William Gilpin1

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:

THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN1

“Man’s most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe.” — Euripides

Robert Richardson has opinioned that the Reverend William “Gilpin showed Thoreau the grand and integrative language of landscape.... Thoreau read Gilpin all during April [1852], and either referred to Gilpin or wrote in obvious imitation of him every day.” It turns up now, that it was the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway who originated, in 1869 after a walk in the woods in England, the conceit that Thoreau had been “an American Gilpin” (as if we were in dire need of yet another reason to doubt this commentator’s judgment).

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

1. Also, almost mentioned in THE MAINE WOODS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1667

Publication of John Milton’s PARADISE LOST, from which Henry Thoreau would derive via William Gilpin a snippet to deploy in derogation of the conceit of a “bottomless” Walden Pond: So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear, Farewell remorse: all good to me is lost; Evil be thou my good. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

WALDEN: A factory owner, hearing what depth I had found, thought PEOPLE OF that it could not be true, for judging from his acquaintance with WALDEN dams, sand would not lie at so steep an angle. But the deepest ponds are not so deep in proportion to their area as most suppose, and, if drained, would not leave very remarkable valleys. They are not like cups between the hills; for this one, which is so unusually deep for its area, appears in a vertical section through its centre not deeper than a shallow plate.Most ponds, emptied, would leave a meadow no more hollow than we frequently see. William Gilpin, who is so admirable in all that relates to landscapes, and usually so correct, standing at the head of Loch Fyne, in Scotland, which he describes as “a bay of salt water, sixty or seventy fathoms deep, four miles in breadth,” and about fifty miles long, surrounded by mountains, observes, “If we could have seen it immediately after the diluvian crash, or whatever convulsion of Nature occasioned it, before the waters gushed in, what a horrid chasm it must have appeared! So high as heaved the tumid hills, so low Down sunk a hollow bottom, broad, and deep, Capacious bed of waters–.” But if, using the shortest diameter of Loch Fyne, we apply these proportions to Walden, which, as we have seen, appears already in a vertical section only like a shallow plate, it will appear four times as shallow. So much for the increased horrors of the chasm of Loch Fyne when emptied. No doubt many a smiling valley with its stretching cornfields occupies exactly such a “horrid chasm,” from which the waters have receded, though it requires the insight and the far sight of the geologist to convince the unsuspecting inhabitants of this fact. Often an inquisitive eye may detect the shores of a primitive lake in the low horizon hills, and no subsequent elevation of the plain has been necessary to conceal their history. But it is easiest, as they who work on the highways know, to find the hollows by the puddles after a shower. The amount of it is, the imagination, give it the least license, dives deeper and soars higher than Nature goes. So, probably, the depth of the ocean will be found to be very inconsiderable compared with its breadth.

CALVIN CARVER DAMON WILLIAM GILPIN HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

Thoreau would also derive “ammiral” as a descriptor of a grand tall-masted sailing vessel:

WALDEN: While these things go up other things come down. Warned by PEOPLE OF the whizzing sound, I look up from my book and see some tall pine, WALDEN hewn on far northern hills, which has winged its way over the Green Mountains and the Connecticut, shot like an arrow through the township within ten minutes, and scarce another eye beholds it; going “to be the mast Of some great ammiral.”

And hark! here comes the cattle-train bearing the cattle of a thousand hills, sheepcots, stables, and cow-yards in the air, drovers with their sticks, and shepherd boys in the midst of their flocks, all but the mountain pastures, whirled along like leaves blown from the mountains by the September gales. The air is filled with the bleating of calves and sheep, and the hustling of oxen, as if a pastoral valley were going by. When the old bell-wether at the head rattles his bell, the mountains do indeed skip like rams and the little hills like lambs. A car-load of drovers, too, in the midst, on a level with their droves now, their vocation gone, but still clinging to their useless sticks as their badge of office. But their dogs, where are they? It is a stampede to them; they are quite thrown out; they have lost the scent. Methinks I hear them barking behind the Peterboro’ Hills, or panting up the western slope of the Green Mountains. They will not be in at the death. Their vocation, too, is gone. Their fidelity and sagacity are below par now. They will slink back to their kennels in disgrace, or perchance run wild and strike a league with the wolf and the fox. So is your pastoral life whirled past and away. But the bell rings, and I must get off the track and let the cars go by;– What’s the railroad to me? I never go to see Where it ends. It fills a few hollows, And makes banks for the swallows, It sets the sand a-blowing, And the blackberries a-growing,

but I cross it like a cart-path in the woods. I will not have my eyes put out and my ears spoiled by its smoke and steam and hissing. Now that the cars are gone by, and all the restless world with them, and the fishes in the pond no longer feel their rumbling, I am more alone than ever. For the rest of the long afternoon, perhaps, my meditations are interrupted only by the faint rattle of a carriage or team along the distant highway.

KING SOLOMON

In addition: HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

• Thoreau’s “MOONLIGHT” explores the realm that Milton’s PARADISE LOST describes as “Chaos and Old Night.” • Milton used “compute” in PARADISE LOST iii., 580. Compute is derived from the latin com- for together and putare, to think, settle, adjust. William Shakespeare is reputed to be the first person to coin and use the term “computation,” which appears in COMEDY OF ERRORS, ii. 2, 4. Dr. Thomas Browne probably first used the term “compute” in VULGAR ERRORS, b. vi., c. 4 Section 4 — along with “computists” and “computable.”

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

People of Cape Cod and Walden “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1719

The Cheam School in Surrey was relocated from “Whitehall” to Tabor Court (it would be in that locale for more than two centuries).

John Donne’s POEMS ON SEVERAL OCCASIONS.... WITH ELEGIES ON THE AUTHOR’S DEATH. TO THIS EDITION IS ADDED SOME ACCOUNT OF THE LIFE OF THE AUTHOR (London: Printed for Jacob Tonson, sold by W. Taylor). This volume would be in the personal library of Waldo Emerson and thus available to be accessed by Henry Thoreau. ON SEVERAL OCCASIONS

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

People of Cape Cod and Walden “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1724

June 4, Thursday (Old Style): According to the manuscript diary of the Reverend John Whiting of Concord, David Taylor and [Ruth] Davis were on this day united by him in wedlock.

William Gilpin was born in Cumberland, a son of Captain John Bernard Gilpin, soldier and amateur artist. From an early age he would be an enthusiastic sketcher and collector of prints, but although his brother Sawrey Gilpin would opt to make of himself a professional painter, William would seek a career in the church.

LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.

People of Cape Cod and Walden “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1747

William Gilpin preached a sermon at Buckingham. While there he must have taken the opportunity to visit Lord Cobham’s famous landscape gardens at Stowe, for he then authored an anonymous tract, A DIALOGUE UPON THE GARDENS OF THE RIGHT HONOURABLE THE LORD VISCOUNT COBHAM AT STOWE. In this tract, for the first time, we find his nice ruminations on distinctions to be made between the beauty of natural scenery, on the one hand, and the beauty of this or that ruined stone tower as depicted in paint from a safe distance — theories which were to become first in England the basis for all his later writings on the “Picturesque,”

and later in America the basis for just gazillions of Kodak Kodachrome snapshots of decaying old red barns HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

standing solemnly in clumps of weeds. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

In that famous garden at Stowe, true fact, he would have seen famous Chinese stuffamajiggers like this:

This much may undoubtedly be asserted, that in artifice, falsehood, and an attachment to all kinds of lucre, many of the Chinese are difficult to be paralleled by any other people; but then the combination of these talents, and the manner in which HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

they are applied in particular emergencies, are often beyond the reach of a foreigner’s penetration.2

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

2. A VOYAGE AROUND THE WORLD IN THE YEARS 1704-1744, by Commodore George Anson. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1748

William Gilpin obtained his MA at Queen’s College, Oxford University.

QUEEN’S COLLEGE

He would initially serve as a curate, then as a master, at Cheam School. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

People of Cape Cod and Walden “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1752

The Reverend William Gilpin got married with a 1st cousin, Margaret Gilpin.

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

People of Cape Cod and Walden “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1755

The Reverend William Gilpin became headmaster of Cheam School (until 1777).

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

People of Cape Cod and Walden “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1765

The Reverend William Gilpin’s THE LIVES OF JOHN WICLIFF AND OF THE MOST EMINENT OF HIS DISCIPLES: LORD COBHAM, JOHN HUSS, JEROME OF PRAGUE, AND ZISCA. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1768

The Reverend William Gilpin, in AN ESSAY ON PRINTS: CONTAINING REMARKS UPON THE PRINCIPLES OF PICTURESQUE BEAUTY; THE DIFFERENT KINDS OF PRINTS; AND THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MOST NOTED MASTERS: ILLUSTRATED BY CRITICISMS UPON PARTICULAR PIECES: TO WHICH ARE ADDED, SOME CAUTIONS THAT MAY BE USEFUL IN COLLECTING PRINTS. ... SECOND EDITION (London: Printed by G. Scott, For J. Robson, Bookseller to the Princess Dowager of Wales, at the Feathers in New Bond Street), defined “picturesque” as indicating “that kind of beauty which is agreeable in a picture.” The good Reverend was going to be teaching us what sort of landscape painting is “agreeable” over the couch in our living room — HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

for instance cows being so big, you needn’t put more than three of them in a group. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

(Hey, I’m not making this up. Agreeable. Cows.)

WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

People of Cape Cod and Walden “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1775

The Reverend William Gilpin’s OBSERVATIONS ON THE COASTS OF HAMPSHIRE, SUSSEX, AND KENT, 3 RELATIVE CHIEFLY TO PICTURESQUE BEAUTY. Professor John R. Stillgoe would comment on this work as follows: Filled with snippets of historical information blended into topographical description, OBSERVATIONS is an essentially didactic work. “An object of this kind is by no means picturesque,” Gilpin explains of a three-mile-long moor abutting the beach, “but it is grand from its uniformity, and striking from its novelty.” The diligent reader learns how to look at the coastal realm in a precise, sophisticated way, to speak of different views accurately, in specific language, and, of course, to understand better paintings and drawings of coastal- realm subjects. But just as Gilpin ventured to Solway Moss to examine quicksand simply because quicksand belongs in any encyclopedic vocabulary of landscape observation, so he paid

3. Professor John R. Stillgoe. ALONGSHORE (New Haven: Yale UP, 1994) Professor John R. Stillgoe. SHALLOW-WATER DICTIONARY (NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003) (examines Thoreau’s use of such words as “guzzle” and “gutter” in CAPE COD.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

close attention to modern elements in the coastal realm. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1777

Having realized the sum of £10,000 in profit while headmaster at Cheam School, the Reverend William Gilpin turned over that lucrative position to his son William Gilpin and, with his wife Margaret Gilpin, relocated to Hampshire near Lymington to become Vicar of an ancient church at Boldre in the New Forest, with ample leisure and an annual income of a not-at-all-shabby £600.4

4. Well, what’s not to like about that? HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1779

The Reverend William Gilpin’s LECTURES ON THE CATECHISM OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1782

At the instigation of the poet William Mason, the Reverend William Gilpin prepared OBSERVATIONS ON THE RIVER WYE AND SEVERAL PARTS OF SOUTH WALES, ETC. RELATIVE CHIEFLY TO PICTURESQUE BEAUTY; MADE IN THE SUMMER OF THE YEAR 1770 (London). This was illustrated with plates based on Gilpin's sketches, etched by his nephew William Sawrey Gilpin using the new aquatint process.

October: William Cowper’s anonymous blank verse humor, “The Diverting History of John Gilpin,” was created in a single night and would soon be published in the Public Advertiser. WM. COWPER ON GILPIN HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1783

The Reverend William Gilpin recorded that summer that the sky in England had been overspread with a “dry dark fog.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1784

The Reverend William Gilpin’s THE LIFE OF THOMAS CRANMER, ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY.

ARCHB. THOMAS CRANMER HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

“Crematus vivus” happens to be the Latin way to say “burned alive” HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1786

The Reverend William Gilpin’s OBSERVATIONS, RELATIVE CHIEFLY TO PICTURESQUE BEAUTY, MADE IN THE YEAR 1772, ON SEVERAL PARTS OF ENGLAND: PARTICULARLY THE MOUNTAINS, AND LAKES OF CUMBERLAND, AND WESTMORELAND. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1788

William Gilpin’s OBSERVATIONS, RELATIVE CHIEFLY TO PICTURESQUE BEAUTY, MADE IN THE YEAR 1772, ON SEVERAL PARTS OF ENGLAND, PARTICULARLY THE MOUNTAINS, AND LAKES OF CUMBERLAND, AND WESTMORELAND (Henry Thoreau would access these volumes at the Harvard Library). GILPIN’S OBSERVATIONS, I GILPIN’S OBSERVATIONS, II HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1789

The Reverend William Gilpin’s OBSERVATIONS, RELATIVE CHIEFLY TO PICTURESQUE BEAUTY, MADE IN THE YEAR 1776, ON FEVERAL PARTS OF GREAT BRITAIN; PARTICULARLY THE HIGH-LANDS OF SCOTLAND began to appear (in this, the portion having to do with the Lake Country had already been in existence for some fifteen years).

PICTURESQUE BEAUTY, I PICTURESQUE BEAUTY, II HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1790

The Reverend William Gilpin’s OBSERVATIONS ON THE RIVER WYE and his AN EXPOSITION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT; INTENDED AS AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF THE SCRIPTURES, BY POINTING OUT THE LEADING SENSE AND CONNECTION OF THE SACRED WRITERS. GILPIN TAKES ON THE NT HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

A N

EXPOSITION

OF THE

NEW TESTAMENT:

INTENDED AS AN

INTRODUCTION

T O

The Study of the Scr i ptures,

B Y

Pointing out the LEADING SENSE, and CONNECTION

OF THE

SACRED WRITERS.

By W I L L I A M 1^ I L P I N, M. A.

PREBENDARY OF SALISBURY, AND VICAR OF EOLDRE, IN

NEW-FOREST, NEAR LYMINGTON.

LONDON:

PRINTED FOR R. BLAMIRE, IN THE STRAND.

M . D C C . X C. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1791

The Reverend William Gilpin’s REMARKS ON FOREST SCENERY, AND OTHER WOODLAND VIEWS, (RELATIVE CHIEFLY TO PICTURESQUE BEAUTY): ILLUSTRATED BY THE SCENES OF NEW-FOREST IN HAMPSHIRE... (London: Printed for R. Blamire, Strand).

GILPIN’S FOREST SCENERY I GILPIN’S FOREST SCENERY II HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1792

The Reverend William Gilpin’s THREE ESSAYS: ON PICTURESQUE BEAUTY; ON PICTURESQUE TRAVEL; AND ON SKETCHING LANDSCAPE: TO WHICH IS ADDED A POEM, ON LANDSCAPE PAINTING. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1796

The Reverend William Gilpin’s THREE DIALOGUES ON THE AMUSEMENTS OF CLERGYMEN.

TO AMUSE THE CLERGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1798

The Reverend William Gilpin’s OBSERVATIONS ON THE WESTERN PARTS OF ENGLAND, RELATIVE CHIEFLY TO PICTURESQUE BEAUTY. TO WHICH ARE ADDED, A FEW REMARKS ON THE PICTURESQUE BEAUTIES OF THE ISLE OF WIGHT (London: Printed for T. Cadell Jun. and W. Davies, Strand). VISIT TO THE ISLE OF WIGHT

Also, the Reverend’s MORAL CONTRASTS: OR, THE POWER OF RELIGION EXEMPLIFIED UNDER DIFFERENT CHARACTERS (Lymington: Printed by J.B. Rutter; and sold by Messrs. Cadell and Davies, in the Strand, London). MORAL CONTRASTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

MORAL CONTRASTS:

OR,

THE POWER OF RELIGION

EXEMPLIFIED ,-JJNDER.

DIFFERENT CHARACTERS.

BY WILLIAM GILPIX,

PREBENDARY OF SALISBURY. AND VICA!*

OF BOLD RE, IN NEW FOXKST.

^ LYMIXGTON :

.PRINTED BY J. B. RUTTER ; AND SOLD BY

.MESSRS. CADELL AND DAVIF.S, IN

THE STRAND, LONDON. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1799

The Reverend William Gilpin’s SERMONS PREACHED TO A COUNTRY CONGREGATION: TO WHICH IS ADDED, A FEW HINTS FOR SERMONS; INTENDED CHIEFLY FOR THE USE OF THE YOUNGER CLERGY (Lymington, Printed by J.B. Rutter, four volumes printed from 1799 to 1805).

COUNTRY CONGREGATION HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1800

The Reverend William Gilpin’s OBSERVATIONS ON THE RIVER WYE, AND SEVERAL PARTS OF SOUTH WALES, &C. RELATIVE CHIEFLY TO PICTURESQUE BEAUTY: MADE IN THE SUMMER OF THE YEAR 1770. BY WILLIAM GILPIN, ... (London: printed by A. Strahan, for T. Cadell junior and W. Davies, 1800). HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1804

The Reverend William Gilpin’s OBSERVATIONS ON THE COASTS OF HAMPSHIRE, SUSSEX, AND KENT, RELATIVE CHIEFLY TO PICTURESQUE BEAUTY: MADE IN THE SUMMER OF THE YEAR 1774 (London, Printed by A. Strahan for T. Cadell and W. Davies).

April 5, Thursday: The Reverend William Gilpin died at the age of 80. The body was interred in a chest tomb in the cemetery to the north of the Boldre church “St John the Baptist.”

IN A QUIET MANSION BENEATH THIS STONE, SECURE FROM THE AFFLICTIONS, AND STILL MORE DANGEROUS ENJOYMENTS OF LIFE, LYE THE REMAINS OF WILLIAM GILPIN, SOMETIME VICAR OF THIS PARISH, TOGETHER WITH THE REMAINS OF MARGARET, HIS WIFE. AFTER LIVING ABOVE FIFTY YEARS IN HAPPY UNION, THEY HOPE TO BE RAISED IN GOD’S GOOD TIME, THROUGH THE ATONEMENT OF A BLESSED REDEEMER FOR THEIR REPEATED TRANSGRESSIONS, TO A STATE OF JOYFUL IMMORTALITY: THEN IT WILL BE A NEW JOY TO MEET SEVERAL OF THOSE GOOD NEIGHBOURS WHO LYE SCATTERED IN THESE SACRED PRECINCTS AROUND THEM. HE DIED APRIL 5TH, 1804, AT THE AGE OF 80. SHE DIED APRIL 14TH, 1807, AT THE AGE OF 82.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: Fifth day of 5 of 4 M 1804 / I have hardly ever witnessed less religous concern than this Morning, but when I entered the threshold of the Meeting House door life sprung up & I was greatly refreshed in the corse of the Meeting the savor still continues, & begits thankfulness in my heart for my many Blessings HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1808

The 3d edition of the Reverend William Gilpin’s REMARKS ON FOREST SCENERY, AND OTHER WOODLAND VIEWS, RELATIVE CHIEFLY TO PICTURESQUE BEAUTY ILLUSTRATED BY THE SCENES OF NEW FOREST IN HAMPSHIRE. IN THREE BOOKS. Thoreau would copy from the two volumes of this new edition into his Fact Book and an extract would appear in WALDEN. ON FOREST SCENERY, I ON FOREST SCENERY, II

The Reverend Gilpin’s OBSERVATIONS ON SEVERAL PARTS OF GREAT BRITAIN, PARTICULARLY THE HIGH- LANDS OF SCOTLAND, RELATIVE CHIEFLY TO PICTURESQUE BEAUTY, MADE IN THE YEAR 1776 was reprinted again in two volumes at London for T. Cadell and W. Davies, Strand.

THE TOUR MADE IN 1776 PEOPLE OF WALDEN WALDEN: William Gilpin, who is so admirable in all that relates to landscapes, and usually so correct, standing at the head of Loch Fyne, in Scotland, which he describes as “a bay of salt water, sixty or seventy fathoms deep, four miles in breadth,” and about fifty miles long, surrounded by mountains, observes, “If we could have seen it immediately after the diluvian crash, or whatever convulsion of Nature occasioned it, before the waters gushed in, what a horrid chasm it must have appeared!

WILLIAM GILPIN

The 3d edition of the Reverend William Gilpin’s THREE ESSAYS: ON PICTURESQUE BEAUTY; ON PICTURESQUE TRAVEL; AND ON SKETCHING LANDSCAPE: WITH A POEM ON LANDSCAPE PAINTING. TO THESE ARE NOW ADDED, TWO ESSAYS GIVING AN ACCOUNT OF THE PRINCIPLES AND MODE IN WHICH THE AUTHOR EXECUTED HIS OWN DRAWINGS (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies). THREE ESSAYS, 3D EDITION

Thoreau would extrapolate some details from this, in regard to the depth of Loch Fyne, together with its attached snippet of poetry (notice how careful Thoreau is here in his use of quotation marks), in evaluating the HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

slope of the bottom of the “bottomless” Walden Pond:

CALVIN CARVER DAMON WILLIAM GILPIN The “factory-owner” with whom Thoreau spoke in the 1840s or 1850s would most likely have been Concord’s own Calvin Carver Damon. But this year of 1808 was before the development of Damon’s Damondale: during the course of this year the fulling mill toward the west end of town, on the site of the old bog-iron works, was being sold by the Conant family to John Brown of Concord and to Ephraim Hartwell of New Ipswich, New Hampshire. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1809

The Reverend William Gilpin and Grizzle, his mare, became grist for the satirical mill of William Combe in THE TOUR OF DOCTOR SYNTAX, IN SEARCH OF THE PICTURESQUE. A POEM (see following screen) illustrated by Thomas Rowlandson. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1834

Robert Dale Owen helped establish the Grand National Consolidated Trade Union. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1846

William Gilpin opinioned that: “The untransacted destiny of the American people is to subdue the continent … to rush over this vast field to the Pacific Ocean … to regenerate superannuated nations … to confirm the destiny of the human race … to carry the career of mankind to its culminating point … to cause a stagnant people to be reborn … to absolve the curse that weighs down humanity, and to shed blessings round the world.” As Henry would say, we were really going places. Along the same lines, the slaveholder John Caldwell Calhoun declared that we stood “at the dawn of the world’s great jubilee.”5As Henry would say, we were really going places. “It is simply crazy that there should ever have come into being a world with such a sin in it, in which a man is set apart because of his color — the superficial fact about a human being. Who could want such a world? For an American fighting for his love of country, that the last hope of earth should from its beginning have swallowed slavery, is an irony so withering, a justice so intimate in its rebuke of pride, as to measure only with God.” — Stanley Cavell, MUST WE MEAN WHAT WE SAY? 1976, page 141

5. Mr. Calhoun seems to have been unaware that a core etymology of the word “jubilee” involves that “all slaves are set free.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1852

March 22, Monday: On this day Henry Thoreau made no entry in his journal. Passing through Cambridge on his way into Boston to deliver “The Sylvan Life” at Fisher’s Rooms to a crowd of 60 or more persons, he stopped by the Harvard Library to check out the first two volumes of William Gilpin’s REMARKS ON FOREST SCENERY, AND OTHER WOODLAND VIEWS, (RELATIVE CHIEFLY TO PICTURESQUE BEAUTY) ILLUSTRATED BY THE SCENES 6 OF NEW-FOREST IN HAMPSHIRE. IN THREE BOOKS... BY WILLIAM GILPIN... (London, 1791).

