the “Great Migration” because during it the population of Jamestown would be growing by more than an order of magnitude, from 400 to 4,500. Sir Walter Raleigh, with four ships, limping home from a disastrous Orinoco expedition in which no gold had been found, passed the North Carolina and Virginia coast but did not stop at the colony.
Sir Walter had spent 12 years in the Wardrobe Tower in the Tower of London on a charge of plotting against King James I, his solace having been his writing and the conversion of a little hen-house into a brewery “where he doth spend all the day in distillations.” Upon his return without gold he found himself right back in the royal lockup. This second time he was kept in “one of the most cold and direful dungeons” in the Brick Tower, and in his speech from the beheading platform in the Old Palace Yard he thanked God that he was dying in the light rather than in the dank dark of that cellar.
Don’t you dast plot against me!
JAMES I
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October 29, Thursday (Old Style): Sir Walter Raleigh smoked one last pipe of tobacco and, with a little help from a king and a commoner, had his head amputated in Old Palace Yard, Westminster, in London (On the scaffold he ran his finger along the edge of the axe and exclaimed, “’Tis a sharp remedy, but a sure cure for all ills.” With the charge having been treason, after its beheading the body needed of course to be quartered and eviscerated — so perhaps he should have run his finger along the edge of the executioner’s butcher knife as well as along the edge of his axe.)8
HEADCHOPPING
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Famous Last Words:
“What school is more profitably instructive than the death-bed of the righteous, impressing the understanding with a convincing evidence, that they have not followed cunningly devised fables, but solid substantial truth.” — A COLLECTION OF MEMORIALS CONCERNING DIVERS DECEASED MINISTERS, Philadelphia, 1787 “The death bed scenes & observations even of the best & wisest afford but a sorry picture of our humanity. Some men endeavor to live a constrained life — to subject their whole lives to their will as he who said he might give a sign if he were conscious after his head was cut off — but he gave no sign Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.” —Thoreau’s JOURNAL, March 12, 1853
1601 Tycho Brahe unsolicited comment “Let me not seem to have lived in vain.”
1618 Sir Walter Raleigh his wife would embalm his head and “Strike, man, strike.” keep it near her in a red leather bag
1649 Charles I the chopper was to wait for a signal “Stay for the sign.” that the king had prepared himself
1659 Friend Marmaduke Ste- unsolicited comments made over the Friend Marmaduke: “We suffer not as evil- venson and Friend Wil- muting roll of a drum intended to pre- doers but for conscience’ sake.” Friend Wil- liam Robinson vent such remarks from being heard liam: “I die for Christ.”
1660 Friend Mary Dyer asked at her execution “Nay, first a child; then a young man; whether they should pray for her soul then a strong man, before an elder of Christ Jesus.” ... other famous last words ...
8. When their son Carew would die, the well-traveled head of the father and husband would finally be interred, on the south side of the alter at St. Margaret’s in Westminster, between the son’s body and the body from which since 1618 it had been detached.
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1637
Sir Walter Raleigh had authored the best known of his historical writings, A HISTORY OF THE WORLD, while imprisoned in the Tower. THE LIFE AND DEATH OF MAHOMET, which was printed in London under his name in this year by R.H. for Daniel Frere, also continued the story of the Islamic nations into late medieval times. This treatise is not universally accepted as his and Arthur Cayley would assert in 1805 in his LIFE OF SIR WALTER RALEGH (Volume 2, page 192) that it is a mere “abstract, or translation of an abstract made in Spanish, of part 1, book 1 and part 2, book 1, of Miguel de Luna’s HISTORY OF THE LOSS OF SPAIN, PRETENDED TO BE TRANSLATED FROM THE ARABIC OF ABULCACIN TARIF ABENTARIQUE.”
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1650
At this point both coffee and tea were virtually unheard-of as hot beverages in Europe and America, although coffee had been playing a minor role as a medication. Tea, Camellia sinensis, was still merely a Chinese crop, and it was alcoholic beverages that remained the universal unchallenged daily drink of “Europeans” everywhere. The New England colonies would be attempting to establish a precise definition of drunkenness that would include the time spent drinking, the amount that was drunk, and the related behavior. However, the 1st shipment of tea was received in New Amsterdam during this year, plus, as of this year the beverage made from the scorched Arabica bean was being introduced into England at a head shop “at the [sign of the] Angel
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in the parish of St. Peter in the East” in the university town of Oxford.
By 1675 there would be over 3,000 such coffee houses in England.
Rumor has it that the proprietor of this 1st coffee shop was a Jew from the Lebanon. Soon there would also be a similar outlet in Exeter in Devonshire, which would be being patronized by the spiritual descendants of Walter Raleigh not only for the consumption of the beverage from Arabia but also for the “drinking” of the smoke from the burning of the leaves of a plant from America, the tobacco. Although many coffee houses
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would also serve beer and wine, the spread of coffee use in Europe’s rapidly growing cities would be facilitated by growing resentment against the effects of alcohol and the need for a center for sober social intercourse and intellectual discussions. In general, tobacco use would begin among the upper classes and aristocrats and then be copied by the lower and middle classes as prices declined.
1692
A section dealing with William the Conqueror out of Samuel Daniel’s COLLECTION OF THE HISTORIE OF ENGLAND, FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES DOWN TO THE END OF THE REIGN OF EDWARD III was published as if it were the work of Sir Walter Raleigh.
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1768
Since it is clear that Henry Thoreau had access to this volume, here are the pages, out of A NEW UNIVERSAL COLLECTION OF AUTHENTIC AND ENTERTAINING VOYAGES AND TRAVELS, FROM THE EARLIEST ACCOUNTS TO THE PRESENT TIME, that pertains to the voyages of discovery of Sir Walter Raleigh. SIR WALTER RALEIGH
(Here, also, is the complete text of that sourcebook.) PERUSE THE ENTIRE BOOK!
