Metaphysical themes and images in the early prose and poetry of Henry David Thoreau

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Authors Hannah, Bruce Frank, 1919-

Publisher The University of Arizona.

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Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/553563 METAPHYSICAL THEMES A11D IMAGES

IN THE EARLY PROSE AND POETRY

0? HENRY DAVID THOREAU

by

Bruce Frank Hannah, Jr.

A Thesis

submitted to the Faculty of tho Department of English

In partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree

Master of Arts

In the Graduate College

University of Arizona

1941

/fy/

. 2-

T A B U OF CONl'i-NTS

Chepter Page I INTRODUCTORY: THOREAU'S PARLY READING. . . . 1

II THCRIAU’S DIR CT USE OF SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY MATERIAL...... 14 III THE HOMELY FI G U R E ...... 29

IV THE ASTRONOMICAL FIGURE ...... 42

V THE HUMAN MIND THEME...... 53

VI THE MAN IN NATURE THEME AND TrCRTAU’S USE 0" SYMBOLISM...... 69

VII IN CONCLUSIONi THE JOURNAL AFTER 1052. . . . 88

143910 CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY i r0iCRKAU

By tiie ago of twenty-four Henry David. Baoreau had read

the throo works which precipitated his thoughts on man end nature, and wlilch explain more fully than any other outside

Influences the development of hi* unique contribution to

American letters. By this tine (1641) ho had come to live

at the homo of Ralph Waldo Emerson bo a recognized member of the most concentrated and self-conscious Intellectual circle

over to Influence American thought, the New England tran-

scendentailsts, and had packed in hia mind and notebooks the

contents of the Hindu "Bhagaved Gita," Emerson^ Nature,

and the volumes of Alexander Chalmers * s English'Poets con- -

talnlng the writings of the seventeenth-century metaphysical

school. It is the purpose of this thesis to trace, from this

time until the publication of Walden, the importance of the

last of these, metaphysical poets, in the growth of Thorecu’s

self-expression, not so much as a source of particular ideas

and images, but rather as an Influence toward a way of think­

ing and writing which was congenial to Tnoreau, which conse­

quently appealed to him In the work of other writers, end

which for these reasons makes a convenient point of departure

for analyzing his own prose end poetry. Ac use of meta­

physical imagery and themes is just one of the throo 2

contributory strands which color most highly Thoreau1o early writings, its inporfcance oust be evaluated with relationship to the other two, the doctrine in the "Bh&gevad Gita" and

the philosophy of Nature. Ho natter how rich the background of a writer la In its complex of reading and other biographical incidents, the total effect of all his experiences on his writing is a aingle force In which it is difficult to discern the specific in­

fluence of a particular experience. The genius of Thoreau

is simpler, externally, than that of most writers, as it was essentially the product of an isolated and independent mind feeding upon itself. His life, passed almost entirely within

the boundaries of Massachusetts, was serenely free from worldly upheaval, and though he read widely and continuously,

the processes of bis own mind were much more real and inter­

esting to him. The external life of even the mental hermit

Thoreau can be over-simplified, however, and to study his

early writings, first the interrelationship must bo shown between the ^Baberaved Gita.w Mature, and the seventeenth-

century metaphysical poets: when and how much did he read

them, which Ideas or particular sections appealed to him most, and what similarities arc reflected in his own writings!

During the first year of his residence at Emerson * s home, if not earlier, Thoreau started reading extensively

in books of Hindu scripture, as the quotations in his note- 3

book drawn from hi® reading for 1841 are almost entirely from 1 this material. The work which appealed to him most, and which he referred to again and again in his journal and in

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, his first puW"-;<;-:

llehed book, was the "Bhagavad Gifca,R a portion of the

sacred Hindu epic Mahabhcrata. In this most famous section

of the work the great god Krishna, having clothed his spirit

In earthly fora, instructs the young Prince Arjuna, about to

go into battle, in the doctrine which man must follow to

attain the highest spiritual state, and in eighteen short

chapters outlines the main points of Hindu philosophy with­

out going into the intricate religious code expounded in the

laws of the Vedas and Menu, which Thoreau also read. Krishna's

typically Oriental dissertations on such mystical problems as

“The Mystery of Omnipresence" and "The Yoga of Devotions" did

not appeal to Thoreau so much as chapter# on "The Secret of

Work" and "Self Mastery," in which he found a basic for prac­

tical ethics very similar to his own convictions#

Specifically, the ideas Thoreau found in the "Bhagavad

Oita” which fitted in perfectly with his own moral reflections

were the doctrine of individual Integrity and the more purely

religious concepts of deity and immortality. One remark by

Krishna suras up what was always Thoreau1s ideal of intellec­

tual development: "Know, 0 Prince, that when a wan froeth

1. ii. W. Adana, 0Thoreau*a Literary Apprenticeship," BP, XXIX (October, 1932), p. 619. 4

himself from the bond# of the desires of his heart, and findeth satisfaction in the Real Self within himself— #ueh 1 a one has attained Spiritual Consciousness.”

It was his striving for this goal which drove Thoresu to live at Walden Pond, which determined the nature of each of hie friendships, and which was at once the strength end weakness of hi® thinking. Carried to the extreme, such an ideal led him to shun contemporary problems fro® time to time and live solely within his own mind, ostensibly to get the proper perspective on universal value#, but as often as not the result was merely rumination on his own ego. "We have repeatedly to withdraw ourselves into our shells of 2 thought like the tortoise,” said Thoreau, a reflection of the words in the "Bhegavad Gita," which says "When a man hath attained true spiritual knowledge, he beccmoth like unto the tortoise which is able to withdraw into Its shell 5 its limbs." this preoccupation with the Real Self con­ siderably narrows individual responsibility and the demands of duty, both for Thoreau and for the writer of the *Bhagavad

Oita." Says the letter.

Take hold of that work which lies nearest thy hand, and do it the best that is in thy power to do— end it will be well with thee...^Perform thy task for the sake of Duty to the Roal Self alone, and2 31

1. bhhagavad Oita,u p. ob. 2. Walden Edition, Journal. Vol. II, p. 46. 3. "BMgfived■ Oita," p. 38 5

1 for no other motive.

The central thesis of Thereto!’s MCivil Disobedience” is that / any individual constitutes a majority if he thinks and acts from the single, motive of personal integrity.

In comparison with his staunch belief in the individual soul as the only determiner of truth, or right and wrong, most of Thoreau*s other philosophical ideas are relatively pale and unimportant, Whatever religious beliefs he held, in the conventional sense of the wordc, were more Hindu than anything else. Any allusion to a god or gods in his writing Is usually purely literary, with reference most often to

Greek mythology. His ono attempt to define deity follows tho Hindu bo lief: ’’Each man1 s God— his Conception of Deity— 2 is himself at his best magnified to infinity.” Thoreau observed that a people frame their gods according to their circumstances and their ideas of authority and respectability. He even gees as far as to say, with characteristic emphasis 3 on the individual, "What a man believes, Goa believes.”

Almost a corollary to his faith in man’s spiritual develop­ ment and his ability to conceive of Cod In his own Imago is his belief in the transmigration of souls, the Hindu eon- 4 coption of immortality.

1. Ibid.* pp, 44-45. 2. lela.. pp. 157-158. 3. Mi vers id e Edition, A u'cek on tho Concord and Kerrlmack Rivers, pp. 82-85*. 4. Por a complete discussion of this point oeo Raymond W. Adams, "Thoreau and Immortality," SP,XXVI (January,1929), pp. 58-66. 6

He comments in his journal after visiting a menagerie,

"It is unavoidable, the idea of transmigration: not merely 1 a fancy of the poets, but an instinct of the race*" That he too had this Instinct and cherished it as personal belief is shown by M s letter to Mre* Imcy Ercvm written shortly 2 after the death of Fmereon*s eon, Waldo* His Intuitive feeling that the soul migrated from lower forma of life to eventual Immortality came to him also when he felt partic­ ularly close to nature, but, aside from the.concept of deity men tidied above, this was his only firmly held, belief which could be called a religious conviction*

Emerson’s Nature, one of the earliest and most complete statements of transcendentalism as a. philosophy, v/rg an earlier and more personal Influence on Tboreeu than tho

"Hhagavad Gita." Henry Seidel Canby, his most recent and most thorough biographer, says, "It is not too much to say that Tboreeu 'ws® made by two book®, •Mature1 and the 5 •Bh&gavad Gita* *" In the Hindu poem he found outlined the only religion which ever appealed to him, at least in his youth, and in Emerson*s treatise, which he probably 4 picked up to rena as a senior at Harvard in 1837, ho found a contemporary describing man*s relation to nature and

1* Walden Ea1tlon«' Journa1, Vol. II. p* 271. 2. Elverside Edition, ramiliar Lottors, p* 46. 3. Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau/ p. W. 4. Ibid.. p. 90. 7

the universe in a way he had often felt but not yot expressed.

The Importance of Emerson1e Influence on Thoreau*o thought and personality has® been re-evaluated by recent writers. John Brooks Moore*e article, "Thoremu Rejects

Emerson,” vigorously tries to establish Thoroau as an in­ dependent thinker in his own right rather than an Inferior mimic of Emerson, the reputation which stuck to Thoreau for many years after it was first pinned on him by James Russell

Lowell. Moor® contends that Emerson did not mold Thoreau, but that Thoreau was already Emerson1e ideal American, des­ cribed in "The American Scholar,11 when they first met.

"Thoreau incarnated some of Emerson’s most precious dreams," oays Moore," he might almost bo called Eta«raonfs truest wish fulfillment." Though Canby also suggests that Emerson mot 2 in Qhoreau one of hie own ideas, full-blown and in the flesh, it is futile and unnecessary to try to show how much of

Thoreau was b o m Emersonian and how much was cultivated. The record of ThoreaufG development does not take us behind his earliest preserved journal entry in 1837, by which time he had read nature and met Baerson, so that in his earliest writing this Influence is already one with his own thought and experience. For present purposes It is sufficient to show, by comparison of a few passages, that tho essential

1. John Brooks Moore, ’'Thoreau Rejects Lnereon,1* American " Literature, IV (Nov.1932), p. 248. 2. Henry boiuoi Canby, Thoreau, p. 90. 6

difference between then Is not In thought content but in method of expression. With acme Indebtedness to Pinto and Coleridge, Bin ore on1 s theory of knowledge recognized two fccultlee by which the mind perceive# truths the und era tending, which apprehends sensible objects, and the reason, the individual’s portion of the Uni­ versal Being, which Is the ultimate reality, and which Inter­ prets and evaluates facto gleaned by the tmderstanding. The suggestion in this doctrine of an inner reality opposed to

an outer reality would naturally appeal to Thoreau’s faith in his own mind over the opinions of others and over outward

appearances. This Is the way he expresses the Idea in a

comparatively late passage In his journalt

I find the actual to be much less real to me than the Imagined....This stream of events which we consent to call actual, and that other mightier stream which alone carries us with It,— what makes the difference? On the one our bodies float, and we have sympathy with It through them; on the other our spirits....Our thoughts are the epochs of our life: all else Is but ns a journal of the winds that blew while wo wore hore.1

Thoreau is thus content to depend upon the inmer reality;

Emerson makes a philosophical attempt to reconcile the two.

Discussion of this problem in Nature leads him to conclude

that, even though the external reality cannot be proved. Its

phenomena are nevertheless important. "In my utter

Impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my

1. Walden Edition, Journal, Vol. 11, p. 45* 9

senses,11 ha says, "to know whether the Impress lone they nrnkc on ne correspond with outlying objects, what ulfferenee does

It make, whether Orion Is up there In heaven, or some god paints the image In the firmament of the soul?"

Thoreau did not think through an idee as steadily as Emerson, but a later statement of the same idea shows a redeeming feature of his method of expression:

I witness a beauty in the form or coloring of the clouds which addresses iteolf to my imagination, for which you account scientifically to my under­ standing, but do not so account to my imagination* It is what it suggests and la the symbol of that I care for, and if, by any trick of science, you rob it of its symbolicalness, you do me no service and explain nothing. 21 3

Besides contrasting Theresa's natural Irascibility with

Emerson's benignity, this passage reveals Thoreau expressing an idea at his beat, by illustration from personal observe- ' tion, for in spite of his insistence on the primacy of mind over experience, his ability to express a thought in

sensuous images from Concord woods and rivers marks hio

superiority to, as well as his essential difference from,

Emerson as a proeo stylist. Emerson himself said, commenting on some pages in Thoreau's journal, "In reading him, I find

the same thought, the same spirit that is in me, but he takes a step beyond, and illustrates by excellent images. that 3 which I should have convoyed by sleepy generalities."

1. kalph baldo tmerecn, Mature.*' Haiph Raido Emerson. Frederic 3E. Carpenter, ed., p. 33. 2. V.aldon Edition, Journal. Vol. Ill, p* 165. 3. Ralph Waldo Baerion,-Journal. Vol* IX, p* 522* 10

Parallel passages from Nature and Thoreau*s Journal further substantiate this difference# Here Is Emerson** statement of the transcendentallEfc,s belief In learning from the moment of intuitiont

The savant becomes unpoetlc. But the best read naturalist..•will see that there remains much to learn of his relation to the world, and that It is not to be learned by any addition or sub­ traction or other comparison of known qualities, but is arrived at by untaught sallies of the spirit. 1

Though Thoresu too believed in Intuitive learning from natural

impulses, he never discusses the Universal Being In quite the abstract terms Emerson does, and even in the moments of his most rarefied thinking he adds the specific example which keeps away the transcendental fog that sometimes gathers

around Emerson's wordy, as in the following sentence, “But

suddenly, in seme fortunate moment, the voice of eternal wisdom reaches even in the strain of the sparrow, and

liberates me; whets and clarifies my own senses, makes me a 2 competent witness."

One last example is.even more of a contrast# Here is

Emerson's description of the process of compensation, the

first sentence In his essay on that subject*

Polarity, or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature; in darkness and light; In heat end1 2

1. " &alpli”!aldo Emerson, ''Nature." nalph "V.aidb laaero6n"! Frederic I. Carpenter, od., pp. 43-44. 2. Thoreau quoteu by W. E. Ghana In g In Thoroau the Poet- Naturalist. p# 78. 11

cold| In the ebb and flow of water; In male and female; In the Inspiration and expiration of plant® and animals; in the equation of quantity and quality in the fluids of the animal body.!

Ho commentary is needed on Thoreau’s lucid statements on the came topics

If wo will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation In every disappointment* If a shower drives us for shelter to the maple grove or the trailing branches of the pine, yet In their recesses with microscopic ©yo we discover some new wonder In the bark, or the leaves or the fungi at our feofc.2

Kins, although similarities between Thoreau and Emerson are difficult to measure, whether Emerson Influenced Thoreau or whether he found him already the embodiment of his ideas,

the principal difference between them Is clear; while

Thoreau thought In terms of his external observation® of

nature end the internal processes of M s own mind, Emerson

philosophised about the reality beyond these, which ho called the Universal Being or the Ovorsoul.