(see the following screen)

After his lecture, Thoreau would spend the night with the Alcott family.

6. Thoreau would be reading in Gilpin from the spring of 1852 to the winter of 1854. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

March 31, Wednesday: It was cloudy, and Henry Thoreau was drowsy, so he gave up his plans for a walk and instead read in read in William Gilpin’s FOREST SCENERY about copses and glens.

He also read in Sir John Richardson’s ARCTIC SEARCHING EXPEDITION, published in this year, about his search in the Arctic for Sir John Franklin, and the relicts which were discovered. READ ABOUT THE SEARCH HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

WALDEN: Yet we should oftener look over the tafferel of our craft, like curious PEOPLE OF passengers, and not make the voyage like stupid sailors picking oakum. The other side of the globe is but the home of our correspondent. Our voyaging is only WALDEN great-circle sailing, and the doctors prescribe for diseases of the skin merely. One hastens to Southern Africa to chase the giraffe; but surely that is not the game he would be after. How long, pray, would a man hunt giraffes if he could? Snipes and woodcocks also may afford rare sort; but I trust it would be nobler game to shoot one’s self.– “Direct your eye sight inward, and you’ll find A thousand regions in your mind Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be Expert in home-cosmography.” What does Africa, –what does the West stand for? Is not our own interior white on the chart? black though it may prove, like the coast, when discovered. Is it the source of the Nile, or the Niger, or the Mississippi, or a North-West Passage around this continent, that we would find? Are these the problems which most concern mankind? Is Franklin the only man who is lost, that his wife should be so earnest to find him? Does Mr. Grinnell know where he himself is? Be rather the Mungo Park, the Lewis and Clarke and Frobisher, of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes, –with shiploads of preserved meats to support you, if they be necessary; and pile the empty cans sky-high for a sign. Were preserved meats invented to preserve meat merely? Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads. What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition, with all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact, that there are continents and seas in the moral world, to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s being alone.– “Erret, et extremos alter scrutetur Iberos. Plus habet hic vitæ, plus habet ille viæ.” Let them wander and scrutinize the outlandish Australians. I have more of God, they more of the road. It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar. Yet do this even till you can do better, and you may perhaps find some “Symmes’ Hole” by which to get at the inside at last. England and France, Spain and Portugal, Gold Coast and Slave Coast, all front on this private sea; but no bark from them has ventured out of sight of land, though it is without doubt the direct way to India. If you would learn to speak all tongues and conform to the customs of all nations, if you would travel farther than all travellers, be naturalized in all climes, and cause the Sphinx to dash her head against a stone, even obey the precept of the old philosopher, and Explore thyself. Herein are demanded the eye and the nerve. Only the defeated and deserters go to the wars, cowards that run away and enlist. Start now on that farthest western way, which does not pause at the Mississippi or the Pacific, nor conduct toward a worn-out China or Japan, but leads on direct a tangent to this sphere, summer and winter, day and night, sun down, moon down, and at last earth down too.

LEWIS AND CLARK HENRY GRINNELL SYMMES HOLE HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

[see Walden, next screen]

He copied the following extract about Inuit homebuilding into his Indian Notebook:

A circle is first traced on the smooth surface of the snow, and the slabs for raising the walls are cut from within, so as to clear a space down to the ice, which is to form the floor of the dwelling.... The slabs requisite to complete the dome, after the interior of the circle is exhausted, are cut from some neighboring spot. Each slab is neatly fitted to its place by running a ... knife along the joint, when it instantly presses to the wall, the cold atmosphere forming a most excellent cement. Crevices are plugged up, and seams accurately closed by throwing a few shovel-fuls of loose snow over the fabric. Two men generally work together in raising a house, and the one who is stationed within cuts a low door, and creeps out when his task is over. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

March 31, Wednesday: Intended to get up early this morning and commence a series of spring walks but clouds & drowsiness prevented. Early however I saw the clouds in the west – for my window looks west – suffused with rosy light – but that ‘flattery’ is all forgotten now. How can one help being an early riser and walker in that season when the birds begin to twitter & sing in the morning. The expedition in search of Sir John Franklin in 1850 landed at Cape Riley on the north side of Lancaster Sound–& one Vessel brought off relics of Franklin – viz “five pieces of beef, mutton, and pork bones, together with a bit of rope, a small rag of canvass, & a chip of wood cut by an ax.” Richardson says “From a careful examination of the beef bones, I came to the conclusion that they had belonged to pieces of salt-beef ordinarily supplied to the Navy, and that probably they & the other bones had been exposed to the atmosphere & to friction in rivulets of melted snow for four or five summers. The rope was proved by the rope-maker who examined it to have been made at Chatham, of Hungarian hemp, subsequent to 1841. The fragment of canvass which seemed to have been part of a boat’s swab, had the Queen’s broad arrow painted on it; and the chip of wood was of ash, a tree which does not grow on the banks of any river that falls into the Arctic Sea. It had, however, been long exposed to the weather, and was likely to have been cut from a piece of drift-timber found lying on the spot, as the mark of the ax was recent compared to the surface of the wood, which might have been exposed to the weather for a century”. – – “The grounds of these conclusions were fully stated in a report made to the Admiralty by Sir Edward Parry, myself, & other officers,”– – Is not here an instance of the civilized man detecting the traces of a friend or foe with a skill at least equal to that of the savage? Indeed it is in both cases but a common sense applied to the objects & in a manner most familiar to the parties. The skill of the savage is just such a science – though referred sometimes to instinct. Perhaps after the thawing of the trees their buds universally swell before they can be said to spring. Perchance as we grow old we cease to spring with the Spring – and we are indifferent to the succession of years, and they go by without epoch as months. Wo be to us when we cease to form new resolutions on the opening of a new year. A cold raw day with alternating hail-like snow & rain. According to Gilpin a copse is composed of forest trees mixed with brushwood which last is periodically cut down in 12 or 14 yrs. What Gilpin says about copses, glens, &c suggests that the different places to which the walker resorts may be profitably classified–& suggest many things to be said. Gilpin prefers the continuous song of the insects in the shade of a copse to the buzzing vagrant fly in the glare of day.– He says the pools in the forest must receive their black hue from clearness– I suppose he means they may have a muddy bottom or covered with dark dead leaves – but the water above must be clear. to reflect the trees. It would be worth the while to tell why a swamp pleases us.– what kinds please us – also what weather &c &c analyze our impressions. Why the moaning of the storm gives me pleasure. Methinks it is because it puts to rout the trivialness of our fairweather life & gives it at least a tragic interest. The sound has the effect of a pleasing challenge to call forth our energy to resist the invaders of our life’s territory. It is musical & thrilling as the sound of an enemy’s bugle. Our spirits revive like lichens in the storm. There is something worth living for when we are resisted – threatened. As at the last day we might be thrilled with the prospect of the grandeur of our destiny – so in these first days our destiny appears grander. What would the days – what would our life be worth if some nights were not dark as pitch – of darkness tangible or that you can cut with a knife! How else could the light in the mind shine! How should we be conscious of the light of reason? If it were not for physical cold how should we have discovered the warmth of the affections? I sometimes feel that I need to sit in a far away cave through a 3 weeks storm – cold and wet to give a tone to my system. The spring has its windy march to usher it in – with many soaking rains reaching into April. Methinks I would share every creatures suffering for the sake of its experience & joy. The song-sparrow [Melospiza melodia] & the transient fox-colored sparrow [Fox Sparrow Passerella iliaca] have they brought me no message this year? Do they lead heroic lives in Rupert’s Land. They are so small I think their destinies must be large. Have I heard what this tiny passenger has to say while it flits thus from tree to tree–? Is not the coming of the foxcolored sparrow something more earnest and significant than I have dreamed of? Can I forgive myself if I let it go to Ruperts Land before I have appreciated it. God did not make this world in jest – no, nor in indifference. These migrating sparrows all bear messages that concern my life. I do not pluck the fruits in their season. I love the birds & beasts because they are mythologically in earnest– I see that the sparrow cheeps & flits & sings adequately to the great design of the universe – that man does not communicate with it, – understand its language because he is not at one with nature. I reproach myself – because I have regarded with indifference the passage of the birds – I have thought them no better than I. What philosopher can estimate the different values of a waking thought & a dream? I hear late tonight the unspeakable rain mingled with rattling snow against the windows – preparing the ground HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

for spring.

April 1, Thursday: The 3rd, final installment of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, OR THE MAN THAT 7 WAS A THING appeared in the Washington DC antislavery weekly, The National Era.

Henry Thoreau continued studying the aesthetic and landscape theories in the Reverend William Gilpin’s FOREST SCENERY. Then he walked on the railroad in the afternoon to Flint’s Pond cedar woods.

April 1, Thursday: Gilpin says well that the object of a light mist is a “nearer distance” Among minuter plants – regarded as component parts of the forest – he thinks the fern the most picturesque He says “We are often at a loss to distinguish in pictures, the rising from the setting sun; tho their characters are very different, both in the lights & shadows. The ruddy lights indeed of the evening are more easily distinguished: but it is not perhaps always sufficiently observed, that the shadows of the evening are much less opaque, than those of the morning.” This morning the ground was completely covered with snow & the water on the meadows looked dark & stormy & contrasted well with the white landscape Now at noon the ground is once more as bare as before. He is in the lowest scale of laborers who is merely an able-bodied man and can compete with others only in physical strength. Woodchoppers in this neighborhood get but 50 cents a cord, but though many can chop 2 cords in a day in pleasant weather & under favorable circumstances, yet most do not average more than 75 cents a day take the months together– But one among them of only equal physical strength and skill as a chopper – having more wit, buys a cross-cut saw for 4 dollars, hires a man to help him at a dollar a day – and saws down trees all winter at 10 cents apiece & 30 or 40 a day – & clears 2 or more dollars a day by it. Yet as long as the world may last few will be found to buy the cross-cut saw – and probably the wages of the sawyer will never be reduced to a level with those of the chopper. 2 Pm to Flints Pond Cedar woods via RR – returning by C. Smith’s orchard. Saw the first bee of the season on the RR causeway – also a small red butterfly and later a large dark one with buff-edged wings. –G. Gilpin’s “Forest Scenery” is a pleasing book So moderate, temperate, graceful, roomy – like a gladed wood – not condensed with a certain religion in its manners and respect for all the good of the past – rare in more recent

7. Harriet Beecher Stowe. UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, OR THE MAN THAT WAS A THING. The National Era, June 8, 1851 to April 1, 1852 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

books – & it is grateful to read after them. Somewhat spare indeed in the thoughts as in the sentences– Some of the cool wind of the copses converted into gramatical & graceful sentences – without heat. Not one of those humors come to a head which some modern books are, but some of the natural surface of a healthy mind. Walden is all white ice but little melted about the shores. The very sight of it when I get so far on the causeway, though I hear the spring note of the chicadee [Black-capped Chicadee Parus Atricapillus] from over the ice carries my thoughts back at once some weeks toward winter – & a chill comes over them. BAKER FARM There is an early willow on sandbank of the RR against the pond by the fence – greyish below & yellowish above– The RR men have dug around the sleepers that the sun may thaw the ground & let them down. It is not yet out. Cut across near Bakers Barn. The swolen buds of some trees now give a new tint to their tops seen at a JAMES BAKER distance – to the maples at least. Bakers peach orchard – looks at this distance purplish below & red above – the color of the last year’s twigs– The geranium? is the most common green leaf to be seen everywhere on the surface now the snow is gone. They have been shooting great numbers of muskrats the last day or two. Is that the red osier (cornel or viburnum) near the grape vine on the Bear Hill road? How sure the farmer is to find out what bush affords the best withes – little of a botanist as he is.– The mts seen from Bare Hill are very fine now in the horizon – so evanescent – being broadly spotted white and blue like the skins of some animals – the white predominating.– The Peterboro Hills to the north are almost all white The snow has melted more on the more southern mts. With their white mantles – notwithstanding the alternating dark patches – they melt into the sky – Yet perhaps the white portions may be distinguished by the peculiar light of the sun shining on them. They are like a narrow strip of broadly spotted leopard skin, the saddle cloth of the sun spread along the horizon– I am surprised to find Flints Pond frozen still which should have been open a week ago. The Great Sudbury meadows covered with water are revealed – blue they look over the woods – each part of the river seen further north shines like silver in the sun – and the little pond in the woods west of this hill is half open water. Cheering that water with its reflections – compared with this opaque dumb pond. How unexpectedly dumb & poor & cold does Nature look when where we had expected to find a glassy lake reflecting the skies and trees in the Spring – we find only dull white ice. Such am I no doubt to many friends– But now that I have reached the Cedar Hill I see that there is about an acre of open water perhaps over bush island in the middle of the pond – and there are some water-fowl there on the edge of the ice mere black spots – though I detect their character by discovering a relative motion.– & some are swiming about in the water. The pond is perhaps the handsomer after all for this distant patch only of blue water in the midst of the field of white ice. Each enhances the other. It is an azure spot an Elysian feature in your cold companion making the imagined concealed depths seem deeper & rarer. This pond is worth coming to if only because it is larger than Walden– I can so easily fancy it indefinitely large– It represents to me that Icy Sea of which I have been reading in Sir J. Richardson’s Book. The prevailing color of the woods at present, excepting the evergreens, is russet – a little more red or greyish as the case may be, than the earth – for those are the colors of the withered leaves & the branches– The earth has the lighter hue of withered grass. Let me see how soon the woods will have acquired a new color.– Went over the hill toward the E. end of the pond. What is the significance of odors – of the odoriferous woods.– Sweet & yellow birch – Sassafras – fever-bush &c are an interesting class to me – when we bruise them in our walk we are suddenly exhilirated by their odor– This sweet scent soon evaporates & you must break the twig afresh– If you cut it, it is not as if you break it. Some like the sassafras have brought a great price as articles of commerce– No wonder that men thought they might have some effect toward renovating their lives. Gosnold, the discoverer of Cape Cod carried home a cargo of sassafras. What could be more grateful to the discoverer of a new country than a new fragrant wood? Gilpins is a book in which first there is nothing to offend – & 2ndly something to attract and please The branches of the young black birch grow very upright – as it were appressed to the main stem. Their buds appear a little expanded now. Saw the foxcolored sparrows [Fox Sparrow Passerella iliaca] & slate colored snow birds [Dark-eyed Junco Junco hyemalis] on Smiths Hill – the latter singing in the sun – a pleasant jingle. The mts which an hour ago were white are now all blue – the mistiness has increased so much in the horizon & crept even into the vales of the distant woods. The mist is in wreathes or stripes because we see the mist of successive vales. There could not easily be a greater contrast than between this morning’s & this evenings landscapes. The sun now an hour high– Now I see the river reach far in the north. The more distant river is ever the most etherial. Sat awhile before sun-set on the rocks in Saw Mill Brook– A brook need not be large to afford us pleasure by its sands & meanderings and falls & their various accompaniments. It is not so much size that we want as picturesque beauty & harmony. If the sound of its fall fills my ear it is enough. I require that the rocks over which it falls be agreeably disposed, & prefer that they be covered with lichens. The height & volume of the fall is of HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

very little importance compared with the appearance & disposition of the rocks over which it falls, the agreeable diversity of still water rapids & falls & of the surrounding scenery. I require that the banks & neighboring hill sides be not cut off – but excite a sense of at least graceful wildness. One or two small evergreens, especially hemlocks standing gracefully on the brink of the rill contrasting by their green with the surrounding deciduous trees when they have lost their leaves, & thus enlivening the scene & betraying their attachment to the water It would be no more pleasing to me if the stream were a mile wide & the (trees) hemlocks 5 feet in diameter. I believe that there is a harmony between the hemlock & the hemlock & the water which it overhangs – not explainable. In the first place its green is especially grateful to the eye the greater part of the year in any locality. and in the winter by its verdure overhanging & shading the water it concentrates in itself the beauty of all fluviatile trees. It loves to stand with its foot close to the water – its roots running over the rocks of the shore – & it 2 or more on opposite sides of a brook make the makes the most beautiful frame to a water-scape especially in deciduous woods – where the light is somber & not too glaring. It makes the more complete frame because its branches – particularly in young specimens such as I am thinking of spring from so near the ground & it makes so dense a mass of verdure. There are many larger hemlocks covering the steep side a hill forming the bank of the assabet where they are successively undermined by the water and they lean at every angle over the water – some are almost horizontally directed, and almost every year one falls in & is washed away. The place is known as the “Leaning Hemlocks.”– But to return to Saw Mill Run. I love that the green fronds of the fern pressed by the snow – lie on its rocks. It is a great advantage to take in so many parts at one view. We love to see the water stand – or seem to stand – at many different levels within a short distance – while we sit in its midst – some above some below us – & many successive falls in different directions meandering in the course of the fall – rather than one “chute” – rather spreading & shoaling than contracting & deepening at the fall– In a small brook like this there are many adjuncts to increase the variety, which are wanting in a river – or if present cannot be attended to – even dead leaves & twigs vary the ripplings & increase the foam.– And the very lichens on the rocks of the run are an important ornament – which in the great waterfall are wont to be overlooked. I enjoy this little fall on Saw Mill Run more than many a large one on a river that I have seen. The hornbeams & witch hazel & canoe birches all come in for their share of attention. We get such a complete idea of the small rill with its overhanging shrubs – as only a birds eye view from some eminence could give us of the larger stream. Perhaps it does not fall more than 5 feet within a rod & a half. I should not hear Niagara a short distance NIAGARA FALLS off. The never ending refreshing sound. It suggests more thoughts than Montmorenci. A stream & fall which the woods imbosom– They are not in this proportion to a larger fall. They lie in a more glaring & less picturesque light. Even the bubbles are a study. It can be completely examined in its details. The consciousness of their being water about you at different levels is agreeable. The sun can break through & fall on it & vary the whole scene infinitely. EDMUND HOSMER Saw the freshly? broken shells of a tortoise’s eggs – or were they a snakes? in Hosmer’s field. I hear a robin [American Robin Turdus migratorius] singing on the woods S of Hosmers just before sunset. It is a sound associated with New England village life– It brings to my thougts summer evenings when the children are playing in the yards before the doors & their parents conversing at the open windows.– It foretels all this now before those summer hours are come. As I come over the turnpike – the song sparrow’s [Melospiza melodia] jingle comes up from every part of the meadow as native as the tinkling rills – or the blossoms of the spirea– The meadow sweet – soon to spring. Its cheep is like the sound of opening buds.– The sparrow is continually singing on the alders along the brook side while the sun is continually setting. We have had a good solid winter – which has put the previous summer far behind us – intense cold deep & lasting snows – & clear tense winter sky– It is a good experience to have gone through with.

April 12, Monday: By torching two of the Cocopas villages of Baja California, Lieutenant Thomas Sweeny induced 150 warriors of this tribe to join with his group of white men in an expedition against their tribal enemies, the Yumas.

Henry Thoreau read the Reverend William Gilpin on the turkeys of Windsor Forest, and in the afternoon he went with a companion to the powder mills at the extreme western edge of town. Since the companion make a coarse sex joke which saddened Thoreau, it seems rather likely that this was Ellery Channing. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

April 12, Monday: Gilpin says that our turkey was domesticated in Windsor Forest at one time & from its size was an object of consequence to lovers of the picturesque as most birds are not–& in its form & color & actions more picturesque than the peacock or indeed any other bird. Being recently reclaimed from the woods, its habits continue wilder than those of other domestic fowls– “It strays widely for its food–it flies well considering its apparent inactivity–and it perches, & roosts on trees.” He says of the leaf of the beech “on handling, it feels as if it were fabricated with metallic rigor” – – “For this reason, I suppose, as its rigor gives it an elastic quality, the common people in France & Switzerland use it for their beds.” I have heard thus far 2 sounds from 2 kinds of frogs I suppose–the hyla’s peep–& a rather faint croak in pond holes– 2 P M to the Powder Mills via Harringtons returning by RR. The road through the pitch pine woods beyond J. Hosmers is very pleasant to me curving under the pines –without a fence– the sandy road with the pines close abutting on it – yellow in the sun & low branched with younger pines filling up all to the ground.– I love to see a sandy road like this curving through a pitch pine wood where the trees closely border it without fences – a great cart path merely. That is a pleasant part of the north river under the black-birches. The dog does not hesitate to take to the water DOG for a stick but the current carries him rapidly down. The lines of saw dust left at different levels on the shore is just hint enough of a saw mill on the stream above. Saw the first blossoms (bright yellow stamens or pistils) on the willow catkins today– The spekled alders & the maples are earlier then. The yellow blossom appears first on one side of the ament and is the most of bright & sunny color the spring has showed.– the most decidedly flower like that I have seen Of flowers then I should say without regard to the skunk cabbage q.v. 1st the spekled alder –then the maple without keys –then this earliest perhaps swamp willow with its bright yellow blossoms on one side of the ament It is fit that this almost earliest spring flower should be yellow the color of the sun. Saw a maple in the water with yellowish flowers. Is it the water brings them forward? But I believe that these are all the barren flowers–& the perfect flowers appear afterward.– When I look closely I perceive the sward beginning to be green under my feet – very slightly. It rains with sleet & hail yet not enough to color the ground. At this season I can walk in the fields without wetting my feet in grass. Observed in the stonework of the R R. bridge I think it must be in acton– Many large stones more or less disintegrated & even turned to a soft soil into which I could thrust my finger – threatening the destruction of the bridge– A geologist is needed to tell you whether your stones will continue stones–& not turn to earth. It was very pleasant to come out on the RR in this gentle rain the track laid in grey sand looks best at such a time with the rails all wet– The factory bridge seen through the mist is agreeably indistinct seen against a dark greyish pine wood– I should not know there was a bridge there if I had not been there – he dark line made by its shaded underside is most that I see here spaning the road – the rails are quite indistinct. We love to see things thus with a certain indistinctness. I am made somewhat sad this afternoon by the coarseness & vulgarity of my companion – because he is one with whom I have made myself intimate. He inclines latterly to speak with coarse jesting of facts which should always be treated with delicacy & reverence. I lose my respect for the man who can make the mystery of sex the subject of a coarse jest – yet when you speak earnestly & seriously on the subject is silent. I feel that this is to be truly irreligious. Whatever may befal me I trust that I may never lose my respect for purity in others. The subject of sex is one on which I do not wish to meet a man at all unless I can meet him on the most inspiring ground. If his view degrades, & does not elevate. I would preserve purity in act & thought as I would cherish the memory of my mother– A companion can possess no worse quality than vulgarity. If I find that he is not habitually reverent of the fact of sex– I–, even I, will not associate with. I will cast this first stone– What were life without some religion of this kind? Can I walk with one who by his jests & by his habitual tone reduces the life of men & women to a level with that of cats & dogs? The man who uses such a vulgar jest describes his relation to his dearest friend. DOG Impure as I am I could protect & worship purity. I can have no really serious conversation with my companion. He seems not capable of it. The men whom I most esteem when they speak at all on this subject do not speak with sufficient reverence– They speak to men with a coarseness which they would not use in the presence of women–& I think they would feel a slight shame if a woman coming in should hear their remarks. A man’s speech on this subject should of course be ever as reverent and chaste & simple as if it were to be heard by the ears of maidens. In the New Forest in Hampshire they had a chief officer called the lord-warden–& under him two distinct officers, one to preserve the venison of the forest, another to preserve its vert (ie woods – lawns &c) Does not our Walden need such. The lord-warden was a person of distinction, as the Duke of Glocester. Walden wood was my forest walk. The English forests are divided into “walks” with a keeper presiding over each. My “walk” is 10 miles from my HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

house every way. Gilpin says “It is a forest-adage of ancient date, non est inquirendum unde venit venison”. i.e. whether stolen or not. “The incroachments of trespassers, and the houses, and fences thus raised on the borders of the forest” – – by forest borderers – – were “considered as great nuisances by the old forest-law, and were severely punished under the name of purprestures, as tending ad terrorem ferarum – ad nocumentum forestae, &c” There is this afternoon & evening a rather cool April rain – pleasant to hear its steady dripping.