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1813
Thomas Hearne’s and John Aubrey’s LETTERS WRITTEN BY EMINENT PERSONS IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES: TO WHICH ARE ADDED, HEARNE'S JOURNEYS TO READING, AND TO WHADDON HALL, THE SEAT OF BROWNE WILLIS, ESQ., AND LIVES OF EMINENT MEN, BY JOHN AUBREY, ESQ: THE WHOLE NOW FIRST PUBLISHED FROM THE ORIGINALS IN THE BODLEIAN ... (Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown). This edition is not good, but it would be what was available in Waldo Emerson’s library for consultation by Henry Thoreau. (A more complete transcript is to be found in the Rev. Andrew Clark’s edition of 1898, BRIEF LIVES CHIEFLY OF CONTEMPORARIES SET DOWN JOHN AUBREY BETWEEN THE YEARS 1669 AND 1696, created from manuscripts in the Bodleian Library of Oxford University and printed by the Clarendon Press.) JOHN AUBREY’S LIVES I JOHN AUBREY’S LIVES II JOHN AUBREY’S LIVES II
Material from this 1813 edition would find its way into A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS and into Thoreau’s 1843 essay on Sir Walter Raleigh.
SIR WALTER RALEIGH
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A WEEK: Some hours seem not to be occasion for any deed, but for resolves to draw breath in. We do not directly go about the execution of the purpose that thrills us, but shut our doors behind us and ramble with prepared mind, as if the half were already done. Our resolution is taking root or hold on the earth then, as seeds first send a shoot downward which is fed by their own albumen, ere they send one upward to the light. There is a sort of homely truth and naturalness in some books which is very rare to find, and yet looks cheap enough. There may be nothing lofty in the sentiment, or fine in the expression, but it is careless country talk. Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a very high art. Some have this merit only. The scholar is not apt to make his most familiar experience come gracefully to the aid of his expression. Very few men can speak of Nature, for instance, with any truth. They overstep her modesty, somehow or other, and confer no favor. They do not speak a good word for her. Most cry better than they speak, and you can get more nature out of them by pinching than by addressing them. The surliness with which the woodchopper speaks of his woods, handling them as indifferently as his axe, is better than the mealy-mouthed enthusiasm of the lover of nature. Better that the primrose by the river’s brim be a yellow primrose, and nothing more, than that it be something less. Aubrey relates of Thomas Fuller that his was “a very working head, insomuch that, walking and meditating before dinner, he would eat up a penny loaf, not knowing that he did it. His natural memory was very great, to which he added the art of memory. He would repeat to you forwards and backwards all the signs from Ludgate to Charing Cross.” He says of Mr. John Hales, that, “He loved Canarie,” and was buried “under an altar monument of black marble —— —— with a too long epitaph”; of Edmund Halley, that he “at sixteen could make a dial, and then, he said, he thought himself a brave fellow”; of William Holder, who wrote a book upon his curing one Popham who was deaf and dumb, “he was beholding to no author; did only consult with nature.” For the most part, an author consults only with all who have written before him upon a subject, and his book is but the advice of so many. But a good book will never have been fore- stalled, but the topic itself will in one sense be new, and its author, by consulting with nature, will consult not only with those who have gone before, but with those who may come after. There is always room and occasion enough for a true book on any subject; as there is room for more light the brightest day and more rays will not interfere with the first.
JOHN AUBREY
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1829
Publication of the Oxford edition of THE WORKS OF SIR WALTER RALEIGH, KT., NOW FIRST COLLECTED: TO WHICH ARE PREFIXED THE LIVES OF THE AUTHOR BY OLDYS AND BIRCH, from which Henry Thoreau eventually would derive an Ovid quote to grace an early page of his WALDEN ms:
WALDEN: It is said that Deucalion and Pyrrha created men DEUCALION by throwing stones over their heads behind them:– PYRRHA Inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborum, OVID Et documenta damus quâ simus origine nati. Or, as Raleigh rhymes it in his sonorous way,– “From thence our kind hard-hearted is, enduring pain and care, PEOPLE OF Approving that our bodies of a stony nature are.” WALDEN So much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, throwing the stones over their heads behind them, and not seeing where they fell.
WALTER RALEIGH
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1840
August 21, Friday: In this journal entry Henry Thoreau by a brief citation in regard to Sir Walter Raleigh, “He can toil terribly,” has revealed to us that he had been reading the life of Sir Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury in one of
the more current volumes of the compendium LIVES OF EMINENT BRITISH STATESMEN, conducted by the Reverend Dionysius Lardner, LL.D. F.R.S. L.&E. M.R.I.A. F.R.A.S. F.L.S. F.Z.S. Hon. F.C.P.S. &c &c assisted by eminent literary and scientific men such as John Forster, Esq. of the Inner Temple, the Right Honourable Thomas Peregrine Courtenay, that had since 1831 been being published, volume by volume year after year, at London, by the firm of Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green.
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SIR THOMAS MORE CARDINAL WOLSEY ARCHBISHOP CRANMER WILLIAM CECIL, LORD BURLEIGH SIR JOHN ELIOT THOMAS WENTWORTH, EARL OF STR JOHN PYM JOHN HAMPDEN SIR HENRY VANE THE YOUNGER HENRY MARTEN ROBERT CECIL, EARL OF SALISBURY THOMAS OSBORNE, EARL OF DANBY OLIVER CROMWELL, I OLIVER CROMWELL, II
Aug. 21st 1840 In fact, good success can only spring from good conduct. The age in which Sir Water Raleigh lived was indeed a stirring one. The discovery of America and the successful progress of the reformation afforded a field both for the intellectual and physical energies of his generation. Its fathers were Calvin — and Knox — and Cranmer, and Pizarro, and Garcilasso; and its immediate forefathers Luther and Raphael, and Bayard, and Angelo and Aristo — and Copernicus ¡ and Machiavel, and Erasmus — and Cabot, and Ximenes — and Columbus. Its device should have been an anchor — a sword — and a quill. The Pizarro laid by his sword and took to his letters. The Columbus set sail for newer worlds still, by voyages which did not need the patronage of princes. The Bayard alighted from his steed to seek adventures no less arduous in the western world. The Luther who had reformed religion began now to reform politics and Science. In his youth, however it might have concerned him, Camoens was writing a heroic poem in Portugal, and the arts still had their representative in Paul Veronese of Italy. He may have been one to welcome the works of Tasso and Montaigne to England, and when he looked about him found such men as Cervantes and Sidney, men of like pursuit and not altogether dissimilar genius from himself — a Drake to rival him on the sea, and a Hudson in western in western adventure — a Halley — a Gallileo, and a Kepler — for his astronomers — a Bacon — a Behmen — and a Burton, for his books of philosophy — and a Spencer and Shakspeare for his refreshment and inspiration.