Where Thoreau parte company with Emerson is where he reveals his similarity to the seventeenth-century poet®*

Mrs* Joan Bennett, In defining metaphysical poetry, remarks,

"The word ^metaphysical* refers to stylo, not to subject matter," and goes on to say that the stylo reflects an

attitude to experience. The content of seventeenth-century1 2

1. Ralph Waldo Emerson. ^Hature.18 Ralph Via Ido Emerson, Frederic I. Carpenter, cd., p.™ lib. 2. Walden Edition, Journal, Vol. I, p* 60. 3* Joan Bennett, Four Metaphysical Foots, p. 3* 12

metaphysical poetry, treatments of love and religion for the

most part. Is seldom found In Thoreau'o writing. An Intri­

cately drawn argument on the physical and spiritual aspects

of love, such as Donne1s "The Extasie,” was quite beyond

him, just as Carey?1 a worldly conceits to his mistresses

would have been beneefch him. In his own opinion. Such con­

cepts are hardly what he had in mind when he snoke of love 1 as "two planets mutually attracted.8 His ideas on religion,

as shewn previously, wore more Hindu than the orthodox

Hebraic-Christian. He remarks In hlc Journal,

Their the Hindus1 religious books describe tho first inquisitive and contemplative access to God j the Hebrew blble a conscientious return, a grosser and more personal repentance. Repentance is not a free and fair highway to God....It Is shocking and passionate.8 2

Hence in Thorenu there Is little of the preoccupation of

Herbert or Queries with sin. and salvation. Such passages

as the following ones are exceptional and aro found only

in the very early journal (1657): "Vthcn a shadow flits

across the landscape of the soul, where is the substance? 3 Has it always Its origin in sin? and is that sin in me?"

and, "Roll Itself may bo contained within the compass of a 4 spark.8

It is for the remainder of this thesis to s o w the *341

1. Walden Edition. Journal, ‘Vo 1. XI, p. TSh. . 2. Walden Edition, Journal, Vol. II, p. 5. 3. Walden Edition, Journal, Vol. I, p. 12. 4. Walden Edition, Journal, Vol, I, p. 19. 13

relationship of metaphysical poetry, sometimes ce a figurative mode of speech end sometimes as anMtimeteand concrete method of demonstrating a personal philosophy, to Thoreau*s methods of thinking and writing. Although Thoraau?s reading in only two other fields has been discussed, and those very ’briefly, it must be remembered that he w s e m omnivorous reader all his life, and that the following discussion 1® concerned with only one facet of Thoreau1s works. Other books ho was vitally interested in at one time or another included the Greek classics, the seventeenth century prose writers, particularly,

Sir Thomas Browne; Coleridge and Carlyle, among his contem­ poraries; and almost any book on travel or natural history that he could lay his hands on. The metaphysical poets, however, provide a particularly convenient point of departure in c study of Thoreau because the purpose of his writing was not, any more than theirs, to construct an impressive and unified philosophy, but simply to Inquire, as they had cone.

Into his own relationship with men, nature, and the rest of the universe, and relate what he found out in personal, vividly colored language. Ao a result of this similarity, quotations from certsin-seventeenth century poets and a dis­ cussion of them take up some space in his early books, and many features of his own writing can be defined in terms of similar features found in these poet®. CHAPTER II

THCREAtMS DIRECT USE CP

SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY MATERIAL

Before disou®sing ^loremu1® use of quotations from seventeenth-century poets in his own writing, his critical evaluation of these writers in the journal, and the appli­ cation of his theory of poetry to them, it is necessary to define metaphysical poetry, a task critics have been attempt ing for two hundred years. Dr. Johnson, in describing

Cowley’s poetry, stated the basis for further definitions:

The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together3 nature and art are ronaeoked for illus- , tration®, comparisons and allusions, their learn­ ing Instructs and their subtility surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his Improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, he is seldom pleased. *

A modern critic describes it a little more objectively:

All poetical imagery arises from a perceived like­ ness between different things....The peculiarity of the metaphysical poets is not that they relate, but that the relations they perceive are more often logical than sensuous or emotional, and that they constantly connect the abstract with the concrete, the remote with the near, and the sublime with the commonplace. 2

Only one portion of this statement needs modification. The

1. Samuel Johnson, “Cowley.!l Lives of tho Poets. Vol. I. p. 25* 2. Joan Bennett, Four Metaphysical Poets, p. 4* 15

poet Is concerned with expressing an Idea rather than an emotion, but a sensuous Image can serve his purpose just ca well as a logical one, Donne usually chooses the logical

Image, but Herbert uses either, and Vaughan usually prefer# a sensuous one#

“Metaphysical” applied to poetical Imagery has obviously a different meaning from Its usual philosophical application, and the origin of the dual meaning explains the occasional ambiguities In the use of the word. Dr, Masson, discussing its first application to a special type of poetry by Dryden and Johnson, says.

That, however, was singularly unhappy choice for a name, vitiating as it did the true and specifie meaning of the word metaphysical; and pandering to the vulgar Georgian use of the word, which made it an adjective for anything that seemed hard, abstract, or bewildering, 1

In the light of this definition, when Dryden and Johnson spoke of metaphysical poetry they meant poetry the outstand­ ing characteristic of which was an intricate or far-fetched figure of speech, such as the analogy drawn by Donne between separation from his mistress and the legs of a compass, the type of analogy that Dryden feared was too perplexing to offer In praise of fair ladies, Hone of the definitions mentioned so far, however, take Into account that many of these seventeenth-century poets are truly metaphysical in

1, Quoted by Mrs, Alexander Napier, editor, in footnote In her edition of Johnson's Lives of the Poets. Vol. I, p, 22. from David Masson, Life of Hilton.Vol. I, p.464, edi ifiei, ------16

the philosophical sense of the word. Though they were not Intent on proving with severe logic problems of epistemology or of any other metaphysical divisions of philosophy, they were often concerned with testing end comparing spiritual and physical reality, and exploring with simian inquisitive­ ness their own place in the Infinities of time and space. In short,with establishing a personal metaphysics which would answer the most insistent problems which rose up In their doubting minds. A definition of metaphysical poetry broad enough to include all these elements might be the following: lyric poetry (since Its substance Is always drawn from per­ sonal experience) which conveys an Idea rather than an emotion through use of unconventional and arresting Imagery.

The poem may express an emotion also, but the image Is used to clarify the idea rather than heighten the emotion. This definition can be augmented with the qualities of meta­ physical poetry listed by Professor E* C. Grierson: "pas­ sionate, paradoxical argument, touched with humor and learned Imagery."

Though Tiioreau never mentions metaphysical poetry as such, his favorite modern poets were those of the seventeenth century usually recognized by modern critics as belonging to the metaphysical school. Proof that his interest was In the seventeenth century, though not necessarily In the

I. H. C. Grierson. Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century, xxvll. 17

metephyslecla. Is shown by the quotations copied into his earliest comraonplaco book and those used in A Week on the

Concord and Merrimack.Rivera* Critical opinion of the seventeenth-century writers extracted from his journal does show preference for the metaphysicsIs, however, even though an examination of his theories of poetry will show that he must have underestimated the careful craftsmanship of these as well as all other poets*

While at Harvard Thoreau read straight through the twenty-one large volumes of Alexander Chalmerses anthology of poetry called English Foots. Though this collection con­ tains a large selection from nearly every poet from Chaucer to William Cowper, Thoreau evidently read volumes three to seven with more interest than the others, as these are the volumes containing the poets most generally quoted in the notebook In which he kept outlines of his reading during his senior year, 1836-37* Adams says.

In the first half of the book the notes are quite untranscendental; such authors as Beaumont and Fletcher, Milton, Sir Thomas Browne, Marvell, Lovelace, Crashaw, and Herrick are generously quoted* Quarles is somehow omitted, to be dis­ covered with delight some years later.8

The reason Quarles is omitted is that Chalmers failed to include him in his anthology* This probably accounts for the absence of Vaughan also* Sometime before Thoreau started

1* Raymond" V**' Adams, "Thorcau's Literary Apprenticeship,'' SF. XXIX (October, 1922), p. 617. 2* Ibla *. p. 619. 18

collecting the material vrhich rent into A Week (the voyage itself was made in 1839), his interest in seventeenth-century writer® widened to Include Quarles end several others who are quoted in that book. Of the ninety-three quotations which can be identified in A Week, exactly one-third are from seventeenth-century poets and most of the others aro either from the Greek and Roman classics, Homer especially, or from early English poetry, especially Chaucer and the ballads.

A table of the seventeenth-century poets and the number of

times they are quoted follow®;

William Brown®...... 1

Charles Cotton...... 2

Samuel Daniel ...... 6

John Donne...... 3

Giles Fletcher...... 4 Phinees Fletcher...... 1

William Hablngton . . • • . 2

George Herbert. . * * . . . 2 John Milton • ...... 1

Francis Queries • ... • . . 8

Shakespeare ...... 1

Samuel Daniel, though he did not live far Into the seventeenth

century. Is Included because ho was one of Thoreau*s favorites

and because the themes Thoreau admired in him were essentially

those of the later poets; that Is, moral reflections on the

spiritual value® of man. Before leaving this table, comment 18

■bould Tdc mad# on fcho absence of contemporary poets. Tenny­ son is quoted once, but the only other contemporaries repre­ sented are W. E. Chancing and Emerson, poets whom Thoreau knew personally rather than through their books.' A journal entry for 1841 sums up his life-long attitude:

V»lien I observe the off ordinate taste of some of my contemporaries in this matter of poetry, and how hardly they bear with certain incongruities, I think if this age were consulted it would not choose granite to be the backbone of the world, but Bristol spar or Brazilian diamonds. 1

At least one example should be given to show the way

Thoreau works these quotations into his own writing. Usually they serve as a text for whatever general observation Thoreau

is making, and usually even the remotest parallelism in word choice or idea tempts him to insert the quotation, leaving

the reader to thread together whatever logical connection® he can. The following sentence from A Week, followed by a quotation from Quarles is typical.

What is called oomraon sense Is excellent in its department, and as invaluable as the virtue of conformity In the army and navy for there must be subordination,— but uncommon sense, that sense which la common only to the wisest, is as much more excellent as it Is more rare....

"He that wants faith and apprehends a grief Because he wants it, hath a true belief; And he that grieves because his grief's so|(small. Has a true grief and the best faith of all.8

Although this indiscriminate use of quotations Is a flaw 12

1. Walden Edition. Journal. Vol. I. p. 2Y8. 2. Riverside Edition. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack ' Rivers, p. 511. ~ " : 80

in the general stylo of the book, it at least show® that

Thoremu knew well the poets quoted* Another proof of Thoreau*® knowledge of seventeenth- century poetry is hie comments on it, both critical comments and casual descriptive comments, found in his books, journals and letters. All these references are made comparatively early, before 1848*

Apparently the first favorite discovered after his reading in Chalmers was Francis Quarles, for he wrote to

Emerson from Staten Island in the fall of 1843 saying.

Books I have access to through your brother m d hr* McKean, and have rood a good deal* Quarles*® *Divine Poems* as well as "Emblems" are qulto a discovery. 1

That ho admired Quarles for his natural sincerity of diction,

in contrast probably to the artificial diction of other poets,

is shown by an undated journal entry written about this time:

Quarles Is never weak or shallow, though coarse and tin tasteful. Ho presses able-bodied and strong- backed words into hi® service, which have a rustle fragrance and force, as If now first devoted to literature after having served severe and s t e m uses* He has the pronunciation of a poet though he stutters* He speak® the English tongue with a right manly accent. To be sure his poems have the musty odor of a confessional. 2

Later in the fall of the same year he wrote to Mrs* Emerson describing Quarles and his poetry in about the same terms

he did in the journal entry, adding this comment, "He was* 2

IZ Riverside Edition. Familiar Letters, p. 128* 2. fielden Edition, Journal, Vol. I, pp. 458-459. 21

a contemporary of Herbert, and a kindred spirit.In an ap;© when Herbert is revived Quarles surely ought not to be 1 forgotten.* This is on® of the few direct references

Thoreau makes to George Herbert, the poet who most directly influenced the style and form of his own poems. Perhaps he gave precedence to Quarles because he more nearly fulfilled

Thoreaufo ideal of the "natural" poetj whose unstudied wordc are the reflections of the truth within him.

Thoreau*s second great favorite was Samuel Daniel.

Except for briefest mention, however, he la only considered once in the journal, when Thoreau describes him by saying,

Daniel deserves praise for his moderation and sometimes has risen into poetry before you know it....His style is without the tricks of.the trade and really in advance of his age. ^

More definite proof of Thoreau * s preference for him is the number of times he is quoted in A Week and the fact that

Rioreau*s favorite quotation was Daniel’s couplets

Unices above himself he can Erect himself, l.ov: poor a thing is man.^

Tills ie quoted at least two other places In his works besides in A Week.

Statements on Cerew and Donne in the Journal are im­ portant because they reveal something of Thoreau*s theory of the composition of poetry. He says of the former, "They

1. RiversIdo Edition. Familiar"Letters, p . 134. 2. Walden Edition, Journal. Vol. I, pp. 466-467. , 3. Riverside Edition, V.'inter, p. 175: Eamlliar Letters.pi265; 22

say that Carom was a laborious writer, but hia poems do not show it. They are finished, but do not show the Berk* of 1 the chisel.8 This Is the only admission I could find on

Thoreau1s part that a good poet ever works over a poem to perfect its form. In Carom the workmanship is permissible because after the poem has been carefully re-drafted it still looks and sounds as though it had dropped from the poet's mind an organic whole. Of Donne, on the other hand, he says,

Donne was not a poet but a man of strong sense, a sturdy English thinker, full of conceits and whimsicalities, hammering away at hie subject, bo It eulogy or epitaph, sonnet or satire, with the patience of a day laborer, without taste but with an occasional fine distinction or poetic phrase. He was rather Doctor Donne, than the poet Donne.2

Thoreau distrusted the tortuous Intellectual exercise which

Donne indulged in; he preferred poems which Immediately suggested an idea to him in a few bold strokes.

Two other seventeenth-eentury poet® Thoreau mentioned

In the journal belong to other group® than the metaphysical school. Giles Fletcher, though seme of his flights in

"Christ's Victory In Heaven" might be called metaphysical,

is classed among the Inter followers of Spenser, and is so recognised by 'Riorean:

Giles Fletcher knew how to write, and lias left English verses behind. He 1® the most valuable 2*

IV Walden' fedlVlcn. Journal. p. 465. 2. Walden Edition, Journal. Vol. I, p. 407. 23

imitator of the Spenserian stanza, and adds a moral too® of his own# 1

The other outstanding group of seventeenth-century poets

Is the Cavaliers, but Thoreau wastes critical comment on only one of them, saying, "Lovelace is what his name 2 expresses*— of slight material to make a poof a fame," Of the metaphysical poet® Carew was cleo often cavalier in spirit, but the only quotation Thoreau ever usee from him,

"Pretensions of Poverty" in Walden, is not in that vein at all.

In 1848 Thoreau wrote to Emerson saying that ho had completed reading all the English authors that Alcofcfc was reading at the time, all, apparently of the seventeenth 6 century. This mark® the end of hi® critical Interest In

them, as from this time forward, except for the travel writers, they arc rarely mentioned in the journal or

letters#

Besides mention of specific poets, Thoreau has in hls writings a great deal to say on the theory of poetry, how

it is written and who the true poet is, Eis statement of

these ideas is entirely disembodied; instead of illustrating

with examples from specific writers he simply speaks of

"The Poet," with occasional descriptions of his own method

in writing poetry. This naturally leads to some lofty but1 23

1. Walden Edition, Journal, Vol. 1, p. 41/!. 2. Walden Edition, Journal-, Vol. I, p. 467. 3. Riverside Edition, Familiar Letters. p. 181 24

vague theorizing on poetry as the revelation of truth, an

Idea he found summed up by four lines of a poem by William

H&blngton, which he quoted in A Week:

Let ue set so just A rate on knowledge, that the world may trust The Poet1s sentence, and not still aver Each art is to Itself a flatterer.1

In this exalted mission the poet becomes a man apart, in

Thoroau1g description of him. "The poet’s body even is not fed like other men’s," he says, "but he sometimes tastes the genuine nectar ami ambrosia of the gods, and lives a divine 2 life.* Thoreau lived too intensely, however, and was too close to his own sensations to let his ideas of tho divine poet carry him completely beyond reality. The poet’s writing must spring directly from experience. He says in describing the creative processi

The true poem is not that which the public reads# There is always a poem not printed on paper, coincident with the production of this, which ia stereotyped in the poet’s life, is what he has become through hi# work. Some symbol of value may shape Itself to the senses in wood, or marble, or verse, but this is fluctuating as the laborer’s hire, which may or may not be withheld. *

Or, as he expressed It more briefly in A Week;41 2*

1. Riverside Edition, A Week on tiie Concord end Merrimack . Rivers, p. 127. — 2. Ibid., p. 452. 5. For a complete discussion of this point see Fred *«V. Lorch* "Thoreau and the Organic Principle in Poetry," PULA, L I U (1958), pp. 266-302# 4. Walden Edition, Journal. Yol. I, p. 167. 25

My life has been the poem I would have writ. But I could not both live and utter it. 1

That poetry Is to Thore&u the way a poet thinks about his experience Is illustrated not only by his description of

the poet quoted above, but also by ono of his typically vague critical definitions: "Poetry is the mysticism of

mankind.” When this idea is interpreted in terms of his

own method of writing, tho emphasis on thought is even more

apparent, and, as usual, the statement is clearer and more forcible: "When I write versos I serve my thoughts as I do

tumblers; I rap them to see if they will ring.” lot only

the central theme, but the allusions and comparisons in a

poem must also come from personal observation, for he

remarks, "The unpretending truth of a simile implies such

distinctness In the conception as only experience could have supplied."