April 13, Tuesday: F.W. Woolworth, who would become the “five-and-ten king,” was born.

On his way home about 11PM, Henry David Thoreau walked through one of those late heavy snowstorms for which the region is renowned:

April 13, Tuesday: A driving snow storm in the night & still raging–5 or 6 inches deep on a level at 7 Am. All birds are turned into snow birds [Dark-eyed Junco Junco hyemalis]. Trees and houses have put on the aspect of winter The travellers carriage wheels, the farmer’s wagon are converted into white disks of snow through which the spokes hardly appear. But it is good now to stay in the house & read & write. We do not now go wandering all abroad & dissipated–but the imprisoning storm condenses our thoughts– I can hear the clock tick as not in pleasant weather– My life is enriched– I love to hear the wind howl. I have a fancy for sitting with my book or paper–in some mean & apparently unfavorable place–in the kitchen for instance where the work is going on–rather a little cold than comfortable– – My thoughts are of more worth in such places than they would be in a well-furnished & warmed studio. Windsor according to Gilpin is contracted from Wind-shore–the Saxons not sounding the sh. The robin is the only bird as yet that makes a business of singing–steadily singing–sings continuously out of pure joy & melody of soul–carols. The jingle of the song-sparrow [Song Sparrow Melospiza melodia] simple & sweet as it is–is not of sufficient volume nor sufficiently continuous to command & hold attention. & the blue birds [Eastern Bluebird Sialia sialis] is but a transient warble.– from a throat overflowing with azure & serene hopes– –but the song of the robin on the elms or oaks loud & clear & heard afar through the streets of a village makes a fit conclusion to a spring day.– The larks [Eastern Meadowlark Sturnella magna] are not yet in sufficient numbers or sufficiently musical. The robin is the prime singer as yet. The black bird’s conqueree when first heard in the spring is pleasant from the associations it awakens–& is best heard by one boating on the river– It belongs to the stream. The robin is the only bird with whose song the groves can be said to be now vocal morning & evening–for though many other notes are heard none fill the air like this bird. As yet no other thrushes. Snowed all day till the ground was covered 8 inches deep. Heard the robin singing as usual last night though it was raining. The elm buds begin to show their blossoms. As I came home through the streets at 11 o’clock last night through the snow It cheered me to think that there was a little bit of a yellow blossom by warm sandy water sides–which had expanded its yellow blossom on the sunny side–amid the snows– I mean the catkins of the earliest willow. To think of those little sunny spots in nature. So incredibly contrasting with all this white & cold. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

April 15, Thursday: Attorney Abraham Lincoln had a busy day in the Woodford County Circuit Court of Metamora, Illinois. First the State’s Attorney David B. Campbell entered a motion of nolle prosequi in the case of People v. Snyder et al. Campbell’s motion, ending the state’s prosecution of attorney Lincoln’s clients Isaac Snyder, John Johnson, Aaron Burt, and Dempsey Hawkins, who had been indicted on a charge of “gaming.” Then, in the chancery case of Dressler v. Dressler et al., attorney Lincoln filed an answer for the minor heirs of Abraham Dressler, to wit, Levi Dressler, Jane Dressler, and Hannah Dressler (Lincoln being the guardian ad litem for the children in that land partition case). Then, in the case of Rogers v. Rogers et al. (another chancery case involving the partition of land), attorney Lincoln filed a guardian ad litem’s answer for minor heirs Susan F. Morton, John W. Morton, Tabitha Ann Morton, Elizabeth Morton, Jeremiah R. Morton, and John A. Halderman.

April 15, Thursday: My face still burns with yesterday’s sunning. It rains this morning, as if the vapor from the melting snow was falling again. There is so much sun & light reflected from the snow at this season that it is not only remarkably white & dazzling but tans in a few moments. It is fortunate then that the sun on the approach of the snows – the season of snow – takes his course so many degrees lower in the heavens – else he might burn us off even at that season. The face comes from the house of winter tender & white to the house of summer – and these late snows convey the sun to it with sudden & scorching power. It was not the march winds or others. It was a still warm beautiful day. I was out but 3 hours It was the sun suddenly and copiously applied to a face from winter quarters The broad flat brown buds on Mr Cheney’s elm containing 20 or 30 yellowish green threads surmounted with little brownish-mulberry cups which contain the stamens & the two styles – these are just expanding or blossoming now. The flat imbricated buds which open their scales both ways – have had a rich look for some weeks past. Why so few elms so advanced – so rich now–? Are the stamenifereous & pistilliferous flowers ever on dif. trees. It is according to Emerson the Dwarf Cassandra C. Calyculata of D. Don that is so common on the river meadows & in swamps & bogs – formerly called an Andromeda – of the Ericaceae or Heath family with the Uva Ursi (Arctostaphylos.) Now well flower-budded. I had forgotten the aspen in my latest enumerations of flowers – v if its flowers have not decidedly appeared. I think that the largest early catkined willow in large bushes in sand by water now blossoming – the fertile catkins with paler blossoms the sterile covered with polen a pleasant lively bright yellow – the brightest flower I have seen thus far– Gilpin says of the stags in the New Forest (a hart is a stag in his 5th or 6th yr & upward – if one “be hunted by the king, and escape; or have his life given him for the sport he has afforded, he becomes from thence forward a hart-royal. – If he be hunted out of the forest, and there escape; the king hath sometimes honored him with a royal proclamation; the purport of which is, to forbid any one to molest him, that he may have free liberty of returning to his forest. From that time he becomes a hart-royal proclaimed.” As is said of Richard the 1st that having pursued a hart a great distance– –“The king in gratitude for the diversion he had received, ordered him immediately to be proclaimed at Tickill, and at all the neighboring towns”. Think of having such a fellow as that for a king causing his proclamation to be blown about your country towns at the end of his day’s sport – at Tickill or elsewhere – that your hinds may not molest the hart that has afforded him such an ever memorable day’s sport– Is it not time that his subjects whom he has so sorely troubled and so long, be harts royal proclaimed – who have afforded him such famous sport? It will be a finer days sport when the hinds shall turn and hunt the royal hart beyond the bounds of his forest – & his kingdom – & in perpetual banishment alone he become a royal-hart proclaimed. Such is the magnanimity of royal hearts – that through a whimsical prick of generosity spares the game it could not kill – & fetters its equals with its arbitrary will. Kings love to say shall & will. Rain rain, rain, all day – carrying off the snow. It appears then that if you go out at this season and walk in the sun in a clear warm day like yesterday – while the earth is covered with snow – you may have your face burnt in a few moments. The rays glance off from the snowy crystals & scorch the skin. Thinking of the value of the gull to the scenery of our river in the spring when for a few weeks they are seen circling about so deliberately & heavily yet gracefully – without apparent object beating like a vessel in the air. Gilpin says something to the purpose – that water-fowl “discover in their flight some determined aim. They eagerly coast the river or return to the sea; bent on some purpose, of which they never lose sight. But the HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

evolutions of the gull appear capricious, and undirected, both when she flies alone, and, as she often does, in large companies. – The more however her character suffers as a loiterer, the more it is raised in picturesque value, by her continuing longer before the eye; and displaying in her elegant sweeps through the air, her sharp- pointed wings, and her bright silvery hue. – She is beautiful also, not only on the wing, but when she floats, in numerous assemblies on the water; or when she rests on the shore, dotting either one, or the other with white spots; which, minute as they are, are very picturesque: – – giving life & spirit to a view.” He seems to be describing our very bird. I do not remember to have seen them over or in our river meadows when there was not ice there. They come annually a-fishing here like royal hunters. to remind us of the sea – & that our town after all lies but further up a creek of the universal sea – above the head of the tide. So ready is a deluge to overwhelm our lands as the gulls to circle hither in the spring freshets. To see a gull beating high over our meadowy flood in chill & windy march – is akin to seeing a mackerel schooner on the coast. It is the nearest approach to sailing vessels in our scenery. I never saw one at Walden. O how it salts our fresh our Sweet watered Fair Haven all at once to see this sharp beaked greedy sea bird beating over it! For awhile the water is brackish to my eyes. It is merely some herring pond – and if I climb the eastern bank I expect to see the atlantic there covered with countless sails. whoever thought that walden’s blue & emerald water was ever prophaned by wing of gull or cormorant– At most it tolerates one annual loon. We are so far maritime – do not dwell beyond the range of the sea going gull – the littoral birds. Does not the gull come up after those suckers which I see? He is never to me perfectly in harmony with the scenery – but like the high water something unusual. –What a novel life to be introduced to a dead sucker floating on the water in the spring!– Where was it spawned pray? The sucker is so recent – so unexpected – so unrememberable so unanticipatable a creation– While so many institutions are gone by the board and we are despairing of men & of ourselves there seems to be life even in a dead sucker – whose fellows at least are alive. The world never looks more recent or promising – religion philosophy poetry – than when viewed from this point. To see a sucker tossing on the spring flood – its swelling imbricated breast heaving up a bait to not despairing gulls– It is a strong & a strengthening sight. Is the world coming to an end?– Ask the chubs. As long as fishes spawn – glory & honor to the cold blooded who despair – as long as ideas are expressed – as long as friction makes bright – as long as vibrating wires make music of harps – we do not want redeemers. What a volume you might on the separate virtues of the various animals – the black duck & the rest. How indispensable our one or two flocks of geese [Canada Goose Branta canadensis] in spring & autumn– What would be a spring in which that sound was not heard.– Coming to unlock the fetters of northern rivers. Those annual steamers of the air Would it not be a fine office to preserve the vert of this forest in which I ramble? Channing calls our walks along the banks of the river – taking a boat for convenience at some distant point – ELLERY CHANNING riparial excursions It is a pleasing epithet – but I mistrust such – even as good as this, in which the mere name is so agreeable, as if it would ring hollow erelong – and rather the thing should make the true name poetic at last. Alcott wished me to name my book Sylvania! But he & C. are 2 men in these respects. We make a good many prairial excursions We take a boat 4 or 5 miles out then paddle up the stream as much further, meanwhile land & making excursions inland or further along the banks. Walden is but little more melted than yesterday. I see that the grass, which unless in the most favored spots, did not show any evidence of spring to the casual glance, before the snow, will look unexpectedly green as soon as it has gone. It has actually grown beneath it. The lengthened spires about our pump – remind me of flame – as if it were a kind of green flame – allied to fire, as it is the product of the sun. The Aspen on the RR is beginning to blossom showing the purple or mulberry – in the terminal catkins – though it droops like dead-cat’s tails in the rain. It appears about the same date with the elm. Is it the chickweed so forward by our back door-step? DOG V that sentence in Gilpin about – A gentleman might keep a greyhound within ten miles of the forest if he was lawed– “Lawing, or expeditation, was a forest-term for disqualifying a dog to exert such speed, as was necessary to take a deer. It was performed either by cutting out the sole of his foot, or by taking off two of his claws by a chisel, and mallet.” It reminds me of the majority of human hounds that tread the forests paths of this world – they go slightly limping in their gait as if disqualified by a cruel fate to overtake the nobler game of the forest – their natural quarry– Most men are such dogs. Ever & anon starting a quarry – with perfect scent which from this cruel maiming & disqualification of the fates he is incapable of coming up with. Does not the noble dog shed tears? Gilpin on the subject of docking horse’s tails – thinks that leaving the tail may even help the racer to fly toward HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

the goal I notice that the sterile blossoms of that large catkin’d early willow begin to open on the side of the catkin – like a tinge of golden light – gradually spreading & expanding over the whole surface & lifting their anthers far & wide. The stem of these sterile catkins is more reddish smoother & slenderer than that of the female ones (pale flowered) which is darker & downy

April 17, Saturday: Arriving in Montréal for a lecture engagement, Waldo Emerson walked across the still-frozen St. Lawrence River. Meanwhile, that afternoon in Concord, Henry Thoreau was walking up the east bank of the Sudbury River to Fair Haven Hill:

April 17, Saturday: Gilpin says – “As the wheeling motion of the gull is beautiful, so also is the figured flight of the goose, the duck, and the widgeon; all of which are highly ornamental to coast-views, bays, and estuaries.” A flight of ducks adds to the wildness of our wildest river scenery. Undoubtedly the soaring & sailing of the hen hawk (the red-shouldered buzzard (?)) [Red-tailed Hawk Buteo jamaicensis] is the most ornamental – graceful – stately – beautiful to contemplate of all the birds that ordinarily frequent our skies – The eagle [Bald Eagle Haliaeetus Leucocephalus] is but a rare & casual visitor.– The goose [Canada Goose Branta canadensis] – the osprey [Pandionhaliaetus] – the great heron [Great Blue Heron Ardea herodias] –though interesting are either transient visitors or rarely seen.– they either move through the air as passengers or too exclusively looking for their prey – but the henhawk soars like a creature of the air. The flight of martins [Purple Martin Progne subis] is interesting in the same way. When I was young and compelled to pass my sunday in the house without the aid of interesting books, I used to spend many an hour till the wished- for sun-down watching the martins soar (from an attic window – and fortunate indeed did I deem myself 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. Gilpin says that the black-cock, scarce in the New Forest, “has the honor, which no other bird can boast, of being protected as royal-game.” Stood by the river side early this morning. The water has been rising during the night. The sun has been shining on it half an hour. It is quite placid. The village smokes are seen against the long hill. And now I see the river also is awakening – a slight ripple beginning to appear on its surface. It wakens like the village– It proves a beautiful day, & I see that glimmering or motion in the air just above the fields, which we associate with heat. I noticed yesterday that some of those early staminate catkins had apparently been blasted on one side by the snow.– The waters are after all as quiet at noon as in the morning – & I see the reflections with rare distinctness from my window. Up the E. bank of river to Fair Haven at 2 Pm. The farmers are in haste beginning their plowing. The season is remarkably backward. The wind is rising at last & it is somewhat from the East S.E. but it is the more fresh & life giving. The water is over the corner road since last night, higher than before this season – so that we (I & C [Ellery Channing]) go not that way. In that little pasture of Potters under the oak – I am struck with the advantage of the fence in landscapes– Here is but a half acre inclosed – but the fence has the effect of confining the attention to this little undulation of the land – and to make you consider it by itself – and the importance of the oak is proportionally increased. This formation of the surface – would be lost in an unfenced prairie, but the fence which nearly enough defines it – frames it & presents it as a picture. Sat on the smooth river bank under Fair Haven– The sun-light in the wood across the stream. It proves a breezy afternoon. There are fresh cobwebs on the alders in the sun. The atmosphere grows somewhat misty & blue in the distance. The sun sparkle on the water is it not brighter now than it will be in summer? In this freshet & overflow – the permanent shore & shore-marks are obliterated – and the wooded point making into the water – shows no gradations – no naked stems beneath – but the pine boughs & the bushes actually rest gently on the water There is no shore. The waters steal so gently and noiselessly over the land amid the alders & the copses – So soft so placid a shore – which would not wreck a cranberry! The groves are simply immersed – as when you raise the water in a wine glass by dropping pins into it. What is that large hawk with a pure white belly & slender long black wings (a goshawk?) which I see sailing over the Cliffs – a pair of them – looking for prey? From this burnt shrub-oak plain beneath the Cliff where in HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

spots not even the grass has caught again – I see the Pond southward through the hazy atmosphere – a blue- rippled water surrounded mistily by red shrub oak woods & on one side green pines & tawny grass– A blue- rippled water surrounded by low reddish shrub oak hills – the whole invested – softened & made more remote & indistinct by a blueish mistiness. I am not sure but the contrast is more exciting & lastingly satisfactory than if the woods were green. A meadow must not be deep nor have well defined shore. The more indented & finely divided & fringed & shallow & copsy its shore – the more islanded bushes & cranberry vines appear here & there above the surface, the more truly it answers to the word meadow or prairie.– These deep withdrawn bays – like that toward Well meadow – are resorts for many a shy flock of ducks. They are very numerous this afternoon we scare them up every quarter of a mile – mostly the whitish duck – which Brown thinks the Golden Eye – (we call them Whistlers) and also Black ducks, perchance also Shell-drakes– They are quite shy – swim rapidly away far into the pond– A flock which we surprised in the smooth Bay of well meadow, divided & showed much cunning – dodging under the shore to avoid us. Struck upon a wild maple swamp a little N W (?) of Well Meadow Head – where the ground had the appearances of a wild ravine running up from the swamp water here even to the rocks of the Cliffs which from no other point would be associated with this place. Here is a very retired wild swamp – now drowned land – with picturesque maples in it & the leaves and sticks on the bottom seen through the transparent water – the yellowish bottom – yellow with decayed leaves &c Found within the just swelling buds of the amelanchier evidences of the coming blossom. Observed in the 2nd of the chain of ponds between Fair Haven & Walden a large (for the pond) island patch of the dwarf Andromeda – I sitting on the east bank– Its fine brownish red color very agreeable & memorable to behold. In the last long pond looking at it from the south – I saw it filled with a slightly greyish shrub which I took for the sweet gale – but when I had got round to the east side chancing to turn round I was surprised to see that all this pond hole also was filled with the same warm brownish red colored Andromeda. The fact was I was opposite to the sun – but from every other other position I saw only the sun reflected from the surface of the andromeda leaves – which gave the whole a greyish brown hue tinged with red – but from this position alone I saw as it were through the leaves which the opposite sun lit up – giving to the whole this charming warm what I call Indian red color– –the mellowest the ripest – red imbrowned color – but when I looked to the right or left i.e. N or S the more the swamp had the mottled light or greyish aspect – where the light was reflected from the surfaces of the leaves – And afterward when I had risen higher up the hill though still opposite the sun – the light came reflected upward from the surfaces & I lost that warm rich-red tinge – surpassing cathedral windows. Let me look again at a different hour of the day & see if it is really so. It is a very interesting piece of magic. It is the autumnal tints in spring only more subdued & mellow– These leaves are so slow to decay. V. when they fall.– Already these frogs are greened with frog spittle – & I see the tracks of muskrats through it.– Hear the faint 1 croak of frogs & the still rather faint peeping of hylas. It is about 4 /2 Pm. The form of the surface here abouts is very agreeable. There are many dry hollows & Valleys here abouts connecting these two ponds. The undulating ground. A fisherman making change the other day gave a ninepence whose pillars were indistinct – some of the women returned it – whereupon he took it & taking off his hat rubbed it on his hair saying he guessed he could make the pillars appear. The Pond is still half coverd – with ice & it will take another day like this to empty it. It is clear up tight to the shore on the S side. dark grey cold ice – completely saturated with water– The air from over it is very cold– The scent of the earliest spring flowers! I smelt the willow catkins today. tender – & innocent – after this rude winter – yet slightly sickening – – Yet full of vernal promise. This odor– How unlike any thing that winter affords – or nature has afforded this 6 months! A mild sweet vernal scent– Not highly spiced & intoxicating as some erelong – but attractive to bees– That early yellow smell. The odor of spring – of life developing amid buds – of the earth’s epithalamium – The first flowers are not the highest scented – as catkins – as the first birds are not the finest singers – as the black-birds & songsparrows [Melospiza melodia] &c. The beginnings of the year are humble. But though this fragrance is not rich – it contains & prophecies all others in it. The leaves of the veratrum viride – Am. Hellebore now just pushing up. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

April 19, Monday: The ice on the St. Lawrence waterway broke up. In Montréal, Waldo Emerson delivered “England” as a preliminary to the “Conduct of Life” series of lectures that he would put into his last book, CONDUCT OF LIFE. In Concord it was raining, and Henry Thoreau went with Ellery Channing at 2PM over Wood’s or South Bridge along Sudbury Road to Lee’s Bridge over the Sudbury River, and back by Baker Farm near Mount Misery. That night there was a great storm.

The California Historical Society was founded.