He wields his pen as one who sits at ease in his chair, and has a healthy and able body to back his wits, and not
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a torpid and diseased one to fetter them. In whichever hand is the pen, we are sure there is a sword in the other. He sits with his armor on, and with one ear open to hear if the trumpet sound, as one who has stolen a little leisure from the duties of a camp. We are confident that the whole man sat down to the writing of his books — as real and palpable as an Englishman can be, and not some curious brain only. Such a man’s mere daily exercise in literature might well astonish us — and Sir Robert Cecil has said, “He can toil terribly”.
The human society will not make the hunter despicable so soon as the butcher nor the grouse shooter so soon as he who kills sparrows— I feel great respect for the English deer stalker on reading that “‘His muscles must be of marble, and his sinews of steel’. He must not only ‘run like the antelope, and breathe like the trade wind;’ but he must be able ‘to run in a stooping position with a grey-hound pace, having his back parallel to the ground, and his face within an inch of it for miles together’ He must have a taste for running, like an eel through sand, ventre à terre, and he should be accomplished in skilfully squeezing his clothes after this operation, to make all comfortable.’”
1841
Henry Thoreau copied from Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas’s DEVINE WEEKS AND WORKS into his 1st Commonplace Book something that he would in 1843 put into his lecture on Sir Walter Raleigh:
We are reminded by this of Du Bartas’s poem on the Probability of the Celestial Orbs being inhabited, translated by Sylvester: I’ll ne’er believe that the arch-Architect With all these fires the heavenly arches deck’d Only for shew, and with their glistering shields T’ amaze poor shepherds, watching in the fields; I’ll ne’er believe that the least flow’r that pranks Our garden borders, or the common banks, And the least stone, that in her warming lap Our kind nurse Earth doth covetously wrap, Hath some peculiar virtue of its own, And that the glorious stars of heav’n have none. JOSHUAH SYLVESTER, I JOSHUAH SYLVESTER, II
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November 30, Tuesday: Henry Thoreau began to spend some of his days in the “Poetry Alcove” at Gore Hall, the new Harvard Library, reading in Geoffrey Chaucer and Sir Walter Raleigh.
We suppose he didn’t find in that alcove anything quite as pretty as the page shown on a following screen, from an original copy of Poet Laureate John Gower’s CONFESSIO AMANTIS:
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He checked out the Reverend Professor Thomas Warton, D.D.’s THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH POETRY: FROM THE CLOSE OF THE ELEVENTH TO THE COMMENCEMENT OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY (Ed. Richard Price. London: T. Tegg, 1824).
THOMAS WARTON I THOMAS WARTON II THOMAS WARTON III THOMAS WARTON IV
He also checked out, again, the initial volume of THE CANTERBURY TALES OF CHAUCER; WITH AN ESSAY ON HIS LANGUAGE AND VERSIFICATION, AN INTRODUCTORY DISCOURSE, NOTES AND A GLOSSARY BY THO. TYRWHITT, ESQ.... (London: W. Pickering, 1830).
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CANTERBURY TALES, I
Nov. 30. Tuesday. Cambridge. — When looking over the dry and dusty volumes of the English poets, I cannot believe that those fresh and fair creations I had imagined are contained in them. English poetry from Gower down, collected into one alcove, and so from the library window compared with the commonest nature, JOHN AUBREY seems very mean. Poetry cannot breathe in the scholar’s atmosphere. The Aubreys and Hickeses, with all their learning, prophane it yet indirectly by their zeal. You need not envy his feelings who for the first time has cornered up poetry in an alcove. I can hardly be serious with myself when I remember that I have come to Cambridge after poetry; and while I am running over the catalogue and collating and selecting, I think if it would not be a shorter way to a complete volume to step at once into the field or wood, with a very low reverence to students and librarians. Milton did not foresee what company he was to fall into. On running over the titles of these books, looking from time to time at their first pages or farther, I am oppressed by an inevitable sadness. One must have come into a library by an oriel window, as softly and undisturbed as the light which falls on the books through a stained window, and not by the librarian’s door, else all his dreams will vanish. Can the Valhalla be warmed by steam and go by clock and bell? Good poetry seems so simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is, nothing but healthy speech. Though the speech of the poet goes to the heart of things, yet he is that one especially who speaks civilly to Nature as a second person and in some sense is the patron of the world. Though more than any he stands in the midst of Nature, yet more than any he can stand aloof from her. The best lines, perhaps, only suggest to me that that man simply saw or heard or felt what seems the commonest fact in my experience. One will know how to appreciate Chaucer best who has come down to him the natural way through the very meagre pastures of Saxon and ante-Chaucerian poetry. So human and wise he seems after such diet that we are as liable to misjudge him so as usually.
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vulgar — lies very near to them.