This concern for drawing from immediate experience is

the most important single common factor in the works of

Thoreau and the metaphysical poets, for they too built the

ideas in their poems on their own experiences, whether

amorous or religious, from Carets thoughts inspired by the

sight of a fly on Celia1s bosom to VaughanTs mystic visions* 412

1. Riverside Edition, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, o. 455. ~" 2. Ibid., p. 453. 5. Walitlen Edition, Journal. Vol. I, p. 281. 4. Walden Edition, Journal, Vol. I, p. 267. 26

of eternity.

Another characteristic of Thovoau and the metaphysical poets is the shifting border line between prose and poetry#

Grierson says of the seventeenth-century poets ho discusses,

*Th© metaphysicals are the masters of the •neutral style* of a diction equally important according as it may be used, to 1 prose and verso." Neither does Thoreau recognize a dis­ tinction. In a journal entry he shows that to him poetry is not a matter of external form: "I cannot read much of the best poetry In prose or verse without feeling that it is a partial and exaggerated plaint, rarely a carol as free as

Nature*a." In his earlier works he tended to call all great writing poetry; later he shifted his attention to prose#

In spite of Thoreau*s fondness for the metaphysical poets, and in spite of the obvious similarities in their ways of thinking and writing, there Is no reason to believe that Thoreau recognized the similarities, as he never linked his comments on these poets with hie critical theories quoted above, which seem to describe them so exactly. The clearest similarity Is between some of Thoreau*e early poetry and George Herbert, not only in thought, but in the very mold of the stanza. Here is an example: 1

1. H. C. Grierson. Metaphysical Lyrics anu kosias of the Seventeenth Century, p. xxxl. 2# Walden Edition. Journal. Vol. I, p» 205. I think a while of Love, and, while I think. Love la to me a world. Sole meat and sweetest drink. And close connecting- link 1 Tween heaven and earth* *

Did Thore&u think he wrote this poem "as naturally as the 2 oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd”? Ho sincerely believed that was the way other poets worked, so he must have believed It of himself, never consciously thinking of

Herbert when he wrote these early verses. To try to des­ cribe an "unconscious" influence in ®ioreau,s writing Is not the present purpose#but the correlation of similar characteristics Is so high between much of the seventeenth- century metaphysical poetry and the early works of Thoreau that a comparison of the two should explain at least to a certain extent the development of Tboreau's pithy, highly figurative prose style, quite possibly the most distinctive in all American literature. In order to be certain that the following discussion includes only the true metaphysical poets, and only those metaphysical poets read by Thoreau, quotations are drawn exclusively from the writers included in I!. C. Grierson* a anthology. Metaphysical Lyric a and Poems of the Seventeenth Century, probably the most scholarly editing yet done on those authors, and of the twenty-seven represented only the seven quoted by Thoreau in his writings* 2

IV Walden Edition. Journal. Vol. I, p« 40. ~ "" 2. Riverside Edition, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, p. 117. ------28

are used. These are George Herbert, Thomas Carew, John

Donne, Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell, Francis Quarles, and

William Hahington. Most of these are quoted In A_ Week on the Concord and Merrimack Elvers. Exceptions are Marveil, who is quoted In the Introductory page to the entire journal|

Carcv/, who Is quoted in Walden; and Vaughan, the ono excep­ tion who is not directly quoted, but whom Chennlng report# as being the topic of a conversation between Thoreau and 1 himself in hie biography.1

1. William illory Ghanaing, Thoreau: The Poct-Haturalist, p. 158. — CHAPTER III

THE H CM ELY ^IGXJIE

®ie parallel paaccgea from llaoreBU end the seventeenth century discussed in the following four chapters will be classified as containing homely figures, astronomical figures, the humani*mind theme, or the man-In-nature theme# The writer who expresses his thoughts, no matter how lofty, in terms of his own experience. In contrast to an author like Emerson who Indulges in abstract theorizing, will naturally draw many of his figures of speech from hie contemporary scene, from the homely sights ana sounds with which he is well acquainted* This is a method of writing common both to

Thoreau and the seventeenth century posts. When Herbert says penance to God is like a yoke and when Thoreau says eternal life is like an Insect ehrycallic in a kitchen table, brought to life by the warmth of the fireplace, they are obviously speaking figuratively in terms of familiar objects; they are using what we.may call the homely figure. But when these writers leave the realm of the sensible familiar, when

Vaughan says eternity is a ring of endless light, and Thoreau says his mind Is a universe, arc they then describing their experiences figuratively, or are they actually describing some personal, perhaps mystical, experiences as literally as they can to on outsider? Since fchis mode of expression so

cannot bo positively called writing figuratively, passages in this vein will be classified according to the two pre­ vailing themes found in them, both in Thoreau and the seven­ teenth-century writers: the these on the potentialities of the human mind and the theme on man’s relationship to nature.

More abstract than the homely figure but more concrete than the general themes just described is another device often used by the metaphysical poets and Thoreau, theastronomical figure. This classification is a logical bridge between the other two, as the sun and stars arc familiar objects end also convenient points of departure when used in figures of speech for soaring passages on more rarefied topics, ouch as the bright, impossible distances of unconsummated love— dE* friendship. These classifications would seem somewhat artificial and arbitrary if used as definite boundaries between each chapter, but Instead they are meant to bo sign posts only In an exposition of literary characteristics progressing from the concrete to the more abstract ones.

Thoreau, it is safe to say, is at his best when the sights and sounds of Walden Pond or the surrounding country inspire him to lyrical reflection. B. 0. Mathiessen has described this process, augmenting it with Thoreau’s own statement on his modo of thoughts

Attention to the objects around him, not intricate speculation, furnished him with his best analogies. Be could define his cost fruitful process quite succinctly: nImprove the opportunity to draw 31

analogies; there are Innumerable avenues to a perception of the truth. Improve the suggestion of each object, however humble, however slight and transient the provocation; what else Is there to be Improved?n 1 / Matthlessen goes on to say that, like the seventeenth-century poets, Thoreau used all the material which he could gather from his experience, and that although his life may not have been as complex as Donne’s It was no less concentrated. Cer­ tainly for all their preoccupation with maps and fleas in unconventional figures, the metaphysical poets could not put to use a specific and simple natural observation the way Thoreau could. Cn February 22, 1840, he observed.

The river Is unusually high owing to the melting of the snow....Great numbers of muskrats, which have been driven out of their holes by the water, are killed by the sportsmen. 2

In the conclusion to Walden, the most serene words that

Thoreau ever wrote, this river scene Is Idealistically re­ interpreted :

The life In us Is like the water In the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. 3

Such examples are plentiful all through the journal. A little lees skillful transition from a natural observation to a moralistic sentiment is this passage from The Maine

Woods, written after Thoreau noticed some timber by a river

1. H. 0. Matthlessen, American Renaissance, p. 11*7. 2. Walden Edition, Journal. Vbl. 1. p. 121. 3. Riverside Edition, Walden, p. 513. m

cast up by a log jam: Methinks that must be where all my property lies, cast upon the rocks on some distant end unexplored stream, and waiting for an unheard of freshet to fetch It down. 0 make haste, ye gods,with your winds and rains, and start the Jam before it rots. 1

In spite of Matthlesson*s statement, it Is paradoxical

that Thoreau did not fully understand this "most fruitful process" of his own mind. Although he believed that truth could be arrived at through analogous reasoning, the method he describes elsewhere in the Journal is exactly the opposite from the one he usually used to enforce his statements, for he says,nIt is more proper for a spiritual fsot to have sug­ gested an analogous natural one than for the natural fact to 2 have preceded the spiritual In our minds." For this con­

tradiction I can find no explanation, except that Thoreau on

this one occasion uttered n generalization, more descriptive

of Emerson than himself, which characterized a method of

reasoning he must have noticed in others, and disregarded

the fact that the opposite method, typical of himself, he had advocated elsewhere. To Thoreau inconsistency was not

incompatible with personal integrity.

Though Thoreau had in common with the metaphysical

poets the mental process of thinking through from the sen­

sible to the abstract, when he followed their examples too

1. Riverside Edition, The Maine Woods, p. 7Ch 2. Y/alden Edition, Journal^ Vol. I, p. 175. 35

specifically the Influence Is detrimental to hie own writing*

In his early poetry end in certain early passages in the

Journal in which he elaborated one of M s homely figures with unnecessary intellectual embroidery he did not write his best, because, unlike the seventeenth-century writers we are considering, he was neither a poet. In the sense of skillful versifier, nor logician*

The most obvious and perhaps tho only unrefutable example of a direct Influence from the seventeenth century on Thoreau Is shown in his poem ’’Sic Vita," which he sent to Mrs. Lucy Brown with a bunch of violets tied together with a straw. Tho appearance of the bouquet launches him on a description of his own existence:

I am a parcel of vain strivings tied By a chance bond together. Dangling this way and that, their links Wore rondo so looso and wide, Hothlnks, For milder weather* 1

The analogy is extended through six more stanzas. Two poems of George Herbert have the same theme illustrated by exactly the same figure, "The Flower* and "Life.” Particu­

larly similar to Thoreau*e poem is the second, which begins,

I made a posio, while the day ran by: Here will I smell ray remnant out, and tie My life within this band.2

Besides the duplication of these Thoreau also uses in2 1

1. Henry David Thoreau. Poems of nature, p. lo. 2. The Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse. p. 374. 54

hie poem short llnea and an Irregular stanza form. This la characteristic of most of his poems, and though in Donne and Herbert the eeme device gives the effect of the irreg­ ularity and simplicity of speech, a fitting vehicle for the homely figure, Thoresu only produces ragged jingles, as In the following effort$

One more is gone Out of the busy throng that tread these paths; 'She church bell tolls. Its sad knell rolls To many hearths. 1

Thoreau wrote two or three good poems, but they were not In

the seventeenth-century pattern*

Another characteristic of seventeenth-century thought and style was, once the poet had selected the familiar ob­

ject for his basic analogy, to exhaust all the possible

comparisons between the object and his idea by using every

logical or purely personal association ho could discern

between the two. Herbert, for example, draws an analogy

between the pulley and spiritual rest, the last blessing

with which God finally draws men's soulsto him, and uses

the figure not merely in passing but as the central them©

of the whole poem. Donne was even more expert In con­

structing extended, purely intellectual conceits, often

working more than one Into the same poem. Since these 1

1. Henry David thoreau. Poems of Nature, p. 62. 35

poems are so intricate and organically perfect. It Is dif­ ficult to quote illustrative excerpts, but the following

lines, quoted from the first three stanzas of a poem by

Quarles gives some idea of the developments

Like to the Artick needle, that doth guide The wand*ring shade by his magnetick pou'r, see Ev*n so my soul, being hurried her® and there, By ev*ry object that presents delight. Fain would bo settled, but she knowes not where; She likes at morning what she loaths at night;

* # * Urns flmling nil the worlds delights to. be But empty toy®a, good God, she points alone to thoe.

But hath the virtued steel a power to move? Or can the untouch’d needle point aright? Or can my wandring thoughts forbear to rove. Unguided by the virtue of thy spirit? *

This device of many-branched analogy Thoreau practiced

also, but with little more success than he attained in

imitating seventeenth-century verse forms. When Thoreau overdeveloped an Idea, the strength and vivid immediacy which he put into his best figurative writing were dis­

sipated. Thoreau was a good editor, however, and these

passages appear ns intellectual exercises of observation

In the Journal; he Incorporated none of the examples here

quoted in his published books. Each one, it will bo

noticed, was suggested by a specific observation or ex­

perience. Though only the Idea of a pulley or a mariner’s

1. &e"Oxford Book of'Seventeenth'Century Verso, p. 550. 36

compass was enough to set the wind® of too motephysical poeta to going, Thoreau struck his thoughts from the immediate incident. The earliest good example in the journal ires written in 1838* The entry reads:

Here I have swallowed an indispensable tooth, and bo rnn no whole man, but a lame and halting piece of manhood. I am conscious of no gap in my soul, but it would cocm that, now the entrance to the oracle has been enlarged, the more rare and commonplace the responses which issue from it...* What a great natter a little spark kindlebh. I believe that if I were called at this moment to rush into the thickest of the fight, I should halt for lack of so insignificant a piece of armor- as a tooth. Virtue and Truth go undefended, and Falsehood and Affectation are thrown in my teeth, though I am toothless.” 1

Hie mild play on words in tho last sentence and the figures of speech suggested by the human body are also found in seventeenth-century poetry, characteristics which will be considered later.

The physical characteristics and the corresponding moral reflections are more perfectly parallel in another example of Thoreau1 a intellectual embroidery*

I saw an old bone in the woods covered with lichens, which looked like the bone of an old settler, which yet some little animal had recently gnawed, and I plainly saw the marks of its teeth, so indefatigable is Nature to strip the flesh from bones and return it to duet again....It survives like the memory of nan. M t h time all that was personal and of­ fensive wears off. Hie tooth of envy may some­ times gnaw it and reduce it more rapidly, but it is much sore a prey to forgetfulness. Lichens

T. V.'cldon 'Edition, journal.''VoY. I, p. 56. m

grow upon it, and, at last, in what moment no man knows. It has completely wasted a tray and ceases to be a bon© any longer.^

A last example la involved and distasteful enough to receive

the full fore® of Dr. Johnson^ censure. Thoreeu stopped on

a walk in the woods to drink at a stream, and this was the resulti

How many ova have I swallowedf Who knows what will be hatched within met there were aomo seeds of thought, methinks, floating in that water, which arc expanding in me. The man must not drink of the running streams, the living waters who ia not prepared to have all nature reborn in him,— to suckle monsters, the snake in my stomach lift® his head to ny mouth at the sound of running water....Is there not such a thing as getting rid of the snake you have swallowed when young, when thoughtless you stooped and drank at stagnant waters, which has worried you In your working hours and in your sloop ever since, and appropriated the life that was yours? Will he not ascend into your mouth at the sound of running water? Then catch him boldly by tho head and draw him out, though you may think his tail bo curled about your vitals.2

In case these passages have obscured the main point, that

Thoreeu was really very adept at writing figuratively in

terms of the sights and sounds around him, perhaps one more

quotation should be Included. Instead of sticking to ono

figure In this paragraph, he juggles four very skillfully,

so that there is more variety than in the samples already

quoted. These sentences in tho journal originally described

a conversation with Bronson Alcotfc, but Thoreeu adapted them2 1

1. Walden Edition. Journal. Vol. 11. r>. 94. 2. Walden Edition, Journal, Vol. II, p. 595. 38

for use in the chapter In Walden on "Winter Visitors":

Having each some shingles of thought well dried, v;e sat and whittled them, trying our knives, and admiring the clear yellowish grain of the pumpkin pine. Wo waded so gently and reverently, or wo pulled together so smoothly, that the fishes of thought were not soared from the stream, nor feared any angler on the bank, but came and went grandly, like the clouds which float through the western sky, and the mother-o*-pearl flock® which sometimes dissolve there.3-

Besides thio rather involved method of expressing their ideas, both Thoreau and the seventeenth-century poets were capable of pointing up their thoughts with a brief play on words, as was illustrated in passing In the previous sec­ tion. Cleenth Brooks, in defending the use of puns in serious poetry, has pointed out two, in the third and fifth lines of the following stanza from Donnet

I have a slnne of fcare, that when I have apunne My last thread, I shall perish cm the shore; But sweare by thyselfc, that at my death, thy Sonne Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;' And, having done that. Thou hast done, I fear noe more.2

Thoreau tried at least two puns in his poetry also, with less

success, and usually in connection with one of his homely figures. These ere the first six lines from an address to his bootsi

Anon with gaping fearlessness they quaff The dewy nectar with a natural thirst. Or wet their leathern lungs where cranberries lurk. 12

1. Riverside Edition* Y.'alden. p. 4lV. 2. Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition, p. 27. 59

With sweeter wine than Chian, Lesbian, or ?alemlan ■ 'far* ' Tlieirs was the Inward lustre that bespeaks In open solo.l

Itioreau was so taken with this particular pun that he used

It again, in the last stanza of "Rumors from an Aeolian Harp."