April 19, Monday: 6 Am rain still, a fine rain. The robin sang early this morning over the bare ground – an hour ago, nevertheless. ushering in the day. Then the guns were fired & the bells rung to commemorate the anniversary of the birth of a nation’s liberty. The birds must live on expectation now. There is nothing in nature to cheer them yet That last flock of geese [Canada Goose Branta canadensis] yesterday is still in my eye– After hearing their clangor, looking S W we saw them just appearing over a dark pine wood in an irregular waved line one abreast of the other – as it were breasting the air & pushing it before them. It made you think of the streams of Cayster &c &c. They carry weight – such a weight of metal in the air. Their dark waved outline as they disappear– The grenadiers of the air. Man pigmifies himself at sight of these inhabitants of the air. These stormy days they do not love to fly – they alight in some retired marsh or river. From their lofty path-way they can easily spy out the most extensive and retired swamp. How many there must be that one or more flocks are seen to go over almost every farm in New Eng. in the spring. That oak by Darbys is a grand object seen from any side– It stands like an athlete & defies the tempests in every direction. It has not a weak point. It is an agony of strength. Its branches look like stereotyped gray lightening on the sky. But I fear a price is set upon its sturdy trunk & roots – for ship timber – for knees to make stiff the sides of ships against the atlantic billows. Like an athlete it shows its well developed muscles. I saw yesterday that the farmers had been out to save their fencing stuff from the flood – and every where it was drawn above high water mark. The north-river had fallen nearly a foot – which I cannot account for unless some of the dams above had broken away or been suddenly raised. This slight difference in the character of the tributaries of a river – & their different histories & adventures is interesting.– all making one character at last. The willow catkin might be the emblem of Spring. The buds of the lilack look ready to take advantage of the first warm day. The skin of my nose has come off in consequence of that burning of the sun reflected from the snow. A stormy day HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

2 PM with C. over Wood’s Bridge to Lee’s and back by Baker Farm. It is a violent N E storm in which it is very difficult & almost useless to carry an umbrella. I am soon wet to my skin over half my body – at first – & for a long time I feel cold and as if I had lost some vital heat by it – but at last the water in my clothes feels warm to me & I know not but I am dry. It is a wind to turn umbrellas. The meadows are higher – more wild & angry & the waves run higher with more white to their caps than before this year. I expect to hear of ship wrecks – & of of damage done by the tide. This wind too keeps the water in the river. It is worth the while to walk today to hear the rumbling roar of the wind – as if it echoed through the hollow chambers of the air. It even sounds like thunder sometimes– And when you pass under trees oaks or elms that overhang the road – the sound is more grand & stormy still– The wind sounds even in open fields as if on a roof over our heads. It sounds as if amid sails. The mists against the woods are seen driving by in upright columns or sections – as if separated by waves of air.– drifting by they make a dimly mottled landscape. What comes flapping low with heavy wing over the middle of the flood– Is it an eagle [Bald Eagle Haliaeetus leucocephalus] or a fish-hawk [Osprey Pandion haliaetus]?– Ah, now he is betrayed, I know not by what motion – a great gull [Herring Gull Larus argentatus] .– right in the eye of the storm– He holds not a steady course – but suddenly he dashes upward even like the surf of the sea which he frequents – showing the under sides of his long, pointed wings – on which do I not see 2 white spots? He suddenly beats upward thus as if to surmount the airy billows by a slanting course as the teamster surmounts a slope. The swallow too flys fantastically & & luxuriously & leisurely – doubling some unseen corners in the sky. Here is a gull then long after ice in the river. It is a fine sight to see this noble bird leisurely advancing right in the face of the storm. How sweet is the perception of a new natural fact! – suggesting what worlds remain to be unveiled. That phenomenon of the Andromeda seen against the sun cheers me exceedingly When the phenomenon was not observed – It was not – at all. I think that no man ever takes an original or detects a principle without experiencing an inexpressible as quite infinite & sane pleasure which advertises him of the dignity of that truth he has perceived. The thing that pleases me most within these three days is the discovery of the andromeda phenomenon– It makes all those parts of the country where it grows more attractive & elysian to me. It is a natural magic. These little leaves are the stained windows in the cathedral of my world. At sight of any redness I am excited like a cow.– To-day you can find arrowheads for every stone is washed bright in the rain. On the Miles road – the beomyces roseus is now in perfection. Seen on the clay-like surface, amid the dark dead birch & pine leaves it looks like a minute dull pinkish bloom.– a bloom on the earth – & passes for a terrene flower. It impresses me like a mildew passing into a higher type. It covers large tracts of ground there a pink color.– C. calls it flesh colored, but it is high-colored for that Observed the thistle again covered with the beads of rain drops & tinged with purple on the edges of the leaves. It impressed me again as some rich fruit of the tropics ready to be eaten with a spoon.– it suggests pine apples – custard-apples or what is it? The pasture thistle. All the farmers cart paths – for their meadow hay – are now seen losing themselves in the water. In the midst of this storm I see & hear the robin still & the songsparrow [Melospiza melodia] – and see the blue-bird [Eastern Bluebird Sialia sialis] also. & the crow [American Crow Corvus brachyrhynchos] – and a hawk – a bunting – (a marsh- hawk (?)) & a blue woodpecker I thought about the size of the hairy. The meadow from Lee’s Causeway looking N E against the storm looks dark & as C. says slate-colored. I observe that to get the dark color of the waves you must not only look in the direction whence they come, but stand as low & nearly on a level with them as possible. If you are on the top of a hill, light is reflected upward to you from their surface. In all this storm & wet, see a muskrat’s head in the meadow – as if someone thrust up a mop from below – literally a drowned rat. Such independence to the moods of nature. He does not care if he knows when it rains. Saw a woodchuck out in the storm. The elder buds are forward. I stood by Clematis Brook – hearing the wind roar in the woods & the water – in the brook & trying to distinguish between these sounds– I at last concluded that the first was a drier sound, the last a wetter– There is a slight dry hum to the wind blowing on the twigs of the forest – a softer & more liquid splashing sound to the water falling on rocks. Scared up 3 blue herons in the little pond close by – quite near us. It was a grand sight to see them rise. So slow & stately – so long & limber with an undulating

motion. from head to foot undulating also their huge wings – undulating in 2 directions & looking warily about them. With HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

this graceful limber undulating motion they arose– as if so they got under way–their two legs trailing parallel far behind like an earthy residuum to be left behind.– They are large like birds of Syrian lands & seemed to oppress the earth – & hush the hill-side to silence as they winged their way over it – looking back toward us It would affect our thoughts – deepen & perchance darken our reflections if such huge birds flew in numbers in our sky. They are few & rare. Among the birds of celebrated flight – Storks – cranes, Geese [Canada Goose Branta canadensis] – & ducks. The legs hang down like a weight which they raise, to pump up as it were with its wings & convey out of danger. The mist today makes those near distances which Gilpin tells of. I saw looking from the R R to Fair Haven Hill soon after we started – 4 such – the woodd on E. Hubbards meadow – dark but open – that of Hubbards Grove showing the branches of the trees – Potter’s Pitch pines perhaps one solid black mass with outline only distinct – Browns on the Cliff but dimly seen through the mist.!– One above & beyond the other.– with vales of mist between. To see the larger & wilder birds you must go forth in the great storms like this. At such times they frequent our neighborhood & trust themselves in our midst. A life of fair weather walks might never show you the goose sailing on our waters, or the Great Heron feeding here. When the storm increases then these great birds that carry the mail of the seasons lay to. To see wild life – you must go forth at a wild season. When it rains & blows keeping men in-doors then the lover of nature must forth. Then returns nature to her wild estate. In pleasant sunny weather you may catch butterflies – but only when the storm rages that lays prostrate the forest & wrecks the mariner, do you come upon the feeding grounds of wildest fowl – of heron & geese. The light buff (?) colored hazel catkins – some three inches long are conspicuous now. Beside the direct & steady rain large drops fall from the trees & dimple the water. Stopped in the Barn on the Baker Farm. Sat in the dry meadow hay – where the mice nest. To sit there rustling the hay just beyond reach of the rain while the storm roars without – it suggested an inexpressible dry stillness – the quiet of the hay-mow in a rainy day – such stacks of quiet & undisturbed thought – when there is not even a cricket to stir in the hay. – but all without is wet & tumultuous, & all within is dry & quiet–8 O what reams of thought one might have here– The crackling of the hay makes silence audible. It is so deep a bed, it makes one dream to sit on it. to think of it. The never failing jay [Blue Jay Cyanocitta cristata]

8. William M. White’s version of this storm is:

Sat in the dry meadow-hay, Where the mice nest.

To sit there, Rustling the hay, Just beyond reach of the rain While the storm roars without, It suggested an inexpressible dry stillness, The quiet of the haymow in a rainy day; Such stacks of quiet and undisturbed thought, When there is not even a cricket to stir in the hay, But all without is wet and tumultuous, And all within is dry and quiet. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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still screams. Standing in Pleasant Meadow Conantum shore seen through the mist & rain looks dark & heavy – & without perspective like a perpendicular upon its edge Crossed by the chain of ponds to Walden. The first, looking back, appears elevated high above Fair Haven between the hills above the swamp – & the next higher yet. Each is distinct, a wild and interesting pond with its musquash house. The 2nd the simplest perhaps – with decayed spruce (?) trees rising out of the island of Andromeda in its midst – draped with usnea & the mists now driving between them. Saw the Veratrum viride 7 or 8 inches high in Well meadow swamp – The greatest growth of the season – at least above water, if not above or below.– I doubt if there is so much recent vegetable matter pushed above ground elsewhere – certainly there is not unless of pads under water– Yet it did not start so early as it has grown fast. Walden is clear of ice. The ice left it yesterday then the 18th Trilium Woods make a lea 30 or 40 rods off though you are raised 20 feet on the causeway.

WALDEN: I set out one afternoon to go a-fishing to Fair-Haven, through the woods, to eke out my scanty fare of vegetables. My way led through Pleasant Meadow, an adjunct of the Baker Farm, that retreat of which a poet has since sung, beginning,– “Thy entry is a pleasant field, Which some mossy fruit trees yield Partly to a ruddy brook, By gliding musquash undertook, And mercurial trout, Darting about.” I thought of living there before I went to Walden. I “hooked” the apples, leaped the brook, and scared the musquash and the trout. It was one of those afternoons which seem indefinitely long before one, in which many events may happen, a large portion of our natural life, though it was already half spent when I started. By the way there came up a shower, which compelled me to stand half an hour under a pine, piling boughs over my head, and wearing my handkerchief for a shed; and when at length I had made one cast over the pickerel-weed, standing up to my middle in water I found myself suddenly in the shadow of a cloud, and the thunder began to rumble with such emphasis that I could do no more than listen to it. The gods must be proud, thought I, with such forked flashes to rout a poor unarmed fisherman.

May 22, Saturday: The Chinese Christian Army took Hsingan.

Henry Thoreau checked out, from Harvard Library, the Reverend William Gilpin’s REMARKS ON FOREST SCENERY, AND OTHER WOODLAND VIEWS, RELATIVE CHIEFLY TO PICTURESQUE BEAUTY ILLUSTRATED BY THE SCENES OF NEW FOREST IN HAMPSHIRE. IN THREE BOOKS ... THE THIRD EDITION, IN TWO VOLUMES (London: Printed for T. Cadell and W. Davies, Strand. 1808). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

May 22. Saturday. On my way to Plymouth, looked at Audubon in the State-House. Saw painted the red berries of the Arum triphyllum. The pigeon is more red on the breast and more blue than the turtle dove. The female (and male?) wood thrush spotted the whole length of belly; the hermit thrush not so. The seringo-bird cannot be the Savannah sparrow. The piping plover has a big head, white breast, and ring neck. Two kinds of bluets in New York Report.

5 P.M. — Plymouth. The hill whence Billington discovered the pond. The field plantain in blossom and abundant here. A chickweed in bloom in Watson's garden. Is it the same that was so early? A yellow flower, apparently a hieraceum, just ready to blossom. The four-leaved loosestrife, with dark leaves, shows its flower-buds on the ends of its threads. The mayweed is ready to blossom. [Was it not whiteweed?] The German forget-me-not reminded me of my little blue flower in the brook.

Per Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, Vol. 17 New Series, No. 438, issued on this date: The authoress of WOMAN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, known also in this country by her PAPERS ON LITERATURE AND ART, occupied among her own people a station as notable as that of De Staël among the French, or of Rahel von Ense in Germany. Mystic and transcendental as she was, her writings teem with proof of original power, and are the expression of a thoughtful and energetic, if also a wayward and undisciplined, mind. One of the two compilers of these MEMOIRS (Emerson and W.H. Channing) observes, that his first impression of her was that of a ‘Yankee Corinna;’ and such is not unlikely to be the last impression of ordinary readers, ourselves among the number. In a letter, dated 1841, we find her saying: ‘I feel all Italy glowing beneath the Saxon crust’ — an apt illustration of her mental structure and tone of sentiment, compounded of New Worldedness, as represented by Margaret Fuller, and of the feelings of Southern Europe, as embodied in the Marchesa Ossoli. Without at this time pausing to review her literary position, and her influence upon contemporary minds, we proceed to draw from these interesting, but frequently eccentric and extravagantly worded Memoirs, a sketch of her remarkable life-history.

Margaret Fuller was born at Cambridge-Port, Massachusetts, in May 1810. Her father was a shrewd, practical, hard-headed lawyer, whose love for his wife ‘was the green spot on which he stood apart from the commonplaces of a mere bread-winning, bread-bestowing existence.’ That wife is described as a fair and flower-like nature, bound by one law with the blue sky, the dew, and the frolic birds. ‘Of all persons whom I have known, she had in her most of the angelic — of that spontaneous love for every living thing, for man, and beast, and tree, which restores the Golden Age.’9 Mr Fuller, in undertaking the education of his daughter, committed the common error of excessive stimulation — thinking to gain time by forwarding the intellect as early as possible. He was himself a scholar, and hoped to make her the heir of all he knew, and of as much more as might be elsewhere attained. He was a severe and exacting disciplinarian, and 9. MEMOIRS OF MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI. 3 vols. London: Bentley. 1852. Mr Fuller’s AUTOBIOGRAPHY, which comprises the first sixty pages of these MEMOIRS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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permanently marred the nervous system of his child by the system he adopted of requiring her to recite her tasks on his return home at night, which was frequently very late. Hence a premature development of the brain, which, while it made her a youthful prodigy by day — one such youthful prodigy, it has been justly said, is often the pest of a whole neighbourhood — rendered her the nightly victim of spectral illusions, somnambulism, &c.; checked her growth; and eventually brought on continual headaches, weakness, and various nervous affections. As soon as the light was removed from her chamber at night, this ill-tended girl was haunted by colossal faces, that advanced slowly towards her, the eyes dilating, and each feature swelling loathsomely as they came; till at last, when they were about to close upon her, she started up with a shriek, which drove them away, but only to return when she lay down again. ‘No wonder the child arose and walked in her sleep, moaning all over the house, till once, when they heard her, and came and waked her, and she told what she had dreamed, her father sharply bade her “leave off thinking of such nonsense, or she would be crazy” — never knowing that he was himself the cause of all these horrors of the night.’ Her home seems to have been deficient in the charms and associations appropriate to childhood. Finding no relief from without, her already overexcited mind was driven for refuge from itself to the world of books. She tells us she was taught Latin and English grammar at the same time; in Latin, which she began to read at six years old, her father, and subsequently a tutor, trained her to a high degree of precision, expecting her to understand the mechanism of the language thoroughly, and to translate it tersely and unhesitatingly, with the definite clearness of one perfectly au fait in the philosophy of the classics. Thus she became imbued with an abiding interest in the genius of old Rome — ‘the power of will, the dignity of a fixed purpose’ — where man takes a ‘noble bronze in camps and battle- fields,’ his brow well furrowed by the ‘wrinkles of council,’ and his eye ‘cutting its way like the sword;’ and thence she loved to escape, at Ovid’s behest, to the enchanted gardens of the Greek mythology, to the gods and nymphs born of the sunbeam, the wave, the shadows on the hill — delighted to realise in those Greek forms the faith of a refined and intense childhood. Reading was now to her a habit and a passion. Its only rival attraction was the ‘dear little garden’ behind the house, where the best hours of her lonely child-life were spent. Within the house, everything, she says, was socially utilitarian; her books told of a proud world, but in another temper were the teachings of the little garden, where her thoughts could lie callow in the nest, and only be fed and kept warm, not called to fly or sing before the time. A range of blue hills, at about twelve miles’ distance, allured her to reverie, and bred within her thoughts not too deep for tears. The books which exercised most power over her at this period were Shakspeare, Cervantes, and Molière — all three students of the ‘natural history of man,’ and inspired by fact, not fancy; reconstructing the world from HDT WHAT? INDEX

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materials which they collected on every side, not spinning from the desires of their own special natures; and accordingly teaching her, their open-eyed disciple, to distrust all invention which is not based on a wide experience, but, as she confesses, also doing her harm, since the child, fed with meat instead of milk, becomes too soon mature. For a few months, this bookish life was interrupted, or varied, by the presence of an English lady, whom Margaret invested with ideal perfections as her ‘first friend,’ and whom she worshipped as a star from the east — a morning-star; and at whose departure she fell into a profound depression. Her father sought to dispel this rooted melancholy, by sending her to school — a destiny from which her whole nature revolted, as something alien to its innermost being and cherished associations. To school, however, she went, and at first captivated, and then scandalised her fellow-pupils by her strange ways. Now, she surprised them by her physical faculty of rivalling the spinning dervishes of the East — now, by declaiming verses, and acting a whole répertoire of parts, both laughter-raising and tear-compelling — now, by waking in the night, and cheating her restlessness by inventions that alternately diverted and teased her companions. She was always devising means to infringe upon the school-room routine. This involved her at last in a trouble, from which she was only extricated by the judicious tenderness of her teacher — the circumstances attending which ‘crisis’ are detailed at length in her story of ‘Mariana.’

Her personal appearance at this time, and for some following years, is described by one of her friends as being that of a blooming girl of a florid complexion and vigorous health, with a tendency to robustness, which she unwisely endeavoured to suppress or conceal at the price of much future suffering. With no pretensions to beauty then, or at any time, her face was one that attracted, but baffled physiognomical art. ‘She escaped the reproach of positive plainness, by her blond and abundant hair, by her excellent teeth, by her sparkling, busy eyes, which, though usually half-closed from near-sightedness, shot piercing glances at those with whom she conversed, and, most of all, by the very peculiar and graceful carriage of her head and neck.’ In conversation she was already distinguished, though addicted to ‘quizzing’ — the not unreasonable ground of unpopularity with her female friends. Emerson alludes to her dangerous reputation for satire, which, in addition to her great scholarship, made the women dislike one who despised them, and the men cavil at her as ‘carrying too many guns.’ A fragment from a letter in her sixteenth year will illustrate her pursuits at that period: — ‘I rise a little before five, walk an hour, and then practise on the piano till seven, when we breakfast. Next, I read French — Sismondi’s Literature of Southern Europe — till eight; then, two or three lectures in Brown’s Philosophy. About half-past nine, I go to Mr Perkins’s school, and study Greek till twelve, when, the school being dismissed, I recite, go home, and HDT WHAT? INDEX

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practise again till dinner, at two. Sometimes, if the conversation is very agreeable, I lounge for half an hour over the dessert, though rarely so lavish of time. Then, when I can, I read two hours in Italian, but I am often interrupted. At six, I walk, or take a drive. Before going to bed, I play or sing, for half an hour or so, to make all sleepy, and, about eleven, retire to write a little while in my journal, exercises on what I have read, or a series of characteristics which I am filling up according to advice.’ Greek, French, Italian, metaphysics, and private authorship — pretty well for a miss in her teens, and surely a promissory-note on the bas bleu joint-stock company! — a note which she discharged in full when it became due. Next year (1826), we find her studying Mme de Staël, Epictetus, Milton, Racine, and Spanish ballads, ‘with great delight.’ Anon she is engrossed with the elder Italian poets, from Berni down to Pulci and Politian; then with Locke and the ontologists; then with the opera omnia of Sir William Temple. She pursued at this time no systematic study, but ‘read with the heart, and was learning more from social experience than from books.’ The interval of her life, between sixteen and twenty- five, is characterised by one of her biographers as a period of ‘preponderating sentimentality, of romance and dreams, of yearning and of passion.’ While residing at Cambridge, she suffered from profound despondency — conscious of the want of a home for her heart. A sterner schooling awaited her at Groton, whither her father removed in 1833. Here he died suddenly of cholera in 1835. Now she was taught the miserable perplexities of a family that has lost its head, and was called to tread a path for which, as she says, she had no skill and no call, except that it must be trodden by some one, and she alone was ready. In 1836 she went to Boston, to teach Latin and French in an academy of local repute; and in the ensuing year she accepted a ‘very favourable offer,’ to become ‘lady-superior’ in an educational institution at Providence, where she seems to have exercised an influence analogous to that of Dr Arnold at Rugby — treating her pupils as ladies, and thus making them anxious to prove that they deserved to be so treated.

By this time, she had attracted around her many and devoted friends. Her conversational powers were of a high order, by common consent. Mr Hedge describes her speech as remarkably fluent and correct; but deriving its strength not from fluency, choice diction, wit, or sentiment, but from accuracy of statement, keen discrimination, and a certain weight of judgment; together with rhetorical finish, it had an air of spontaneity which made it seem the grace of the moment: so that he says, ‘I do not remember that the vulgar charge of talking “like a book” was ever fastened upon her, although, by her precision, she might seem to have incurred it.’ The excitement of the presence of living persons seems to have energised her whole being. ‘I need to be called out,’ are her words, ‘and never think alone, without imagining some companion. It is my habit, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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and bespeaks a second-rate mind.’ And again: ‘After all, this writing,’ she says in a letter, ‘is mighty dead. Oh, for my dear old Greeks, who talked everything — not to shine as in the Parisian saloons, but to learn, to teach, to vent the heart, to clear the head!’ Mr Alcott of Boston considered her the most brilliant talker of the day. Miss Martineau was fascinated by the same charm. It is thus characterised by the author of Representative Men: ‘Talent, memory, wit, stern introspection, poetic play, religion, the finest personal feeling, the aspects of the future, each followed each in full activity, and left me, I remember, enriched and sometimes astonished by the gifts of my guest.’ Her self-complacency staggered many at first — as when she spoke, in the quietest manner, of the girls she had formed, the young men who owed everything to her, the fine companions she had long ago exhausted. ‘I now know,’ she has been heard to say in the coolest style, ‘all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.’ Well may Mr Emerson talk of her letting slip phrases that betrayed the presence of ‘a rather mountainous ME.’ Such phrases abound in her conversation and correspondence — mountainous enough to be a hill of offence to the uninitiated and untranscendental. At anyrate, there was no affectation in this; she thoroughly believed in her own superiority; her subscription to that creed was implicit and ex animo. Nor do we detect affectation in her most notable vagaries and crotchets. She loved the truth, and spoke it out — we were about to write, manfully; and why not? At heart, she was, to use the words of an intimate and discerning friend, a right brave and heroic woman — shrinking from no duty because of feeble nerves. Numerous illustrations of this occur in the volumes before us. Thus we find her going from a bridal of passing joyfulness to attend a near relative during a formidable surgical operation — or drawing five hundred dollars to bestow, on a New-York ‘ne’er- do-weel,’ half-patriot, half-author, always in such depths of distress, and with such squadrons of enemies that no charity could relieve, no intervention save him.