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The Saxon Poetry extant seems of a more serious and philosophical cast than the very earliest that can be called
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English— It has more thought, but less music. It translates Boethius, it paraphrases the Hebrew Bible, it solemnly sings of war –of life and death– and chronicles events— The earliest English poetry is tinctured with romance through the influence of the Normans, as the Saxon was not— The ballad and Metrical Romance belong to this period. Those old singers were for the most part imitators or translators — Or will it not appear when viewed at a sufficient distance — that our brave new poets are also secondary as they, and refer the eye that reads them and their poetry too, back and backward without end?9
Nothing is so attractive and unceasingly curious as character. There is no plant that needs such tender treatment, there is none that will endure so rough. It is the violet and the oak. It is the thing we mean, let us say what we will. We mean our own character, or we mean yours. It is divine and related to the heavens, as the earth is by the flashes of the Aurora. It has no acquaintance nor companion. It goes silent and unobserved longer than any planet in space, but when at length it does show itself, it seems like the flowering of all the world, and its before unseen orbit is lit up like the trail of a meteor. I hear no good news ever but some trait of a noble character. It reproaches me plaintively. I am mean in contrast, but again am thrilled and elevated that I can see my own meanness, and again still, that my own aspiration is realized in that other. You reach me, my friend, not by your kind or wise words to me here or there; but as you retreat, perhaps after years of vain familiarity, some gesture
9. This paragraph needs to be understood in the context of the various texts upon which Henry Thoreau had relied while a student at Harvard College, texts which have been identified as: the Reverend Joseph Bosworth’s THE ELEMENTS OF ANGLO=SAXON GRAMMAR ... (London: Printed for Harding, Mavor, and Lepard, 1823), the Reverend John Josias Conybeare’s ILLUSTRATIONS OF ANGLO-SAXON POETRY, EDITED, WITH ADDITIONAL NOTES, INTRODUCTORY NOTICES, &C., BY HIS BROTHER WILLIAM DANIEL CONYBEARE (London: Harding and Lepard, 1826), the three volumes of Lord Bishop Thomas Percy’s RELIQUES OF ANCIENT ENGLISH POETRY (London: J. Dodsley, 1765), the three volumes of Joseph Ritson’s ANCIENT ENGLISH METRICAL ROMANCES (London: W. Bulmer, for G. & W. Nicol, 1802), the four volumes of Thomas Evans’s OLD BALLADS, HISTORICAL AND NARRATIVE, WITH SOME OF MODERN DATE COLLECTED FROM RARE COPIES AND MANUSCRIPTS... A NEW EDITION, REVISED AND CONSIDERABLY ENLARGED FROM PUBLIC AND PRIVATE COLLECTIONS, BY HIS SON, R.H. EVANS (London: Printed for R.H. Evans, by W. Bulmer and co., 1810), and the two volumes of Robert Jamieson’s POPULAR BALLADS AND SONGS, FROM TRADITIONAL MANUSCRIPTS AND SCARCE EDITIONS; WITH TRANSLATIONS OF SIMILAR PIECES FROM THE ANCIENT DANISH LANGUAGE, AND A FEW ORIGINALS BY THE EDITOR. (Edinburgh: A. Constable and co.; [etc. etc.], 1806). BOSWORTH’S ANGLOSAXON CONYBEARE’S ANGLOSAXON THOMAS PERCY’S RELIQUES RITSON’S ROMANCES I RITSON’S ROMANCES II RITSON’S ROMANCES III EVANS’S OLD BALLADS I EVANS’S OLD BALLADS II EVANS’S OLD BALLADS III EVANS’S OLD BALLADS IV JAMIESON’S BALLADS I JAMIESON’S BALLADS II
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or unconscious action in the distance speaks to me with more emphasis than all those years. I am not concerned to know what eighth planet is wandering in space up there, or when Venus or Orion rises, but if, in any cot to east or west and set behind the woods, there is any planetary character illuminating the earth.
Packed in my mind lie all the clothes Which outward nature wears, For, as its hourly fashions change, It all things else repairs. My eyes look inward, not without, And I but hear myself, And this new wealth which I have got Is part of my own pelf. For while I look for change abroad, I can no difference find, Till some new ray of peace uncalled Lumines my inmost mind, As, when the sun streams through the wood, Upon a winter’s morn, Where’er his silent beams may stray The murky night is gone. How could the patient pine have known The morning breeze would come, Or simple flowers anticipate The insect’s noonday hum, Till that new light with morning cheer From far streamed through the aisles, And nimbly told the forest trees For many stretching miles?
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December: Henry Thoreau copied two poems by Vincent Bourne, “Hymn” and “On the Feast of Pentecost,” from MISCELLANEOUS POEMS: CONSISTING OF ORIGINALS AND TRANSLATIONS (London: W. Ginger, 1772) into his 1st Commonplace Book.
MISCELLANEOUS POEMS He copied an anonymous poem “Upon a Small Building in Gothic Taste” from a set of volumes edited by Robert Dodsley and printed for J. Dodsley in Pall Mall in 1775, entitled A COLLECTION OF POEMS IN SIX VOLUMES. BY SEVERAL HANDS.
He copied from a compilation in the library of Waldo Emerson, John Gilchrist’s A COLLECTION OF ANCIENT AND MODERN SCOTTISH BALLADS, TALES, AND SONGS, WITH EXPLANATORY NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS. INTWO VOLUMES (Edinburgh: Printed by Gilchrist & Heriot, Printers, Leith for William Blackwood: and Baldwin, Craddock, & Joy, Paternoster-row, London).
From this month into the following March, Thoreau would be reading in the 8 volumes of the 1829 Oxford edition of THE WORKS OF SIR WALTER RALEGH, KT., NOW FIRST COLLECTED: TO WHICH ARE PREFIXED THE LIVES OF THE AUTHOR BY OLDYS AND BIRCH. It appears that after studying the first 7 volumes in the Harvard Alcove (for instance, THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD in Volume II), on December 10th he withdrew Volume VIII for home study. From that last volume he would derive an Ovid quote which eventually he would situate
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in the early pages of his WALDEN ms:
WALDEN: It is said that Deucalion and Pyrrha created men DEUCALION by throwing stones over their heads behind them:– PYRRHA Inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborum, OVID Et documenta damus quâ simus origine nati. Or, as Raleigh rhymes it in his sonorous way,– “From thence our kind hard-hearted is, enduring pain and care, PEOPLE OF Approving that our bodies of a stony nature are.” WALDEN So much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, throwing the stones over their heads behind them, and not seeing where they fell.