And. ever if you hearken v/ell. You still may hear its vesper bell. And tread of high-aoulcd men go by. Their thoughts conversing with the aky.^

These are the only puns in %oreau*s writing used in the same.manner that the metaphysical® used them, although more mundane ones are very common in his prose*

In their search for startling figures in familiar objects the seventeenth-century poets often drew analogies from the human body for their poems, the outstanding example being PhIncas Fletcher*s "Purple Island," which Thoreau quoted at some length in A Week. From 'Bioreau1 a favorite poets of the seventeenth century, Quarles offers this rue­ ful comparison:

My sinnes are like the hairee upon my head. And raise their Audit to as high a score: In this they differ: these doe dnyly shed; But oh! my sinnes grow doyly more*and more.5

There are a few similar but obscure examples In

Thoreau*s Journal, usually dealing with his state of health*

T." Walclen' ltd it Ion, journal. Vol. I. p. CO* 2* Henry David Thoreau, Nature Poems, p. 40. 3. Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verso, p. 340. 40

In 1041 describing sight as a physically wired connection, he seId, "If I am well, then I see well. The bulletin® of health aro twirled along ray visual rays, like pasteboards on a kite string." These sentences are almost an echo of the lines in Donne1s "The Extasle"s Our hands were firmoly cimonted With a foot balrae, which thence did spring. Our eye-be&mes twisted, and did thred Our eyes, upon one double string

A more general simile, found in Thoreau's journal for 1842, also describes his present condition of healthi "My soul and body have tottered along together of late, tripping and S hindering one another like unpractised Siamese twine."

The epigrammatic nature of the last two quotations from

Thoreau suggests an important generalisation about the develop­ ment of Ills style. As was stated in the introduction, Thoreau by 1841 with his important literary influences behind him had started using the material from hie reading and experiences in an individual manner of expression. The outstanding characteristic of this individual style la his typically epigrammatic sentence, enforced by a single simile or metaphor, which can stand alone without reference to context, such as the two quotations above on health. Similar sentences, drawing color from a suggestion of the homely figure, appear frequently. The first truly Thoreauvlan sentence appeared 231

1. Walden Edition, feurnai, Vol. I, p. 260. 2. The Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse, p. 106. 3. Walden Edition, Journal. Vol. I, p. 322. 41

In the journal as early as 18591 "Hie word® of eooe men are

thrown forcibly against you end adhere like burs." They are much more typical, however, of his writing done three and four years later, and especially of the pages he In­ corporated In Walden.which contains this more elaborate

example:

The bullet of your thought must have overcome Its lateral and ricochet motion and fallen Into its last and steady course before It reaches the oar of the hearer, else It may plough out again through the side of his head. *

Not only as he mastered the homely figure did his writing

turn more toward the epigrammatic, but in all the classi­

fications of themes and figurative writing which follow

it is generally true that the later he used the material

the more completely it Is molded Into the sentences which

modern readers recognise as Thoreau1s most characteristic

style. 12

1. Walden Edition, Journal. Vol. I, p. 80. 2. Riverside Edition, Walden, p. 219. GHSiTE! If

TilF ASTRONOMICAL FIGURE

As the us® of the homely figure In the passages quoted

In the preceding chapter brings an abstract Idea closer through Illustration from familiar objects, so the astronom­ ical figure In a converse manner magnifies the activities of men and their relationships In many figurative passages of Thoreau and the seventeenth-eentury poets. References to sun, moon, and stars arc numberless in any poet's writing, but the Images In the writers considered hero are more com­ plex than the common romantic allusions, utilising as they do cataclysmic tide® and revolutions for their comparisons*

This Interest of the seventeenth-century writers say havo been stimulated by the contemporary discoveries of Galileo and Kepler; apparently Thoreau used the astronomical figure occasionally. Instead of the sensuous and concrete Imagery more typical of him, simply because It was so fitting for

expressing the lofty transcendental ideals, particularly of friendship.

A typical metaphysical lovo song making use of astro­ nomical flattery Is Thomas Carow’s nA Beautiful Mistress.”

The two metaphysical qualities In this poem which distinguish

It from the typically romantic love song are the sense of

extra-terrestrial space and the paradox which Carew packs 43

Into the last four lines:

If when the sun at noon® displcyco His brighter reyes. Thou but appear, He then all pale with shame and foar, Quencheth his light.

If thou but show thy face again. When darkenedso doth at midnight raign, darkencoso flyos, and light is hurl'd Round about the silent worlds So as alike thou driv'st nway 1 Both light and darkenesse, night and day.

The only love song Tlioreau ever wrote was in this same 2 vein, addressed probably to Ellen Sewell, and as In most of hie Inter astronomical imagery, the person spoken of is

identified with the heavenly object. The following version

appears untitled In the journal for July 24, 1839t

Nature doth have her dawn each day. But mine are far between; Content, I cry, for, sooth to ssy. Mine brightest are, I ween.

For when ay cun doth deign to rise, Though It be her noontide. Her fairest field in shadow lies. Nor can ay light abide.

Sometimes I bask me in her day. Conversing with my mate; But if we interchange one ray. Forthwith her heats abate.

Through Ills discourse I climb and see. As from some eastern hill, A brighter morrow rise to me Than lieth in her skill. 21

1. The Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse, pp. 390-391. 2. Henry Seidel CGnby.~~Tnoreau.~lD.' 11%. 44

As 1t were two summer days in one. Two Sundays come together. Cur rays united moke one sun. With fairest summer weather.1

In this poem, as in most of the early verses, Thoreau uses e lightly archaic words and expressions which add to their similarity to the seventeenth-century poems.

Donne, more frequently than any other metaphysical poet, uses the same astronomical comparison which also was

Thoreau*a favorite metaphysical expression, friends and lovers spoken of as heavenly bodies with their own orbits. Donne in one of the Holy Sonnets, describing all men as members of ono planetary system, says;

You which beyond that heaven was most high Have found new sphears, and of new lands can write, Pouro new sons in ray eyes,2

An example even more akin to Thoreau*s favorite astronomical analogy are the lines from Donne*s valediction to his mis­ tress, in which he describes the superiority of their love* s progress to that of less spiritual loversi

Moving of th*earth brings harmes ana fesres. Men reckon what it did and meant. But trepidation of the sphearos, 3 Though greater farre, is Innocent.

The two previous quotations from Donne show some vari­ ation in use of the "man as heavenly sphere” theme; Thoreau, rather monotonously, uses it almost exclusively in the 312

1. Walden'E31fcion, Journal. Vo 1. I. pp. W'-66. 2. The Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse, p. 138. 3. The Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse, p. 106. 45

presentation of just one Idea. A brief sentence In the journal Is the litoral statement of the thought expressed In the ma­

jority of Thoreau’s astronomical figures:

I find that I postpone all actual Intercourse with my friends to a certain real Intercourse which takes place commonly when we are actually at a distance from one another.1

thls statement elucidates many vaguely Idealistic passages

in Thoreau on person relationships, such as tho following

stanza from his long poem "Friendship*t

Two solitary star— Unmeasured systems far Between ue roll; But by our conscious light wo are Determined to one pole.®

An earlier poem, * Love,11 Is more obvious i

We two that planets erst had been Are now a double star. And In the heavens may bo seen. Where that we fixed are.

Yet whirled with subtle power along. Into new apace we enter. And evermore with spheral song Resolve about one center.*3 2

Thoreau never explains exactly what the "one center* or "one

pole* which controls ideal friendship Is, whether it is any

common Intellectual interest or something more specific.

Perhaps his lifelong disappointments in his friendships could

be explained by the fact that he didn* t know himself what

this mutual factor was.

I'. y.'aidcn Edition. Journal, Vo 1. II, p. 206. 2. Henry David Thoreau, Poems of Nature, p. 27. 3. Walden IditIon, Journal. VoTT I, p. 72. 46

A minor confusion In the stanzas and sentences contain­ ing astronomical figures is caused by the double mean lag of Warn word " spherean ambiguity found both in Thor ecu and In the metaphysical poeae« In the first quotation from Donne in this chapter "spheara" could mean heavenly bodies or the orbits of heavenly bodies, probably the latteri In the second

quotation from Donne rtsphearesn could also have either mean­

ing, but in this ess® it probably refers to any heavenly

body more important than the earth. In the following quo­ tation from Cares, very similar in figure at least to the

two previously quoted Thoreau poems, ”sphere” means ”orbIt"s

Thou art my star, shin*at in my skiesj Then dart not from thy borrowed sphere Lightning on him that flat theo there.1

Thoreau used the word with both meanings, but never confused

the two. Still describing the ideal human relationship, he says in the journal.

Let ours be like the meeting of two planets, not hastening to confound their jarring spheres, but drawn together by the influence of a subtile at­ traction, soon to roll diverse In their respective orbits, from this their porlgree, or point of nearest approach.2

A later journal entry, still on the same these, uses "sphere”

meaning "heavenly body"t

Love is a mutual confidence whose foundation no one knows....By our very mutual attraction,2 1

1. The Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse, p. 594. 2. balden Edition, Journal/ Vol.I, p. 59. a m our attraction to all other spheres, kept properly asunder. Two planets which aro mutually attracted, being at the same time attracted by the sun, preserve equipoise and harmony.!

This minor point of usage was discussed only to show one of the similarities in diction between Thorcau and the seven­ teen th-century poets.

Though the relationship of friends who are attracted but distent, like parts of an astronomical system is usually spoken of by Thoreau as the most satisfactory state, at least twice in hie use of the astronomical figure he indicates that these starry friendships are not as Ideal as bhoy might be. A similar use is mado of the figure by Andrew Marvell in the last two stanzas of "The Definition of Love” i

As Lines so Loves oblique may well Themcolvee In every Angle greeti But ours to truly Parallel, Though infinite can never meet.

Therefore the Love which us doth bind. But Pate so enviously debars. Is the Conjunction of the Mind, And Opposition of the Stars.®

Thoreau1o like astronomical dissatisfaction is first men­ tioned in on© of the early poems in the journal, which reads in parts .

I have rolled near some other spirit’s path. And with a pleased anxiety have folt Its purer influence on my opaque mass. But always was I doomed to learn, alas 1 I had scarce changed its sidereal time.5 *31

1. Yiald en Id i t ion . Journal , Vol. II . p. 185. $3. The Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verso, p. 746. 3. V,aId on Kdifcicn, Journa l , Vol. I,' p." 45V. 48

A later observation might have been provoked by.dis­ appointment in Kre. Emersons

She who warn as the morning light to me is now neither the morning star nor the evening star* Wo meet but to find each other further asunder.... So a star of the first magnitude pales in the heavens, not from any fault in the observer’s eye nor from any fault in itself, perchance, but because its progress in its own system has put a greater distance between.*

Thoremu, especially after 1850, wrote many Journal entries expressing dlssatlsfrctlon with his friends, but few of them ore as figuratively expressed ®a the preceding one.

Though stars were almost the symbols of friendship to

Tboreau, he used them occasionally in figures characterizing other people as well. His first published essay, 11 The Ser­ vice," which appeared In the Dial in 1840, contains this sentence, describing the bravo mans

He rides as wide of this earth’s gravity as a star, and by yielding incessantly to all Impulses of the soul is drawn upward and becomes a fixed star.2 k Journal entry also suggests the transcendental belief in the divinity of men through use of a similar figures

All men, indeed, ore divine in their core of light, but that is indistinct and distant to me, like the stars of the last magnitude, or the galaxy itself, but my kindred planets show their round disks end even their attendant moons to my eye.32 31

1. balden M it ion. Journal. Vbl'. til, p. 82'.' 2. Riverside Edition. Miscellanies, p. 35. 3. Walden Edition, Journal, Vol. I, p. 383. The astronomical flguro wno a very natural and appropriate) way for Thoreau to express his Ideas on man, hut he occasion­ ally used It inappropriately to describe some ludicrously trivial incident. Thoreau was seldom at ease around strangers, or even in a social group where he knew everyone, and conse­ quently his manners were often rude, though he doubtless defended his conduct very passionately on the grounds of his rights as an independent individual* At a very crowded lecture in Concord one evening he offended some good woman very deeply because he refused to offer her hie chair. His own reaction was apparently just as strong, as the whole

situation is described in an explosive tirade in the journal, which concludes:

I will rest as the mountains do, so that your ladles might as well walk into the midst of the Tyrol, and look for nature to spread them a green lawn for their disport in the midst of those solemn fastnesses as that I should fly out of my orbit at their approach and go about eccen­ tric, like a comet, to endanger other system#.*

It would be libelous to accuse the sternly honest Thoreau

of rationalising, but it la certainly safe to say that this

is a loss appropriate use of the astronomical figure than

hie more usual descriptions of transcendental friendship*

Some examples of ThoreauTs thinking in astronomical

comparisons naturally overlap with the human-mind theme

discussed in the next chapter. For instance, Thoreau * s 1

1. W aMen Sdltl'on.' Journal,' Vol'.'" 2. ' p..195. jealously held belief that each individual reind should train iteeIf to complete eelf-eufficiency is expressed in astronom­ ical terms in the early journal in a sentens# later recast

In "The Service#" The Journal entry reads.

Our lives 7;111 not attain to be spherical by lying on one or the other side forever, but only so far as we resign ourselves to the law of gravity In us, will our axis become coin­ cident with the celestial axis, and by revolv­ ing incessantly through all circles, shall we acquire n perfect sphericity.1

A more personal emphasis on the importance of intellec­

tual Integrity also appears In the journal in astronomical metaphor* I will endeavor to separate the tide in my thoughts, or what is due to the influence of the noon, from the current distractions and fluctuations# The winds which the sun has aroused go down at evening, and the lunar Influence may then perchance bo detected*®

If a romanticist is an escapist, then Thoreau was a roman­

ticist and this was his medium of escape* he withdrew within

Maself as completely as possible, perennially fascinated by

the world inside his own mind*

The other important strand in the human-mind theme le

a feeling rather than an idea, an intimate feeling of com­

prehension of vast stretches of time and space, which Thorcnu

naturally attempted to describe at times in terms of astronomy*

This feeling occasionally creeps into Thoroau’s description

1* Walden Edition. Journal. ¥ol* I# pp. 142-143. 8* Walden Edition, Journal. Vol. IV, p. 341. 51

of the most commonplace, as In these sentences from the characterization of a landlord: His life is sublimely trivial for the good of men....The hourlies and half-hourlies,'"the dailies and weeklies, whirl on well-worn tracks, round and round his house, as If it were the goal In the stadium, and still he sits within In unruffled serenity, with no chow of retreat.1

The sens® of astronomical apace as well as time is often felt

In a brief lino or two In Thoreau. An example in this excerpt from an early poem describing the sound of church bollsi

*T is perchance the salute which our planet doth ring When It passes another In space.®

Parallel examples from the seventeenth-century poets express­ ing .confidence in the powers within tho human mind and its ability to probe vast stretches of time and space will be

Included In the next chapter.