In 1839, she removed from Groton, with her mother and family, to Jamaica Plain, a few miles from Boston; and thence, shortly, to Cambridge and New York. Boston, however, was her point d’appui, and in it she formed acquaintances of every class, the most utilitarian and the most idealistic. In 1839, she published a translation of Goethe’s Conversations with Eckermann; in 1841, the Letters of Bettina; in 1843, the Summer on the Lakes — a narrative of her tour to Lake Superior and Michigan. During the same period she was editor of the Dial, since conducted by Emerson and Ripley, and in which appeared her papers on Goethe and Beethoven, the Rhine, the Romaic Ballads, John Sterling’s Poems, &c.

Exhausted by continuous exertion in teaching and writing for the press, Miss Fuller, in 1844, sought refreshment and health in HDT WHAT? INDEX

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change of scene; and, desiring rather new employments than cessation from work, she accepted a liberal offer from Mr Horace Greeley of New York, to become a regular contributor to the Tribune; and for that purpose to take up her abode in his house, first spending some time in the Highlands of the Hudson. At New York, she took an active interest, after Mrs Fry’s manner, in the various benevolent institutions, and especially the prisons on Blackwell’s Island. For more than a year she wrote regularly for the Tribune, ‘always freshly, vigorously, but not always clearly.’ The notice attracted by her articles insured fresh hosts of acquaintances, and she became a distinguished character at Miss Lynch’s réunions, and at literary soirées of a similar order. In 1846, she left her native land — for ever, as the melancholy event proved — to join Mr and Mrs Spring in a European tour. Her letters home contain much pleasant gossip about some of the Old-World notabilities. Thus she records her interviews with Wordsworth in his Rydal retreat, with Dr Chalmers, Dr Andrew Combe, Mr De Quincey, the Howitts, &c. She visited Paris in the winter, and became acquainted with Lamennais, Béranger, Mme Dudevant, and others. Thence, in the spring of 1847, she went to Italy, where she remained until she embarked in 1850 on board that doomed ship, the Elizabeth. As a resident in Rome, her safety was seriously imperiled during the French siege of 1849. She was appointed by the ‘Roman Commission for the succour of the wounded,’ to the superintendence of an hospital, and all along took the liveliest interest in the fortunes of Mazzini and the republic. She was then a wife and a mother, having been married privately to the Marquis Ossoli, a Roman, ‘of a noble but impoverished house,’ whom she described, in a letter to her mother, as ‘not in any respect such a person as people in general would expect to find with her,’ being a man ‘absolutely ignorant of books, and with no enthusiasm of character,’ but endowed with excellent practical sense, a nice sense of duty, native refinement, and much sweetness of temper. The peculiar circumstances attending the marriage in that country, and at that agitated crisis, involved Margaret in numerous afflictions, and taxed her powers of endurance to the very uttermost.

She had to suffer compulsory separation from husband and child — the one in hourly peril of a bloody death, the other neglected and pining away in the hands of strangers: penury, loneliness, prostrating sickness, and treachery on the part of those around her, were meanwhile her own lot in the land of strangers. How this season of trial affected her character, may be inferred from the remarks of her friend Mrs Story, then sojourning in Italy, who says, that in Boston she had regarded Margaret as a person on intellectual stilts, with a large share of arrogance, and little sweetness of temper; and adds: ‘How unlike to this was she now! — so delicate, so simple, confiding, and affectionate; with a true womanly heart and soul, sensitive and generous, and, what was to me a still greater surprise, possessed of so broad a charity, that she could cover with its HDT WHAT? INDEX

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mantle the faults and defects of all about her.’ Her devotion to her husband, and her passionate attachment to her little Angelo, were exhibited in the liveliest colour: the influence she exercised, too, by love and sympathy, over Italians of every class with whom she came in contact, appears of a kind more tender, chastened, and womanly than that which previously characterised her. When the republican cause at Rome left no hope of present restoration, Margaret found a tranquil refuge in Florence, devoting her mornings to literary labours, and her evenings to social intercourse with cultivated natives and a few foreign visitors, among whom the Brownings occupied a distinguished place. Greatly straitened in means at this time, the repose she and her husband enjoyed at Florence, in their small and scantily-furnished room, seems to have been peculiarly grateful to both. Soon, however, arrangements were made for their departure to the United States; for Margaret was heart- weary at the political reaction in Europe, and the pecuniary expediency of publishing to advantage her chronicles of the revolution, seconded by a yearning to see her family and friends once more, constrained to this step.

From motives of economy, they took passage in a merchantman from Leghorn, the Elizabeth, the expense being one-half what a return by way of France would have been. The remonstrances of her acquaintance, founded on the fatigues of a two months’ voyage — the comparative insecurity of such a bark — the exposed position of the cabin (on deck) — and so on, were not unaided by Margaret’s own presentiments. Ossoli, when a boy, had been told by a fortune-teller, to ‘beware of the sea,’ and this was the first ship he had ever set his foot in. In a letter where she describes herself ‘suffering, as never before, all the horrors of indecision,’ his wife expresses a fervent prayer that it ‘may not be my lot to lose my boy at sea, either by unsolaced illness, or amid the howling waves; or if so, that Ossoli, Angelo, and I may go together, and that the anguish may be brief.’ That ‘or if so’ is affecting — and was realised, except, indeed, that the anguish was not brief, for it lasted twelve terrible hours — a long communion face to face with Death! The bark sailed May 17, 1850. Captain Hasty, ‘so fine a model of the New-England seaman,’ inspired the passengers with cheerful confidence, and for a few days all went prosperously. But early in June, Captain Hasty died of confluent small-pox. The child Angelino caught it, but recovered, and won all hearts by his playful innocence, loving especially to be walked up and down in the arms of the steward, who had just such a boy at home waiting his arrival. On Thursday, July 15, the Elizabeth was off the Jersey coast: at evening-tide, a breeze sprang up, which by midnight had become a hurricane. About four o’clock next morning, she struck on Fire Island beach, and lay at the mercy of the maddened ocean. Mr Channing’s description of the wreck is a most picturesque narrative, but too long for quotation. Very touching is the sketch of the Ossoli group, remaining on board after nearly all HDT WHAT? INDEX

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the passengers and crew had perished or escaped to land, which was distant only a few hundred yards — the infant crying passionately, shivering in the wet, till soothed and lullabied to sleep by his mother, a calm expectant of death; and Ossoli tranquillising by counsel and prayer their affrighted handmaid from Italy; all exchanging kindly partings, and sending messages home, if any should survive to be their bearer. Though persons were busy gathering into carts, on the shore, whatever spoil was stranded, no life-boat appeared; and the few remaining on the wreck were now fain to trust themselves to the rioting surf. Margaret would not go alone. With her husband and attendant (Celeste), she was just about to try the planks prepared by four seamen, and the steward had just taken little Nino in his arms, pledged to save him or die, ‘when a sea struck the forecastle, and the foremast fell, carrying with it the deck and all upon it. The steward and Angelino were washed upon the beach, both dead, though warm, some twenty minutes after. Celeste and Ossoli were caught for a moment by the rigging, but the next wave swallowed them up. Margaret sank at once. When last seen, she had been seated at the foot of the foremast, still clad in her white night-dress, with her hair fallen loose upon her shoulders.’ No trace was found of her manuscript on Italy: her love-correspondence with Ossoli was the only relic — the last memorial of that howling hurricane, pitiless sea, wreck on a sand-bar, an idle life-boat, beach-pirates, and not one friend!

With the exception of certain sections of laboured, writhing wordiness, the feverish restlessness and hectic symptoms of which are but too familiar to persons read in the literature of second-rate transcendentalism, these volumes comprise a large amount of matter that will well repay perusal, and portray a character of no ordinary type — a ‘large-brained woman and large-hearted man.’ HDT WHAT? INDEX

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May 24, Monday: Henry Thoreau checked out, from Harvard Library, OBSERVATIONS ON THE RIVER WYE, AND SEVERAL PARTS OF SOUTH WALES, &C. RELATIVE CHIEFLY TO PICTURESQUE BEAUTY: MADE IN THE SUMMER OF THE YEAR 1770. BY WILLIAM GILPIN, ... (London: printed by A. Strahan, for T. Cadell junior and W. Davies, 1800), which had initially appeared in 1782 although subsequently it had gone through numerous editions.

He would copy from this into his Fact Book. He also checked out Gilpin’s OBSERVATIONS ON SEVERAL PARTS OF THE COUNTIES OF CAMBRIDGE, NORFOLK, SUFFOLK & ESSEX AND ON SEVERAL PARTS OF NORTH WALES (London, 1809). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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He also checked out the 2d of the ten volumes of Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778)’s AMOENITATES ACADEMICAE (1749-1769).

He also checked out, from the Society of Natural History Library in Boston, Part 1 “Mammalia” of James Ellsworth De Kay’s ZOOLOGY OF NEW-YORK, OR THE NEW-YORK FAUNA; COMPRISING DETAILED DESCRIPTIONS OF ALL THE ANIMALS HITHERTO OBSERVED WITHIN THE STATE OF NEW-YORK, WITH BRIEF NOTICES OF THOSE OCCASIONALLY FOUND NEAR ITS BORDERS, AND ACCOMPANIED BY APPROPRIATE ILLUSTRATIONS (White & Visscher, 1842). MAMMALIA, VOLUME I

May 24. The cooing of a dove reminded me of an owl this morning. Counted just fifty violets (pedata) in a little bunch, three and a half by five inches, and as many buds, there being six plants close together; on the hill where Billington climbed a tree. A calabash it Pilgrim Hall nearly two feet high, in the form of a jar, showed what these fruits were made for. Nature's jars and vases. Holbrook says the Bufo Americanus is the most common in America and is our representative of the Bufo communis of Europe; speaks of its trill; deposits its spawn in pools. N. A. HERPETOLOGY Found in College Yard Trifolium procumbens, or Yellow clover. Concord. Celandine in blossom, and horse-chestnut. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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(While at the Society of Natural History in Boston, Thoreau had consulted Volume IV of the 2d edition of Dr. John Edwards Holbrook’s NORTH AMERICAN HERPETOLOGY: OR A DESCRIPTION OF THE REPTILES INHABITING THE UNITED STATES.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

July 26, Monday: Henry Thoreau checked out, from Harvard Library, William Gilpin’s OBSERVATIONS, RELATIVE TO PICTURESQUE BEAUTY, MADE IN THE YEAR 1772 ON SEVERAL PARTS OF ENGLAND, PARTICULARLY THE MOUNTAINS AND LAKES OF CUMBERLAND AND WESTMORELAND (1788).

GILPIN’S OBSERVATIONS, I GILPIN’S OBSERVATIONS, II

He also checked out OBSERVATIONS, RELATIVE CHIEFLY TO PICTURESQUE BEAUTY, MADE IN THE YEAR 1776, ON SEVERAL PARTS OF GREAT BRITAIN; PARTICULARLY THE HIGH-LANDS OF SCOTLAND BY WILLIAM GILPIN (London: R. Blamire, 1792).

He had a conversation with the Harvard College librarian, the entomologist Dr. Thaddeus William Harris, HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

about the emperor moth Atticus Luna.

(During this year a monograph that Thoreau had accessed, by his former science teacher Dr. Harris, during the preparation of his “Natural History of Massachusetts” essay, was receiving a 2d edition via White & Potter in Boston, as A TREATISE ON SOME OF THE INSECTS OF NEW ENGLAND WHICH ARE INJURIOUS TO VEGETATION. This 2d edition has been found in Thoreau’s personal library.) INJURIOUS INSECTS

He responded to a 15-year-old Charlestown autograph-seeker, William H. Sweetser, who had written to him:

Concord July 26 ‘52 Wm. H. Sweeter This is the way I write when I have a poor pen and still poorer ink. Yrs. Henry D. Thoreau

July 26, Monday: By my intimacy with nature I find myself withdrawn from man. My interest in the sun & the moon –in the morning & the evening compels me to solitude.

The grandest picture in the world is the sunset sky. In your higher moods what man is there to meet? You are of necessity isolated. The mind that perceives clearly any natural beauty is in that instant withdrawn from human society. My desire for society is infinitely increased –my fitness for any actual society is diminished. Went to Cambridge & Boston today. Dr Harris says that my great moth is the Atticus Luna –may be regarded as one of several emperor moths They are rarely seen being very liable to be snapped up by birds. Once, as he was crossing the college yard, he saw the wings of one coming down which reached the ground just at his feet. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

What a tragedy! –the wings came down as the only evidence that such a creature had soared –wings large & splendid which were designed to bear a precious burthen through the upper air. So most poems even epics are like the wings come down to earth while the poet whose adventurous flight they evidence has been snapped up the ravenous vulture of this world. If this moth ventures abroad by day some bird will pick out the precious cargo & let the sails and rigging drift –as when the sailor meets with a floating spar & sail and reports a wreck seen in a certain lat. & long. For what were such tender & defenceless organizations made. The one I had being put into a large box beat itself its wings &c all to pieces in the night in its efforts to get out –depositing its eggs nevertheless on the sides of its prison. Perchance the entomologist never saw an entire specimen –but as he walked one day the wings of a larger species than he had ever seen came fluttering down. The wreck of an argosy in the air.

He tells me the glow worms are 1st seen he thinks in the last part of August. Also that there is a large & brilliant glow worm found here more than an inch long as he measured it to me on his finger. –but rare

Perhaps the sunset glows are sudden in proportion as the edges of the clouds are abrupt –when the sun finally reaches such a point that his rays Can be reflected from them.

A 10 Pm I see high columns of fog formed in the lowlands lit by the moon –preparing to charge this higher ground– It is as if the sky reached the solid ground there –for they shut out the woods.

Flowers observed between June 23d & July 27th

x Those observed in very good season xx " " " rather early S Those which have been in blossom for a day or two X " " " some days 0 " " " some time V " " " not quite open

Rubus hispidus seen July 6th o Potamogeton hybridus seen June 26th– o " narrow leaved (leaves seen July 10) o Linnaea borealis June 24th going out of blossom

June24th Vaccinium macrocarpum x Calopogon pulchellus V Asclepias quadrifolia s x Spiraea salicifolia x Archangelica atropurpurea

25th xx Maruta cotula x Prinos verticillatus x Convolvulus sepium -seen by another 19th ult Linaria vulgaris Specularia perfoliata S

26th x Nymphaea odorata Sagittaria variabilis small form o

27th Epilobium angustifolium prob about 16th Hedyotis longifolia O HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

28th x Oenothera biennis

29th Leonurus Cardiaca ap in good season Sparganium ramosum pretty good season 29th xx Pontederia cordata Anemone Virginiana X

30th Nepeta cataria ap. in good season

July 1st xx Trifolium arvense Lysimachia stricta V Ligustrum vulgare X Hypericum ellipticum S x Polygonum sagittatum x Lobelia spicata Krigia Virginica ap in pretty good season Comarum palustre O

2nd x Mollugo verticellata x Polygonum convolvulus Cornus stolonifera S

3d x Lilium Canadense Chimaphila umbellata O x Polygonum persicaria x Ceanothus Americanus x Asclepias purpurascens x Daucus carota

4th Lysimachia lanceolata var hybrida S Gratiola aurea "

5th Typha latifolia X Campanula aparinoides ap in good season x Cicuta maculata x Asclepias Cornuti x " incarnata

6th x Cirsium arvense Vicia cracca O x Pastinaca sativa x Agrimonia Eupatoria Tanacetum vulgare V

6th Castanea vesca S x Lilium Philadelphicum Lycopodium dendroideum S Galium trifidum X " triflorum X Scutellaria lateriflora S Circaea alpina S HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

7th x Spiraea tomentosa Pyrola rotundifolia (?) Elliptica (?)Chlorantha (?) some earlier some later O x Plantago major x Lepidium Virginicum x 17–18–or l9th aster (?) of Gray

8th Small globose white flower with grasslike leaves in mud X Sium latifolium S

9th x Tilia Americana Asclepias obtusifolia ap in good season x Lactuca elongata Ludwigia palustris O Utricularia cornuta S Ilysanthes gratioloides S Sisymbrium amphibium ? X x Galium asprellum

10th x Portulaca oleracea Melilotus leucantha ap in pretty good season x Scutellaria galericulata Drosera longifolia X x Seriocarpus conyzoides (?)

11th x Polygonum hydropiperoides ? Large orange lily strayed from cult. S x Impatiens fulva 13 x Solidago stricta ? July 13th Polygala sanguinea S " cruciata S x verbena urticifolia cichorium intybus S Urtica gracilisS Polygonum aviculareO

16th x chenopodium album Common form of sagittaria S x Xyris x cephalanthus occidentalis

x Rhexia Virginica x Stachys aspera x Platanthera lacera Desmodium acuminatum S xx Lechea major

17th x Antennaria margaritacea HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

Rosa Carolina ? X Lobelia inflata S x Lappa major x Amaranthus hybridus x Verbena hastata x Gnaphalium uliginosum Hypericum Canadense S 18th x Mentha Canadensis Peltandra Virginica about end of 1st week of July A Neottia well out x A narrow leaved polygonum front rank in river Spergula arvensis O Raphanus raphanistrumX x Lycopus sinuatus Brasenia peltata O since July 1st

19 Phytolacca decandra S

20th Elodea Virginica X x Penthorum sedoides Boehmeria cylindrica ? S Alisma plantago O

21st x Mimulus ringens Sium Lineare (?) with round smooth stem

22nd Aster macrophyllus S Lysimachia ciliata O Drosera rotundifolia X Monotropa uniflora S xx Solidago Canadensis ? x Either Polygonum hydropiperoides or amphibium x Cnicus lanceolatum Galium circaezans O unknown flower. Quite small aster like flower just out 23d x Pycnanthemum muticum x cnicus pumilum x chenopodium hybridum unknown plant out of flower

24th x Lobelia Cardinalis x Erigeron Canadense?

25 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

x Polygonum hydropiper.

Miscellaneous observations within same dates– June 24th White ash keys excrescences on grape leaves & vines uncommonly cool weather Many grasshoppers for first time most June grass dead in dry fields Pine tops incline Panicled Andromeda has froth on it. 25th Season of wild roses White pine cones 1/2 inch long A fine wiry grass in sproutlands 26th Silvery undersides of maples & other leaves in breeze V. Pennsylvanicum ripe for a day or two on hills 27 Meadow fragrance still perceived Freshness of the year nearly passed Fields generally incline to a reddish or brownish green Partridge with her brood. Strawberries in their prime 29th Blue berries brought to sell Yel. water ranunculus scarce 30th Lower shoots of dwarf Andromeda 6 inches long Shrub oak acorns as big as peas Bobolinks rarely heard for a week. July 1st Roses in their prime Rubus triflorus (?) ripe 2nd Clover heads drying up 3d Have seen no violets for some time Rubus strigosus ripe prob. a day or two Hardly a geranium now 4th Young pouts 1 inch long moss rose ap. out of bloom 5th Thimble berry ripe Vaccinium fuscatum (?) ripe by RR Season progresses to berrying time & locust weather Buttercups have generally disappeared. 6th Caterpillar nests on shrub oaks 7th First really foggy morning 7th Do not see the arethusa now 8th Drooping heads of rattlesnake grass Great Moth–Atticus Luna on river. Pontederia begins to show 9th First hear a tanager this year Bathing a great luxury Warm weather Vaccinium vacillans here & there ripe Rubus Canadense White spruce shoots a strawberry fragrance? fir. 10th Hottest weather thus far 11th Fishes nests left dry– Elder–pogonias, & calopogons Abundant HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

Shade important & significant. 13th Cerasus Pennsylvanica ripe Gaylussacia blue for a day or two ripe " resinosa ripe Vaccinium corymbosum ripe 15 Fleets of yel. butterflies in road 16 Link link fall note of bobolink a Goldfinch twitters over Sarsaparilla berries black 17th Gentle summer rain (misty–) dew like filling the air & on leaves Roses early kind not numerous swamp pinks still numerous Green coats of hazel nuts Yellow flowered bunches of Indigo weed Entire leaved erigeron abounds Meadows white with meadow rue 18 Pontederias in prime White lilies in greatest profusion Cooler–breezier–(muggy–shady) weather after heats A columbine still Strawberries still found under high mead. grass Green grapes ready for stewing 19th Cerasus pumila may be a day or two Chestnut blossoms have made a great show sometime 20th Aromatic leaves of blue curls appear 21st A broken strain from a bobolink A golden robin 2 or 3 times Early straight thorned roses out of bloom Alder locust 22nd Flock of female bobolinks Green berries of arum–axil flowerd Sol. seal & reddish fruit of Trillium Farmers fairly begin meadow haying More furnace like heat after all Huckle berrying & blackberrying commence 23d Cerasus Virginiana ripe Pyrus arbutifolia" 24th Some smooth sumac berries red Fresh green on shorn fields Goldfinch plainly about on willows 25th Morning fog filling lowlands like a sea & evening battalions. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

August 6, Friday: The brig conveying Alfred Russel Wallace and his biological specimens, and some live animals, burned and sank at sea. The crew and human passengers were left stranded in two badly leaking lifeboats.

After Henry Thoreau’s death in 1862, Sophia Thoreau would allow Waldo Emerson to look back through Thoreau’s journals, and he would make a comment about an entry for this date:

In Journal, 1852, August 6, he writes, “Hearing that one with whom I was acquainted had committed suicide, I said, ‘I did not know, when I planted the seed of that fact, that I should hear of it.’” I see the Thoreau poison working today in many valuable lives, in some for good, in some for harm.

August 6. 5AM — I do not hear this morning the breathing of chip-birds nor the song of robins. Are the mornings now thus ushered in? Are they as spring-like? Has not the year grown old? Methinks we do ourselves, at any rate, somewhat tire of the season and observe less attentively and with less interest the opening of new flowers and the song of the birds. It is the signs of the fall that affect us most. It is hard to live in the summer content with it. To Cliffs. How different the feeble twittering of the birds here at sunrise from the full quire of the spring! Only the wood thrush, a huckleberry-bird or two, or chickadee, the scream of a flicker or a jay, or the caw of a crow, and commonly only an alarmed note of a robin. A solitary peawai may be heard, perchance, or a red-eye, and no thrashers, or catbirds, or oven-birds, or the jingle of the chewink. I hear the ominous twittering of the goldfinch over all. The village is seen through a thin veil of fog. I just distinguish the tree-tops beneath me in the southwest, and the light-colored river through the mist, which is gathering and preparing to retreat before the sun rise, a tree- top I see the surface of Walden, whose shores are laid bare, the sun being directly opposite, and therefore the surface of the lake is a bright sheen seen through some stately pines near the railroad. This bright, silvery sheen comes through the dispersing mists to me, its shores being still concealed by fog, and a low white scudding mist is seen against the more distant dark clouds, drifting westward over all the forests before the sun. Gathered some of those large, sometimes pear-shaped, sweet blue huckleberries which grow amid the rubbish where woods have just been cut. A farmer told me that he lost a good many doves by their being trodden upon by oxen.