WALTER RALEIGH For his interest in Sir Walter during this period, refer to his Journal, I, 314, 318ff., 332-334. St. Augustine noteth that Zoroaster was said to have laughed at his birth, when all other children weep; which presaged the great knowledge which afterward he attained unto. AUGUSTINE ZOROASTER SECT. V. That man is, as it were, a little world: with a digression touching our mortality. MAN, thus compounded and formed by God, was an abstract or model, or brief story of the universal: in whom God concluded the creation and work of the world, and whom he made the last and most excellent of his creatures, being internally endued with a divine understanding, by which he might contemplate and serve his Creator, after whose image he was formed, and endued with the powers and faculties of reason and other abilities, that thereby also he might govern and rule the world, and all other God’s creatures therein. And whereas God created three sorts of living natures, to wit, angelical, rational, and brutal; giving to angels an intellectual, and to beasts a sensual nature, he vouchsafed unto man both the intellectual of angels, the sensitive of beasts, and the proper rational belong unto man, and therefore, saith Gregory Nazianzene, Homo est utriusque naturae vinculum; “Man is the bond and chain which tieth together both natures;” and because in the little frame of man’s body there is a representation of the universal, and (by allusion) a kind of participation of all the parts thereof, therefore was man called microcosmos, or the little world. Deus igitur hominem factum, velut alterum quendam mundum, in brevi magnum, atque exiguo totum, in terris statuit; “God therefore placed in the earth the man whom he had made, as it were another world, the great and large world in the small and little world.” For out of earth and dust was formed the flesh of man, and therefore heavy and lumpish; the bones of his body we may compare to the hard rocks and stones, and therefore strong and durable; of which Ovid: Inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborum, Et documenta damus qua simus origiae nati. From thence our kind hard-hearted is, Enduring pain and care, Approving, that our bodies of A stony nature are.
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His blood, which disperseth itself by the branches of veins through all the body, may be resembled to those waters which are carried by brooks and rivers over all the earth; his breath to the air; his natural heat to the enclosed warmth which the earth hath in itself, which, stirred up by the heat of the sun, assisteth nature in the speedier procreation of those varieties which the earth bringeth forth; our radical moisture, oil, or balsamum, (whereon the natural heat feedeth and is maintained,) is resembled to the fat and fertility of the earth; the hairs of man’s body, which adorns, or overshadows it, to the grass, which covereth the upper face and skin of the earth; our generative power, to nature, which produceth all things; our determination, to the light, wandering, and unstable clouds, carried every where with uncertain winds.; our eyes to the light of the sun and moon; and the beauty of our youth, to the flowers of the spring, which, either in a very short time, or with the sun’s heat, dry up and wither away, or the fierce puffs of wind blow them from the stalks; the thoughts of our mind, to the motion of angels; and our pure understanding, (formerly called mens, and that which always looketh upwards,) to those intellectual natures which are always present with God; and, lastly, our immortal souls (while they are righteous) are by God himself beautified with the title of his own image and similitude. And although, in respect of God, there is no man just, or good, or righteous, (for, sin angelis deprehensa est stultitia, “Behold, he “found folly in his angels,” saith Job;) yet, with such a kind of difference as there is between the substance and the shadow, there may be found a goodness in man; which God being pleased to accept, hath therefore called man the image and similitude of his own righteousness. In this also is the little world of man compared, and made more like the universal, (man being the measure of all things; “Homo est mensura omnium rerum,” saith Aristotle and Pythagoras,) that the four complexions resemble the four elements, and the seven ages of man the seven planets; whereof our infancy is compared to the moon, in which we seem only to live and grow, as plants; the second age to Mercury, wherein we are taught and instructed; our third age to Venus, the days of love, desire, and vanity; the fourth to the sun, the strong, flourishing, and beautiful age of man’s life; the fifth to Mars, in which we seek honour and victory, and in which our thoughts travel to ambitious ends; the sixth age is ascribed to Jupiter, in which we begin to take account of our times, judge of ourselves, and grow to the perfection of our understanding; the last and seventh to Saturn, wherein our days are sad, and overcast, and in which we find by dear and lamentable experience, and by the loss which can never be repaired, that of all our vain passions and affections past, the sorrow only abideth; our attendants are sicknesses and variable infirmities; and by how much the more we are accompanied with plenty, by so much the more greedily is our end desired, whom when time hath made unsociable to others, we become a burden to ourselves: being of no other use, than to hold the riches we have from our successors. In this time it is, when (as aforesaid) we, for the most part, and never before, prepare for our eternal habitation, which we pass on unto with many sighs, groans, and sad thoughts, and in the end, by the workmanship of death, finish the sorrowful business of a wretched life; towards which we always travel both sleeping and waking; neither have those beloved companions of honour and riches any power at all to hold us any one day by the glorious promise of entertainments; but by what crooked path soever we walk, the same leadeth on directly to the house of death, whose doors lie open at all hours and to all persons. For this tide of man’s life, after it once turneth and declineth, ever runneth with a perpetual ebb and falling stream, but never floweth again; our leaf once fallen, springeth no more; neither doth the sun or the summer adorn us again, with the garments of new leaves and flowers.
Redditur arboribus florens revirentibus aetas: Ergo non homini, quod fuit ante, redit. To which I give this sense. The plants and trees made poor and old By winter envious, The spring-time bounteous Covers again from shame and cold:
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But never man repair’d again His youth and beauty lost, Though art, and care, and cost, Do promise nature’s help in vain.
And of which Catullus, Epigram 53 Soles occidere et redire possunt: Nobis com semel occidit bgrevis lux, Nox est perpetua una dormienda.
The sun may set and rise: But we contrarywise Sleep after our short light One everlasting night.
For if there were any bating place, or rest, in the course or race of man’s life, then, according to the doctrine of the Academics, the same might also perpetually be maintained; but as there is a continuance of motion in natural living things, and as the sap and juice, wherein the life of plants is preserved, doth evermore ascend or descend; so it is with the life of man, which is always either increasing towards ripeness and perfection, or declining and decreasing towards rottenness and dissolution.