Before going on to the next topic, however, brief men­ tion should be made of Thoreau*s use of tho astronomical figure in hie epigrammatic sentences. As in his develop­ ment of the homely figure, so his use of astronomical com­ parisons in later writing Is worked into brief statements more typical of his mature style. An example from the journal of 1850 reads.

It is wisest to live without any definite and recognized object from day to day,— any particu­ lar object,— for the world Is round, and we are1 2

1. Riverside Edition. Excursions, pp. 194-19S. 2. Walden Edition, Journal. VolL I, p. 74. 52

not to live on n tangent or a radius to the sphere.1

An earlier smaple, though Inter then "The Service* and the earliest Journal material used in A week is also typical of the 1Gter style, although it draws its comparison from physics rather than astronomy:

My pen is a lever which, in proportion as the near end stirs roe further within, the further end reaches to a greater depth in the reader.2

Since the astronomical analogies are more typical of Tboreau*s

youthful Idealism than the homely figures are, there are

fewer references to astronomy in Thoreau1a later stylo.2 1

1. Walden Ldltion. Journal, Vol. II, p'p% 8-9. 2. Walden Edition, Journal. Vol. I, p. 265. CHAPTER V

THE HUKAH-MIITD THEME

Classifying and coaparing oxanplos in the two types of imagery so far analysed by no means exhausts Thoreau's affin­ ity with the seventeenth-century mind; both held similar philosophical convictions about the human intellect and man in the universe which cannot be explained by parallelisms in language only* Although the terra implies a certain vagueness, "metaphysical problems11 is the only phase appli­ cable to these final similarities of thought, as they are expressions of "the fundamental problems relating to the ultimate nature of reality and of human knowledge." Thoreau would be the first to repudiate much jargon, for Charming said of him, .

Metaphysics was his aversion. Ho believed and lived. In his senses loftily. Speculations on the special faculties of the mind, or whether the Mot He cooes out of the "I" or the All out of the infinite Nothing, he could not entertain.2

Nevertheless, any thinker as inquiring as Thoreau is bound

to come to some conclusion about the ability of his own mind to comprehend reality, or at least real vnluoss— in

short, to find practical answers to metaphysical problems.

17 11 lie taphys i c s.11 r-ncyciop

that any one man can only know truly what ho Is In himself, did they believe these words, but with a conviction that

the individual mind is a universal measuring stick. As a result, they described their own minds as entities— seas, worlds, or universes— as real, or more real, as anything outside themselves. Marvell, for example, describes his mind in this figure:

Mean while the Mind, from pleasure less, Withdraws into its happinesss The Mind, that Ocean where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find; Yet It creates, transcending these. Far other Worlds, and other Seas;l

A similar figure, not Identified but probably seventeenth

century, is even more typical of Thorenu's uso of the human

mind theme, and is quoted in the "Conclusion! of Walden:

Direct your eye right inward and you'll find A thousand regions in your mind Yet undiscovered. Travel them and be Expert in home cosmography.2

Such a concept of the mind as a world within neatly expresses

Thoreau' s ideal of sphericity; for & spherical mind is not

only c well-rounded one with all its faculties fully dcvol-

1. The Oxford Book of Seventeenth mturar Verge, P« 2. Riverside Edition, balden..p..4 55

oped; it is also a completely independent mind, standing freo from any influence not native to its own good. Two sentences, examples of Thoreau’a most skillful phrase balancing, express the "world within” theme in on early essays

In the spaces of thought are the reaches of land and water where men go and come. The landscape lies far and fair within; ana the deepest thinker is the farthest travelled.*

Naturally, if Thorcau feels such vast resources within him* self, he exploits them instead of the possibilities outside himself. As an early Journal entry words it, "Within, whore

I resolve and deal with principles, there is more apace and 2 room than anywhere without where my hands execute." When

this mood is at its most intense, his inner self is exalted excessively. "What temple," Thorcau asks triumphantly,

•what fate, what sacred place can there be but the innermost 5 part of my own being?” Such egocentric withdrawal, however, was sterile as far as producing real thought was concerned,

unless Thoreau was first stimulated by some of the external

impressions which he could transfer to his writing so con­

cretely. A sentence such as the following stands alone in

the journal; it does not evolve from any vivid natural

description nor lead to acidulous moral reflections; it is

only "sphericity" at the end of its rope, smug and self-

contained;

i« Riverside Edition^" Excursions. Vtetlk' to y.&chusett.p. 16G. 2. Riverside Edition, Winter. "'pT 562. 5. Ymlden Edition, Journal. Vol. II, p. 315. As I can throw ay voice into my heed and sing very loud and clear there, so I can throw my thought into a higher chamber, and thin;: louder and clearer above the earth than men will understand.

The imago of a Yankee with a naturally nasal voice deliber­ ately singing through his nose is not a very appealing on©, but the same idea is expressed many times in the journal, usually In a more appropriate figure. Here Is one drawn fro® the seasons $

The wind of man in the two seasons is like the atmosphere of winter. He depends more on him­ self in winter,— on his own resources,— less on outward aid. He migrates into his mind, to perpetual summer.2

For one last example of these abort figures praising self- cultivation of the intellect, a journal entry for October 12,

1851, reads, ’’What if the clouds shut out the heavens, pro­ vided they concentrate my thoughts and make a more celestial 3 heaven below." When Thoreau1® picture of the mind as a world within is immediately stimulated by some outside ex­ perience, however, the figurative passage is more vivid.

Some contemplation of astronomy leads him to observe.

But is not the poet who walks by night conscious of a tide in hi® thought which is to be referred • to lunar influence. In which the ocean within him overflows its shores and bathos the dry land? Has he not his spring tides and his neap tides, the former sometimes combining with the winds of heaven to produce those memorable high tides of the calendar which leave their marks for ages, when all Broad Street is submerged, and incal-

T. Weldon Ed it ion. Journal. Vol. IV« p. 19. 2. Walden Edition, Journal. Vol. Ill, p. 70. 5. Walden Edition, 'Journal'. Vol. Ill, p. 67. culabl® damage is done to the ordinary shipping of the mind?l

Mother long passage on cultivating the yeeoureee of the mind. Is provoked by reading about recent gold discoveries. The analogy is expanded at length for several pages, saying In part.

I asked myself why I might not bo washing some gold daily, though it were only the finest particles,— why i might not sink a shaft down to the gold within me, and work that mine. There is a Ballarat, a Bendigo for you,— what though it were a sulky-gully?2

Robert Louis Stevenson, in his stringent criticism of

Thoremu, said.

The secret of his retirement lies not in misanthropy, of which he had no tincture, but part in his engross­ ing design of self-improvement, and^part in the real deficiencies of social lntercouraa.3

The preceding quotations show Thorecu absorbed in self-

improvement ; other examples of the world-within theme show him withdrawing not do much for self-improvement as from the feeling he occasionally had of the social deficiency in others as well as in himself. So great was hie disgust with

the trivial matters which use up the social intercourse of

most men, that he was sometimes led to a complete repudia­

tion of contemporary affairs, as in the journal passage 123

1. Walden Edition. Journal^"Vol# 111, p. 9% 2. Riverside Edition, Miscellanies. "Life Without Principle," pp. 266-267." 3. Robert Louis Stevenson,"Henry David .Thqrcnu, His.Character ■ and Opinions.* Familiar Studies of Uen and Books, p. 14b. 58

which reads, ■

Shall the tcaplo of cur thought he c public arena where the moat trivial affaire of the market and the gossip of the tea table is sic discussed,— a dusty, noisy, trivial place? Or shall it be a quarter of heaven itself, a place consecrated to the service of the gods, a hypaefchrnl temple?..,. Think of admitting the details of a single case of the criminal court into the mind...to make a very bar-rocn of your nind*s Inmost apartment.1

A more personal dissatisfaction with the possibility of any real communication of ideas appears in the labor journal*

”1 have never met with a friend who furnishes me sea-room," remarks Thoreau. "I have only tacked a few times and come to anchor,— not sailed,— made no voyage, carried no venture."2

Did it never occur to Thoreau that his jealously guarded integrity was the intellectual strait jacket which might have been preventing the perfect communication he wca always seek­ ing? Apparently not, because time and again he expresses his distrust of outside influences, of other people or even of travel. "I am afraid to travel much to famous places," he said, "lost it might completely dissipate the mind."^

And after ho reached maturity he never loft New England,

seldom even Concord, except for a brief sojurn in Canada

and a later one in Minnesota in search of health. Norman

Poerster say® truly of him, "Concord was not only his chamber

of joys; it was also his cell."^

1.' ft a id on' Edit ion," vwmSECTS uu .&.* Vol. II, p. 2m Walden Edition, Journal, Vol. *wa.. IV, p.i 514. 5* W aMen Edition, Journal. Vol. Ill, p. 255. 4. Norman Poerster, "yrhorcau'," Nature irT AtaericcnLiterature. p. 86. Ab with Concord •so with his sphericity of mind: it was the source of his greatness as well as his limitations.

Even though Thereau limited himself deliberately to the landscapo of hia own mind, the prospect was "far and fair within.11 and ho furnished it attractively. Both Thorcnu and the seventeenth-century poets considered themselves microcosms, as is clearly shown by their repeated uce of the #world within* figure. "Man is one world, and hath 1 another to attend him," song Herbert. "I cm a little world made cunningly of elements," said Donne, in a more personal application. "This earth which is spread out like a map around mo is but the lining of ay inmost soul exposed," asserted Thoreau In the same vein. But the figure was more closely identified with reality in Thoreau* c thinking, so he treated it more often and at greater length than did the metaphysical poets. A poem which appears only In the journal

shows how detailed Thoreau could make the analogy:

I do not fear my thoughts will die, For never yet it was so dry As to scorch the asuro of the sky. It knows no withering and no drought. Though all eyes crop, it ne'er gives out. My eyes my flocks arc; Mountain ray crops are. I do not fear my flocks will stray, For they were made to roam the day. For they can wander with the latest light Yet be at home at night.4

1. The English Works of" >1. ii, p. £lb. 2. "me The uxroraOxford uookBook oiof oovenuecnanSovt uenmry Verse, p. 130. 5. Quo feed by V?. K . Chann In r . Thoreau: the Poe b-llntura list, p . 110. 4. Walden Edition, Journal. Vo? TT‘r - ’r‘re~" The concept or a human being ee a microcosm Is usually only mentioned in passing in the metaphysical poems to demonstrate man’s universality, but it was one of Thorcau’s favorite topics of speculations Less concrete, hence less interest­

ing, than Thoreau’s previous description of the landscape of his mind is this day dream, which is recorded in the

journal:

In proportion as I have celestial thoughts is the necessity for me to be out and behold the sky before sunset these winter days. That is the symbol of the unclouded mind that knows neither winter nor summer. V/hat Is your thought like? That is the hue, that the purity, and trans­ parency, and distance from earthly taint of my inmost mind, for whatever wo see without is a symbol of something within, and that which is farthest off is the symbol of whet is deepest within.1

A more homely description of the contents of his mind

may be a borrowing from Herbert. On the first page of the

journal Is this cxcorpt from "The Church Porch":

By all moans use sometimes to be alone. Salute thyself, see whet thy soul doth wear. Daro to look in thy chest; for 1t is thine own: And tumble up and down what thou find’st there. Who cannot rest till he good fellows find. He breaks up home, turns out of doors his mind.2

The image of the mind as a chest of clothes is used by

Thoreau in one of his own poems in the same volume of the

journals 12

1. "'Walden"Edition.' Journal. Voi.~IIT.~p. 20fl~. 2. Walden Edition, Journal. Vol. I, p. 2. 61

Packed In my mind lie all fcho clothes Which outward nature wears.... * » #- . - . . , . , . ^ ^ For while I look for change abroad, I can no difference find. Till some now ray of peace uncalled Lmnines ay Insect mind.l

This quotation is the last sample of the variety of ways

Thoreau and the seventeenth-century poets rejoiced In their minds1 completeness within themselves, in figures using world, seas, gold mines, and clothes chosts for their comparisons.

The belief, somewhat over-confident, in the mind as

"infinite space In n walnut shell" is easily turned in#Id# out into a belief that the mind, containing Infinities within itself, can comprehend tho Infinities of space and time with­ out. Even though attempts to express these concepts some­ times sky-rocketed away with them, the two ideas arc closely linked both in Thoreau and in tho metaphysical poets. For example both beliefs are stated, fairly concretely, in Her­ bert’s poem "Man."

Man is all symmetric. Full of proportions, one limbo to another. And all to all the world besides. Each part may call the farthest, brother. For head with foot hath private amitle. And both with moons and tides. # * # His eyes dismount tho highest starre. He is in little all the sphere.2

l'. Walden Edition. Jou'rna 1. Vol. I. p. 1291. 2. The English Works of George Herbert. Vol. II, pp. 217 219. fho cerae relationship wna pointed out nor© succinctly by

Thoreau, when he said, ^Your scheme must be the frsrncwcrk of 1 the universej all other schemes will soon be ruins*"

Man1c disembodied Intellect afloat in boundless time and space is pictured frequently by the metaphysical poets, although they preferred to call it "soul" rather than "mind" or "intellect." For instance Carow in a song In memory of

Lady Mary Wentworth says:

Else the soul grew so fast within. It broke the outward shell of sin. And go was hatch*d a Cherubin*

In height, it soar’d to God above; . In depth, it did to knowledge move. And spread in breadth to general love*2

Hablngton describes a similar expansion of the soul in the lines:

My soul® her wings doth spread And heaven-ward flies, Th* Almighty’s Mysteries to read In the large volumes of the skies.3

The same theme, without the religious ccsfcacy. Is ex­ pressed in Thoremu’s journal when he cays, "Man Is but the place where I stand, and the prospect hence is infinite,

Even though the prospect was infinite, Thoreau believed ho could see to the end of it, at least in his youth, for more consistently typical of his early writing than any other

1* Riverside Edition, A Week on the Concord end Merrimack Rivers, p. 88. ' : 2. ThcOxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse, p. 598. 5. The Oxford book of Seventeenth Century Verse, p. 427. 4. Walden Edition, Journal,Vox. Ill, p. 382. 63

Characteristic %ao his belief la his mind.*o ability to travel to the height or depth of any feet or idea while he sat in quirt contemplation* The following quoted variations on this themo'are presented chronologically, and all except one appear before 1840.

In the early journal, even in the simplest natural descriptions, a sense of "the human infinite," as Kerman

Poorster calls it, is often evident. For example, follow­

ing the descriptions of a landscape in a journal entry for

1837, Thoreau adds, "Thus X ednire the grandeur of my emerald carriage, with its border of blue, in which I am 2 rolling through space." More often, however, tho idea io more consciously and elaborately expressed* Another journal

entry in 1837, for example, reads.