P.M. — To Saw Mill Brook and hill beyond. I still remember how much bluer those early blueberries were that grew in the shade. Have just finished Gilpin’s “Lakes of Cumberland.” An elegant writer of English prose. I wish he would look at scenery sometimes not with the eye of an artist. It is all side screens and fore screens and near distances and broken grounds with him. I remark that in his tour through Wales, and afterward through Cumberland and Westmoreland, he never ascends to the top of a mountain, and if he gets up higher than usual, he merely says that the view is grand and amusing, as if because it was not easy to paint, or picturesque, it was not worth beholding, or deserving of serious attention. However, his elegant moderation, his discrimination, and real interest in nature excuse many things. Milkweeds and trumpet-flowers are important now, to contrast with the cool, dark, shaded sides and recesses of moist copses. I see their red under the willows and alders everywhere against a dark ground. Methinks that blue, next to red, attracts us in a flower. Blue vervain is now very attractive to me, and then there is that interesting progressive history in its rising ring of blossoms. It has a story. Next to our blood is our prospect of heaven. Does not the blood in fact show blue in the covered veins and arteries, when distance lends enchantment to the view? The sight of it. is more affecting than I can describe or account for. The rainbow, after all, does not attract an attention proportionate to its singularity and beauty. Moses (?) was the last to comment on it. It is a phenomenon more aside from the common course of nature. Too distinctly a sign or symbol of something to be disregarded. What form of beauty could be imagined more striking and HDT WHAT? INDEX

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conspicuous? An arch of the most brilliant and glorious colors completely spanning [the] heavens before the eyes of men! Children look at it. It is wonderful that all men do not take pains to behold it. At some waterfalls it is permanent, as long as the sun shines. Plainly thus the Maker of the universe sets the seal to his covenant with men. Many articles are thus clinched. Designed to impress man. All men beholding it begin to understand the significance of the Greek epithet applied to the world, -- name for the world, - Kosmos, or beauty. It was designed to impress man. We live, as it were, within the calyx of a flower. Methinks there are few new flowers of late. An abundance of small fruits takes their place. Summer gets to be an old story. Birds leave off singing, as flowers blossoming, i.e. perhaps in the same proportion. With the goldenrod comes the goldfinch. About the time his cool twitter was heard, did not the bobolink, thrasher, catbird, oven-bird, veery, etc., cease? I see some delicate ferns, in the low damp woods by the brook, which have turned whitish at the extremity. Cohush berries have just begun to be white, as if they contained a pearly venom, — wax white with a black spot (or very dark brown), imp-eyed. The leaves of one of the cornels (alternate-leaved or else round-leaved) are, some of them, turned lake-color. The weeds are now very high and rank in moist wood-paths and along such streams as this. I love to follow up the course of the brook and see the cardinal flowers which stand in its midst above the rocks, their brilliant scarlet the more interesting in this open, but dark, cellar-like wood; the small purple fringed orchises with long dense spikes, all flower, - for that is often all that is seen above the leaves of other plants (is not this the last flower of this peculiar flower kind,-i. e. all flower and color, the leaves subordinated?); and the Mimulus ringens, abundant and handsome in these low and rather shady places. Many flowers, of course, like the last, are prominent, if you visit such scenes as this, though one who confines himself to the road may never see them. From Smith’s Hill beyond, there is as good a view of the mountains as from any place in our neighborhood, because you look across the broad valley in which Concord lies first of all. The foreground is on a larger scale and more proportionate. The Peterboro Hills are to us as good as mountains. Hence, too, I see that fair river- reach, in the north. I find a bumblebee asleep in a thistle blossom (a pasture thistle), the loiterer; having crowded himself in deep amid the dense florets, out of the reach of birds, while the sky was overcast. What a sweet couch! As I always notice the tone of the bell when I go into a new town, so surely, methinks, I notice some peculiarity in the accent and manners of the inhabitants. The bristly aralia berries are ripe; like the sarsaparilla, a blue black. The shorn fields are acquiring a late green or refresh [sic]. They are greener, much, than a month ago, before the grass was cut. For ten days the weather has been cool and the air full of moisture. Is it not because of the increase of vegetation, the leaves being multiplied, the weeds more rank, the shadows heavier? This is what is called dog-day weather. The water in the river and pond is quite cool, and it is the more bracing and invigorating to bathe, though less luxurious. Methinks the water cannot again be as warm as it has been. Erechthites hieracifolia, apparently a day or two. Lespedeza capitata, Aralia racemosa, how long? petty morel, spikenard, like a large sarsaparilla. Hieracium paniculatum. Lycopus Virginicus (with five calyx-teeth). Solidagos, lanceolata (?) and puberula (?). Stellaria media at R.W.E.’s. Is it the same, then, which I saw in Cheney’s garden so early’, That clammy, hairy-leaved cerastium (?) I still see, with a starry white flower. Was it the Urtica gracilis I examined, or the common nettle? What is that plant at the brook with hairy under sides now budded?

September 1, Wednesday: Heinrich August Marschner’s Natur und Kunst, allegorisches Festspiel zur Einweihung des neuen hannoverschen Hoftheaters 1852 to words of Waterford-Perglass was performed for the initial time, in Hanover. It was staged as an intermezzo with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Tasso.

Henry Thoreau extrapolated material from the Reverend William Gilpin’s 1808 edition of OBSERVATIONS ON SEVERAL PARTS OF GREAT BRITAIN, PARTICULARLY THE HIGH-LANDS OF SCOTLAND, RELATIVE CHIEFLY TO HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

PICTURESQUE BEAUTY, MADE IN THE YEAR 1776, that he would use in WALDEN.

WALDEN: William Gilpin, who is so admirable in all that relates PEOPLE OF to landscapes, and usually so correct, standing at the head WALDEN of Loch Fyne, in Scotland, which he describes as “a bay of salt water, sixty or seventy fathoms deep, four miles in breadth,” and about fifty miles long, surrounded by mountains, observes, “If we could have seen it immediately after the diluvian crash, or whatever convulsion of Nature occasioned it, before the waters gushed in, what a horrid chasm it must have appeared!

WILLIAM GILPIN

September 1. Wednesday. Some tragedy, at least some dwelling on, or even exaggeration of, the tragic side of life is necessary for contrast or relief to the picture. The genius of the writer may be such a colored glass as Gilpin describes, the use of which is “to give a greater depth to the shades; by which the effect is shown with more force.” The whole of life is seen by some through this darker medium, - partakes of the tragic, - and its bright and splendid lights become thus lurid. 4 P. M. —To Walden. Paddling over it, I see large schools of perch only an inch long, yet easily distinguished by their transverse bars. Great is the beauty of a wooded shore seen from the water, for the trees have ample room to expand on that side, and each puts forth its most vigorous bough to fringe and adorn the pond. It is rare that you see so natural an edge to the forest. Hence a pond like this, surrounded by hills wooded down to the edge of the water, is the best place to observe the tints of the autumnal foliage. Moreover, such as stand in or near to the water change earlier than elsewhere. This is a very warm and serene evening, and the surface of the pond is perfectly smooth except where the skater; dimple it, for at equal intervals they are scattered over its whole extent, and, looking west, they make a fine sparkle in the sun. Here and there is a thistle(?)-down floating on its surface, which the fishes dart at, and dimple the water, — delicate hint of approaching autumn, when the first thistle-down descends on some smooth lake’s surface, full of reflections, in the woods, sign to the fishes of the ripening year. These white fairy vessels are annually wafted over the cope of their sky. Bethink thyself, O man, when the first thistle-down is in the air. Buoyantly it floated high in air over hills and fields all day, and now, weighed down with evening dews, perchance, it sinks gently to the surface of the lake. Nothing can stay the thistle-down, but with September winds it unfailingly sets sail. The irresistible revolution of time. It but comes down upon the sea in its ship, and is still perchance wafted to the shore with its delicate sails. The thistle-down is in the air. Tell me, is thy fruit also there? Dost thou approach maturity? Do gales shake windfalls from thy tree? But I see no dust here as on the river. Some of the leaves of the rough hawkweed are purple now, especially beneath. I see a yet smoother, darker water, separated from this abruptly, as if by an invisible cobweb resting on the surface. I view it from Heywood’s Peak. How rich and autumnal the haze which blues the distant hills and fills the valleys. The lakes look better in this haze, which confines our view more to their reflected heavens and makes the shore-line more indistinct. Viewed from the hilltop, it reflects the color of the sky. Some have referred the vivid greenness next the shores to the reflection of the verdure, but it is equally green there against the railroad sand-bank and in the spring before the leaves are expanded. Beyond the deep reflecting surface, near the shore, where the bottom is seen, it is a, vivid green. I see two or three small maples already scarlet, across the pond, beneath where the white stems of three birches diverge, at the point of a promontory next the water, a distinct scarlet tint a quarter of a mile off. Ah, many a tale their color tells of Indian times — and autumn wells [?] — primeval dells. The beautifully varied shores of Walden, — the western indented with deep bays, the bold northern shore, the gracefully sweeping curve of the eastern, and above all the beautifully scalloped southern shore, where successive capes overlap each other and suggest unexplored coves between. Its shore is just irregular enough not to be monotonous. From this peak I can see a fish leap in almost any part of the pond, for not a pickerel or shiner picks an insect from this smooth surface but it manifestly disturbs the equilibrium of the HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

lake. It is wonderful with what elaborateness this simple fact is advertised. This piscine murder will out, and from my distant perch I distinguish the circling undulations when they are now half a dozen rods in diameter. Methinks I distinguish Fair Haven Pond from this point, elevated by a mirage in its seething valley, like a coin in a basin. [At this point Thoreau placed a question mark in the margin.] They cannot fatally injure Walden with an axe, for they have done their worst and failed. We see things in the reflection which we do not see in the substance. In the reflected woods of Pine Hill there is a vista through which I see the sky, but I am indebted to the water for this advantage, for from this point the actual wood affords no such vista. Bidens connata (?) not quite out. I see the Hieracium venosum still, but. slightly veined. Have I not made another species of this variety? Aster undulatus (?), like a many-flowered amplexicaulis, with leaves narrowed below, a few days. Amphicarpœa monoica, like the ground-nut, but ternate, out of July or August. Pods just forming. Desmodium rotundifolium just going out of bloom. Last two, side of Heywood’s Peak. Gilpin, who is usually so correct, standing at the head of Loch Fyne in Scotland, which he describes as “a bay of salt water, sixty or seventy fathoms deep, four miles in breadth,” and about fifty miles long, surrounded by mountains, observes: “If we could have seen it immediately, after the diluvian crash, or whatever convulsion of nature occasioned it, before the waters gushed in, what a horrid chasm must it have appeared!

“So high as heaved the tumid hills, so low Down sunk a hollow bottom, broad, and deep, Capacious bed of waters——.”

But if we apply these proportions to Walden, which, as we have seen, appears already in a transverse section like a shallow plate, it will appear four times as shallow. So much for the increased horrors of the emptied chasm of Loch Fyne. No doubt many a smiling valley with its extended fields of corn occupies exactly such a “horrid chasm,” from which the waters have receded, though it requires the insight of the geologist to convince the unsuspicious inhabitants of the fact. Most ponds, being emptied, would leave a meadow no more hollow than we frequently see. I have seen many a village situated in the midst of a plain which the geologist has at length affirmed must have been levelled by water, where the observing eye might still detect the shores of a lake in the horizon, and no subsequent elevation of the plain was necessary to conceal the fact. Thus it is only by emphasis and exaggeration that real effects are described. What Gilpin says in other place is perfectly applicable to this case; though he says that that which he is about to disclose is so bold a truth, “that it ought only, perhaps, to be opened to the initiated.” “In the exhibition of distant mountains on paper, or canvas,” says he, “unless you make them exceed their real or proportional size, they have no effect. It is inconceivable how objects lessen by distance. Examine any distance, closed by mountains, in a camera, and you will easily see what a poor, diminutive appearance the mountains make. By the power of perspective they are lessened to nothing. Should you represent them in your landscape in so (diminutive a. form, all dignity, and grandeur of idea would be lost.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

October 5, Tuesday: Henry Thoreau checked out, from Harvard Library, the Reverend William Gilpin’s OBSERVATIONS ON THE WESTERN PARTS OF ENGLAND, RELATING CHIEFLY TO PICTURESQUE BEAUTY; TO WHICH ARE ADDED, A FEW REMARKS ON THE PICTURESQUE BEAUTIES OF THE ISLE OF WIGHT (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1798; London: Printed for T. Cadell and W. Davies, Strant, 1808).

(Some material from this would wind up in THE MAINE WOODS.)

THE MAINE WOODS: Those Maine woods differ essentially from ours. There you are never reminded that the wilderness which you are threading is, after all, some villager’s familiar wood-lot, some widow’s thirds, from which her ancestors have sledded fuel for generations, minutely described in some old deed which is recorded, of which the owner has got a plan too, and old bound- marks may be found every forty rods, if you will search. ’T is true, the map may inform you that you stand on land granted by the State to some academy, or on Bingham’s purchase; but these names do not impose on you, for you see nothing to remind you of the academy or of Bingham. What were the “forests” of England to these? One writer relates of the Isle of Wight, that in Charles the Second’s time “there were woods in the island so complete and extensive, that it is said a squirrel might have travelled in several parts many leagues together on the top of the trees.” If it were not for the rivers, (and he might go round their heads,) a squirrel could here travel thus the whole breadth of the country. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

10 He also checked out the JESUIT RELATION volumes for the years 1633 and 1634.

http://www.canadiana.org

Caroline Rounseville Alger was born at Roxbury.

Oct. 5. Was told at Bunker Hill Monument to-day that Mr. Savage saw the White Mountains several times while working on the monument. It required very clear weather in the northwest and a storm clearing up here.

October 21, Thursday: Henry Thoreau made some notes that would go into THE MAINE WOODS.)

Oct. 21. Thursday, P.M. — To Second Division Brook and Ministerial Swamp. Cerastium. Apparently some flowers yield to the frosts; others linger here and there till the snow buries them. Saw that the side-flowering skull-cap was killed in the frost. If they grow in some nook out of the way of frosts, they last so much longer. Methinks the frost puts a period to a large class. The goldenrods, being dead, are now a dingy white along the brooks (white fuzz, dark-brown leaves), together with rusty, fuzzy trumpet-weeds and asters in the same condition. This is a remarkable feature in the landscape now, the abundance of dead weeds. The frosts have done it. Winter comes on gradually. The red maples have lost their leaves before the rock maple, which is now losing its leaves at top first. All the country over, the frosts have come and seared the tenderer herbs along all brooksides. How unobserved this change until it has taken place! The birds that fly at the approach of winter are come from the north. Some time since I might have said some birds are leaving us, others, like ducks, are just arriving from the north, the herbs are withering along the brooks, the humming insects are going into winter quarters. The deciduous trees are green but about four months in the year,-from June 1st to October 1st, perhaps. Polygonum articulatum lingers still. [At this point Thoreau has placed a question mark in the margin.] Silvery 10. Cramoisy, Sebastian (ed.). RELATION DE CE QUI S’EST PASSÉ EN LA NOUVELLE FRANCE IN L’ANNÉE 1636: ENVOYÉE AU R. PERE PROVINCIAL DE LA COMPAGNIE DE JESUS EN LA PROVINCE DE FRANCE, PAR LE P. P AUL LE JEUNE DE LA MESME COMPAGNIE, SUPERIEUR DE LA RESIDENCE DE KÉBEC. A Paris: Chez Sebastian Cramoisy..., 1637 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

cinquefoil, hedge-mustard, and clover. I find caddis-cases with worms in Second Division Brook. And what mean those little piles of yellow sand on dark-colored stones at the bottom of the swift-running water, kept together and in place by some kind of gluten and looking as if sprinkled on the stones, one eighteenth of an inch in diameter? These caddis-worms just build a little case around themselves, and sometimes attach a few dead leaves to disguise it, and then fasten it (?) slightly to some swaying grass stem or blade at the bottom in swift water, and these are their quarters till next spring. This reminds me that winter does not put his rude fingers in the bottom of the brooks. When you look into the brooks you see, various dead leaves floating or resting on the bottom, and you do not suspect that some are the disguises which the caddis-worms have borrowed. Fresh Bœmyces roseus near Tommy Wheeler’s. The cotton-woolly aphides oil the alders. Gilpin speaks of “floats of timber” on the river Wey, in 1775, as picturesque objects. Thus in the oldest settled and civilized country there is a resemblance or reminiscence still of the primitive new country, and more or less timber never ceases to grow on the head waters of its streams, and perchance tile wild muskrat still perforates its banks. England may endure as long as she grows oaks for her navy. [Vide London on the extent of oak forest there.] Timber rafts still (?) annually come down the Rhine, like the Mississippi and St. Lawrence. But the forests of England are thin, for Gilpin says of the Isle of Wight in Charles II’s time, “There were woods in the island so complete and extensive, that it is said a squirrel might have travelled in several parts, many leagues together, on the tops of the trees.”

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1853

Summer: Moncure Daniel Conway spent the summer boarding in a house on Ponkawtasset Hill so he could chat with Waldo Emerson, and read in Montaigne, Giovanni Boccaccio’s DECAMERON, Browning, Shakespeare, and Richard Hurrell Froude’s NEMESIS OF FAITH. Being homeless in the North, my summer vacation (1853) was passed at Concord. The Emersons found for me a very pleasant abode at “Hillside,” on Ponkatasset Hill, about a mile out of the village, where Ellery Channing once lived, and where be wrote his poem on New England. Two sisters, the Misses Hunt, educated ladies, received me into this pleasant cottage, where I was the only boarder. These ladies were cousins of Miss Martha Hunt, whose suicide in Concord River and the recovery of her body are described in Hawthorne’s “Blithedale Romance.” They were troubled because G.W. Curtis, in his “Homes of American Authors,” had suggested that Martha’s suicide was due to the contrast between her transcendental ideals and the coarseness of her home. They described the family of their cousin as educated people. One of these sisters walked with me to the river and pointed out all the places connected with the tragedy, and some years later another cousin drowned herself there. Emerson introduced me to his friends. First of all he took me to Henry Thoreau, who lived in the village with his parents and his sister. The kindly and silent pencil-maker, his father, John Thoreau, was French in appearance, and Henry resembled him physically; but neither parent impressed me as possessing mental qualities that could account for such a rare spirit as Henry. He was thirty-six when I met him. He received me pleasantly, and asked what we were studying at Cambridge. I answered, “The Scriptures.” “Which?” he asked. Emerson said, “You will find our Thoreau a sad pagan.” Thoreau had long been a reverent reader of Oriental scriptures, and showed me his bibles, translated from various languages into French and English.

Emerson talked to him about the BHAGAVAD GITA, the DESATIR, and the GULISTAN and introduced him to interesting women.

During this summer of rustication in Concord, Conway would be going on a number of saunters in Walden Woods with Henry Thoreau. During their discussions Thoreau evidently apprised Conway of the investigation he was conducting into the touristy scenery aesthetic of the Reverend William Gilpin, that of the “picturesque” — for in 1869 Conway would write stupidly of Thoreau as having amounted to a sort of American Gilpin: The pleasantest association I have hitherto had with the New Forest was that it had been the haunt of one whose name I had heard from the lips of Henry Thoreau –one who might almost be thought of as having reappeared in Thoreau– William Gilpin, author, artist, man of science, and clergyman. The descendant of that Bernard Gilpin, the pupil of Erasmus, whom the death of HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

Mary unbound beside the stake upon which he was about to suffer, William Gilpin received the surplice almost as an hereditary mantle; but his heart worshiped with truest enthusiasm amidst these forest aisles. His works on the trees, forests, and general scenery of England, illustrated by his own pencil (with which he was almost as skillful as his brother, Sawney Gilpin, the painter of animals), still have a value which few works written in the last century on subjects related to science possess. He was an Oxonian, and upward of fifty years old when he received his living –(he was poor, and had married an undowered girl because he loved her)– in the village of Boldre, which was worth £700 — a snug sum in 1777. An earnest, simple, and impressive preacher, a warm-hearted, industrious man, healthy and cheerful, he set to work in this wilderness; and while having an artist’s eye, and a singular subtlety of observation, he divined the treasures of thought and beauty every where. He transmuted the money their publication brought him into schools for day- laborers. He was thus able to endow the schools at Boldre, Brockenhurst, and elsewhere, which still exist. In the Boldre school the day-laborers’ children are taught free, the endowment being for twenty boys to be taught reading, writing, and ciphering, and the same number of girls reading, sewing, and spinning. In addition, the boys receive annually a jacket, breeches, and green vest, and the girls a black petticoat and green frock. The “green” was meant to be a kind of uniform. Near Brockenhurst Howard, the philanthropist, lived and labored three years, and the place became part of the parish in which Gilpin worked in the same spirit during the twenty-seven years of his life in the New Forest, where now his works succeed him in beneficent influence.... Gilpin had the same disposition with Thoreau –the disposition, one may call it, of all men of genius– to find a glory in things generally regarded as mean... He finds an especial beauty in the notes of the woodpecker and the jay.... Gilpin sometimes, though not like Thoreau always, saw the landscape tinted by “the light that never was on sea or land.” SOUTH-COAST SAUNTERINGS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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November 28, Monday: Henry Thoreau checked out, from Harvard Library, the Reverend William Gilpin’s OBSERVATIONS ON THE COASTS OF HAMPSHIRE, SUSSEX, AND KENT, RELATIVE CHIEFLY TO PICTURESQUE BEAUTY: MADE IN THE SUMMER OF THE YEAR 1774 (London, Printed by A. Strahan for T. Cadell and W. 11 Davies). He also checked out the Reverend’s THREE ESSAYS: ON PICTURESQUE BEAUTY; ON PICTURESQUE TRAVEL; AND ON SKETCHING LANDSCAPE: WITH A POEM ON LANDSCAPE PAINTING. TOTHESE ARE NOW ADDED, TWO ESSAYS GIVING AN ACCOUNT OF THE PRINCIPLES AND MODE IN WHICH THE AUTHOR EXECUTED HIS OWN DRAWINGS (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies), in its 3d edition issued in 1808.

THREE ESSAYS, 3D EDITION Having already perused the volumes for the years 1633-1638 and 1640, Thoreau checked out the JESUIT 12 RELATION volumes for the years 1640-1641 and 1642.