Thoreau’s penciled note: “There is an undefinable flowing musical sweetness and rhythm — lie the rippling flow flow of rivers, in his prose hardly to be matched in any prose or verse.”
“Recte quidem bonum definierunt, quod omnia expetunt; Rightly have some men defined good or goodness, to be that which all things desire.” [“History of the World,” Bk. II, ch. III, WORKS, III, 110]
How the Greeks viewed their danger from the tide of Philip. “And, indeed, it was not in their philosophy to consider that all great alterations are, storm-like, sudden and violent; and that it is then overlate to repair the decayed and broken banks when great rivers are once swollen, fast running, and enraged. No; the Greeks did rather employ themselves in breaking down those defences which stood between them and this inundation, than seek to rampart and reinforce their own fields; which, by the level of reason, they might have found to have lain under it.” [“History of the World,” Bk. IV, ch. I, WORKS, V, 280.]
The prospect of the Roman period. “By this which we have already set down, is seen the beginning and end of the three first monarchies of the world; whereof the founders and erectors thought that they never would have ended. That of Rome, which made the fourth, was also at this time almost at the highest. We have left it flourishing in the middle of the field, having rooted up or cut down all that keep it from the eyes and admiration of the world. But, after some continuance, it shall begin to lose the beauty it had; the storms of ambition shall beat her great boughs and branches one against another; her leaves shall fall off; her limbs wither; and a rab[b]le of barbarian nations enter the field and cut her down.” [“History of the World,” Bk. V, ch. VI, WORKS, VII, 898.]
[Copied into the Literary Note-Book at the Library of Congress, pages 2-4 and 130-141:]
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“[To make soldiers serviceable consisteth in good choice and good discipline; the one at this day little regarded:] Emunt militem, non legunt. Liv.” [“The Cabinet-Council,” WORKS, VIII, 71.]
“[Abstinence is also fit for all soldiers; for thereby guided they refrain from violence and insolency; by that rule also they are informed to govern themselves civilly in the country where they serve, and likewise in their lodgings; never taking any thing from the owner, nor committing any outrage:] Vivant cum provincialibus jure civili, nec insolescat animus qui se sensit armatum.” [“The Cabinet-Council,” WORKS, VIII, 74.]
“To the perfections of men three things are necessarily required; nature, nurture, and use:” [“The Cabinet-Council,” WORKS, VIII, 86.]
“Whose desireth to know what will be hereafter, let him think of what is past; for the world hath ever been in a circular revolution; whatsoever is now was heretofore; and things past or present are no other than such as shall be again; Redit orbis in orbem. [“The Cabinet-Council,” WORKS, VIII, 102.]
“Men for the most do use rather to judge by their eyes than by their hands; for every one may see, but few can certainly know.”? Machiavel – [“The Cabinet-Council,” WORKS, VIII, 104-105.]
“It hath been long observed, and is a rule which rarely faileth, that he shall be ever suspected of the prince in possession, whom men account worthy to be a prince in reversion.” Ralegh [“The Cabinet-Council,” WORKS, VIII, 112.]
He calls astrology “star-learning”. [“The Cabinet-Council,” WORKS, VIII, 112.]
“We labour hard to publish our abilities and conceal our infirmities: and our inquiry into ourselves is so slight and partial, that few men are really what they appear to themselves to be.” [“Discourse of War,” WORKS, VIII, 282.]
“And when we say we are fallen into bad times, we mean no otherwise but that we are fallen amongst a wicked generation of men. For the sun, the mediate vivifying cause of all things here below, and constant measurer of time, keeps its steady course. The condition of the public grows worse, as men grow more wicked; for in all ages, as the morals of men were depraved, and vice increased, the commonwealth declined.” [“Discourse of War,” WORKS, VIII, 282.]
“Delores omnes ex amore animi erga corpus nascuntur” – Plato. [Kenneth Walter Cameron has been unable to locate this in Raleigh’s WORKS]
“But no senate nor civil assembly can be under such natural impulses to honor and justice as single persons — [i.e., ...] For a majority is nobody when that majority is separated, and a collective body can have no synteresis, or divine ray, which is in the mind of every man, never assenting to evil, but upbraiding and tormenting him when he does it: but the honor and conscience that lies in the majority is too thin and diffusive to be efficacious; for a number can do a great wrong, and call it right, and not one of that majority blush for it. – This must be the reason why a Roman senate should act with less spirit and less honor than a single Roman would do.”
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Discourse of War in General. [WORKS, VIII, 282.]
“The ordinary theme and argument of history is war;” Beginning of Raleigh’s “Discource &c” [“A Discourse of the Original and Fundamental Cause of War,” WORKS, VIII, 253]
“And it is more plain there is not in nature a point of stability to be found; every thing either ascends or declines: when wars are ended abroad, sedition begins at home, and when men are freed from fighting for necessity, they quarrel through ambition.” [“A Discourse of the Original and Fundamental Cause of War,” WORKS, VIII, 293]
“We must look a long way back to find the Romans giving laws to nations, and their consuls bringing kings and princes bound in chains to Rome in triumph; to see men go to Greece for wisdom, or Orphir for gold; when now nothing remains but a poor paper remembrance of their former condition.”
We may note in the lengthy extracts above that there is a significant reference from “Discourse of War in General” to one of Thoreau’s main political themes, the “majority of one,” which Thoreau extracted as follows:
But no senate nor civil assembly can be under such natural impulses to honor and justice as single persons — [i.e., ...] For a majority is nobody when that majority is separated, and a collective body can have no synteresis, or divine ray, which is in the mind of every man, never assenting to evil, but upbraiding and tormenting him when he does it: but the honor and conscience that lies in the majority is too thin and diffusive to be efficacious; for a number can do a great wrong, and call it right, and not one of that majority blush for it. — This must be the reason why a Roman senate should act with less spirit and less honor than a single Roman would do.
It was in the course of this 1841 reading, also, that Thoreau became aware that Raleigh had opposed astrology by insisting that “the souls of men loving and fearing God, receive influence from that divine light it self, whereof the suns clarity, and that of the stars, is by Plato called but a shadow. Lumen est umbra Dei, Deus est lumen luminus; Light is the shadow of God’s brightness, who is the light of light.” This is of course material which he would rework in his Draft F for the conclusion to WALDEN, as “The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us.”
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WALDEN: I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this; PEOPLE OF but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time WALDEN can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
“JOHN” (BULL) “JONATHAN”
This is from the 2d draft of Thoreau’s essay on Sir Walter:
But alas! What is truth? That which we know not — What is Beauty? That which we see not — What is heroism? That which we are not. It is in vain to hang out flags on a day of rejoicing, fresh bunting bright and whole, better the soiled and torn remnant which has been borne in the wars. We have considered a fair specimen of an English man in the 16th century but it behooves us to be fairer specimens of American men in the 19th. The Gods have given man no constant gift but the power and liberty to act greatly. How many wait for health and warm weather to be heroic and noble! We are apt to think there is a kind of virtue, which need not be heroic and brave — but in fact virtue is the deed of the bravest — and only the hardy souls venture upon it — for it deals with what we have no experience; — and alone does the rude pioneer work of the world. In winter is its campaign — and it never goes into quarters. “Sit not down,” said Sir Thomas Browne, “in the popular seats and common level of virtues, but endeavor to make them heroical. Offer not only peace offerings but holocausts unto God.”
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December 10, Friday: Henry Thoreau checked out, from Harvard Library, the 8th and final volume of THE WORKS OF SIR WALTER RALEGH, KT., NOW FIRST COLLECTED; TO WHICH ARE PREFIXED THE LIVES OF THE AUTHOR, BY OLDYS AND BIRCH (Oxford, 1829).
WALTER RALEIGH
Thoreau also checked out the four volumes of James Sibbald’s CHRONICLE OF SCOTTISH POETRY; FROM THE 13TH CENTURY TO THE UNION OF THE CROWNS ... AND GLOSSARY OF THE SCOTTISH LANGUAGE (Edinburgh: Printed for J. Sibbald, by C. Stewart & Co. [etc., etc.], 1802) and made notes in his Miscellaneous Extracts and Literary Notebooks.
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SCOTTISH POETRY I SCOTTISH POETRY II SCOTTISH POETRY III SCOTTISH POETRY IV
A WEEK: On the sandy shore, opposite the Glass-house village in Chelmsford, at the Great Bend where we landed to rest us and gather a few wild plums, we discovered the Campanula rotundifolia, a new flower to us, the harebell of the poets, which is common to both hemispheres, growing close to the water. Here, in the shady branches of an apple-tree on the sand, we took our nooning, where there was not a zephyr to disturb the repose of this glorious Sabbath day, and we reflected serenely on the long past and successful labors of Latona. “So silent is the cessile air, That every cry and call, The hills, and dales, and forest fair Again repeats them all. The herds beneath some leafy trees, Amidst the flowers they lie, The stable ships upon the seas Tend up their sails to dry.”
ALEXANDER HUME
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Thoreau also checked out the three volumes of THE WORKS OF THE HONOURABLE SR. PHILIP SIDNEY, KT., IN PROSE AND VERSE: IN THREE VOLUMES: CONTAINING, I. THE COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE’S ARCADIA.—II. THE DEFENSE OF POESY.—III. ASTROPHEL AND STELLA.—IV. THE REMEDY OF LOVE; SONNETS, &C.—V. THE LADY OF MAY: A MASQUE.—VI. THE LIFE OF THE AUTHOR (If Thoreau got the 14th edition of this, it was: London: Printed for E. Taylor, A. Bettesworth, E. Curll, W. Mears, and R. Gosling, 1725.)
1843
February 8, Wednesday: Henry Thoreau lectured on Sir Walter Raleigh and heroism at the Concord Lyceum.10
10. Thoreau apparently prepared this essay for THE DIAL but was refused by Margaret Fuller. The essay remained unpublished as a fair copy with pencil revisions, until “Sir Walter Raleigh” was published in 1905 in Boston by the Bibliophile Society, edited by Henry Aiken Metcalf and Franklin Benjamin Sanborn. SIR WALTER RALEIGH
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Lecture11
DATE PLACE TOPIC
January 27, Wednesday, 1841, at 7PM Concord; Masonic Hall “Is It Ever Proper to Offer Forcible Resistance?” February 8, Wednesday, 1843, at 7:30PM Concord; Masonic Hall “The Life and Character of Sir Walter Raleigh” November 29, Wednesday, 1843, at 7PM Concord; Unitarian Church, Vestry “Ancient Poets”
11. From Bradley P. Dean and Ronald Wesley Hoag’s THOREAU’S LECTURES BEFORE WALDEN: AN ANNOTATED CALENDAR.
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Narrative of Event: On 18 November 1842, Henry Thoreau, despite his protest, was elected curator of the Concord Lyceum. As such, he had a shaping hand in the course of twenty-five lectures delivered on Wednesday evenings at 7:30 over the six-month season that began the night of his election with a lecture by Ralph Waldo Emerson and that concluded on 26 April 1843 with another Emerson offering (MASSACHUSETTS LYCEUM; see complete list below).12 Thoreau later wrote, “How much might be done for a town with $100: I myself have provided a select course of twenty-five lectures for a winter, together with room, fuel, and lights, for that sum, — which was no inconsiderable benefit to every inhabitant.”13 Indeed, with a working budget of $109.20, Thoreau spent exactly one hundred dollars, persuading many of the speakers to lecture for free. His own unpaid lecture was the thirteenth presentation of the season, noted in the Lyceum records with the entry, “Feby. 8th H. D. Thoreau lectured. Charles W. G[oodnow]. [Secretary]” (MASSACHUSETTS LYCEUM, page 157). Unfortunately, the records of the Concord Lyceum do not indicate where lectures for the 1842-43 season were delivered. Our conjecture above is based on suggestions in the records that lectures for the 1841-42 season were delivered at Masonic Hall and that those for the 1843-44 season were delivered in the vestry of the Unitarian Church (MASSACHUSETTS LYCEUM, pages 156-7).
Advertisements, Reviews, and Responses: The following unidentified newspaper clipping pasted in the back of Thoreau’s college notebook14 identifies the lecturers for the 1842-43 season, including the introductory lecture by Emerson on the evening Thoreau was elected curator: [next screen]
12.Cameron, Kenneth Walter. THE MASSACHUSETTS LYCEUM DURING THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE. Hartford CT: Transcendental Books, 1969, pages 156-7. 13.Quoted in WALTER HARDING ‘s THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), page 143.
14.The notebook is at NNPM (MA 594). A facsimile of the clipping appears in Kenneth Walter Cameron, “Thoreau’s Newspaper Clippings in the Morgan College Notebook,” Emerson Society Quarterly, number 7 (3rd Quarter 1957): 52.
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Concord Lyceum. THERE is a Lecture before this Institution every 1 Wednesday Evening, at 7 /2 o’clock precisely. The course for the present season, as far as ascertained, is as follows: Nov. 18, (Introductory) R.W. Emerson, Concord. " 30, R. W. Emerson, Concord. Dec. 7, James Richardson, Cambridge. " 14, James Freeman Clarke, Boston. " 19, (Extra lecture) Horace Greeley, N. York. " 21, Wendell Phillips, Boston. " 28, O. A. Brownson, Chelsea. Jan. 4, Charles Lane, England. " 11, M. B. Prichard, Concord " 18, John S. Keyes, Cambridge. " 25, J. F. Barrett, Boston. Feb. 1, C. T. Jackson, " " 8, H. D. Thoreau, Concord. " 15, Mr. Knapp, Lexington. " 22, Edward Jarvis, Louisville. March 1, E. H. Chapin, Charlestown. " 8, Charles Bowers, Concord. " 16, (Thursday) Henry Giles, Ireland. " 22, Theodore Parker, Roxbury. " 29, E. W. Bull, Concord. " 30, Extra Lecture, R. W. Emerson, Concord. April 5, George Bancroft, Boston. " 12, Charles Lane, England. " 19, Barzillai Frost, Concord, and Conversation. ______" 26, R. W. Emerson, Concord. All are invited to attend. By order of the Curators. January 6, 1843.
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The success of Thoreau’s lecture is testified to both by the local newspaper and by Lidian Jackson Emerson in a letter to her husband. On 10 February 1843, the Concord Freeman reported, “MR. THOREAU’S LECTURE, delivered last Wednesday evening, before the Lyceum, is spoken of as a production very creditable to its author. The subject was the life and character of Sir Walter Raleigh.” An eleven-sentence summary of the lecture followed. Mrs. Emerson, who had postscripted an earlier letter to Waldo with the notice, “Henry lectures the week after next on Sir Walter R.,” wrote to him on 12 February 1843:15 Henrys Lecture pleased me much — and I have reason to believe others liked it. Henry tells me he is so happy as to have received Mr [John S.] Keyes’s suffrage and the Concord paper has spoken well of it. I think you would have been a well pleased listener. Henry ought to be known as a man who can give a Lecture. You must advertise him to the extent of your power. A few Lyceum fees would satisfy his moderate wants — to say nothing of the improvements and happiness it would give both him & his fellow creatures if he could utter what is “most within him” — and be heard. Description of Topic: Generally, the “Raleigh” manuscripts can be divided into three categories, each representing a fairly discrete stage in Thoreau’s composition process: working notes, lecture draft, and essay draft. What was apparently the lecture-draft manuscript, which had “disappeared without a trace and without confirming documentation for its ever having existed” (EARLY ESSAYS AND MISCELLANIES, page 392), re-surfaced in the summer of 1990 and was sold by Chapel Hill Rare Books of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to an unidentified collector.16 This manuscript was available to Henry A. Metcalf and Franklin B. Sanborn in 1905 when they worked on the Bibliophile Edition of the essay,17 and some of their “amplifications” of the essay no doubt derive from the lecture draft. Until that draft can be examined, however, we must assume that Thoreau used in his lecture an earlier version of substantial portions of the essay, the authoritative text of which is in EARLY ESSAYS AND MISCELLANIES (pages 178-218).
15.THE SELECTED LETTERS OF LIDIAN JACKSON EMERSON, ed. Delores Bird Carpenter (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), pages 123, 128. 16.Undated postcard in the Collection of Bradley P. Dean (received 16 July 1990). 17.SIR WALTER RALEIGH, ed. Henry A. Metcalf and Franklin B. Sanborn (Boston: Bibliophile Society, 1905).
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1905
Margaret Fuller had evidently rejected Henry Thoreau’s 1843 lecture “Sir Walter Raleigh” in essay form for THE DIAL. It remained a fair copy with pencil revisions until the publication in this year of SIR WALTER RALEIGH: LATELY DISCOVERED AMONG HIS UNPUBLISHED JOURNALS AND MANUSCRIPTS as edited by Henry Aiken Metcalf and Franklin Benjamin Sanborn by the Bibliophile Society in Boston in 489 copies “for members only.” SIR WALTER RALEIGH
Its editors had access to three drafts: Thoreau’s preliminary notes, a heavily corrected 2d draft he produced from these preliminary notes which comprised the working manuscript he used to produce the fair copy, and the fair copy itself. (This 2d draft was acquired as part of the Bixby collection by the Huntington Library, but then they sold it at auction in 1916, perhaps by mistake. That draft is now in the hands of an anonymous private collector who, wouldn’t you know, refuses to let anyone see it.)
COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2013. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at
“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST
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THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: SIR WALTER RALEIGH PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT
GENERATION HOTLINE
This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, upon someone’s request we have pulled it out of the hat of a pirate that has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (depicted above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of data modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture. This is data mining. To respond to such a request for information, we merely push a button. 80 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Commonly, the first output of the program has obvious deficiencies and so we need to go back into the data modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and do a recompile of the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process which you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.
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