Not the carpenter alone earrlea him rule in his pocket. Space is quite subdued to us,The meanest peasant finds in a hair of his head, or the white crescent upon his nail, the unit of measure for the distance of the fixed stars. His middle finger measures how many dinits into space; he extends a fcvz times his thumb and finger, and the continent is spanned; he stretches out his arms, and the sea’ is fathomed.5

Thin theme of "I Cover tho Universe" is expressed

sometimes in terror, sometimes in confidence* Thorcau is

usually complacent in his expressions of personal omnis­

cience, but a poofc like Herbert or Quarles enriches tho2 1

1. Norman Foors ter eau:;"' Nature in' Am eric ah;. Literature.?* H i * 2. YJaldcn Edition, Journal. Vol. I, p. 13. 5, Waldon Edition, Journal. Vol. I, p. 15. 64

sene theree with a religious passion unknown to Thorccu. The best instance Is shown in two stanzas from Herbert’s poere

"The Tenper*t ' : . ' . ” ■ - Although there were some fourtie hcav’ns, or more. Sometimes I poere above there all; Sometimes I hardly reach a score. Sometimes to hell I fall.

0 rack roe not to such a vast extent; Those distances belong to fchoo: The world’s too little for thy tent, A grave too big for mo.3-

Thoreau’ s contemplation of tra v?-at extent’’ raises in him little core than the mild anxiety reported in Journal

entires like the following one in 1848:

How can a man sit down and quietly pare his nails, while the earth goes gyrating ahead amid such a din of sphere music, whirling him along about her axis some twenty-four thousand miles between sun and sun, but mainly in a circle some two millions of miles in actual progress.2 -

Two other examples from the Journal of 1838 are more typical

of Thoreau’s early passages on this theme, and more mystical

One of the last stonsas in his poem "The Bluebirds” reads:

1 felt that the heavens were all around, And the earth was all below. As when in the ear there rushes a sound Which thrills you from top to toe.3

A longer prose paragraph shows the direct Influence of Hindu

doctrines of Yoga but closes with a typical metaphysical

figures

1. The Oxford book of Seventeenth Century-Verse, p. 366. 2. Walden Edition, Journal. Vol. I, p. 3o. 3. Walden Edition, Journal. Vol. I, p. 46. If Y/ifcfct closed cars and eyes I consult conscious­ ness for a moment, immediately are all walls and barriers dissipated, earth rolls from no, and I float, by the impetus derived from the earth and the system a subjective end heavd'ly laden thought, in the midst of an unknown and infinite sea... eternity and space gamboling familiarly through my depths....! an a restful kernel in the magazine of the universe.^

Though records of sueh mlasmic trances occur frequently in the first volume of the journal, Thoreau seldom incor­ porated them in his works# When he did, the words were more vivid and the resulting passage has more to say. In an excellent example taken from A Week. Thoroau remarks:

In what inelosuro does the astronomer loiter I His skies arc shoal and Imagination, like a thirsty traveler, pants to be through their desert. The roving mind Impatiently bursts the fetters of astronomical orbits, like cob­ webs in the c o m e r of its universe, and launches itself to where distance fails to follow, and law, such ns science has discovered, grows weak and weary.2

Since Thoreau’s preoccupation with the BI Cover the Universew

theme is a characteristic of his early writing, it is

prominent only in A Viook. of all his published books, and

in the journal disappears almost entirely after 1839. Tho

only exception I could find was an entry in 1851, which

states briefly, "Imbosomed in clouds as in a chariot, the

mind drives through the boundless fields of space*•1

1. WaldehSSltlon. Journal. Vol. I. pp. 55-54. 2. Riverside Edition, A ’week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers p. 510. ~ 3. Walden Edition, Journal. Vol. II, p. 205* All th® preceding quotations from Thoreau and the seventeenth~cenfcui*7 poets deal with the mind in infinity of space$ only slightly less frequent are figures using infinity of time for thoir comparisons, a recognized char­ acteristic of metaphysical poetry. "To speak familiarly of ultimate things," says Mrs. Joan Bennett, "is the prerogative of the metaphysical poets, their habit of connecting the - - ■ : . 1 temporal and the eternal made it possible for them." Her statement is corroborated by a m o d e m writer in the field of philosophy who has said, "The eternal appears to have enjoyed a peculiar fascination for the metaphysically-minded

2 . : - of the human species." Both Thoreau and the seventeenth- century poets are fascinated by the prospect of eternity and the swiftness of passing time.

Two metaphysical poems of very different temper illus­ trate this characteristic. The mystical Vaughan in the first stanza of his poem "The World" says*

I saw Eternity the other night Like a great Ring of pure and endless light. All calm, as it was bright. And round beneath it. Time in hours, days, years Driven by the spheres Like a vast shadow mov’d. In which the world And all her train wore hurl’d;3

A more famous and more intense reflection on the problem of

time by a metaphysical poet are the lines in Marvell’s

1. joan Bennett. Pour- Motaphysleal' Poets. p. 90. 2. W. T. Feldman, The Philosophy of John Dewey, p, 25. 3. The Oxford Book of seventeenth Century Verse, p. 776. "To his Coy Mistress.

But at my back I nlv;aics hear Times winged Charrlot hurrying near: And yonder #11 before us lyo Deserts of vest Eternity.1

Thoreau too felt "the irresistible revolution of time," as he termed it, and the vastness of eternity.

Even in n lively objection to tho futility of philosophical inquiry he includes an observation on the problem of time.

Pointing up his words as usual with a specific and homely comparison, he says.

Stick your nose into any gutter, entity or object, this of Motion or another, with obstinacy, you will easily drown if that be your determination. Time, at its own pleasure, will untie the knot of destiny. If there be one, like a shot of electricity through an elderly, sick household cat.3

Apparently he did not foci himself drowning when ho attempted to describe the soul stretched over all time and space, as he did in the following early journal entry:

Nor can all the vanities that so vex tho world alter one whit the measure that night has chosen, but ever it must be short particular metre. The human soul is a silent harp in God*s quire, whose strings need only to be swept by the divine breath to chime in with the harmonies of creation. Every pulse-boat is in exact time with the cric­ ket’s chant, and tho tickings of tho death watch in the wall. Alternate With these if you can.4 1

1. The Oxford Book of SeventeenthCentury Verse, p. 744. 2* Wel'fi.en Edition. Journal. Vol.""IV. p. 33G. 3. Yuotea by W.E. Channing in Thore&u.: tho Poet-Naturalist. pp. 203-204. 4. Walden Edition, Journal. Vol. 1, p. 53. Once again, however, when the Idea Is rewritten for the finished book It is imaginatively but specifically re­ stated. In Walden the words with which Thorcau considers the problem of the human mind grappling with time and eternity are more vividly concrete than the bald statement of such an impossibly recondite theme would load one to be­ lieve. The passage roadst

Time is but the stream I go a fishing in, I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky whose bottom is pebbly with stars.1

Thoreau’o test flights into boundless time and space, his only truly metaphysical contemplations, are couched in some of the most poetio sentences of A Week and balden.but, no was stated previously, this was characteristic of only hie early writing. By 1851 only a trace of the former con­ fidence is found as in a sentence like this: "The excur­ sions of the imagination are so boundless, the limits of 2 towns are so petty," The belief is still held, but the

Intensity of personal experience has gone. 1

1. Riverside Edition, Walden, 'p.' 15b. 2. 7,widen Edition, Journal. Vol. Ill, p. 5. CHAPTER VI

THE HAH I!T NATURE THEME

AND THOREAU’S USE CP SYMBOLISM

m e one subject treated In Thorcau’s writing which has become most closely associated with his name, his love, almost pantheistic worship, of external nature, has been at least mentioned In all the previous classifications of themes and images he used, but it remains for this chapter to dem­ onstrate tho form it took in his early writing; it is in­ cluded because no study of Thoreau Is complete without somo consideration of his rhapsodic words on nature. Thoreau tho nature worshipper was not the product of the romantic move­ ment or any other literary or intellectual Influence. His on® man back-to-nature movement was a practical and success­ ful mode of life, in contrast to the romantic experiments

In returning to nature such as Brook Perm and Bronson Alcott*s

Fruitlands, which were failures. Neither did Wordsworth have any appreciable influence on Thoreau’s thoughts on nature.

The only critical comment he makes on Wordsworth is a single

slightly unfavorable remark in the journal, which says, "I wee reminded of the way in which Wordsworth no coldly speaks

of some natural visions or scenes’ giving him pleasure!"1

1. Riverside Edition. Summer, p.obb. ■ 70

Even in describing his communion, with nature, the deepest emotional experience he ever folfc, Ihoreau’e witing

Is closer to some of the seventeenth-century poets than any of his contemporaries, though he failed to credit the earlier writers with his depth of under#fcandlag* lie remarked In an early journal entry,

I am amused with the manner in which Quarles and his contemporary poets speak of nature,— with a sort of gallantry, as a knight of his lady,— not as lovers, but go having a thorough respect for her and some title to her acquaintance.!

Apparently when he wrote that,ho had forgotten the lines in Andrew Marvell1s "The Garden" which shortly precede the words in the same poem which he copied onto the first page of M s journal, and which express the relation of the human soul to nature as intimately as anything Thorecu ever wrote.

These linos, the climax of the poem, rends

Here at the Fountains sliding foot. Or at some fruit-trees mossy root. Casting the Bodies Vest aside. My Soul Into the boughs does glide: There like a Bird it sits, and sings. Then whets, and combs Its silver Wingsj2

Marvell’s treatment of this theme is not the only one

in metaphysical poetryj Vaughan’s poems particularly con­

tain many figures in which he identifies himself with some object in nature# one example appears in his poem "Unprofit­ ableness," which contains the following comparison: 1

1. Walden Edition. Journal."Vol."I T pT~458~. 2« The Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verso, pp. 752-753. •Twas Mfc jtiafc now ny black leaves hopeless hang. Sullied with dust and mud; Each snarling blast shot through no and did shear Their youth and beauty.1

Vaughan stated the same idea more specifically In these lines from his poem "And Do They So?*

I would I were a stone, or tree. Or flovrre by pedigree. Of some poor high-way herb, or Spring To flow, or bird to sing I Then should I (fcyec; to one sure state,) All day expect my date; Hut I am sadly loose, and stray A giddy blast each \vay;2

Donne also, at loaat once, approaches this identification of self with an object in nature in the lines from "Twick- nam Carden* which reads

Dove let meo Some senclesse peace of this place bee; Ivlako me a mandrake, so I may groane here, Cr a stone fountain# weeping out my years.3

The metaphysical poets, as these examples shew, were not always concerned with writing intellectual conceits with facile logic*

Thoremu*s paeans to nature are usually expressed in poetry in the early journal, and though the prosody ciay be faulty, tho sincerity of his sense of Intimacy is unques­

tionable. Sometimes in only a few words he can suggest his feeling of mystical unity with nature, as in those two

I’." Roberta Florence Brinkley, editor, English .Poetry of the Seventeenth Century, p. 4?8e 2. The Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse, p. 773. 3. The Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse, p. 90. 72

lines from hie "May Horning" * For Zephyr rustled past v?ith leafy tread. And heedlessly with one hcol grazed my hcad.*L

Even more- in the vein of the lines quoted above from Andrew

Marvell1a "The Garden" are the last two stanzae of "The

Bluebirds," written in 1838, which reads

I dreamed that I was a Waking thought, A something I hardly knew. Hot a solid piece, nor an empty thought. But a drop of morning dew,

•Tvras the world and I at a game of bo-peep. As a man would dodge hie shadow. An idea becalmed in eternity's deep, 'Tween Lima and Segraddo.2

The similarity between Thoreau and Marvell is greatly strength­

ened by the fact that to neither of them is external nature merely a sensuous emotional stimulant, but a source of in­

tellectual communion* In Thoreau's poem it is his thoughts which are one with nature, just as in Marvell's poem it

is the power of his mind which is

Annihilating all that's made To a green Thought in a green Shade.3

More typically romantic in mood, though no more so

than Donne's "Twicknam Garden," is Thoreau’s poem "The

Thaw.” ■

I saw the civil sun drying earth’s tears. Her tears of joy that only faster flowed*

Fain would I stretch me by the highway-side. *2

1 * %aldcn Edition. Journal. Vol* I. p. 50. 2. Walden Edition, Journal. Vcl* I, p. 116. 3* Hie Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verso, p. 752. 73

To fchavr and trickle with the melting snow. That, mingled soul and body with the tido, I too nay through the pores of nature flow.

But I, alas, nor trickle can nor fame One jot to forward the great work of Time, *Tls mine to hearken while these ply the loom. So shall ny silence with their music chime.1

Thoreau*s Inter assertions of his own identity with nature are related in prose rather than poetry, and are occasionally, though not always, quite as rhapsodic. A good example Is this entry from the Journal for November 7,

18511

Dear to me to lie in, this sand; fit to pre­ serve the bones of a race for thousands of years to come. And this is my home, my native soil; and I am e New Englander. Of thcc, 0 earth, are my bone and sinew made; to thee, 0 sun, an I brother.2

Numerous other examples c o u M be drawn from the journal, but a final passage taken from one of Thoroau’s finished books show how he used the journal sentences describing his com­ munion with nature In presenting a more concrete idea. The opening sentences of the chapter ’’Solitude” In Walden read s /a- This is a delicious evening, when the whole body ic one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and cone with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself.3

Thoremu continues his description of the evening scene. 12

1. fcaldcn- tdi'tlon. Journal. Vol. 1. n. 71. 2. Walden Edition, Journal, Vol. Ill, p. 95. 5. Riverside Edition, Walden, p. 202. 74

explaining that such repose can be found only In solitude, which leads naturally, by contrast, to an exposition of tho evils of society in the paragraph beginning, "Society is

1 ■. ,4 ' r . - ' v : f coBRsonly too cheap** • ... . The development of an idea in this way from a physical

sensation is recognised by H.0» Llatthiossen as the most

Important similarity between Thorcau and the ooventeenth-

century writers, and he says, in describing the process,

, . This power to unite the thought with sense impres­ sion, the immediate feeling with tho reflection upon it. Is what Eliot has discerned to be tho distinguishing attribute of the English meta­ physical poets and has called...their "unified sensibility."2

Although an exact parallel of the sense image as used by

Thoreau is difficult to find in the seventeenth-century

poets, examples of their own particular treatment arc numer­

ous. r-'or instance, George Herberts "The Odour" begins:

How sweetly doth Hy Master round I My Master t As Amber-grls loaves a rich scent Unto the taster. So do those words a sweet content,,. An oriental! fragrancio, Ky Kastcr?

Hot only these opening lines but all six stanzas describe the spirit of worship in terms of the sense of smell.

As the use of immediate sense impression marks Thoreau1s

kinship with the metaphysical poets, so does it mark his

most Important difference from the other How England tran-3 1*

1. Iold., p* 21o. H.O* Hatthiesren, American Renaissance, p. 98. 3. The Oxford Book of" SdventeenMi' Genlury Verse, p. 582. 75

' ■ - ' ' eeendentftltats, .Describing their opposition to Locke*3

Ideas, E.C* Goddard says, TranBcsndenfeallst; and scnsatloncllEn 1— these t?erc the poles of philosophy of wind, and among the elect of the new rsovewcnfc to call a wan a sensationalist; vmr. a polito way of informing him that ho was. a spiritual and Intellectual dullard*1 : . ■ ■ Though Thereat: load his mystic moments, he vins essentially ■ : ■ ' ■ ■ c. sensationalist; and although his elders among the bran-

• ■ - - ecendentailsts attempted to see the oversoul through and beyond nature, Thoreau alone apprehended her with all five

senses. This discrepancy In their ways of thinking, which

sets Tziorcau considerably apart from Emerson, Ghana inn,

Parker, and the rest, la probably the reason that Thoreau

Is Ignored almost completely In studies of transcendentalism

as a philosophy, such as those by Frothlngham? and Goddard*

Thoreau*a us® of his senseg though It distinguished

him from the other transcendentalistc, did not keep him

from being one, for he himself proclaimed, "The fr.ct is I

am a mystic, a transeendentellst, and a natural philosopher 3 to boot." John Brooks I'ooro cays truly of him.