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At the Boston Society of Natural History, Thoreau checked out the 3d volume of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s and Captain Seth Eastman’s HISTORICAL AND STATISTICAL INFORMATION RESPECTING … THE INDIAN TRIBES OF THE UNITED STATES. THE INDIAN TRIBES, III, 1854

Monday Nov. 28 Saw boys skating in Cambridge-Port the first ice to bear– Settled with J. Munroe & Co — and on a new Act placed 12 of my books with him on sale. I have paid him directly out of pocket since the book was published 290 dollars and taken his receipt for it — This does not include postage on proofsheets &c &c 11. He would copy from this into his Fact Book, and use some of the material in CAPE COD. 12. Thoreau presumably read each and every volume of the JESUIT RELATIONS that was available in the stacks at the Harvard Library. We know due to extensive extracts in his Indian Notebooks #7 and #8 that between 1852 and 1857 he did withdraw or consult all the volumes for the years between 1633 and 1672. Thoreau took notes in particular in regard to the reports by Father Jean de Brébeuf, Father Jacques Buteux, Father Claude Dablon, Father Jérôme Lallemant, Father Paul Le Jeune, Father François Le Mercier, Father Julien Perrault, Father Jean de Quens, Father Paul Ragueneau, and Father Barthélemy Vimont. Cramoisy, Sebastian (ed.). RELATION DE CE QUI S’EST PASSÉ EN LA NOUVELLE FRANCE IN L’ANNÉE 1636: ENVOYÉE AU R. PERE PROVINCIAL DE LA COMPAGNIE DE JESUS EN LA PROVINCE DE FRANCE, PAR LE P. P AUL LE JEUNE DE LA MESME COMPAGNIE, SUPERIEUR DE LA RESIDENCE DE KÉBEC. A Paris: Chez Sebastian Cramoisy..., 1637 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

— I have received from other quarters about 15 dollars. This has been the pecuniary value of the book– Saw at the Nat Hist– Rooms the skeleton of a moose — with horns– The length of the spinal processes (?) over the shoulder was very great– The hind legs were longer than the front — & the horns rose about 2 feet above the shoulders & spread between 4 & 5 I judged– Dr Harris described to me his finding a species of Cicindela at the White mts this fall — (the same he had found there one specimen of som time ago–) supposed to be very rare — found at st Peter’s River & at Lake Superior — but he proves it to be common near the Wht. mts.

CAPE COD: To-day it was the Purple Sea, an epithet which I should not PEOPLE OF before have accepted. There were distinct patches of the color of a CAPE COD purple grape with the bloom rubbed off. But first and last the sea is of all colors. Well writes Gilpin concerning “the brilliant hues which are continually playing on the surface of a quiet ocean,” and this was not too turbulent at a distance from the shore. “Beautiful,” says he, “no doubt in a high degree are those glimmering tints which often invest the tops of mountains; but they are mere coruscations compared with these marine colors, which are continually varying and shifting into each other in all the vivid splendor of the rainbow, through the space often of several leagues.” Commonly, in calm weather, for half a mile from the shore, where the bottom tinges it, the sea is green, or greenish, as are some ponds; then blue for many miles, often with purple tinges, bounded in the distance by a light almost silvery stripe; beyond which there is generally a dark-blue rim, like a mountain ridge in the horizon, as if, like that, it owed its color to the intervening atmosphere. On another day it will be marked with long streaks, alternately smooth and rippled, light- colored and dark, even like our inland meadows in a freshet, and showing which way the wind sets. Thus we sat on the foaming shore, looking on the wine-colored ocean,—

Here and there was a darker spot on its surface, the shadow of a cloud, though the sky was so clear that no cloud would have been noticed otherwise, and no shadow would have been seen on the land, where a much smaller surface is visible at once. So, distant clouds and showers may be seen on all sides by a sailor in the course of a day, which do not necessarily portend rain where he is. In July we saw similar dark-blue patches where schools of Menhaden rippled the surface, scarcely to be distinguished from the shadows of clouds. Sometimes the sea was spotted with them far and wide, such is its inexhaustible fertility. Close at hand you see their back fin, which is very long and sharp, projecting two or three inches above water. From time to time also we saw the white bellies of the Bass playing along the shore.

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PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1854

January 8, Sunday morning: Before his walk Henry Thoreau placed excerpts into his Fact Book from the Reverend William Gilpin’s OBSERVATIONS ON THE COASTS OF HAMPSHIRE, SUSSEX, AND KENT, RELATIVE CHIEFLY TO PICTURESQUE BEAUTY: MADE IN THE SUMMER OF THE YEAR 1774, and it is clear when he characterizes such an approach as “superficial” and then explodes in outrage “And he a clergyman, ‘vicar of Boldre!’” — that his two-year inquiry into British leisure-class hoity-toity aesthetic theorizing has definitively come to an end.

January 8. Sunday. Gilpin, in his essay on the “Art of Sketching Landscape,” says: “When you have finished your sketch therefore with Indian ink, as far as you propose, tinge the whole over with some light horizon hue. It may be the rosy tint of morning; or the more ruddy one of evening; or it may incline more to a yellowish, or a greyish cast.... By washing this tint over your whole drawing, you lay a foundation for harmony.” I have often been attracted by this harmonious tint in his and other drawings, and sometimes, especially, have observed it in nature when at sunset I inverted my head. We love not so well the landscape represented as in broad noon, but in a morning or evening twilight, those seasons when the imagination is most active, the more hopeful or pensive seasons of the day. Our mood may then possess the whole landscape, or be in harmony with it, as the hue of twilight prevails over the whole scene. Are we more than crepuscular in our intellectual and spiritual life? Have we awakened to broad noon? The morning hope is soon lost in what becomes the routine of the day, and we do not recover ourselves again until we land on the pensive shores of evening, shores which skirt the great western continent o£ the night. At sunset we look into the west. For centuries our thoughts fish those grand banks that lie before the newfoundland, before our spirits take up their abode in that Hesperian Continent to which these lie in the way. P.M. –To the Spruce Swamp in front of J. Farmer’s. Can go across both rivers now. New routes are more practicable. Stood within a rod of a downy woodpecker [Downy Woodpecker Picoides pubescens] on an apple tree. How curious and exciting the blood-red spot on its hindhead! I ask why it is there, but no answer is rendered by these snow-clad fields. It is so close to the bark I do not see its feet. It looks behind as if it had on a black cassock open behind and showing a white undergarment between the shoulders and down the back. It is briskly and incessantly tapping all round the dead limbs, but rare twice in a place, as if to sound the tree and so see if it has any worm in it, or perchance to start them. How much he deals with the bark of trees, all his life long tapping and inspecting it! He it is that scatters those fragments of bark and lichens about on the snow at the base of trees. What a lichenist he must be! Or rather, perhaps it is fungi makes his favorite study, for he deals most with dead limbs. How briskly he glides up or drops himself down a limb, creeping round and round, and hopping from limb to limb, and now flitting with a rippling sound of his wings to another tree! The lower two-thirds of the white spruce has its branches retraced or turned downward, and then curving upward at the extremities, as much as the white pine commonly slants upwards. Above it is so thick that you cannot see through it. All the black spruce that I know hereabouts stand on higher land than this. Saw two squirrel-nests in the thick top of a spruce. It was a foot in diameter, of coarse grass and bark fibres, with very thick bottom and sides and a scarcely distinguishable entrance, lined with fine fibres of bark, probably inner bark of maple, very warm. Probably a red squirrel’s, for I heard one winding up his clock. Many white pine cones had been eaten in the neighborhood. Gilpin’s “Essay on Picturesque Beauty” is the key to all his writings. He says in the outset that he does not mean to inquire “into the general sources of beauty,” but the questions which he proposes to himself depend on the result of such an inquiry. He asks, first, “What is that quality in objects, which particularly marks them as picturesque?” and answers “roughness,” assigning to that kind of beauty which he makes the opposite to the picturesque the quality of “smoothness.” This last he styles, too generally or exclusively, “the beautiful.” The beautiful, he says, cannot be painted; e.g., “A piece of Palladian architecture may be elegant in the last degree. The proportion of its parts — the propriety of its ornaments — and the symmetry of the whole, may be highly pleasing. But if we introduce it in a picture, it immediately becomes a formal object, and ceases to please. Should we wish to give it picturesque beauty, we must use the mallet, instead of the chisel: we must beat down one half of it, deface the other, and throw its mutilated members around in heaps. In short from a smooth building we must turn it into a rough ruin.” I do not believe that the “beautiful” is not equally beautiful in picture, that the beautiful statue for instance, however smooth, may not appear beautiful when daguerreotyped HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

or painted. In the case instanced he must use, the mallet either because the building is not beautiful, or because lie cannot catch and render the spirit of its beauty. If there is the same genius in the painter that there was in the architect, the painting will be beautiful too. The smooth may be more difficult, but is not impossible, to be represented by picture. It is not the mere roughness of the surface which makes the patriarchal head more interesting than that of a youth ever, nor is this the reason why we “admire the Laocoön more than the Antinoüs,” for we do not admire it more than the Apollo Belvidere. True, there are many reasons why the painter should select the rough. It is easier to execute; lie can do it more justice. In the case of the patriarchal head, those lines and wrinkles which man’s life has produced his hand can better represent than the fullness and promise of infancy; and then, on the whole, perhaps, we have more sympathy with performance than promise. The humble or sincere and true is more commonly rough and weather-beaten, so that from association we prefer it. But will Mr. Gilpin assert that the Venus and Apollo are not fit objects for painting? So we prefer the poor man’s irregular garden for its sincerity and truth to the rich man’s formal and pretending parterres, and the “worn-out cart-horse” to the pampered steed for similar reasons. Indeed “he does riot recommend his art,” if he fails to fix the fleeting forms of the beautiful. The worn-out cart- horse is thought to be more picturesque and admits “of being rendered with spirit,” because we can far more easily enter into his spirit, whether as beholders or painters, — have more sympathy with it than with that of the free horse of the prairie. Beside, what has the pampered coach-horse done to deserve our respect and sympathy? He defends the painter, first, by saying that “a free, bold touch is in itself pleasing,” and assuming to too great an extent that the objects which he calls beautiful do not admit of being painted in this touch, — but God used a free and bold touch when he created them, and so may the creative painter do when he paints them, — secondly, by saying that “the very essence of his art requires” that he select the Picturesque for the sake of composition, variety, light and shade, and coloring. But he is superficial. He goes not below the surface to account for the effect of form and color, etc. For instance, he thus attempts to account for the fact that the pampered steed may be a picturesque object. “Though the horse, in a rough state, as we have just observed, or worn down with labor, is more adapted to the pencil than when his sides shine with brushing, and high feeding; yet in this latter state also he is certainly a picturesque object. But it is not his smooth, and shining coat, that makes him so. It is the apparent interruption of that smoothness by a variety of shades, and colors, which produces the effect. Such a play of muscles appears, everywhere, through the fineness of his skin, gently swelling, and sinking into each other — he is all over so lubricus aspici, the reflections of light are so continually shifting upon him, and playing into each other, that the eye never considers the smoothness of the surface; but is amused with gliding up, and down, among those endless transitions, which in some degree, supply the room of roughness.” And this is the reason why a pampered steed can be painted! Mark that there is not the slightest reference to the fact that this surface, with its lights and shades, belongs to a horse and not to a bag of wind. The same reasoning would apply equally well to one of his hind quarters hung bottom upwards in a butcher’s stall. This comes of not inquiring “into the general sources of beauty.” So I should answer that “the beauty of an old head” is not “greatly improved by the smoothness of the bald pate” (if bald pates were rough they would do just as well), but it may be improved by the associations which a bald pate suggests. He fails to show why roughness is essential to the picturesque, because he does not go beneath the surface. To return to the horse, I should say that no arrangement of light and shade without reference to the object, actual or suggested, so lit and shaded can interest us powerfully, any more than the paint itself can charm us. In the “Essay on Picturesque Travel,” after speaking of the objects of such travel, he treats of the way in which “the mind is gratified by these objects.” He says: “we might begin in moral style, and consider the objects of nature in a higher light than merely as amusement. We might observe, that a search after beauty should naturally lead the mind to the great origin of all beauty,” etc. “But though in theory this seems a natural climax, we insist the less upon it, as in fact we have scarce ground to hope that every admirer of picturesque beauty is an admirer also of the beauty of virtue.” And he a clergyman, “vicar of Boldre!” This is to give us the play of Hamlet with Hamlet’s part left out. But there is no half way in this case that is not at the same time half true. Again, as if that were true, which G. asserts in another essay, that “the eye, which has nothing to do with moral sentiments, and is conversant only with visible forms, is disgusted,” etc., any more than a telescope is disgusted! As if taste resided in the eye! As if the eye, which itself cannot see at all, were conversant with surfaces! Yet he adds directly that “there is a still higher character in landscapes than what arises from the uniformity of objects — and that is the power of furnishing images analogous to the various feelings, and sensations of the mind.” Can good landscape have any lower aim? But he says, “To convey however ideas of this kind is the perfection of the art: it requires the splendor, and variety of colors; and is not to be attempted in such trivial sketches as these.” And this is Dot modesty merely, but a low estimate of his own art. I might have said some pages back HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

that he allows that grandeur which is produced “by uniformity of color, and a long continuation of line,” falls under the head of picturesque beauty, though he says that the idea of it is not easily caught. The elegant Gilpin. I like his style and manners better than anything he says.

February 6, Monday: In the afternoon Henry Thoreau walked to Fair Haven Cliff and Walden Pond.

Feb. 6. The weather has been very changeable for some weeks. First it is warm and thawing, sloshy weather; then the thermometer goes down to 1.9° below zero, and our shoes squeak on the snow; then, perhaps, it moderates and snows; then is mild and pleasant again and good sleighing; then we wake to find a drifted snow upon the last and a bleak, wintry prospect.

P. M. —To Cliffs and Walden. It is a very light snow and, though seven or inches deep, but a slight obstacle to walking. Its surface in the woods is everywhere creased and scored by the flitting leaves and the snow that has fallen from the trees. For a drifting wind has followed fast upon the snow, shaking it off the trees, and there is a new fall of withered leaves. Probably these leaves decay the faster for being deposited thus in successive layers, alternating with the snow. From the Cliff Hill the landscape looks very bleak and Nova-Zernbla-like. A cold, drifting wind sweeps from the north; the surface of the snow is imbricated on a great scale, being very regularly blown into waves, alike over the high road and the railroad, concealing the tracks and the meadow and the river and the pond. It is all one great wintry-looking snow-field, whose surface consists of great wave-like drifts, maybe twenty feet wide with an abrupt edge on the south. It is like a scaly armor drawn alike over the meadow and the pond. We need not trouble ourselves to speculate how the human race on this globe will be destroyed at last, whether by fire or otherwise. It would be so easy to cut their threads any time with a little sharper blast from the north. We go on dating from the Cold Fridays and the Great Snows and the September gales, but a little colder Friday, or greater snow, or more eight violent gale would put a period to man’s existence on the globe. I see great shadows on the northeast sides of the mountains, forty miles off, the sun being in the southwest. The snow is so light that few animals have been out. I see the track of a rabbit about the Cliff; there are hollows in the snow on the tops of the rocks, shaped like a milk-pan and as large, where he has squatted or whirled round. I also see the tracks of a few mice or moles. The squirrel, too, has been out. Hear the old owl at 4.30 P.M. Crossing Walden where the snow has fallen quite level, I perceive that my shadow [is of] a delicate or transparent blue rather than black. Price on the Picturesque says, “The midsummer shoot is the first thing that gives relief to the eye, after the sameness of color which immediately precedes it; in many trees, and in none more than the oak, the effect is singularly beautiful; the old foliage forms a dark background, on which the new appears, relieved and detached in all its freshness and brilliancy: it is spring engrafted upon summer.” Is not this the effect which I noticed by Fair Haven side last summer or autumn, toward night, — that watered and variously shaded foliage? As for autumn, he speaks of “the warm haze, which, on a fine day in that season, spreads the last varnish over every part of the picture.” Gilpin talked as if there was some food for the soul in mere physical light and shadow, as if, without the suggestion of a moral, they could give a man pleasure or pain! HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

WALDEN: Though, when I had been exposed to the rudest blasts a long time, my whole body began to grow torpid, when I reached the genial atmosphere of my house I soon recovered my faculties and prolonged my life. But the most luxuriously housed has little to boast of in this respect, nor need we trouble ourselves to speculate how the human race may be at last destroyed. It would be easy to cut their threads any time with a little sharper blast from the north. We go on dating from Cold Fridays and Great Snows; but a little colder Friday, or greater snow, would put a period to man’s existence on the globe.

THE GREAT SNOW

HENRY OFTEN MENTIONS THE GREAT SNOW HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

October 1, Sunday: In Syracuse NY, the 3d annual “Jerry Celebration” sponsored by the Unitarian congregation of the Reverend Samuel Joseph May, honoring the freeing of Jerry McHenry from the federal marshals who had been seeking to “return” him to his “owner” on October 1, 1851. RESISTING THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW

Father Isaac Hecker, CSSR, wrote to Orestes Augustus Brownson.

Scheduling difficulties had forced the postponement of Henry Thoreau’s lecture in Plymouth MA by one week. He responded to Friend Daniel Ricketson’s letter of August 12th, talking about visiting Middleboro Ponds and recommending William Gilpin’s books on nature, which he was just then reading.

Concord Mass, Oct 1st ’54 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

Dear Sir, I had duly received your very kind and frank letter, but delayed to answer it thus long because I have little skill as a correspondent, and wished to send you something more than my thanks. I was gratified by your prompt and hearty acceptance of my book. Yours is the only word of greeting I am likely to receive from a dwell- er in the woods like myself, from where the whippoorwill and cuckoo are heard, and there are better than moral clouds drifting over, and real breezes blow. Your account excites in me a desire to see the Middleboro Ponds, of which I had already heard somewhat; as also of some very beautiful ponds on the Cape, in Harwich I think, near which I once passed. I have sometimes also thought of visiting that remnant of our Indians still living near you.— But then, you know there is nothing like ones native fields and lakes. The best news you send me is, not that Nature with you is so fair and genial, but that there is one there who likes her so well. That proves all that was asserted. Homer, of course, you include in your list of lovers of nature – and, by the way, let me mention here, – for this is “my thunder” lately – Wm Gilpin’s long series of books on the Picturesque, with their illustrations. If it chances that you have not met with these, I cannot just now frame a better wish than that you may one day derive as much pleasure from the inspection of them as I have. Much as you have told me of yourself, you have still I think a little the advantage of me in this correspondence, for I have told you still more in my book. You have therefore the broadest mark to fire at. A young English author, Thomas Cholmondeley, is just now waiting for me to take a walk with him – therefore excuse this very barren note from Yrs, hastily at last, Henry D. Thoreau HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1855

October 12, Friday: Henry Thoreau wrote to Friend Daniel Ricketson. Concord Oct 12th 1855 Mr Ricketson, I fear that you had a lonely and disagreeable ride back to New Bedford, through the Carver Woods & so on,—perhaps in the rain, too, and I am in part answerable for it. I feel very much in debt to you & your family for the pleasant days I spent at Brooklawn. Tell Ar- thur & Walter that the shells which they gave me are spread out, and make quite a show to inland eyes. Methinks I still hear the strains of the piano[,] the violin[,] & the flageolet[,] [blended] together. Excuse me for the noise which I believe drove you to take refuge in the shanty. That shanty is indeed a favorable place to expand in, which I fear I did not enough improve. On my way through Boston, I inquired for Gilpin’s works at Little, Brown, & Co’s;—Monroe’s;

Page 2 Ticknor’s, & Burnham’s. They have not got them. They told me at Little Brown & Co’s that his works (not complete) in 12 vols 8vo, were imported & sold in this country 5 or 6 years ago for about 15 dollars. Their terms for importing are 10 per cent on the cost. I copied from “The London Catalogue of Books, HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1816-51” at their shop, the following list of Gilpin’s Works— L S d “Gilpin (Wm Dialogues on Various Subjects 8vo 0—9—0 Ca- dell Essays on Picturesque Subjects 8vo " 15 " " Exposition of the New Testament 2 vols 8vo 0—16—0 Longman— Forest Scenery, by Sir T. D. Lauder 2 vols 8 0—l8—0 Smith & E Lectures on the Catechism, 12mo 0—3—6 Longman Lives of the Reformers 2 v. 12mo " 8— " Rivington Sermons Illustrative & Practical 8vo 0—12—0 Hatchard. " to Country Congregations, 4 v. 8vo 1—16—0 Longman Tour in Cambridge Norfolk &c 8vo 0—18—0 Cadell " of the River Wye, 12mo " 4 ", with plates 0—17—0 Cadell Gilpin (W S (?)) Hints on Landscape Gardening Roy. 8vo 1—0—0 Cadell.” Beside these I remember to have read 1 volume on Prints

Page 3 His Southern Tour (1775) Lakes of Cumberland 2 vols— Highlands of Scotland " " NB. There must be plates & West of England. in every volume. I still see an image of those Middleborough Ponds in my mind’s eye—broad shallow lakes with an iron mine at their bottom—com- paratively unvexed by sails—only by Tom Smith & his squaw Sepit’s “sharper”. I find my map of the state to be the best I have seen of that district. It is a question whether the islands of Long Pond or Great Quitticus offer the most attractions to a Lord of the Isles. That plant which I found on the shore of Long Pond chances to be a rare & beautiful flower—the Sabbatia chlo- roides—referred to Plymouth. In a Description of Middleborough in HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

the Hist. Coll. vol 3d 1810—signed Nehe- miah Bennet, Middleborough[,] 1793[,]—it is said. “There is on the easterly shore of As- sawampsitt Pond, on the shore of Betty’s Neck, two rocks which have curious marks thereon (supposed to be done by the Indians) which appear like the steppings of a person with

Page 4 naked feet which settled into the rocks, likewise the prints of a hand on several places, with a number of other marks; also there is a rock on a high hill, a little to the eastward of the old stone fishing wear, where there is the print of a person’s hand in said rock.” It would be well to look at those rocks again more carefully,—also at the rock on the hill. I should think that you would like to explore Snipatuct Pond in Rochester[,—] [it] is so large & near. It is an interesting fact[,] that the alewives used to ascend to it[,]—if they do not still,—both from Mattapoisett, & through Great Quitticus. There will be no trouble about the chamber in the old house, though, as I told you, Hosmer counts his coppers and may expect some compensation for it. He says “Give my respects to Mr R[.] & tell him that I cannot be at a large expense to preserve an antiquity or curiosity. Nature must do its work,” “But” say I, [he] asks you only not to assist Nature.” I find that Channing [is] gone to his wife at Dorchester—perhaps for the winter— & both may return to Concord in the Spring. rs Henry D. Thoreau

October 13, Saturday: Henry Thoreau was written to by Friend Daniel Ricketson in New Bedford. Brooklawn Saty noon HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