The ctrain of music, the touch of damp earth, the glance of a darting flan, the fragrance of a pond- lily— they were to Thoreau the instant materials of thought.»••The region of thought is, thus, to Thoreau a place net remote from the world of the

1. H. G. Goddard. Studies in -Jew fcneiand 'i'ranscendftntelism. p . 4. “ “ : 2* Octavius B. FrothIngham, 5* Walden Edition, Journal. 76

concrete, but ncceccarlly and intinatoxy atuacnca to ttiat world. Eg could not think on any other terms.1

The attachment to sense Impression does not Imply any 11ml- tatlon, however, for through it Thorcau reached Idealistic realms of thought just as surely, often more surely, than the other transcendentallsts. 'Kio product of Thoreau*s union of physical sensations with idealistic thinking is a sensuous mysticism, quite as deep though not as intonso as the same process in the seventeenth-century poets. A brief entry in the Journal shows how casually such obcerva-

tlons came to Bioresu: "As I go through the Spring woods

I perceive a sweet dry scent from the underbrush like that

of the fragrant life everlasting." Thorcnu's sense of hearing was the moot fruitful source of such reflections,

ns many entries In the journal testify. Early in the first

volume of the journal is a five-page ossay on "Sound and

Silence," and after the Journal degenerates around 1652

Into little more than lengthy catalogue® of Hew England

birds and plants there still occurs an occasional entry

which sows Thoreau’s mind stimulated to reflective thought

by some natural sound. One short example from the many

found in the journal follows: „ „

There is a sweet wild world which lies along tho strain of the wood thrush— the rich intervales1 2

1. John"Brooks'MooroT"RThoremu Rejects Emerson.^ American Literature, IV (ITovember, 1952), pp. 244,245% 2. Y;aIden fedltlbn, Journal, Vol. Ill, p. 47. 77

which border the stream of its song— more thoroughly genial to «y nature than any other.1

Tiie tolling of church bolls, as well as tho sound a of the woods, often Inspire him to this type of reflection. Several early poems have aa their central imago tho ringing of dis­ tant bells, an.: a journal entry for October 12, 1051, reads:

I hear Lincoln Loll tolling for church....All sound heard at a great distance thus tends to produce the same music, vibrating the strings of the universal lyre. There comes to mo a melody which tho air has strained, which has conversed with every leaf and needle of tho woods.2

Thoreau’s favorite sound of all, however, was the sound of tho wind in the telegraph wires which ran along the rail­ road tracks in ’’The Cut” near Walden Pond, his "aeolian harp." hatthiesf.cn has counted thirty different entries in 5 the journal describing the music of the telegraph harp; two are enough to illustrate his usual treatment of this theme. A passage written in 1G51 after Thoreau had stopped under the wires reeds,

I hear now, as it were, the mellow sound of dis­ tant horns in the hollow mansion® of tho upper- sir, a sound to make all men divinely insane that hear it, for away overhead, subsiding into my ear. To ears that arc expanded what a harp this world is

A slightly later entry is even more typical of his customary *412

1. balden Miklcn, Journal, Vo'l. 11, p. 19. 2. Walden Edition, Journal. Vol. Ill, p. 60. 3« H.O. Mntfchiessen, American Renaissance, p. 89. 4. Walden Edition, Journal.Vol. II. p. 550. 73

treatment of the - subject: As I tvent under the nexr fcelorraph ’."ire, I heard it vibrating like a harp high overhead. It v.ae as the sound of a far-off glorious life, a super­ nal life, which came dov;n to us, and vibrated the lafctloe-vrork of this life of ours.l ,

So often is the telegraph harp mentioned in connection vrith the ideal spiritual life that In many places in the journal it stands without explanation as a symbol for such a life, and often the symbol of the spirit of ancient Crock life

In particular.

It was natural for a thinker like Thoreuu, especially

In a body of writing as personal as the journal, to use concrete objects to symbolise ideas; that is, to use the some thing over end over to stand for the sane idea without fully explaining the relationship. The railroad, for example, often symbolises the new Industrialism, undirected by spiritual values, which fhorc.au so deprecated in the ex­ panding American life of his day. Cfhcir train of clouds

•tretchlng far behind end rising higher and higher, going 5 to heaven while the cars are going to Boston...." ) Since a

parallel use of symbols docs not appear In the metaphysical

poems, there is no place for a discussion of Ihoreau1s use

of them here, with two exceptions. Cne of Ikcrc-au*c symbols

can be explained most satisfactorily with reference to two

1. Id#nTId 111 on, Journal, Voi. II, p. dbQ. 2» Cne example is on entry for January 0, 1855; Riverside Edition, V/intcr, p. 146. 3# Riverside Edition, Walden, p. 18S* seventeenth-century poonn vfhlch he quoted in A V/®ek; another example of hie symbolism, a paragraph in'Waldon, can ho clarified only If It is explained in tiorao Of the thought process v/lilch links Iilta vrith the seventeenth century: the extraction of an idea from an immediate sense perception.

'The first of these tuo uses cf symbolism by Thoreau occurs in hia poem ”Pilgrims,’* T-liich reads in full:

’Have you not seen In ancient times Pilgrims pass by Toward other climes? With chining faces. Youthful and strong. Mounting this hill . With speech and with song?’

Uh, my good sir, I know not those ways. Little my knowledge, Tho* many my days. When I have remembered, I have heard sounds As of travelers passing These my grounds:

• 1Twas a sweet music Waf ted them by, I co u M not tell If afar off or nigh. Unless .1 dreamed it. This was of yore: I never told It To mortal beforei

* Never remembered But in my dreams, lhat to me waking t A miracle seems.1

This io one of the few allusions in Thoreau*c writing which

1. Henry David Thoreau. poems of Mature, pp.llu-lil. can to called purely literary, since its explanation lies

. .. ' ,-V" In the words of other poets rather than Thoroau's own ex­ perience. The pilgrims obviously stand for something lost, perhaps an Ideal or a better :;ay of life, but a glance at two quotations In A 'Week makes the meaning much more specific than this. In the stanza from Giles Fletcher's "Christ's '

Victory In Heaven" used by ‘fnorcau the meaning of !rpilgrim" is e-.pressed in a clearly stated simile. Hero in the full quotationt

Therefore as doth the pilgrim, whom the night Hastes darkly to imprison on ills way. Think on thy home, my soul, and think aright Of what's yet loft thee of life's westing day: Thy sun posts westward, passed Is thy m o m . And twice It la not given thee to bo born.-

A quotation from Quarles earlier In the same volume may have a more direct bearing on the meaning of Thoroau'a poem:

where Is this love become In later ago? Alas l 't Is gone on endless pilgrimage Prom hence, and never to return I doubt. Till revolution wheel those times about.^

Quarles, since this stanza is probably from Jonah, Is speak­ ing of divine love, but divine love had no religious connota­ tions for Thorecu; to him it was the ideal spiritual friend­ ship which he was always seeking. Kencc it is probable that

Thore&u's poem is a different version of one of hls favorite themes, and the pilgrims arc the seekers after the divine

1. Riverside Ldltlon, A V.c'ek on the 'Concord and Merrimack Rivers, p. 514. 2. Ibia., p. 85. 81

lovo, attainable in previous golden ages of the intellect, but no longer attainable in an age characterised by mate­ rialism and petty desires, blind to tho possibility of true communion of minds*

The second example of Tkioroau*s symbolism is tho only real literary riddle In the study of Thoreau. In the early pages of Walden this paragraph appears:

I long ago loot a hound, a bay-horse and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travelers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and -chat calls they an­ swered to* I have met one or ttvo who had hoard the hound, and tho tramp of the horse, end evon seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, but they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themeelves,1

When a friend once asked Thoreau what he meant by saying that he had lost a hound, a horse, and a dove, he replied,

"Have not you?” which was all tho explanation ho ever 2 offered. As a result, nearly every critic of Thoreau ever since has offered his own interpretation. Emerson ad­ mitted that it was a rltidlo, called it merely ”a record of his mythical disappointments.” Another of Thoreau * s con­

temporaries explained that the lost animals stood for three

lost persons, Edmund Bewail, John Thoreau, and Ellen ScwallV5

Among modern critics Mark Van Doren also thinks they ropre-

1* Riverside' Edition, v?a 2* Henry Seidel Canby, ___ _ , ._ ___ 3, Ralph Waldo Emerson, *' Thoreau," Atlantic Monthly. X .(Aug., 1862), p. 246. » * 4* Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau. p* 294. sent the them® of loot friendship, symbolizing "neither the transcendental universe nor the uill-of-tho-v/isps of Beauty and the Present, but some one of the human relationships themselvese,r Even more vague is the suggestion of John

Burroughs that these animals represent the "fine effluence" of nature for which Thoroau was always searching, while a more recent critic traces the passage back to "the symbolic 3 ...... language of the Persian poets."

The most elaborate interpretation of all deserves special mention. Edith Pcairs assorts that the paragraph is a borrowing from Voltaire's novel Zadlg. although she admits that there is no evidence that Thorcau read Voltalro, 4 as his name is not even mentioned in the journal. After comparing some of the Ideas of Thorcau and Voltaire to show their philosophical kinship, she offers the following para­ phrase of a portion of Zadlg as the source for Thoreau's paragraph:

One day, walking in a wood, Zadig saw a eunuch of the Queen who asked him if he had soon the Queen's dog* Zadig described the dog minutely, but said that he had not seen it. Later he mot the King's master of the hounds who asked him if he had seen the King's horse* Zadig gave a full description of the horse, but said that he had41 2*

1. Mark Van Doron. Thorcau: A Critical Study, p. 15. 2, John Burroughs, "henry D.'"Thorcau," The Century. 11(1882). p. 377. 5, Henry Soidol Canby, Thorcau. p. 294. 4. Edith Feairs, "The Hound, The Bay Horse, and the Turtle- Dove: A Study of Thorcau and Voltaire," TULA, LII,(Sept.1937) pp# 863—869. . . _ , . not seen it* Cf course ho stolen the horse end the dog.

The source for the turtle-dove of Thoreeu* s paragraph itiss iealre finds in another episode in the novel in which a parrot saves Zadlg's life by retrieving a poem he wrote in praise of the King. The three sniaals arc mentioned to­ gether at the closo of this last episode* <

Thoreav^s transformation of "dog," "horse," and "par­ rot" into "a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove" she ex­ plains in the following sentences:

The apparent discrepancy in the use of the word hound for la chlonne may be explained by Thoreau*o love of musical sounds and he preferred the euphonious word hound (which in Old English as well as in German means any kind of a dog) to the word dog. Thorcan, the poet, felt impelled to make his sentences rhythmical* Therefore it was necessary to prefix the adjective bay to horse, as well as to translate olsoau as turtle- love in order to complete M s measures.2

A disproportionate amount of space has been used to discuss

Miss Peairs1 interpretation because it is the most recent

and because Canby gives some credence to it.

At this point it is not necessary to state again that

Tboreau's writing is best explained in terms of his own

experience, not as a patchwork of borrowings from other

authors. Thoreau in passages from the journal and other

writings gives a full explanation of the hound, horse, and

i*' ifcidV, p» 867. 2. Ibid., p. 068. 3. Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau. p. 476. 84

turfcle-dovo paragraph- At least one other tine he used the first two together as symbols of losses. In a letter written throe years after the publication of balden ho said, ”lf others have their losses which they are busy repairing, so have I nine, and the hound and horse nay per­ haps be the symbols of some of then.” With the exception of this one sentence, all references to horses, hounds, and doves occur separately, and the sight of one of then often Incites him to the inevitable moral reflections, reflections later synthesized in the Walden paragraph.

The baying of hounds had for Thorcnu the sane fascina­ tion that many other distant sounds did. He observed once in the journal, "The wind through the blind just now sounded like the baying of a distant hound,— somewhat plaintive and 2 melodious." The sound of the hounds themselves inspired him in Week to a page and a half of lyrical reflection, which says in part,

I have heard the voice of a hound, just before daylight, while the stars were shining, far in the horizon, when it Bounded sweet and melodious as an lnstrunenfc....Thc very dogs that sullenly bay to the moon from farm-yards these nights excite more heroism in our breasts than nil the civil exhortations or war sermons of the age.3

He goes on to compare the sound to the hunting horn, calling

1- Riverside hditlcn. b’omllior_ Letters._ _ _ _ _ P* "5537 2.Walden Edition, Journal. Vool. 1. 1 II, p. 49. 3. Riverside Edition. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, p. 50. it the "natural hurle” of the ancient vorld. A later obser­ vation, made in.the journal, is more in the vein of the

Walden paragraph. Commenting on the chase of lame hounds he cays,

it reminds me of the majority of human hounds that tread the forest paths of this world; they go slightly limping in their gait, as if dis­ qualified by a cruel fate to overtake tho nobler gtuno of the forest, their natural quarry. Kost men arc such dogs. Ever and anon starting a quarry, with perfect scont, which from this cruel maiming and disqualification of the fates, he is incapable of coming up with.!

Several sententious observations on horses also appear

In the Journal, one of which seems directly applicable to tho

Walden paragraph. Seeing an old horse being ohoed resulted in two page* on horses in the journal, which conclude,

I had always instinctively regarded the horse as a free people somewhere, living wild. What­ ever has not como under the sway of man is wild. In this cense original and independent men are wild,— not tamed and broken by society.2

Tkm turtle-dove wes not a rare and erotic animal which had to be borrowed from Persian poetry any moro than the hound and bay horse were. Thorcan mentions specifically 3 and describes a turtle-dove at least twice in his journal,

though the entries do not contain the moral reflections

that the horse and hound passages do. More important for

the light they throw on tho balden paragraph arc two other

1. balden Ed1tion. Journa1. Vo1. Ill, p. 4l9. 2. balden Edition, Journal. Vol. II, p. 440. 3* Walden Edition, Journal. Vol. IV, p. 62 and p. 3G5. GG

entries describing hawks. The journal for the spring of

1G52 1c notable for the many descriptions of birds in flight, especially gulls, ducks, and geese, and in the midst of these occurs the following observation; And fortunete indeed did I deem myself [when youn^J when a hawk appeared in the heavens, though far toward the horizon against a downy cloud, and I searched for hours till I had found his mate. They at least took my thoughts from earthly things.1

The symbolism of the bird in flight is stated even more specifically in n slightly earlier entry which reads.

Saw a large hawk circling over a pine wood below me, and screaming, apparently that he might dis­ cover his prey by their flight....what a symbol of the thoughts, now soaring, now descending, taking larger and larger circles, or smaller and smaller.. • lights of Imagination, Color- idgean thoughts. So a man is said to soar in M s thought, ever to fresh woods and pastures new.2

These six journal entries and the sentences from A_

Viteak present complete evidence of what the hound, the bay horse, and the turtle-dove stand for, without recourse to any explanation from literary borrowings. The hound, ac­ cording to the passage from TTock. is man1 a heroism as ancient warrior, or according to the journal entry, the failure of any ideal quest; the horse is man*s independence as "boble savage,M a quality always dear to fhorcau; the dove. If the hawk analogies can be anId to present the snae

1. v.aldcn Edition. Journal. Vol. Ill, p. 427. ~ 2. Walden Edition, Journal, Vol. Ill, pp. 143-1/4. C7

Idea, is r.an1 o potrer of nlntl as an idealistic thinker. In­ terpreting the passage so bluntlj clearly s h o w why Thoreeu tney have been reluctant to offer explanation. Though the "hound" paragraph resembles the oriental fable® Thoroau uses in ’.7aIdea much more than any material

in seventeenth-century pootry, this examination of its

sources in the journal has -shewn•that it sprang from the

thought process which links Thorcau with the seventeenth

century: ideas stimulated by sense perception, the sound

of a hound baying in the distance or the? eight of a bird

against a white cloud.

It Is also interesting to note that nearly-all the

passages from tho journal quoted in connection with the "hound*1 paragraph, which is essentially an express? un of

disillusionment, were written in 1052, the year that marks

the definite change from Thoroau*s youthful optimism to his

greatest disappointments in hie friends and hie own achieve­

ments. An examination of the journal for this year clearly

shows tho shift from the homely comparisons resulting in

lofty flights of thought and the astronomical comparisons

expressing his confidence In. his intellectual prowess,

characteristic® which make him .comparable to the seventeenth

century writers, to a brief period of dejected nostalgia

before the journal finally turns into a catalog of tho

natural phenomena of Hew England. CHAPTER VII

II CCNCLUSICM: THE JCUHHAL A'-1 TER 1852.

It has been suggested severe! times in tho preceding pages that there is a division in the journal Thick marks a definite ehan.ro in Thor ecu1 s style as Toll as in his way of thought, and it is tho purpose of this last chapter to describe the change and its relationship to ThoremVc use of metaphysical themes and images. With this purpose in mind most of the Illustrative quotations from Thorcnu have been taken from the Waldon Edition of the journal, tho edition which keeps the chronological order of the entries and the one which has been used for the source material of most critical studies of Thorcau. Van Doren cays in his preface, "The journal is Important, I think, not because it is the most attractive, but because It is the moot complete picture of Thoreau1s mind.” Thoroau himself describes the

Importance of the journal even more accurately:

The charm of the journal crust consist in a certain greenness, through freshness, and not in maturity. Here I cannot afford to be remembering what I said or did. ray scurf cast off, but what I am and asnlre to be.*

It is because of this "freshness,” end because the

1. hark Van boron, Henry Davie: Thorcau. A Critical StudyJ p. vii. 2, Riverside Edition, Winter, p. 240. journal Is a complete running account of Tboreau's develop­ ment at first band, that the change which started in the entries of 1851 and is completed in 1852 can bo accurately described. Most obvious of the new characteristics in the lat'er- volumes is the greater amount of space spent in

cataloguing animals and plants and weather conditions.

(Poorster calls pages 587 to 395 in the seventh volume "a

veritable theraoeetrie orgy.” Also noticeable are the repeated statements of Thoreau*s disappointments in his

friends. Although those occur throughout the Journal, they

are particularly prominent in 1851, perhaps because this

was the year when his friendship with Mrs. Emerson was

cooling rapidly. The journal for this time also ba«

passages on current affairs which do not appear in the

earlier volumes. Escaping slaves passing through Concord

were forcing Thorecu to recognise .that a national crisis

was at hand, end sentiments which had appeared earlier in

”Civil Disobedience” and wore to reappear in "Slavery in

Massachusetts" are frequently expressed, as in the follow­

ing sentence: "That certainly is the best government where

the Inhabitants are least often reminded of the government.•S

More important for the present study is the change

which shows Trier ecu’s regret for his lost ability at youth-

1. horman Poors ter.' *Thorei.d;fl "Nstdre "1A "American Li tbra tureT P * 07 e 2. Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau. p. 355. 3. Knlden Edition, Journal. Vol. II, p. 412. 143910 90

ful rhapsodizing# "I rlchcd to do again, or for onco," he wrote on December Iz, 1851, "things quite congenial to my highest inmost and coot sacred nature, to lurk in crystal­ line tiiought like the trout under verduous banks, v,hcrc stray mankind should only see my bubbles rice to the surface."

Apparently he found the change to the interminable pages of minute observation in the later journal as barren ns moot modern renders do, for he also observed in this year,

I fear that the character of my knowledge is from year to year, becoming more distinct and scientific; that, in exchange for views as wide as heaven’s cope, I am being narrowed down to the field of the microscope. I see details, not wholes nor the shadow of the whole** 2 3

By 1652 these nostalgic regrets almost disappear- Only occasionally, wedged in between description* of the female

Populus tremullforms catkins and the male Populua grand!- dento, la there found a sentence like this one, which he copied into Walden;

The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or perchance a palace or temple on earth, and at length the middle-aged men concludes to build a woodshed with the*.&

Ac it Is difficult to Illustrate the shift in the temper of the journal with a few quotations, the remarks of three of Thorcau’a critics on the change in the journal should be quoted to substantiate the above conclusions.

1* Walden Edition. Journal, Vo1. Ill, p. I&5. 2. Walden Edition, Journal. Vol. II, p. 406. 3. Walden Edition, Journal, Vol. IV, p. 227. 81

Poereter says, nIfc almost seems to one who turns the pages of the latter part of tho Journal that he decided not

to live but to know; and yet he never knew." Van Doron, who finds these pages oven more dlsappointinr, says that

they "confess him growing Impotence In expansion.n Cnnby too notices the change, but he describes It as a growth rather than a degeneration, for he says.

The legend that Thoreau In his last phase was a frustrated and unhappy man has no basis of fact, except In his Inevitable grumblings at his failure to reconcile science and the Transcendental. Ecstasies were rare with him In these years, nostalgia for his more Impressionable youth frequent, but the joy of free observation was constant.*5

Few writers take the hypercritical attitude towards Thoreau1s later works that Cnnby Indicates, however, for to

do so would be to deny the excellence of such essays as

"Autumnal Tints" end "Wild Apples,” or the impassioned ex­

hortations in defense of John Brown. Conway relates this

Incident from his first meeting with Thoreau in 1853: "Ho

offered me a peculiar grass to chew for an instant, saying, 4 •It is a little sharp, but an experience.1" Tills is tho

same interest In tho life of the senses that Thoreau1s early

writing shows, but in his Inter years those sense Impres­

sions are not the source of esfca-

T. Norman Foerstor. '‘Thoreau.11 liature In American Literature. p. 89. 2. Mark Van Doren, Thoreau. A Critics1 Study, p. 110. 3. Henry Seidel Cnnby. Thoreau. p. Sofc. 4. Moncure D. Conway, Autobiography. Memories. and Experi­ ences of Moncure i). Conway. Yol. I, p. 142. 92

physical •peculation; henco the thought process which links him with the seventeenth century is no longer apparent. The early works of a writer show literary influences more ob­ viously because the young author has not completely assimi­ lated the thought or style of his masters Into his own rnodo of expression, and this is true of the seventeenth-century influence on Tboreau, particularly on the early poetry. It is also true that an influence is not effective unless it reflects a tendency already present in the writer, and the tendency to think in themes and images similar to those used by the metaphysical poets disappears In the last volumes of Tboreau’s journal* In a later essay, much as

"Life Without Principle," Tboreau’s life-long Ideal of sphericity is expressed in terse, pungent sentences attack­

ing the vices of the state and contemporary society rather

than in dreamy, poetic passages describing his mind as a world within*

Thoreau’s kinship with the seventeenth century has been mentioned by his critics from Emoreon on, though sel­

dom has it been emphasized as an early characteristic. For

example, Crawford in his introduction to Thoreau’s selected

works says.

His preference for Milton over Shakeapeare was likely a Puritan Inheritance, ana based on moral grounds, but his fondness for Donne and Vaughan, Craahnw, Quarles, and Herbert doubtless arose 93

from tin affinity of a less logical and more elusive nature.'

Paul Elmer lore, even lees specific, cays in describing fcho

"sense of constant expectancy* which he considers the out­ standing quality of Thorcau'c writing, "It came to him In part from his birth In & new land, and It was strengthened by his

familiarity with the English poets of the seventeenth century.*2 More notes a particular res mblance to Vaughan. Canby has an

excellent paragraph on Thoreeu and the metaphysical poets, whom he calls "wrestlers with the word and the spirit," though he, too, falls to support his statements with specific illustrations.

"Mot subtlety of doctrine," says Canby, "but subtlety of expres­

sion, by which the feeling of man In the presence of God in

nature became articulate, was his aim as well as theirs.r,3Van

Doren shows the parallels in theme and fora between Thoreau* a

"Sec Vita" and two of Herbert* o poems, but on the whole his 4 comparison is as general as the others. If such statements as those quoted above are worth

making, they are worth proving. The classification of similar

devices of expression in Thorecu’s writing and the poetry

of the seventeenth-century metaphysical school in the

main chapters of this thesis has outlined the artistic

and intellectual kinship between Thoreau and the seventeenth

1. Bartholow V. Crawford. ed>, Henry bgvld Thoreau. kopro- sentatlve Selections, p. xix. 2. PauV £Imer Jore, "Thoreau* s Journa1."Shelburne Ec£ ays. Fifth Series, p. 151. 3. Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau. p* 189. 4. Mark Van Doren, Henry David Thoreau. A Critical Study. pp. 102-108. (An exception Is Matthicssen*s excellent chapter in American Renaissance on Thoreau*s relation­ ship to the seventeenth century whlehbe calls "The Metaphysical Strain." This discusses the pros© writers more than the poets, however.) 94

century In its differences so well ns its similarities, a kinship which has often been described but never demonstrated.

Since the passages which clearly reveal this relationship appear only in the early journal, Thorecu’s . ffinitywith the seventeenth-century mind was essentially a youthful characteristic.

Perhaps the reason this affinity has not been clearly defined by Hiorenu’s critics is that it is not obvious in his finished books. The joints in Thoreau’s books and essays are perfectly welded, and it is only in the raw material of the journal that isolated qualities of style and thought can bo detected. Not the least of Thorecu*e genius was his ability as on editor, as each of his four longer works tes­

tify. The material in Cape Cod and The Maine ?;oodg was

taken from notes made on several different journeys. The thoughts and observations in A Week were gleaned from the

journal pages written between 1859 and 1849, rather than being confined to the single week of the actual journey.

The material in Walden was taken from the entries in the

journal covering a period of twenty-six years. Although

the book was virtually In its final form by 1849, the last

excerpt from the journal which Thoreau used io dated April 27,

1854. Hence it contains the youthful, pantheistic hymns

. to nature and his own mind; it has passages reflecting the

disillusionment of the journal of 1851-52, particularly

in the first chapter; and the perfect detail in the natural descriptions of the roods and fields are from the nany paces of such description in the Inter journal.

But Walden is more than a skillful compilation of

Thorcau*s finest Journal entries; it is also the successful expression of the tro prime forces in his personality. A native child of hie time and place and an authentic member

of the ITer England trune send entails ts, Thoreau felt com­ pelled to translate their ideals into living experience

and then to express them in words as concrete no his life had been. Hie two years at Walden Pond were the living

experience, and his book is its expression in writing.

Thoreau also searched his entire life for fcho secret of

absolute intellectual integrity and independence of mind:

’’sphericity" he called It. Communing with himself in the

solitude of the woods, several miles away from the con­

fusion of hie mother’s boarding house, he came ns close to

achieving this ideal as any man over could. Because it is

the perfect fusion of the best that Thoreau over wrote,

lived, and thought, Walden is fcho first, and probably fcho

greatest, non-fiction classic In American Literature. 96

BIBLIOGRAPH*

I. Editions of Primary Sourcoo

Bhagavad Gita. Ed. by Yogi Haeacharalm* Chicago: The Yogi Publication Society, 1911, 1 Brinkley, Roberta Florence, editor, English Poetry of the Seventeenth Century. New York: W.Yi. Norton and Co.. t b s t .------Chalmers, Alexander, Mltor. The Works of the English Poets from Chaucer to Cowpcr. 21 vols.; London: C. Khittlng- liam, Printer,~T8l^)7

Eteerson, Ralph Waldo, Journals of Ralph Waldo Eraorson. Ed. by E.W. and W.R. Emerson.lu vols.* Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1908-1914.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, "Nature." Ralph Waldo Emerson. Repre­ sentative Selections, ed. by Frederic J. Carpenter. New York: American Book Company, 1954.

Grierson, Herbert J.C., editor. Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century. Oxford University Press, “TsSTT

Grierson, II.J.C., and G. Bullough, editors, % e Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verso. Oxford University Press, 1934: Herbert, George, The English Works of George Herbert. Ed. by George Herbert Palmer. 3 vols.j Boston and Hew Yorks Houghton Mifflin Co., 1906.

Thoreau, Henry David, Poems of Nature. Ed. by Henry 5. Salt and Frank 13. Sanborn. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin and Co., 1895.

Thoreau, Henry David, The Writings of Henry David Thoreau. 20 vols.; Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin and Co., 1906. (Walden Edition.) (Journal, volumes 1-7, through 1854.} 97

Thoresra, Henry David, The Writings of Henry David Tlioreau, 10 vole.; Boston and Hew York: nouc'ntcn Mifflin and Co., 1894. (Riverside Edition.) Thoreau, Henry David, Henry David Thore-au. Representative Selections. Ed. by Bertholow V. Crawford• New foric: American Book Co., 1934.

II. Biography and Criticism

Adams, R.V7., ”Thoreau and Immortality," SF. XXVI (January, 1929), 58-66.

Adcms, R.W., "Thoreau*s Literary Apprenticeship," SP. XX-IX (October, 1932), 617-629.

Bennett, Joan, Four Metaphysical Poets. Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 1934.

Brooks, Cleanth, Modern Poetry and tJio Tradition. University of North Carolina, 1939.

Burroughs, John "Henry D. Thoreau," The Century. II (1882), 368-379.

Cambridge History of American Litcraturo, "Thoreau," Vol.II, Chap. X, pp. l-lb%

Canby,^Honry Seidel, Thoreau. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.,

Channlng, William Ellery, Thoreaui the Poet-Naturalist. Bostonx Roberts Brothers, 1075.

Conway, Moncure D., Autobiography. Memories, and Experiences of Moncure D. Conway. 2 vols.: Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1904.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, "Thoreau," Atlantic Monthly. X (August, 1862), 239-249.

Feldman, V/.T., The Philosophy of John Dewey. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1934.

Foerster, Norman, "Thoreau," Chap. IV., Nature in American Literature, lew York: Mscmilien Co., 1923. Pp. 69-142. 98

Frothinghem, Octavius B«, Transcend entail sin In Hen England, Boston* American Unitarian Association, 1006.

Goddard, Harold Clarke, Studies in Hew England Transcenden­ talism. Columbia University Press, 1908.

Johnson, Samuel, Lives of the Poets, Ed, by Mrs, Alexander Napier. 2 vols.; Eon3on: George Bell and Sons, 1890.

Lorch, Fred W., "Thoreau and the Organic Principle in Poetry," PMLA. LIII (May, 1938), 266-302.

Lowell, James Russell, "A Fable for Critics." The Writings of James Russell Lowell. Vol. IX, pp. 5-95. 10 vols.; Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Co., 1895.

Metfchlesren, F.O., American Renaissance. Hew York* Oxford University Press, 1941.

"Metaphysics," Encyclopedia Brltannlca. 14th edition, XV, 332-353. ~ ~

Moore, John E., "Thoreau Rejects Emerson," American Litcra- ture. IV (November, 1932), 241-246.

Wore, Paul Elmer, "Thoreau1s Journal." Shelburne Essays: Zj-fth Series. New York: G.P. Putnam1s Sons, I S ® , Bp.

Farrington, Vernon Louis, "Henry Thoreau, Transcendental Economist." Main Currents in American Thought. Vol. II, 400-413. 4 vols. ;"liew York: Bar court Brace and Co., 1927.

Pealrs, Edith, "The Hound, the Bay Horse, and the Turtle- Dove: A Study of Thoreau and Voltaire." PMLA, LII, (September, 1937), 863-869.

Salt, Henry S., Life of Henry David Thoreau. London: Walter Scott, Ltd.,' 1896.

Stevenson, Robert Louis, "Henry David Thoreau: His Character and Opinions," Familiar Studies of Men and Books. New York: Poter"Fenelon (Jollier, 1881.Pp. 12^-155.

Van Doren, Mark, Henry David Thoroau. A Critical Study. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 19X6. / V 3 ? / * C' o .

9 7 9 1 94 1 2 8 2 HANNAH ti F #ME TAPHYS I CAL THEMES AND IMAGE

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