13 Oct. 1855. Dear Thoreau, I wrote a few lines to you this morg. before breakfast, which I took to the post office, but since I have received yours of yesterday, which rather changes my mind as to coming to Concord. I thank you for your kindness in procuring for me information concerning Gilpin’s work, which I shall endeavor to procure. My ride home as you anticipate, was somewhat dull & dreary through Carver woods, but I escaped the rain which did not come on until after my arrival home about tea time. I think

Page 2 that you hurried away from Brooklawn. We had just got out affairs in good train. I hope however, that you will soon be able to come again and spend several weeks, when we will visit the pond in Rochester which you mention and review review our rides and rambles — the Middleborough ponds and the surroundings never tire me. I could go every day for a long time to them. I give my preference to the Isles in Long Pond — we must get the Indian name of this favorite lake of ours. my The principal reason for my changing mind ^ in regard to going to Concord is that you say Channing has gone & perhaps for the Winter. Although I intended to board & lodge at the Tavern I expected to philosophize with you & C. by his wood-fire. is But this only a good reason for you to ^

Page 3 come to Brooklawn again. We have some weeks of good rambling weather yet before Winter sets in. You will be very welcome to us all & dont feel the least hesitation HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

about coming if you have the desire so to do. I am in the Shanty — Uncle James is here with me. He came up as soon as he heard you had gone. I have endeav- ored to convince him that you are perfectly harmless, but I think he still retains a portion of his fears. I think you would affiliate well if you should ever come together. Yours truly D. Ricketson H D Thoreau Esq Concord Mass. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1858

November 8, Sunday: Last naked-eye observation of Donati’s comet. SKY EVENT

November 8: P. M. – To Boulder Field. Goodwin, laying wall at Miss Ripley’s, observed to me going by, “Well, it seems that ——— thought that he had lived long enough.” He committed suicide within a week, at his sister’s house in Sudbury. A boy slept in the chamber with him, and, hearing a noise, got [up] and found on the floor with both his jugular veins cut, but his windpipe whole. He said to the boy, “Take the razor and cut deeper,” but the boy ran, and ——— died, and Garfield said it was about time, for ———, in revenge for being sent to the house of correction, had set fire to a pile of wood of his, that long pile by the roadside beyond William Wheeler’s, that I stood under in a rain once. ——— probably burned Witherell’s house too, and perhaps Boynton’s stable. The red osier at Mrs. Simmons’s is quite bare; how long? Her hawthorn is still quite leafy and pretty, yellow- brown, dotted. A thorn at Hall’s fence is dark scarlet and pretty. There are many leaves on the buckthorn still. Common thorn bushes, long since bare, when many grow together in clumps, make another such a smoke, though smaller, as the maples, – the same color. I can often distinguish the bush by this. Alders are a very dark gray, sort of iron gray, and, if near enough, you see dark lines (the stems) and specks (the fruit) like cinders, like a very dense, dark, and unconsumed uliginous smoke, in which many cinders rise. Those trees and bushes which grow in dense masses and have many fine twigs, being bare, make an agreeable misty impression where there are a myriad retreating points to receive the eye, not a hard, abrupt wall; just as, in the sky, the visual ray is cushioned on clouds, unless it is launched into the illimitable ether. The eye is less worn and wearied, not to say wounded, by looking at these mazes where the seer is not often conscious of seeing anything. It is well that the eye is so rarely caught and detained by any object in one whole hemisphere of its range, i.e. the sky. It enjoys everlasting holiday on this side. Only the formless clouds and the objectless ether are presented to it. For they are nervous who see many faces in the clouds. Corresponding to the clouds in the sky are those mazes now on the earth. Nature disposes of her naked stems so softly as not to put our eyes out. She makes them a smoke, or stationary cloud, on this side or that, of whose objective existence we rarely take cognizance. She does not expect us to notice them. She calls our attention to the maple swamp more especially in October. There is also the coarse maze produced by an oak wood (when nearly all the leaves are fallen), in which, however, the large boughs reflecting the light have considerable distinctness, and that of the forest in general. I thought, from a small specimen, that the brushy yellow birch tops were of the same hue with the alders. [Vide November 11th] Nature has many scenes to exhibit, and constantly draws a curtain over-this part or that. She is constantly repainting the landscape and all surfaces, dressing up some scene for our entertainment. Lately we had a leafy wilderness, now bare twigs begin to prevail, and soon she will surprise us with a mantle of snow.13 Some green she thinks so good for our eyes, like blue, that she never banishes it entirely, but has created evergreens. It is remarkable how little any but a lichenist will observe on the bark of trees. The mass of men have but the vaguest and most indefinite notion of mosses, as a sort of shreds and fringes, and the world in which the lichenist dwells is much further from theirs than one side of this earth from the other. They see bark as if they saw it not. These objects which, though constantly visible, are rarely looked at are a sort of eye-brush. Each phase of nature, while not invisible, is yet not too distinct and obtrusive. It is there to be found when we look for it, but not demanding our attention. It is like a silent but syrnpathizing companion in whose company we retain most of the advantages of solitude, with whom we can walk and talk, or be silent, naturally, without the necessity of talking in a strain foreign to the place. I know of but one or two persons with whom I can afford to walk. With most the walk degenerates into a mere vigorous use of your legs, ludicrously purposeless, while you are discussing some mighty argument, each one having his say, spoiling each other’s day, worrying one another with conversation, hustling one another with our conversation. I know of no use in the walking part in this case, except that we may seem to be getting on together toward some goal; but of course we keep our original distance all the way. Jumping every wall and 13. I read that snow fell two or three inches deep in Bangor yesterday morning. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

ditch with vigor in the vain hope of shaking your companion off. Trying to kill two birds with one stone, though they sit at opposite points of [the] compass, to see nature and do the honors to one who does not. Animals generally see things in the vacant way I have described. They rarely see anything but their food, or some real or imaginary foe. I never saw but one cow looking into the sky. Lichens as they affect the scenery, as picturesque objects described by Gilpin or others, are one thing; as they concern the lichenist, quite another. These are the various grays and browns which give November its character. There are also some red mazes, like the twigs of the white maple and our Cornu~ sericea, etc. (the red osier, too, further north), and some distinct yellow ones, as willow twigs, which are most interesting in spring. The silvery abeles are steadily falling nowadays. The chalky white under side of these leaves is remarkable. None of our leaves is so white. I think I admire again about this time the still bright-red or crimson fruit of the sumach, now when not only its own but most other leaves have fallen and there are few bright tints, it is now so distinct on its twigs. Your attention is not distracted by its brilliant leaves now. I go across N. Barrett’s land and over the road beyond his house. The aspect of the Great Meadows is now nearly uniform, the new and exposed grass being nearly as brown and sere as that which was not cut. Thus Nature has been blending and harmonizing the colors here where man had interfered. I wandered over bare fields where the cattle, lately turned out, roamed restless and unsatisfied with the feed; I dived into a rustling young oak wood where not a green leaf was to be seen; I climbed to the geological axis of elevation and clambered over curly-pated rocks whose strata are on their edges, amid the rising woods; and again I thought, They are all gone surely, and left me alone. Not even a man Friday remains. What nutriment can I extract from these bare twigs? Starvation stares me in the face. “Nay, nay!” said a nuthatch, making its way, head downward, about a bare hickory close by. “The nearer the bone the sweeter the meat. Only the superfluous has been swept away. Now we behold the naked truth. If at any time the weather is too bleak and cold for you, keep the sunny side of the trunk, for there is a wholesome and inspiring warmth such as the summer never afforded. There are the winter mornings, with the sun on the oak wood tops. While buds sleep, thoughts wake.” (“Hear! hear!” screamed the jay from a neighboring copse, where I had heard a tittering for some time.! “Winter has a concentrated and nutty kernel if you know where to look for it.” And then the speaker shifted to another tree, further off, and reiterated his assertions, and his mate at a distance confirmed them; and I heard a suppressed chuckle from a red squirrel that heard the last remark, but had kept silent and invisible all the while. Is that you? “Yes-sir-ee,” said he. Then, running down a slanting bough, he called out rather impudently, “Look here! just get a snug-fitting fur coat and a pair of fur gloves like mine, and you may laugh at a northeast storm,” and then he wound up with a slang phrase, in his own lingo, accompanied by a flourish of his tail, just as a newsboy twirls his fingers with his thumb on his nose and inquires, “Does your mother know you are out?” The wild pear tree on Ponkawtasset has some yellow leaves still. The now more noticeable green radical leaves of the buttercup in the russet pastures remind me of the early spring to come, of which they will offer the first evidence. Now, too, I can see (for the same reason) where grows our only patch of broom, a quarter of a mile off, it [is] such a distinct, somewhat yellowish, green. Already the creeping juniper is a ripe glaucous green, with a distinct ruddy tinge to the upper surface, – the whole bush a ripe tint like a fruit. I stand in Ebby Hubbard’s yellow birch swamp, admiring some gnarled and shaggy picturesque old birches there, which send out large knee-like limbs near the ground, while the brook, raised by the late rain, winds fuller than usual through the rocky swamp. I thought with regret how soon these trees, like the black birches that grew on the hill near by, would be all cut off, and there would be almost nothing of the old Concord left, and we should be reduced to read old deeds in order to be reminded of such things, – deeds, at least, in which some old and revered bound trees are mentioned. These will be the only proof at last that they ever existed. Pray, farmers, keep some old woods to match the old deeds. Keep them for history’s sake, as specimens of what the township was. Let us not be reduced to a mere paper evidence, to deeds kept in a chest or secretary, when not so much as the bark of the paper birch will be left for evidence, about its decayed stump. The sides of the old Carlisle road where it is low and moist are (and have for a long time been), for many rods together and a rod in width, brown or cinnamon-colored with the withered dicksonia fern, not-like the brown of trees (their withered leaves), but a peculiar cinnamon-brown. The bare huckleberry bushes and the sweet- ferns are draped with them as a kind of mourning. Solidago puberula still out, for you see a few bright-yellow solidago flowers long after they are generally turned to a dirty-white fuzzy top. Pratt says he saw a few florets on a Polygala sanguinea within a week. He shows me samphire, plucked three weeks ago in Brighton, when it was a very brilliant crimson still. Looking from Pratt’s window at sunset, I saw that purple or rosy light reflected from some old chestnut rails on the hilltop before his house. Methinks it is pinkish, even like the old cow-droppings in the pastures. So HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

universally does Nature blush at last. The very herbage which has gone through the stomachs and intestines of the cow acquires at last a faint pinkish tinge. The button-bush balls are now blackish (really dark-brown) and withered, looking much blacker against the light than a month ago. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1869

August: Another in the series of the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway’s “South-Coast Saunterings in England” appeared in Harpers’ New Monthly Magazine. In this installment, Conway characterized the American author Henry Thoreau as having been a sort of American version of the British clergyman tourist aesthete, the Reverend William Gilpin, wandering around in the rustic areas taking “views” of this and that for his own personal enjoyment. The conversations on the basis of which Conway formulated such a comparison had been conversations while he had been a Harvard student on summer vacation in Concord and the two of them had sauntered together in the Walden Woods, and that had been while Thoreau had been, in a characteristic manner, thoroughly investigating and duly considering –and ultimately repudiating– this Brit clergyman’s extended series of travel and aesthetic publications. This is to say that these had been conversations that had occurred prior to Thoreau’s ultimate dismissal of the British writer’s influence in early 1854 — for Thoreau had wound up chiding the good Reverend in exasperation, for having been someone without a proper sense of moral seriousness. Thoreau had decidedly moved on, a fact of which his erstwhile walking companion the Reverend Conway seems to be unaware:14 The pleasantest association I have hitherto had with the New Forest was that it had been the haunt of one whose name I had heard from the lips of Henry Thoreau –one who might almost be thought of as having reappeared in Thoreau– William Gilpin, author, artist, man of science, and clergyman. The descendant of that Bernard Gilpin, the pupil of Erasmus, whom the death of Mary unbound beside the stake upon which he was about to suffer, William Gilpin received the surplice almost as an hereditary mantle; but his heart worshiped with truest enthusiasm amidst these forest aisles. His works on the trees, forests, and general scenery of England, illustrated by his own pencil (with which he was almost as skillful as his brother, Sawney Gilpin, the painter of animals), still have a value which few works written in the last century on subjects related to science possess. He was an Oxonian, and upward of fifty years old when he received his living –(he was poor, and had married an undowered girl because he loved her)– in the village of Boldre, which was worth £700 — a snug sum in 1777. An earnest, simple, and impressive preacher, a warm-hearted, industrious man, healthy and cheerful, he set to work in this wilderness; and while having an artist’s eye, and a singular subtlety of observation, he divined the treasures of thought and beauty every where. He transmuted the money their publication brought him into schools for day- laborers. He was thus able to endow the schools at Boldre, Brockenhurst, and elsewhere, which still exist. In the Boldre school the day-laborers’ children are taught free, the endowment being for twenty boys to be taught reading, writing, and ciphering, and the same number of girls reading, sewing, and spinning. In addition, the boys receive annually a jacket, breeches, and green vest, and the girls a black petticoat and 14. You have only to scan what sort of remarks Conway made to Emerson about the book WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, after his initial reading — to recognize that this man had a tin ear in his head. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

green frock. The “green” was meant to be a kind of uniform. Near Brockenhurst Howard, the philanthropist, lived and labored three years, and the place became part of the parish in which Gilpin worked in the same spirit during the twenty-seven years of his life in the New Forest, where now his works succeed him in beneficent influence.... Gilpin had the same disposition with Thoreau –the disposition, one may call it, of all men of genius– to find a glory in things generally regarded as mean... He finds an especial beauty in the notes of the woodpecker and the jay.... Gilpin sometimes, though not like Thoreau always, saw the landscape tinted by “the light that never was on sea or land.” SOUTH-COAST SAUNTERINGS

“Man’s most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe.” — Euripides HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1973

November: Gordon V. Boudreau’s “H.D. Thoreau, William Gilpin, and the Metaphysical Ground of the Picturesque” (American Literature Volume 45, Number 3, pages 357-369). In the fall of 1858, Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal of how nearly impossible it was to describe “the infinite variety of hues, tints, and shades” in nature, “for the language affords no names for them, and we must apply the same term monotonously to twenty different things.” To describe such colors truly, he felt, “language ... would have not only to be greatly enriched, but as it were dyed to the same colors herself, and speak to the eye as well as to the ear” (Journal for October 27, 1858). It is no matter for wonder, then, that Thoreau was drawn to the works of Reverend William Gilpin (1724-1804), the English writer whose six popular tour books of the British Isles were supplemented by landscape sketches washed with aquatint of the “picturesque” in nature. On January 8, 1854, Thoreau quoted from Gilpin’s “Art of Sketching Landscape”: “When you have finished your sketch therefore with Indian ink ... tinge the whole over with some light horizon hue. It may be the rosy tint of morning; or the more ruddy one of evening; or it may incline more to a yellowish, or a greyish cast ... By washing this tint over your whole drawing, you lay a foundation for harmony.” Thoreau reacted: “I have often been attracted by this harmonious tint in his and other drawings, and sometimes, especially, have observed it in nature when at sunset I inverted my head.” According to William D. Templeman in an essay published more than forty years ago, no author aside from such personal friends as Emerson, Channing, and Daniel Ricketson “commanded nearly so much of his time in the journal as has Gilpin.” That Templeman sees a more or less continuous affinity of Thoreau for Gilpin, with the exception of a single “flare-up,” does not stand up under scrutiny, however; rather, Thoreau’s reading of and commentary upon Gilpin suggests a brief, two-year period of influence which terminates in early 1854. In the early spring of 1852, Thoreau’s attitude is one of unqualified attraction; in the late summer through the autumn of 1852, continued attraction and praise, qualified by a discriminating criticism of Gilpin’s methodology; and in the winter of 1854 –in spite of a valedictory approval of Gilpin’s sketches, prose style, and manners– rejection of the picturesque as expounded by Gilpin, on account of its superficiality and lack of a moral basis. During a twenty-three day span in the early spring of 1852, Thoreau mentions Gilpin by name –often quoting directly from Remarks on Forest Scenery– in eight journal entries, those of March 31, and of April 1, 12, 13, 15, 17, 19, and 22. Having borrowed this two-volume work from Harvard Library on March 22, Thoreau in the second of these journal entries takes notice of Gilpin’s remarks on the “nearer distance,” and on April 19 finds HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

that the mist as he looks from the railroad to Fair Haven Hill, makes “those near distances which Gilpin tells of,” giving four distinct tints to the landscape.... By August 6, 1852, the beginning of his second series of journal references to Gilpin, Thoreau had become acquainted with four of his tour books on the picturesque; and by October 21, the last day in this second series, he had read and commented upon a fifth. The initial entry in the series contains Thoreau’s first negative reaction: “Have just finished Gilpin’s ‘Lakes of Cumberland.’ An elegant writer of English prose. I wish he would look at scenery sometimes not with the eye of an artist. It is all side screens and fore screens and near distances and broken grounds with him.” At another point Thoreau challenges Gilpin’s extravagant supposal that Loch Fyne in Scotland would have seemed a “horrid chasm” to a bystander next to it “immediately after the diluvian crash,” just before the waters rushed in. Having taken the dimensions of Walden Pond, which some had supposed bottomless, Thoreau suspected rather that the Loch would have seemed no deeper than a hay meadow. And yet he grants Gilpin the right to exaggerate the size of mountains in paintings: “unless you make them exceed their real or proportional size, they have no effect” (Gilpin being quoted in Thoreau’s Journal entry for September 1, 1852). After borrowing the remaining Gilpin tour book as well as Three Essays on Picturesque Beauty from the Harvard Library more than a year later, Thoreau commented upon Gilpin in one last series of journal entries — a long “essay” of January 8, 1854, and a shorter entry of February 6, both highly critical. Eight months later Thoreau wrote to his new friend Daniel Ricketson that “‘my thunder’ lately” is “Wm Gilpin’s long series of books on the Picturesque, with their illustrations.” But that he may already have put that experience behind him is suggested in his comment: “I cannot now form a better wish than that you may one day derive as much pleasure from the inspection of them as I have.” A year later, making friendly inquiry at four publishing houses in Boston, Thoreau reported to Ricketson that Gilpin’s works “(not complete) in 12 vols 8 vo, were imported and sold in this country 5 or 6 years ago for about 15 dollars” [October 12, 1855] Thoreau copied out ten titles by Gilpin that were listed in “The London Catalogue of Books, 1816-51,” and added five of his own recollection, observing that “There must be plates in every volume.” There is no other mention of Gilpin in the published correspondence of Thoreau. In the journals after 1854, there is only a casual allusion in the entry of November 8, 1858: “Lichens as they affect the scenery, as picturesque objects described by Gilpin or others, are one thing; as they concern the lichenist, quite another.” When one turns to the borrowings from Gilpin in Thoreau’s published works, he finds additional support for placing the period of attraction between 1852 and 1854. Gilpin is mentioned or quoted twice in Walden (in “House Warming” and “The Pond in Winter”), once in Cape Cod (in “The Beach Again”), and once in The Maine Woods (near the end of “Chesuncook”). The HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

genetic text of Walden indicates that the first reference occurs in the E version of the manuscript (late 1852-1853), the second in the D and F versions (1852 and 1853-1854 respectively). The “House Warming” quotation derives from Remarks on Forest Scenery, which Thoreau borrowed on March 22, 1852, entering into his journal on April 12 the passage to appear in this thirteenth chapter of Walden; “The Pond in Winter” quotation is from Observations on the Highlands of Scotland, which he had borrowed on July 26, 1852, entering in his journal on September 1, 1852, the passage later to appear in “The Pond in Winter.” ... The Gilpin reference that appeared when “The Beach Again” was first published in the posthumous book was evidently part of the “new material,” and may therefore date from a time between November 1852, when Curtis had the original Cape Cod material, and the August 8 letter. Since the Gilpin quotation is from Observations on the Coasts of Hampshire, Sussex and Kent, which Thoreau borrowed on November 28, 1853, it almost certainly dates from his reading of Gilpin late in that year. ...Thoreau conveyed his approval of Gilpin in conversation with Moncure D. Conway, whose “South-Coast Saunterings” in the August 1869 issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine ... “The pleasantest association I have hitherto had with the New Forest was that it had been the haunt of one whose name I had heard from the lips of Henry Thoreau one who might almost be thought of as having reappeared in Thoreau William Gilpin, author, artist, man of science, and clergyman.” These conversations took place when Thoreau and Conway walked in the Concord woods during July and August of 1853. In such late essays as “Walking,” “Autumnal Tints,” and “Wild Apples,” where one might expect notice of the picturesque, there is no mention of Gilpin. ... That Thoreau ultimately rejects Gilpin’s technique and vision is owing to the latter’s superficiality, which is related to his failure of moral vision, penetration, or courage. Thoreau’s vision, on the other hand, was profoundly metaphysical, finding in nature, and in a language that he sensed was derivative from it, a moral “being” with which he identified as a profound and vital expressiveness assumed into the very style of his writing. Doubtless because of his awareness of the life of words as well as things, Thoreau once commented that “most words in the English language do not mean for me what they do for my neighbors” (October 18, 1856). This statement should illuminate the metaphysical understanding of Thoreau in a journal entry of his twenty-third year: “An act of integrity is to an act of duty what the French verb être is to devoir. Duty is ce que devrait être” (February 13, 1840). A similar apprehension lies behind the parenthetical remark in Thoreau’s title for the review of J.A. Etzler’s book as “Paradise (to be) Regained.” By reading at least eight of Gilpin’s works (eleven volumes) during the period between March 22, 1852, and March 1, 1854, Thoreau may have sharpened and subtilized his eyes for certain hues in the landscape, especially those of the dawning and evening hours. But he was hardly an “ill-trained” esthete who “took from Gilpin ... a HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

sense of composition and design” that he previously lacked. Inevitably, however, Thoreau’s eye returned from the picturesque overlaid by Gilpin’s theorizing to a “still life” more natural, one that exercised Thoreau’s “hue of the mind,” and his metaphysical, as well as his aesthetic and moral, imagination. On June 21, 1852, during the period of Gilpin’s “influence,” Thoreau clearly declares the focus of his own vision: “Nature has looked uncommonly bare and dry to me for a day or two. With our senses applied to the surrounding world we are reading our own physical and corresponding moral revolutions. Nature was so shallow all at once I did not know what had attracted me all my life. I was therefore encouraged when, going through a field this evening, I was unexpectedly struck with the beauty of an apple tree. The perception of beauty is a moral test” (Journal, June 21, 1852).

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

People of Cape Cod and Walden “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2014. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: October 2, 2014 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:THE REVEREND WILLIAM GILPIN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD