Timeline of Thoreau’S

TIMELINE OF THOREAU’S

WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS:

“A BOOK’S NOT READ UNTIL IT’S WRITTEN IN”

“The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.” — Jean Cocteau HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

618,000 BCE

The beginning of the Cromerian interglacial of this current Ice Age. The Yellowstone dome blew its lid, although not so severely as it had in 640,000 BCE (this blast was only about 5 times greater than the Tambora eruption of April 10, 1815).

OUR MOST RECENT GLACIATION Based on the best global evidence available (continuous cores from abyssal marine sediments and from the summit domes of the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets), the Walden paleo-valley was probably glaciated four times. These well-dated global records match the tally of four glaciations present in both the sea- cliffs of Nantucket and and [sic] drill cores of Georges Bank. Based on the best astronomical dates on hand, these glaciations culminated about 22, 130, 420, and 620 thousand years ago, plus or minus a few thousand years. During each of the four ice sheet culminations, the same source of ice moved over the same paleo-valley with the same mechanisms, and reached roughly the same thickness over roughly the same resistant bedrock topography. Even more conservative was the bedrock highland associated with the Bloody Bluff Fault that divides the watersheds of the Sudbury River and Charles River. This suggests that comparable drainage scenarios were present during each ice advance and retreat, meaning that a series of broadly similar glacial lakes existed in the Sudbury Valley as the ice sheets came and went. Using Occam’s Razor, the default assumption is that previous ice sheets made previous versions of Walden. Not clones or identical twins but fraternal twins, perhaps the relationship Thoreau had in mind when he linked Walden and White Ponds. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, WALDEN’S SHORE, pages 98-9 TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

418,000 BCE

The completion of another spasm of glaciation during this present Ice Age, the Kansan glaciation. Within awhile the British Isles would be entering the Hoxnian interglacial. Huts with palisaded walls would have been being built in France — but we don’t know whether these structures were primarily to keep wild animals and human enemies out or primarily to keep children and domestic animals in. In about this timeframe, in places where there were people (not, of course, the North American landmass), these people would have been beginning to wet their digging sticks and throwing sticks and spears and then bury them near their fires, to slowly temper them into strong, springy rods. We now have collected some of these oldest wooden weapons known to have survived (we have also some fire-hardened curved sticks, and suppose they may have been useful as drumsticks).

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

128,000 BCE

Until circa 108,000 BCE this planet would experience a warm but stormy interglacial we now term “the Eemian period.” The initial 12,000 years of the Eemian would be a relative stable climate with cozy temperatures, just about like our Holocene era, and what would follow this would retain some warmth even as the North American ice sheets began gradually again to expand. The North American landmass may have suffered some terrific storms during the period between 116,000 BCE and 108,000 BCE, amounting to horrific blizzards laying down a snowpack that would compact into the advancing glaciers of a new episode of our current Ice Age. Such spasms can begin fairly abruptly with little warning (they also can end abruptly, although probably not so very abruptly as their beginnings). Global sea levels were presumably nearly the same as at present or possibly slightly higher, ensuring that land links such as the Bering land bridge, and many sea islands, would be submerged (the greater Southeast Asian peninsula would have also in large part been beneath salt water.)

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

18,000 BCE

On the basis of Carbon-14 measurements, this was the last Glacial Maximum, the coldest period of the most recent Ice Age. People made wall paintings in caves, for example in the cave of Lascaux, France. Rope was in use, according to evidence there.

The extreme terminal moraine of the farthest reaching advance of the ice of our current Ice Age fell across Staten Island, where Henry Thoreau would reside, and therefore date to this period or earlier (prior to the publication of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, Thoreau never lived anywhere except on top of the same sort of terrain of glacial detritus characteristic of Walden Woods — that landscape was in fact the sole landscape with which he to that point had had any experience at all).

Chauvet cave in France.

People living in or visiting caves in what are now Israel and Jordan were putting notches on bones to record sequences of numbers (the devices are thought to have functioned primarily as lunar calendars).

By about this point or at least by 13,000 BCE, the spear thrower and the harpoon would have been invented.

The first-known artifact with a map on it, made of bone, has been at what is now Mezhirich — it appears to show the region immediately around the site at which it was found.

OUR MOST RECENT GLACIATION At about this point the Laurentide Ice Sheet retreated, and features called glacial lakes were formed in what would be termed “New England.” These glacial lakes were being fed a constant supply of meltwater from the HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN glacial wall to the north and these streams were carrying along sand and gravel. Two particularly prominent lakes were Lake Sudbury and Lake Concord. Lake Sudbury formed 1st and was about 4 miles wide and 20 miles long and 90 feet deep and was situated just south of present-day Massachusetts Route 2. As the glacier would continue to retreat, Lake Concord would come into existence north of Massachusetts Route 2. There would have been chunks of ice remaining in these lakes, so instead of being one expanse of water, they actually consisted of a number of smaller bodies of water. Eventually the glacial waters would drain away through various outlets toward the east, leaving behind a lake basin filled with clay and silt. These layer of clay and silt would become the materials with which colonial settlers in Massachusetts would make bricks to build their houses. They also left behind landscape features known now as “kame deltas,” as indicated by the rows of black upside-down pyramids below:

Based on the best global evidence available (continuous cores from abyssal marine sediments and from the summit domes of the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets), the Walden paleo-valley was probably glaciated four times. These well-dated global records match the tally of four glaciations present in both the sea- cliffs of Nantucket and and [sic] drill cores of Georges Bank. Based on the best astronomical dates on hand, these glaciations culminated about 22, 130, 420, and 620 thousand years ago, plus or minus a few thousand years. During each of the four ice sheet culminations, the same source of ice moved over the same paleo-valley with the same mechanisms, and reached roughly the same thickness over roughly the same resistant bedrock topography. Even more conservative was the bedrock highland associated with the Bloody Bluff Fault that divides the watersheds of the Sudbury River and Charles River. This suggests that comparable drainage scenarios were present during each ice advance and retreat, meaning that a series of broadly similar glacial lakes existed in the Sudbury HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Valley as the ice sheets came and went. Using Occam’s Razor, the default assumption is that previous ice sheets made previous versions of Walden. Not clones or identical twins but fraternal twins, perhaps the relationship Thoreau had in mind when he linked Walden and White Ponds. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, WALDEN’S SHORE, pages 98-9 TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1821

August 11, Saturday: In The Middlesex Gazette an article signed “S” recounted the convenient local legend “–the oldest people telle [sic] me that they heard it in their youth–” that Henry Thoreau would reference in Draft F of “The Ponds.”

WALDEN: Some have been puzzled to tell how the shore became so regularly paved. My townsmen have all heard the tradition, the oldest people tell me that they heard it in their youth, that anciently the Indians were holding a pow-wow upon a hill here, which rose as high into the heavens as the pond now sinks deep into the earth, and they used much profanity, as the story goes, though this vice is one of which the Indians were never guilty, and while they were thus engaged the hill shook and suddenly sank, and only one old squaw, named Walden, escaped, and from her the pond was named.

A deep and clear body of isolated water such as Walden Pond must have seemed quite mysterious before the development of the geological theory of ice ages, and before the development of an account of how buried masses of ice often linger at the edge of a retreating glacier and gradually melt over centuries or dozens of centuries, to leave precisely such deep water-filled holes. Alas, however, a people with a “forgotten” history of genocide, such as these white Concordians, are ever in dire need of some fanciful account by which their record can precisely be reversed and the people they victimized be portrayed as aggressors while the guilty (or themselves, descendants of the guilty parties and inheritors of the loot the guilt and the shame of genocide) can be allowed to posture as innocent prisoners being tortured and burned alive by barbarous savages. Barbarous savages whom these white Christians trapped in their peaceable villages in the snow of that winter of 1676- 1677, and roped together at the neck, and marched onto the Deer Island concentration camp in Boston Harbor and destroyed by starvation and exposure.1 Note that in this 1821 news item the existence of Walden Pond has become a fanciful proof that it is God, not white Concordians, who destroys strange peoples who interfere with the legitimate agendas of white Concordians. This article is not a “news story” at all, but rather it is a fantasy by which white people, as inheritors of desperate deeds, have discovered a way to add to the original affect of the viciousness and greed of their parents the affect of outrage of a surviving victim and thus mobilize, in the service of their own lives, the force of a shame which might otherwise forestall them from further such acts of desperation.

1.The scenario is rather a familiar one –although its deeps have never adequately been fathomed– at least we have been able to observe this legitimation-myth as it repeated itself in Minnesota during our race war and then in Germany before and during World War II. Margaret Fuller, not one easy to deceive, described it as “the aversion of the injurer for him he has degraded.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Walden Pond This pond, in the southerly part of town, has something singular, both in its appearance and in the tradition concerning it. It is said that the place which now contains a body of water, was once a high hill — that on this hill the Indians assembled at certain seasons to celebrate their religious festivals, and at other times to burn and torture prisoners taken in the wars with the early settlers of the country; it was on a meeting of numerous chiefs and tribes for the latter purpose, that this celebrated hill disappeared in the midst of their barbarous rejoicings, and sunk with all its savage inhabitants upon it. And on account of the remarkable depth of the water, which has never been fathomed, it was supposed to have continued to sink to such an amazing depth, that the bottom dropped out one day. This much for tradition — We do not vouch for the truth of the story, still there is enough that is singular about this pond, to warrant a stranger in going a little distance to view it; its banks are very bold, and decorated on all sides with evergreens and other forest trees — its waters are pure — no weeds or grass grow on its borders, no stream runs into it, or issues from it, and it is found to be highest in the driest time. In this deep water many pike and pickerell have been taken, weighing from one to five pounds, and it is confidently asserted, that others have been seen which would probably weigh from ten to twenty pounds; this sort never have been taken. Some of your readers, it is hoped, will give a more particular description of this singular pond.

Perhaps father John Thoreau, or someone else who regularly read the gazettes, clipped this vicious article when it was printed and passed it on to Henry in 1853/1854 while he was writing the history of the pond. Perhaps it was passed on with the suggestion that Thoreau be the one to realize the last sentence, “give a more particular description of this singular pond” — give a description of this singular pond that will particularly and effectively remove it forever from the list of geographical landforms available for use by white people as legitimators of genocide. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN We may remember that indeed there was a “high hill” near Concord, upon which a “barbarous” event had taken place. However, this barbarous event was not the torture and slaughter of innocent white people by savage red people, but was, instead, the murder of Native American women and children by white Concordians. For which, you must refer to the events of 1676.

Walden

Mount Misery

According to Professor Walter Roy Harding’s THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), in the course of this year: “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

WALTER HARDING’S BIOGRAPHY Chapter 1 (1817-1823) -Downing gives a cursory account of the Thoreau and Dunbar heritage and more fully traces the nature and movement of the Thoreau family in the first five years of Henry’s life. Thoreau’s father, John, while intellectual, “lived quietly, peacefully and contentedly in the shadow of his wife,” Mrs. Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau, who was dynamic and outspoken with a strong love for nature and compassion for the downtrodden. • 1st Helen -quiet, retiring, eventually a teacher. • 2nd John Jr. -“his father turned inside out,” personable, interested in ornithology, also taught. • 3rd Henry (born July 12,1817) -speculative but not noticeably precocious. • 4th Sophia -independent, talkative, ultimately took over father’s business and edited Henry’s posthumous publications. The Thoreau’s constantly struggled with debt, and in 1818 John Sr. gave up his farm outside Concord and moved into town. Later the same year he moved his family to Chelmsford where he opened a shop which soon failed and sent him packing to Boston to teach school. (Robert L. Lace, January-March 1986)

In 1836, in John Warner Barber’s CONNECTICUT HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS: CONTAINING A GENERAL COLLECTION OF INTERESTING FACTS, TRADITIONS BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES, ANECDOTES, ETC., RELATING TO THE HISTORY AND ANTIQUITIES OF EVERY TOWN IN CONNECTICUT, WITH GEOGRAPHICAL DESCRIPTIONS (Durrie & Peck and J.W. Barber), in regard to Lake Quinebaug (Nell Alexander’s Lake) in Killingly, HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Connecticut:

In ancient times, when the red men of this quarter had long enjoyed prosperity, that is, when they had found plenty of game in the woods, and fish in the ponds and rivers, they at length fixed a time for a general powwow, a sort of festival for eating, drinking, smoking, singing and dancing. The spot chosen for this purpose was a sandy hill, or mountain, covered with tall pines, occupying the situation where the lake now lies. The powwow lasted four days in succession, and was to continue longer had not the Great Spirit, enraged at the licentiousness which prevailed there, resolved to punish them. Accordingly, while the red people in immense numbers were capering about upon the summit of the mountain, it suddenly “gave way” beneath them, and sunk to a great depth, when the water from below rushed up and covered them all except one good old squaw, who occupied one of the peaks, which now bears the name of Loon's Island. Whether the tradition is entitled to credit or not we will do it justice by affirming that in a clear day, when there is no wind and the surface of the lake is smooth, the huge trunks and leafless branches of gigantic pines may be occasionally seen in the deepest part of the water, some of them reaching almost to the surface, in such huge and fantastic forms as to cause the beholder to startle!

Professor Robert M. Thorson has inferred in his WALDEN’S SHORE: HENRY DAV ID THOREAU AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCIENCE (Harvard UP, 2013, page 307), that the Concord fable about the inversion of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts would be merely Henry’s extrapolation from this fable about Alexander’s Lake in Killingly, Connecticut, pointing out that in his personal copy of WALDEN we find the

notation in his handwriting “This is told of Alexanders Lake in Killingly, CT, by Barber in his Con. Hist. Coll.” “That Thoreau borrowed this story of topographical inversion for Walden suggests he thought it applied there as well.” Nevertheless, Concord had been the initial inland town settled in all of New England and the record we have of its Walden Pond fable dates to 1821 or earlier, whereas the Killingly region had not been settled by white intrusives until 1700 –in fact the 42d such town settled in Connecticut– and the record we have of its Alexander’s Lake fable has been dated only as far back as 1835. Aiding us in this is evidence of Concord’s criminal motivation: we don’t yet know of any criminal motivation in the case of Killingly, but, in the case of Concord, we do know of a decided motive for the creation of such a fable: the fable helped conceal through the common criminal tactic of inversion the town shame of a mass murder of reds by whites, followed by the undeniable hanging of white town citizens on Boston’s common for this sad race atrocity. Unless and until, therefore, we have chronological evidence to the contrary from Connecticut, it is going to remain more plausible for us to suspect that all the cultural borrowing had been done by Connecticut that to suspect that any of the cultural borrowing had been done by Concordians! HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1832

It has been said that religion can function as an opiate for the masses, but in this year a religion-book was being prepared by a recently hooked Chinaman, Liang Afa, that would have made Karl Marx proud for its dopey influences. This Liang Afa had been the 1st Chinese convert to Christianity, in 1828, of the Dr. Robert Morrison who had in 1807 been sent to Canton by the London Missionary Society in an American ship with a letter of introduction provided by then Secretary of State James Madison. His treatise QUANSHI LIANGYAN or GOOD WORDS TO EXHORT THE AGES described in a manner which could be understood in China the basic elements of the belief structure, such as proselytization, I’m right and you’re wrong, etc.

Such truth-proclamation of course works almost everywhere. In this same year the Reverend Charles Grandison Finney was becoming the minister of the 2d Free Congregational Church and beginning an almost continuous revival in the city of New-York.

In a different category altogether was the publication in this year in London of the 2d edition of Rammohan Roy’s TRANSLATION OF SEVERAL PRINCIPAL BOOKS, PASSAGES, AND TEXTS OF THE VEDS, AND OF SOME 2 CONTROVERSIAL WORKS ON BRAHMUNICAL THEOLOGY.

This was not pap, or warmed-over Christian righteousness.

2. Rammohan Roy would be cited by name in draft E of the of WALDEN manuscript in late 1852 or in 1853 based upon Henry Thoreau’s reading of this material in April 1850. Refer to William Bysshe Stein’s 1967 recovery of the reference in TWO BRAHMAN SOURCES OF EMERSON AND THOREAU, published by Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints of Gainesville FL. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

TRANSLATION

OF SEVERAL

PRINCIPAL BOOKS, PASSAGES, AND TEXTS

OF THE VEDS,

AND OF

SOME CONTROVERSIAL WORKS

BRAHMUNICAL THEOLOGY.

————

RAJAH RAMMOHUN ROY.

————

SECOND EDITION.

————

LONDON: PARBURY, ALLEN, & CO., LEADENHALL STREET. —— 1832. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN From the 12th page of this treatise, Henry Thoreau would extrapolate the following material for A WEEK:

A WEEK: It is necessary not to be Christian to appreciate the PEOPLE OF beauty and significance of the life of Christ. I know that some A WEEK will have hard thoughts of me, when they hear their Christ named beside my Buddha, yet I am sure that I am willing they should love their Christ more than my Buddha, for the love is the main thing, and I like him too. “God is the letter Ku, as well as Khu.” Why need Christians be still intolerant and superstitious?

GAUTAMA BUDDHA

TIMELINE OF A WEEK

Also, from page 21 Thoreau would extrapolate the following materials (and the materials on the succeeding screens) for his WALDEN chapter on “Higher Laws”:

WALDEN: But to tell the truth, I find myself at present somewhat less particular in these respects. I carry less religion to the table, ask no blessing; not because I am wiser than I was, but, I am obliged to confess, because, however much it is to be regretted, with years I have grown more coarse and indifferent. Perhaps these questions are entertained only in youth, as most believe of poetry. My practice is “nowhere,” my opinion is here. Nevertheless I am far from regarding myself as one of those privileged ones to whom the Ved refers when it says, that “he who has true faith in the Omnipresent Supreme Being may eat all that exists,” that is, is not bound to inquire what is his food, or who prepares it; and even in their case it is to be observed, as a Hindoo commentator has remarked, that the Vedant limits this privilege to “the time of distress.”

TIMELINE OF WALDEN

(Rajah Rammohan Roy, unlike Thoreau, moved in the circles of power. He vigorously supported the Reform Bill — which was enacted. He visited Paris — and had an audience with King Louis Philippe.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

WALDEN: The other day I picked up the lower jaw of a hog, with white and sound teeth and tusks, which suggested that there was an animal health and vigor distinct from the spiritual. This creature succeeded by other means than temperance and purity. “That in which men differ from brute beasts,” says Mencius, “is a thing very inconsiderable; the common herd lose it very soon; superior men preserve it carefully.” Who knows what sort of life would result if we had attained to purity? If I knew so wise a man as could teach me purity I would go to seek him forthwith. “A command over our passions, and over the external senses of the body, and good acts, are declared by the Ved to be indispensable in the mind’s approximation to God.” Yet the spirit can for the time pervade and control every member and function of the body, and transmute what in form is the grossest sensuality into purity and devotion. The generative energy, which, when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it. Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is open. By turns our purity inspires and our impurity casts us down. He is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him day by day, and the divine being established. Perhaps there is none but has cause for shame on account of the inferior and brutish nature to which he is allied. I fear that we are such gods or demigods only as fauns and satyrs, the divine allied to beasts, the creatures of appetite, and that, to some extent, our very life is our disgrace.– “How happy’s he who hath due place assigned To his beasts and disaforested his mind! *** Can use his horse, goat, wolf, and ev’ry beast, And is not ass himself to all the rest! Else man not only is the herd of swine, But he’s those devils too which did incline Them to a headlong rage, and made them worse.” All sensuality is one, though it takes many forms; all purity is one. It is the same whether a man eat, or drink, or cohabit, or sleep sensually. They are but one appetite, and we only need to see a person do any one of these things to know how great a sensualist he is. The impure can neither stand nor sit with purity. When the reptile is attacked at one mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at another. If you would be chaste, you must be temperate. What is chastity? How shall a man know if he is chaste? He shall not know it. We have heard of this virtue, but we know not what it is. We speak conformably to the rumor which we have heard. From exertion come wisdom and purity; from sloth ignorance and sensuality. In the student sensuality is a sluggish habit of mind. An unclean person is universally a slothful one, one who sits by a stove, whom the sun shines on prostrate, who reposes without being fatigued. If you would avoid uncleanness, and all the sins, work earnestly, thought it be at cleaning a stable. Nature is hard to be overcome, but she must be overcome. What avails it that you are Christian, if you are not purer than the heathen, if you deny yourself no more, if you are not more religious? I know of many systems of religion esteemed heathenish whose precepts fill the reader with shame, and provoke him to new endeavors, though it be to the performance of rites merely. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

I hesitate to say these things, but it is not because of the subject, –I care not how obscene my words are,– but because I cannot speak of them without betraying my impurity. We discourse freely without shame of one form of sensuality, and are silent about another. We are so degraded that we cannot speak simply of the necessary functions of human nature. In earlier ages, in some countries, every function was reverently spoken of and regulated by law. Nothing was too trivial for the Hindoo lawgiver, however offensive it may be to modern taste. He teaches how to eat, drink, cohabit, void excrement and urine, and the like, elevating what is mean, and does not falsely excuse himself by calling these things trifles. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1840

March: Henry Thoreau made the earliest surviving journal entry which would find a place we know about in WALDEN. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

... The buckeye does not grow in New England; the mockingbird is rarely heard here. ... Shall we not compete with the buffalo, who keeps pace with the seasons, cropping the pastures of the Colorado till a greener and sweeter grass awaits him by the Yellowstone? The wild goose is more a cosmopolite than we; he breaks his fast in Canada, takes a luncheon in the Susquehanna, and plumes himself for the night in a Louisiana bayou. Yet we think if rail fences are pulled down and stone walls set up on our farms, bounds are henceforth set to our lives and our fates decided. If you are chosen town clerk, forsooth, you can’t go to Tierra del Fuego this summer... .

WALDEN: To the sick the doctors wisely recommend a change of air and scenery. Thank Heaven, here is not all the world. The buckeye does not grow in New England, and the mocking-bird is rarely heard here. The wild-goose is more of a cosmopolite than we; he breaks his fast in Canada, takes a luncheon in the Ohio, and plumes himself for the night in a southern bayou. Even the bison, to some extent, keeps pace with the seasons, cropping the pastures of the Colorado only till a greener and sweeter grass awaits him by the Yellowstone. Yet we think that if rail-fences are pulled down, and stone-walls piled up on our farms, bounds are henceforth set to our lives and our fates decided. If you are chosen town- clerk, forsooth, you cannot go to Tierra del Fuego this summer; but you may go to the land of infernal fire nevertheless. The universe is wider than our views of it.

This entry would not, however, be moved into the WALDEN manuscript until 1853, as of its final draft version now extant. Therefore Professor Lawrence Buell notes on page 125 of THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMAGINATION that: Thoreau’s biography, the composition sequence, and the “plot” of the published book [WALDEN] do not correlate neatly. He began and ended his career fascinated by the vision of the natural realm as symbolically significant of the human estate. He could not get past the Emersonian axiom that “nature must be viewed humanly to be viewed at all.” The proof-text snippet which Professor Buell cites here as an “Emersonian axiom” actually is not a citation from Emerson, but a citation from Thoreau!

Nature must be viewed humanly to be viewed at all; that is, her scenes must be associated with humane affections, such as are associated with one’s native place, for instance. She is most significant to a lover. A lover of Nature is pre-eminently a lover of man. If I have no friend, what is Nature to me? She ceases to be morally significant. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Is it not curious that Professor Buell, dedicated as he is everywhere always, as a knee-jerk reaction, to construing the somewhat older and significantly taller Concord squire as having been Thoreau’s “mentor,” in this cited denigration of Thoreau as unable to get past Waldo Emerson, is forced to mis-attribute, from Thoreau’s journal for June 30, 1852, a sentiment which the “guru” Emerson has exactly nowhere put in such terms as “viewed humanly” or “viewed at all”?

Ouch, the Harvard English prof is really groping this time!

March 21, Saturday: Julia Lawrence Hasbrouck complained in her diary about New-York weather that was “Cold as winter; wind blowing hurricanes.” Henry Thoreau made the initial entry in his journal that would eventuate in his WALDEN ms when he jotted down “The buckeye does not grow in New England; the mockingbird is rarely heard here. ... Shall we not compete with the buffalo, who keeps pace with the seasons, cropping the pastures of the Colorado till a greener and sweeter grass awaits him by the Yellowstone? The wild goose is more a cosmopolite than we; he breaks his fast in Canada, takes a luncheon in the Susquehanna, and plumes himself for the night in a Louisiana bayou. Yet we think if rail fences are pulled down and stone walls set up on our farms, bounds are henceforth set to our lives and our fates decided. If you are chosen town clerk, forsooth, you can’t go to Tierra del Fuego this summer.” TIMELINE OF WALDEN

March 21: The world is a fit theatre to-day in which any part may be acted. There is this moment proposed to me every kind of life that men lead anywhere, or that imagination can paint. By another spring I may be a mail-carrier in Peru, or a South African planter, or a Siberian exile, or a Greenland whaler, or a settler on the Columbia River, or a Canton merchant, or a soldier in Florida, or a mackerel-fisher off Cape Sable, or, a Robinson Crusoe in the Pacific, or a silent navigator of any sea. So wide is the choice of parts, what a pity if the part of Hamlet be left out! I am freer than any planet; no complaint reaches round the world. I can move away from public opinion, from government, from religion, from education, from society. Shall I be reckoned a ratable poll in the county of Middlesex, or be rated at one spear under the palm trees of Guinea? Shall I raise corn and potatoes in Massachusetts, or figs and olives in Asia Minor? sit out the clay in my office in State Street, or ride it out on the steppes of Tartary? For my Brobdingnag I may sail to Patagonia; for my Lilliput, to Lapland. In Arabia and Persia, my day's adventures may surpass the Arabian Nights' Entertainments. I may be a logger on the head waters of the Penobscot, to be recorded in fable hereafter as an amphibious river-god, by as sounding a name as Triton or Proteus; carry furs from Nootka to China, and so be more renowned than Jason and his golden fleece; or go on a South Sea exploring expedition, to be hereafter recounted along with the periplus of Hanno. I may repeat the adventures of Marco Polo or Mandeville. These are but few of my chances, and how many more things may I do with which there are none to be compared! HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Thank Fortune, we are not rooted to the soil, and here is not all the world. The buckeye does not grow in New England; the mockingbird is rarely heard here. Why not keep pace with the day, and not allow of a sunset nor fall behind the summer and the migration of birds? Shall we not compete with the buffalo, who keeps pace with the seasons, cropping the pastures of the Colorado till a greener and sweeter grass awaits him by the Yellowstone? The wild goose [Canada Goose Branta canadensis] is more a cosmopolite than we; he breaks his fast in Canada, takes a luncheon in the Susquehanna, and plumes himself for the night in a Louisiana bayou. The pigeon carries an acorn in his crop from the King of Holland’s to the Mason and Dixon’s line. Yet we think if rail fences are pulled down and stone walls set up on our farms, bounds are henceforth set to our lives and our fates decided. If you are chosen town clerk, forsooth, you can’t go to Tierra del Fuego this summer. But what of all this? A man may gather his limbs snugly within the shell of a mammoth squash, with his back to the northeastern boundary, and not be unusually straitened after all. Our limbs, indeed, have room enough, but it is our souls that rust in a corner. Let us migrate interiorly without intermission, and pitch our tent each day nearer the western horizon. The really fertile soils and luxuriant prairies lie on this side the Alleghanies. There has been no Hanno of the affections. Their domain is untravelled ground, to the Mogul’s dominions. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1841

A “villa book,” A TREATISE ON THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF LANDSCAPE GARDENING by Andrew Jackson Downing, was published. Since Henry Thoreau would mention this book in his journal for April 10, 1857, it LANDSCAPE GARDENING

seems possible that he consulted it as one source for his architectural remarks in WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. (In this context he would also instance another of Downing’s productions, his 1845 THE FRUITS AND FRUIT TREES OF NORTH AMERICA.) TIMELINE OF WALDEN FRUITS AND FRUIT TREES

REPLICA OF SHANTY

EMERSON’S SHANTY HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

ANDREW JACKSON DOWNING

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

Walden “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN September 4, Sunday: Henry Thoreau proposed “a poem to be called ‘Concord’.”3 TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Early in this month, although perhaps not exactly on the 4th, “Captain Hay, who was with a small force in the Zoormut valley, situated nearly west from Ghuznee and south from Cabul, having been induced by the representations of Moollah Momin –the collector of the revenues, who was a Barikzye, and a near relation of one of the leaders of the insurrection, in which he afterwards himself took an active part– to move against a fort in which the murderers of Colonel Herring were said to have taken shelter, the inhabitants resisted his demands, and fired upon the troops. His force was found insufficient to reduce it, and he was obliged to retire; a stronger force was therefore sent, on the approach of which the people fled to the hills, and the forts they had evacuated were blown up. This occurrence was not calculated seriously to disturb the confident hopes that were entertained of the permanent tranquillity of the country; but before the force employed upon that expedition had returned to Cabul, a formidable insurrection had broken out in another quarter” of Afghanistan.4

3. For instance, taking as his starting point the assertion by the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson that before Thoreau nature had never been described in the national letters, Frederick Turner has asserted that:

Before Thoreau there wasn’t any such thing as an American literary landscape. And before his contemporary, Thomas Cole, there wasn’t a tradition of American landscape painting … [except] as the stylized background of portraiture.

Just as Turner dates Thoreau’s realization of his task, that his task was to create a place in an American literary landscape, to this date of September 4, 1841, when he was musing on the writing of, he said, “a poem to be called ‘Concord’,” others use this date as the inception of the manuscript stack which eventually would take the form of the book WALDEN. 4. Lieut. V. Eyre (Sir Vincent Eyre, 1811-1881). THE MILITARY OPERATIONS AT CABUL: WHICH ENDED IN THE RETREAT AND DESTRUCTION OF THE BRITISH ARMY, JANUARY 1842, WITH A JOURNAL OF IMPRISONMENT IN AFFGHANISTAN. Philadelphia PA: Carey and Hart, 1843; London: J. Murray, 1843 (three editions); Lieut. V. Eyre (Sir Vincent Eyre, 1811-1881). PRISON SKETCHES: COMPRISING PORTRAITS OF THE CABUL PRISONERS AND OTHER SUBJECTS; ADAPTED FOR BINDING UP WITH THE JOURNALS OF LIEUT. V. EYRE, AND LADY SALE; LITHOGRAPHED BY LOWES DICKINSON. London: Dickinson and Son, [1843?] HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Frederick Douglass took part in the quarterly meeting of the Abington Anti-Slavery Society at the Town House of Abington, Massachusetts. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1843

October: Henry Thoreau may have derived his WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS subtitle “Life in the Woods” from something that appearing in the American Pioneer of this month, an article by John S. Williams titled “Our Cabin; or, Life in the Woods.”5

TIMELINE OF WALDEN (At this point Thoreau was busy not on the Walden manuscript but instead on a draft of the “Agiocochook” section in “Thursday” of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. [Princeton Journal, Volume I, page 476]) TIMELINE OF A WEEK

5. Thoreau may also have derived this subtitle from an essay that Charles Lane had put in the last issue of THE DIAL as of April 1844, “Life in the Woods,” an article in which he had argued that in some respects primitive society was superior to civilization. What is certain sure is that he did not derive this subtitle from a book published in New-York in 1849, by J.T. Headley, titled THE ADIRONDACK: OR LIFE IN THE WOODS, because although this book was then popular, it had not appeared until after James Munroe and Co. had already announced Thoreau’s forthcoming WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS specifically by that title, in the back pages of the 1st edition of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS as of its publication date of May 30th, 1849. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1844

April: Last issue of THE DIAL, with an essay by Charles Lane arguing that in some respects primitive society was superior to civilization. THE DIAL, APRIL 1844

In this issue appeared Henry Thoreau’s “Fragments of Pindar,” with which he was dissatisfied, and his defense of Nathaniel Peabody Rogers’s Herald of Freedom, the weekly allegedly put out by the New Hampshire Anti- Slavery Society, from the attack by William Lloyd Garrison.6 Thoreau may have derived his subtitle “Life in the Woods” from Lane because this was the title of his essay — or, possibly, he derived it from an article that had appeared in the October 1843 American Pioneer by John S. Williams, titled “Our Cabin; or, Life in the Woods.”7 TIMELINE OF WALDEN

With this literary magazine becoming history, Thoreau obviously needed to begin to seek other outlets. While preparing to go to Walden Pond, he revised and copied relevant Journal entries into his Long Book, drafted original passages of narration and description, and incorporated Journal entries (1837-1844) not

6. Nathaniel Peabody Rogers was advocating that society could be reformed only through a process in which individuals reformed themselves, and therefore was abolitionist but was not attracted to the antislavery societies, which he believed were on a path toward self-institutionalization. Thoreau endorsed Rogers’s principles.

He refused to adopt the new war-cry lifted up by Mr. Garrison — “No union with slave-holders.” He could bring his lips only to say, “No union with slaveholding.” He looked upon Anti-Slavery as exclusively a moral agitation, and felt that its high office was degraded by connecting it with party politics, or with a political party. He was a thorough, and meant to be a consistent, Non-resistant. As such, he warmly condemned the formation of the “Liberty Party;” and having denounced the “Third Party,” he did not feel himself inclined to join a Fourth, and, with it, or in it, to commence an agitation for the dissolution of the Union, even though that party was headed by Mr. Garrison. He went farther. Having, in company with his non-resistant friends, repudiated all political organization, by following out the same principle, he became an advocate for “free meetings,” and opposed putting the Anti-Slavery movement under the guardianship and control of Chairmen, Committees, and Boards. Disquieted by this inconvenient consistency, and this thorough carrying out of his non-resistant principles, his non-resistant friends in Massachusetts, consulting and coöperating with some of those in New Hampshire, decided that the property of the “Herald of Freedom” was not in him, but in the Board of the New Hampshire Anti-Slavery Society. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN originally related to his river trip with his brother.

TIMELINE OF A WEEK

What follows is a hybrid of two versions of Thoreau’s essay on Nathaniel Peabody Rogers. The 1st was written before Rogers’s death and published in THE DIAL in 1844; the 2d was composed after Rogers’s 1846 death, and omits the portions displayed here in red letters, includes the paragraphs that follow those portions, and makes some minor changes (for instance, shifting some verbs to past-tense) to the rest of the text. “Herald of Freedom (1844/1846),” by Henry David Thoreau

A review of Herald of Freedom, a magazine of the New Hampshire Anti-Slavery Society. We have occasionally, for several years, met with a number of this spirited journal, edited, as abolitionists need not to be informed, by Nathaniel P. Rogers, once a counselor at law in Plymouth, still further up the Merrimack, but now, in his riper years, come down the hills thus far, to be the Herald of Freedom to those parts. We have been refreshed not a little by the cheap cordial of his editorials, flowing like his own mountain- torrents, now clear and sparkling, now foaming and gritty, and always spiced with the essence of the fir and the Norway pine; but never dark nor muddy, nor threatening with smothered murmurs, like the rivers of the plain. The effect of one of his effusions reminds us of what the hydropathists say about the 7. What is certain sure is that he did not derive this subtitle from a book published in New-York in 1849, by J.T. Headley, titled THE ADIRONDACK: OR LIFE IN THE WOODS, because although this book was then popular, it had not appeared until after James Munroe and Co. had already announced Thoreau’s forthcoming WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS specifically by that title, in the back pages of the 1st edition of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS as of its publication date of May 30th, 1849. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN electricity in fresh spring-water, compared with that which has stood over night, to suit weak nerves. We do not know of another notable and public instance of such pure, youthful, and hearty indignation at all wrong. The Church itself must love it, if it have any heart, though he is said to have dealt rudely with its sanctity. His clean attachment to the right, however, sanctions the severest rebuke we have read. We have neither room, nor inclination, to criticise this paper, or its cause, at length, but would speak of it in the free and uncalculating spirit of its author. Mr. Rogers seems to us to occupy an honorable and manly position in these days, and in this country, making the press a living and breathing organ to reach the hearts of men, and not merely “fine paper, and good type,” with its civil pilot sitting aft, and magnanimously waiting for the news to arrive the vehicle of the earliest news, but the latest intelligence recording the indubitable and last results, the marriages and deaths, alone. The present editor is wide awake, and standing on the beak of his ship; not as a scientific explorer under government, but a Yankee sealer rather, who makes those unexplored continents his harbors in which to refit for more adventurous cruises. He is a fund of news and freshness in himself has the gift of speech, and the knack of writing, and if anything important takes place in the Granite State, we may be sure that we shall hear of it in good season. No other paper that we know keeps pace so well with one forward wave of the restless public thought and sentiment of New England, and asserts so faithfully and ingenuously the largest liberty in all things. There is, beside, more unpledged poetry in his prose than in the verses of many an accepted rhymer; and we are occasionally advertised by a mellow hunter’s note from his trumpet, that, unlike most reformers, his feet are still where they should be, on the turf, and that he looks out from a serener natural life into the turbid arena of politics. Nor is slavery always a sombre theme with him, but invested with the colors of his wit and fancy, and an evil to be abolished by other means than sorrow and bitterness of complaint. He will fight this fight with what cheer may be. But to speak of his composition. It is a genuine Yankee style, without fiction real guessing and calculating to some purpose, and reminds us occasionally, as does all free, brave, and original writing, of its great master in these days, Thomas Carlyle. It has a life above grammar, and a meaning which need not be parsed to be understood. But like those same mountain-torrents, there is rather too much slope to his channel, and the rainbow sprays and evaporations go double-quick-time to heaven, while the body of his water falls headlong to the plain. We would have more pause and deliberation, occasionally, if only to bring his tide to a head more frequent expansions of the stream, still, bottomless, mountain tarns, perchance inland seas, and at length the deep ocean itself. We cannot do better than enrich our pages with a few extracts from such articles as we have at hand. Who can help sympathizing with his righteous impatience, when invited to hold his peace or endeavor to convince the understandings of the people by well ordered arguments? “Bandy compliments and arguments with the somnambulist, on ‘table rock,’ when all the waters of Lake Superior are thundering in the great horse-shoe, and deafening the very war HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN of the elements! Would you not shout to him with a clap of thunder through a speaking-trumpet, if you could command it if possible to reach his senses in his appaling extremity! Did Jonah argufy with the city of Nineveh ‘yet forty days,’ cried the vagabond prophet, ‘and Nineveh shall be overthrown!’ That was his salutation. And did the ‘Property and Standing’ turn up their noses at him, and set the mob on to him? Did the clergy discountenance him, and call him extravagant, misguided, a divider of churches, a disturber of parishes? What would have become of that city, if they had done this? Did they ‘approve his principles’ but dislike his ‘measures’ and his ‘spirit’!” “Slavery must be cried down, denounced down, ridiculed down, and pro-slavery with it, or rather before it. Slavery will go when pro-slavery starts. The sheep will follow when the bell-wether leads. Down, then, with the bloody system, out of the land with it, and out of the world with it into the Red Sea with it. Men shan’t be enslaved in this country any longer. Women and children shan’t be flogged here any longer. If you undertake to hinder us, the worst is your own.” “But this is all fanaticism. Wait and see.” He thus raises the anti-slavery “war-whoop” in New Hampshire, when an important convention is to be held, sending the summons “To none but the whole-hearted, fully-committed, cross-the- Rubicon spirits.” “From rich ‘old Cheshire,’ from Rockingham, with her horizon setting down away to the salt sea.” “From where the sun sets behind Kearsarge, even to where he rises gloriously over Moses Norris’s own town of Pittsfield; and from Amoskeag to Ragged Mountains — Coos — Upper Coos, home of the everlasting hills, send out your bold advocates of human rights wherever they lay, scattered by lonely lake, or Indian stream, or ‘Grant,’ or ‘Location’ from the trout-haunted brooks of the Amoriscoggin, and where the adventurous streamlet takes up its mountain march for the St. Lawrence. “Scattered and insulated men, wherever the light of philanthropy and liberty has beamed in upon your solitary spirits, come down to us like your streams and clouds and our own Grafton, all about among your dear hills, and your mountain-flanked valleys whether you home along the swift Ammonoosuck, the cold Pemigewassett, or the ox-bowed Connecticut. — “We are slow, brethren, dishonorably slow, in a cause like ours. Our feet should be ‘as hinds’ feet.’ ‘Liberty lies bleeding.’ The leaden-colored wing of slavery obscures the land with its baleful shadow. Let us come together, and inquire at the hand of the Lord what is to be done.” And again; on occasion of the New England Convention in the Second-Advent Tabernacle, in Boston, he desires to try one more blast, as it were, “on Fabyan’s White Mountain horn.” “Ho, then, people of the Bay State men, women, and children; children, women, and men, scattered friends of the friendless, wheresoever ye inhabit — if habitations ye have, as such friends have not always — along the sea-beat border of Old Essex and the Puritan Landing, and up beyond sight of the sea-cloud, among the inland hills, where the sun rises and sets upon the dry land, in that vale of the Connecticut, too fair for human content, and too fertile for virtuous industry — where deepens the haughtiest of earth’s streams, on its seaward way, proud with the pride of HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN old Massachusetts. Are there any friends of the friendless negro haunting such a valley as this? In God’s name, I fear there are none, or few, for the very scene looks apathy and oblivion to the genius of humanity. I blow you the summons though. Come, if any of you are there. “And gallant little Rhode Island; transcendent abolitionists of the tiny Commonwealth. I need not call you. You are called the year round, and, instead of sleeping in your tents, stand harnessed, and with trumpets in your hands every one! “Connecticut! yonder, the home of the Burleighs, the Monroes, and the Hudsons, and the native land of old George Benson! are you ready? ‘All ready!’ “Maine here, off east, looking from my mountain post, like an everglade. Where is your Sam. Fessenden, who stood storm-proof ’gainst New Organization in ’38? Has he too much name as a jurist and orator, to be found at a New England Convention in ’43? God forbid! Come one and all of you from ‘Down East’ to Boston, on the 30th and let the sails of your coasters whiten all the sea- road. Alas! there are scarce enough of you to man a fishing boat. Come up, mighty in your fewness. “And green Vermont, what has become of your anti-slavery host thick as your mountain maples mastering your very politics not by balance of power, but by sturdy majority. Where are you now? Will you be at the Advent Meeting on the 30th of May? Has antislavery waxed too trying for your off-hand, how-are-ye, humanity? Have you heard the voice of Freedom of late? Next week will answer. “Poor, cold, winter-ridden New-Hampshire — winter-killed, I like to have said — she will be there, bare-foot, and bare-legged, making tracks like her old bloody-footed volunteers at Trenton. She will be there, if she can work her passage. I guess her minstrelsy8 will for birds can go independently of car, or tardy stage-coach. “Let them come as Macaulay says they did to the siege of Rome, when they did not leave old men and women enough to begin the harvests. Oh how few we should be, if every soul of us were there. How few, and yet it is the entire muster-roll of Freedom for all the land. We should have to beat up for recruits to complete the army of Gideon, or the platoon at the Spartan straits. The foe are like the grasshoppers for multitude, as for moral power. Thick grass mows the easier, as the Goth said of the enervated millions of falling Rome. They can’t stand too thick, nor too tall for the anti-slavery scythe. Only be there at the mowing.” In noticing the doings of another Convention, he thus congratulates himself on the liberty of speech which antislavery concedes to all — even to the Folsoms and Lamsons: “Denied a chance to speak elsewhere, because they are not mad after the fashion, they all flock to the anti-slavery boards as a kind of Asylum. And so the poor old enterprise has to father all the oddity of the times. It is a glory to anti-slavery, that she can allow the poor friends the right of speech. I hope she will always keep herself able to afford it. Let the constables wait on the State House, and Jail, and the Meeting Houses. Let the door-keeper at the Anti-Slavery Hall be that tall, celestial-faced Woman, that carries the flag on the National 8. The Hutchinsons. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Standard, and says, ‘without concealment,’ as well as ‘without compromise.’ Let every body in, who has sanity enough to see the beauty of brotherly kindness, and let them say their fantasies, and magnanimously bear with them, seeing unkind pro-slavery drives them in upon us. We shall have saner and sensibler meetings then, than all others in the land put together.” More recently, speaking of the use which some of the clergy have made of Webster’s plea in the Girard case, as a seasonable aid to the church, he proceeds: “Webster is a great man, and the clergy run under his wing. They had better employ him as counsel against the Comeouters. He wouldn’t trust the defence on the Girard will plea though, if they did. He would not risk his fame on it, as a religious argument. He would go and consult William Bassett, of Lynn, on the principles of the ‘Comeouters,’ to learn their strength; and he would get him a testament, and go into it as he does into the Constitution, and after a year’s study of it he would hardly come off in the argument as he did from the conflict with Carolina Hayne. On looking into the case, he would advise the clergy not to go to trial — to settle — or, if they couldn’t to ‘leave it out’ to a reference of ‘orthodox deacons.’” We will quote from the same sheet his indignant and touching satire on the funeral of those public officers who were killed by the explosion on board the Princeton, together with the President’s slave; an accident which reminds us how closely slavery is linked with the government of this nation. The President coming to preside over a nation of free men, and the man who stands next to him a slave! “I saw account,” says he, “of the burial of those slaughtered politicians. The hearses passed along, of Upshur, Gilmer, Kennon, Maxcy, and Gardner but the dead slave, who fell in company with them on the deck of the Princeton, was not there. He was held their equal by the impartial gun-burst, but not allowed by the bereaved nation a share in the funeral.” ... “Out upon their funeral, and upon the paltry procession that went in its train. Why didn’t they enquire for the body of the other man who fell on that deck! And why hasn’t the nation inquired, and its press? I saw account of the scene in a barbarian print, called the Boston Atlas, and it was dumb on the absence of that body, as if no such man had fallen. Why, I demand in the name of human nature, what was that sixth man of the game brought down by that great shot, left unburied and above ground — for there is no account yet that his body has been allowed the right of sepulture.” ... “They didn’t bury him even as a slave. They didn’t assign him a jim-crow place in that solemn procession, that he might follow to wait upon his enslavers in the land of spirits. They have gone there without slaves or waiters.” — “The poor black man they enslaved and imbruted him all his life, and now he is dead, they have, for aught appears, left him to decay and waste above ground. Let the civilized world take note of the circumstance.” We deem such timely, pure, and unpremeditated expressions of a public sentiment, such publicity of genuine indignation and humanity, as abound everywhere in this journal, the most generous gifts a man can make, and should be glad to see the scraps from which we have quoted, and the others which we have HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN not seen, collected into a volume. It might, perchance, penetrate into some quarters which the unpopular cause of freedom has not reached. Long may we hear the voice of this Herald. But since our voyage Rogers has died, and now there is no one in New England to express the indignation or contempt which may still be felt at any cant or inhumanity. When, on a certain occasion, one said to him, “Why do you go about as you do, agitating the community on the subject of abolition? Jesus Christ never preached abolitionism!” he replied, “Sir, I have two answers to your appeal to Jesus Christ. First, I deny your proposition, that he never preached abolition. That single precept of his ‘Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them’ reduced to practice, would abolish slavery over the whole earth in twenty-four hours. That is my first answer. I deny your proposition. Secondly, granting your proposition to be true and admitting what I deny that Jesus Christ did not preach the abolition of slavery, then I say, “he didn’t do his duty.” His was not the wisdom of the head, but of the heart. If perhaps he had all the faults, he had more than the usual virtues of the radical. He loved his native soil, her hills and streams, like a Burns or Scott. As he rode to an antislavery convention, he viewed the country with a poet’s eye, and some of his letters written back to his editorial substitute contain as true and pleasing pictures of New England life and scenery as are anywhere to be found. Whoever heard of Swamscot before? “Swamscot is all fishermen. Their business is all on the deep. Their village is ranged along the ocean margin, where their brave little fleets lay drawn up, and which are out at day-break on the mighty blue where you may see them brooding at anchor still and intent at their profound trade, as so many flies on the back of a wincing horse, and for whose wincings they care as little as the Swamscot Fishers heed the restless heavings of the sea around their barks. Every thing about savors of fish. Nets hang out on every enclosure. Flakes, for curing the fish are attached to almost every dwelling. Every body has a boat and you’ll see a huge pair of sea boots lying before almost every door. The air too savors strongly of the common finny vocation. Beautiful little beaches slope out from the dwellings into the Bay, all along the village where the fishing boats lie keeled up, at low water, with their useless anchors hooked deep into the sand. A stranded bark is a sad sight especially if it is above high water mark, where the next tide can’t relieve it and set it afloat again. The Swamscot boats though, all look cheery, and as if sure of the next sea-flow. The people are said to be the freest in the region owing perhaps to their bold and adventurous life. The Priests can’t ride them out into the deep, as they can the shore folks.” His style and vein though often exaggerated and affected were more native to New England than those of any of her sons, and unfinished as his pieces were, yet their literary merit has been overlooked. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN April 30, Tuesday: In a letter of this date from Waldo Emerson to Samuel Gray Ward of Lenox, Massachusetts, we learn that “Mr Thoreau is building himself a solitary house by Walden Pond.” TIMELINE OF WALDEN

At approximately 1PM on this day, however, cooking their noon meal of freshly caught fish during one of the most serious droughts that Concord had experienced, Henry Thoreau and Edward Sherman Hoar, Harvard senior and scion of Concord’s “royal family,” set a cooking fire in a stump on the bank of a stream that set fire to dry grass that caused a forest fire to go roaring up into Walden Woods. Over a hundred acres would be burnt over on this day, including the totality of Fair Haven Hill. The Hoars would eventually reimburse the owners of the wood for their share of the damages that had been done, the Thoreaus would not. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN The loss Thoreau had helped cause was on the order of $2,000.00, which at that time was approximately the value of two really fine new houses facing Concord common. And the Hoar family seems to have made a cash payment to the financially injured parties –the Hubbard brothers Cyrus and Darius, and A.H. Wheeler– while we know that the Thoreaus instead elected to conspicuously, promptly, and locally spend their surplus money by embarking on the construction of a new home. The “Texas” house cost the family $25.00 for the lot, $475.00 for construction materials, and $600.00 for labor. FIRE

It would not be until June 1850 that Thoreau would be able to deal with his responsibility for this forest HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN fire.9

SETTING FIRE TO THE WOODS (WRITTEN IN 1850) I once set fire to the woods. Having set out, one April day, to go to the sources of Concord River in a boat with a single companion, meaning to camp on the bank at night or seek a lodging in some neighboring country inn or farmhouse, we took fishing HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN tackle with us that we might fitly procure our food from the stream, Indian-like. At the shoemaker’s near the river, we obtained a match, which we had forgotten. Though it was thus early in the spring, the river was low, for there had not been much rain, and we succeeded in catching a mess of fish sufficient for our dinner before we had left the town, and by the shores of Fair Haven Pond we proceeded to cook them. The earth was uncommonly dry, and our fire, kindled far from the woods in a sunny recess in the hillside on the east of the pond, suddenly caught the dry grass of the previous year which grew about the stump on which it was kindled. We sprang to extinguish it at first with our hands and feet, and then we fought it with a board obtained from the boat, but in a few minutes it was beyond our reach; being on the side of a hill, it spread rapidly upward, through the long, dry, wiry grass interspersed with bushes. “Well, where will this end?” asked my companion. I saw that it might be bounded by Well Meadow Brook on one side, but would, perchance, go to the village side of the brook. “It will go to town,” I answered. While my companion took the boat back down the river, I set out through the woods to inform the owners and to raise the town. The fire had already spread a dozen rods on every side and went leaping and crackling wildly and irreclaimably toward the wood. That way went the flames with wild delight, and we felt that we had no control over the demonic creature to which we had given birth. We had kindled many fires in the woods before, burning a clear space in the grass, without ever kindling such a fire as this. As I ran toward the town through the woods, I could see the smoke over the woods behind me marking the spot and the progress of the flames. The first farmer whom I met driving a team, after leaving the woods, inquired the cause of the smoke. I told him. “Well,” said he, “it is none of my stuff,” and drove along. The next I met was the owner in his field, with whom I returned at once to the woods, running all the way. I had already run two miles. When at length we got into the neighborhood of the flames, we met a carpenter who had been hewing timber, an infirm man who had been driven off by the fire, fleeing with his axe. The farmer returned to hasten more assistance. I, who was spent with running, remained. What could I do alone against a front of flame half a mile wide? I walked slowly through the wood to Fair Haven Cliff, climbed to the highest rock, and sat down upon it to observe the progress of the flames, which were rapidly approaching me, now about a 9. This was the illustration used by Edmund A. Schofield in the Thoreau Research Newsletter 2, 3 of July 1991 to show the extent of the forest fire Thoreau and Edward Sherman Hoar caused in April 1844.

Consider also Wang Yufeng, an 18-year-old transient laborer in the national forest whose carelessness with his brush cutter would set off the enormous Black Dragon fire in northern Manchuria in 1987 – a fire far larger than the two-thousand-square-mile fire of 1918 near Duluth, Minnesota which would take nearly 400 lives. Wang would be shown on television at his trial, sitting in a little wood-barred cage with his hands manacled. For refueling the machine before it had cooled off, and thus starting a fire which consumed an area, along the border between China and Russia, the size of Ireland, he would serve six and a half years in prison. (Salisbury, Harrison E., 1989, THE GREAT BLACK DRAGON FIRE: A CHINESE INFERNO, Little, Brown, Boston.)

We might usefully compare Thoreau’s reaction to his having set this forest fire with the feelings of guilt that Samuel Langhorn Clemens (Mark Twain) was experiencing during the same timeframe, after a jailed tramp set his prison cell on fire, burning himself to death. Sam had given him the matches! He “remembered” this hoosegow in his writings only as a place of truth and heroism, as the place where Tom Sawyer saved Muff by testifying against the real murderer, Injun Joe. When he would revisit this spot on a quiet Sunday morning in the spring of 1882, he would be already 47 years old. You can read about his reaction to this return to an early scene of importance in THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN, written at the end of his life and published in 1917. AUTOBIOGRAPHY HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN mile distant from the spot where the fire was kindled. Presently I heard the sound of the distant bell giving the alarm, and I knew that the town was on its way to the scene. Hitherto I had felt like a guilty person, — nothing but shame and regret. But now I settled the matter with myself shortly. I said to myself: “Who are these men who are said to be the owners of these woods, and how am I related to them? I have set fire to the forest, but I have done no wrong therein, and now it is as if the lightning had done it. These flames are but consuming their natural food.” (It has never troubled me from that day to this more than if the lightning had done it. The trivial fishing was all that disturbed me and disturbs me still.) So shortly I settled it with myself and stood to watch the approaching flames. It was a glorious spectacle, and I was the only one there to enjoy it. The fire now reached the base of the cliff and then rushed up its sides. The squirrels ran before it in blind haste, and three pigeons dashed into the midst of the smoke. The flames flashed up the pines to their tops, as if they were powder.When I found I was about to be surrounded by the fire, I retreated and joined the forces now arriving from the town. It took us several hours to surround the flames with our hoes and shovels and by back fires subdue them. In the midst of all I saw the farmer whom I first met, who had turned indifferently away saying it was none of his stuff, striving earnestly to save his corded wood, his stuff, which the fire had already seized and which it after all consumed. It burned over a hundred acres or more and destroyed much young wood. When I returned home late in the day, with others of my townsmen, I could not help noticing that the crowd who were so ready to condemn the individual who had kindled the fire did not sympathize with the owners of the wood, but were in fact highly elate and as it were thankful for the opportunity which had afforded them so much sport; and it was only half a dozen owners, so called, though not all of them, who looked sour or grieved, and I felt that I had a deeper interest in the woods, knew them better and should feel their loss more, than any or all of them. The farmer whom I had first conducted to the woods was obliged to ask me the shortest way back, through his own lot. Why, then, should the half-dozen owners and the individuals who set the fire alone feel sorrow for the loss of the wood, while the rest of the town have their spirits raised? Some of the owners, however, bore their loss like men, but other some declared behind my back that I was a “damned rascal;” and a flibbertigibbet or two, who crowed like the old cock, shouted some reminiscences of “burnt woods” from safe recesses for some years after. I have had nothing to say to any of them. The locomotive engine has since burned over nearly all the same ground and more, and in some measure blotted out the memory of the previous fire. For a long time after I had learned this lesson I marvelled that while matches and tinder were contemporaries the world was not consumed; why the houses that have hearths were not burned before another day; if the flames were not as hungry now as when I waked them. I at once ceased to regard the owners and my own fault, —if fault there was any in the matter, —and attended to the phenomenon before me, determined to make the most of it. To be sure, I felt a little ashamed when I reflected on what a trivial occasion this had happened, that at the time I was no better employed than my HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN townsmen. That night I watched the fire, where some stumps still flamed at midnight in the midst of the blackened waste, wandering through the woods by myself; and far in the night I threaded my way to the spot where the fire had taken, and discovered the now broiled fish, —which had been dressed, —scattered over the burnt grass. The only thing that heated their homes in winter, was this wood from these woodlots. The wood standing as growing trees had value. The wood stored in cords at various places in these woodlots, that had not yet been carted to the woodsheds of the houses in Concord, had value. This wood equaled warmth in winter, it equaled not only the comfort but also the health of their families, it equaled security. And, a whole lot of wood equaled a whole lot of money. One way to understand this woodland carelessness and destruction, therefore is the economic way. Thoreau destroyed value and then made no attempt to compensate the victims. That, quite frankly, is a tort. However, I wonder whether there might not be another way to understand this event. For many, many years our national policy, in our national forests, has been exceedingly simplistic. Four legs good, two legs bad: Smoky the Bear prevents forest fires. The end result of this protectionism has been, that our national forests have become tinderboxes, ready to succumb in massive conflagration after massive conflagration caused by random strikes of lightning. Because all fire is suppressed all the time, there is so much undergrowth and so much dead wood lying around on the forest floor that when a forest fire occurs, of necessity it burns hot. In these hot fires, everything is destroyed. It didn’t use to be like that. In the old days the native Americans kept these woodlands under control by constantly setting fires and burning off the undergrowth and dead wood. Very simply, open woodland was immensely more productive of game animals than dense woodland, and was easier to move through, and setting these fires was not a whole lot of work — so from the native American standpoint, this practice made a whole lot of practical sense. In consequence of such management practice by the native Americans, when a fire occurred, whether the fire was man-set or a random natural event, it moved rapidly through the forest at a comparatively low heat, leaving the trunks of the major trees protected by their thick bark and often not reaching into the canopy of leaves far overhead. Then came the white man whose mind was possessed of a different sort of greed, and the result has been, as we now understand, a whole lot of foolishness. The white man had the simplistic notion was that wealth was good and fire was destructive of wealth. The white man created the tinderbox. So, in the Concord woodlots in Thoreau’s florut, as a direct result of this incompetent white management practice, it was all danger all the time. Anyone who moved through the forest was liable “carelessly” to start something, the impact of which would inevitably be severe. –Therefore private property! –Therefore no trespassing! –Therefore this may look like nature, but what it is is, this is asset! Yada yada yada. My conclusion is that Thoreau was prescient in protesting such a foolish arrangement. It was not his fault that the forests around Concord had been transformed insanely into this unsustainable tinderbox. Yes, his carelessness had set the match — but that release of destruction might just as well have come from a random strike of lightning. You flibbertigibbets of Concord, if you want to shout “Woods Burner!” at Henry’s back as he walks down the town street, then for consistency you should be prepared also to shout “Woods Burner!” at God in the heavens, whenever you hear a roll of thunder in the distance or see a white flash on the horizon. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN July 10, Wednesday: Lidian gave birth to another boy, and Waldo bought some Concord property adjacent to Walden Pond and wrote Thomas Carlyle about a woodlot he had bought: TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Edward we call him, and my wife calls him Edward Waldo. And when shall I show you a pretty pasture and woodlot which I bought last week on the borders of a lake which is the chief ornament of this town, called Walden Pond?

LIDIAN EMERSON WALDO EMERSON DR.EDWARD WALDO EMERSON

WALDO’S RELATIVES HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Late September: Late in the month Waldo Emerson paid $8.10 per acre for Thomas Wyman’s farmed-out pasture of “eleven acres more or less” behind the poorfarm on the road to Walden Pond. The pasture, which had been logged over but had not been farmed for sixteen years, was overgrown but was more or less level.10 There wasn’t, of course, a whole lot of shade — the area was relatively open. According to a letter written by Waldo to his brother William on October 4th, he had paid $8.10 an acre for this 11-acre plot near Walden Pond when he had met some men walking in the woods (I suppose the similarity between the name “Waldo” and the name “Walden” cannot have been overlooked by Waldo, however little he knew about the history of religious dissent on the European subcontinent). The next day he had gone back, he told his brother, with some “well beloved gossips” and they persuaded him to pay $125.00 for about 3 more acres of pine grove from Heartwell Bigelow to protect his investment by preventing these nearby trees from being logged. This became, of course, the land on which Henry Thoreau built his shanty when he made his agreement to clear the pasture of brambles and turn it into a beanfield, but at the time its owner had other plans for it:11

... so am landlord and waterlord of 14 acres, more or less, on the shore of Walden, & can raise my own blackberries.... I may build me a cabin or a turret there high as the treetops and spend my nights as well as my days in the midst of a beauty which never fades for me.

THE BEANFIELD TIMELINE OF WALDEN Brad Dean indicated that “Sometime later that month Thoreau apparently negotiated with Emerson for the right to squat on the Wyman lot and there conduct his ‘experiment of living.’ Emerson’s permission was apparently attended with two provisos: that the small house Thoreau planned to build would become Emerson’s after Thoreau’s tenancy, and that Thoreau would clear and plant the cultivatable portion of the lot.”

10. This land is now near the intersection of Route 2 and Route 126. 11. Later, when Emerson wrote a will, he had willed this woodlot to Thoreau, but since Thoreau was already twenty years dead by the time Emerson died, the property was retained in the family. Eventually, in 1922, the family would sign the lot on the pond over to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1845

March: Near the end of this month, having cut a deal with Waldo Emerson for the use of his woodlot property, Henry Thoreau carried an ax, probably Amos Bronson Alcott’s ax, about a mile and a half down the railroad bed,

through the Deep Cut and on up to where the Irish laborers had had their shanties, and began to clear a site at the Walden Pond lake-front access of the woodlot.

WALDEN: Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and went PEOPLE OF down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to WALDEN build my house, and began to cut down some tall arrowy white pines, still in their youth, for timber. It is difficult to begin without borrowing, but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit your fellow-men to have an interest in your enterprise. The owner of the axe, as he released his hold on it, said that it was the apple of his eye; but I returned it sharper than I received it. It was a pleasant hillside where I worked, covered with pine woods, through which I looked out on the pond, and a small open field in the woods where pines and hickories were springing up. The ice in the pond was not yet dissolved, though there were some open spaces, and it was all dark colored and saturated with water. There were some slight flurries of snow during the days that I worked there; but for the most part when I came out on to the railroad, on my way home, its yellow sand heap stretched away gleaming in the hazy atmosphere, and the rails shone in the spring sun, and I heard the lark and pewee and other birds already come to commence another year with us. They were pleasant spring days, in which the winter of man’s discontent was thawing as well as the earth, and the life that had lain torpid began to stretch itself.

KING RICHARD III WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

HOUSE FRAMING THOREAU RESIDENCES HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN After considering merely sleeping in a railroad toolbox12 like Diogenes of Sinope in his barrel or a corpse in its “last and narrow house,” Thoreau bought the materials of a summer shanty from a railroad construction laborer, as the laborer’s family trudged off down the right-of-way toward Boston with their personal effects on their backs. (The Thoreau family had already bought one or two of these shanties from the railroad authorities, as materials for the shed behind their house that they used for the pencil business.)

TIMELINE OF WALDEN

At some point, presumably, although he does not speak of this, he portaged Red Rover, second of the three boats the brothers had built, down the Lincoln turnpike and along the cart path and down the steep slope to the Emersons’ cove on the pond. In July he would begin spending nights in the rough frame of his own home, 13 which must have been a great relief to his family. Beginning in the middle of that summer he would be living there, mostly, walking up the track to Concord for occasional meals with his family, and walking up the turnpike past the poorhouse farm to eat Lydia’s and Lidian’s Sunday dinners, for two years, two months, and two days with a few minor gaps (there was some problem in getting the shanty plastered and weather-tight before the first blasts of winter, so he slept elsewhere for part of the first winter, and then he was of course

12. “... a large box by the railroad, six feet long by three wide, in which the workmen [“laborers,” in WALDEN] locked up their tools at night…. I should not be in so bad a box as many a man is in now” (a phrase inserted into the manuscript in 1852). 13. If you’ve not yourself had experience with small town justice, and don’t know that when property loss occurs, further property loss is likely, don’t bother to challenge this inference. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN spending that one night in jail, and making all sorts of canoeing, hiking, huckleberrying and hunting trips),

until September 1847 when Mrs. Lidian Emerson would request that he spend the winter with her, to help manage the house and take care of her children, and build a summerhouse in the Emerson back yard, while “R.W.E.” was in England for a lecture tour:

During this period Waldo Emerson would be adding 41 more acres to his holdings on the pond, with the idea that he could hire Thoreau, Amos Bronson Alcott, or somebody to construct for him a tower on the other side HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN of the pond,

looking out to Monadnock & other New Hampshire Mountains … to go with book & pen when good hours come.

Kathryn Schulz, who writes for The New Yorker, has glanced into the cold eyes of a “Pond Scum” Henry Thoreau, and has engaged in a deep reading of WALDEN, coming to the general conclusion that whatever Thoreau’s success may have amounted to over and above all the obvious negatives, must have owed a great deal not to his own genius but to the influence and generosity of elder neighbor Waldo Emerson. Thoreau had met Ralph Waldo Emerson, a fellow Concord resident fourteen years his senior. Intellectually as well as practically, Emerson’s influence on Thoreau was enormous. He introduced the younger man to transcendentalism, steered him toward writing, employed him as a jack-of-all-trades and live- in tutor to his children, and lent him the pond-side land where Thoreau went to live on July 4, 1845.

Why did Thoreau go to Walden Pond, beginning regular residency as of July the 4th? In WALDEN he plays cozy with us, speaking only of going there “to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles.”

WALDEN: Finding that my fellow-citizens were not likely to offer me any room in the court house, or any curacy or living any where else, but I must shift for myself, I turned my face more exclusively than ever to the woods, where I was better known. I determined to go into business at once, and not wait to acquire the usual capital, using such slender means as I had already got. My purpose in going to Walden Pond was not to live cheaply nor to live dearly there, but to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles; to be hindered from accomplishing which for want of a little common sense, a little enterprise and business talent, appeared not so sad as foolish. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

TIMELINE OF WALDEN

I propose very simply that we take him at his word in this regard. I am offering that this private business was private because it had to do with one of the most forbidden of the boundary transgressions, an “amalgamating” liaison with a person of another complexion that was utterly forbidden, unthinkable, in that society — because it was on culturally forbidden conditions of parity. Parity with Frederick Douglass. That, of course, is a thesis which will require the most careful documentation and the closest of reasoning:

Who Wrote Douglass’s ARRATIV N ? E

After March 11: … While there remains a fragment on which a man can stand –and dare not tell his name”– referring to the case of Frederick , to our disgrace we know not what to call him, unless Scotland will lend us one of her hero Douglasses out of history or fiction for a season –till we be trustworthy and hospitable enough to hear his proper name.– A fugitive slave, in one more sense than we — who has proved himself a possessor of a White intellect, and has won a colorless reputation among us — who we trust will prove himself as superior to temptation from the sympathies of freedom, as he has done to the degradation of slavery. When he communicated his purpose said Mr. Philips the other day to a New Bedford audience of writing his life and telling his name and the name of his master and the place he ran from– This murmur ran round the room, and was timidly whispered by the sons of the Pilgrims “he had better not” –and it was echoed under the shadow of Concord monument– “he had better not.” But he is going to England where this revelation will be safe.

Spring: The “Texas” House the Thoreau family had built in the fall of 1844, and the shanty Henry Thoreau was building on Walden Pond beginning in this spring, and continuing through the summer and fall: were they traditionally framed or were they “balloon” framed? Americans’ technologies of building in the first decades of the 19th Century had evolved gradually from those of their 17th- and 18th-Century ancestors and for the most part would have been recognizable to earlier generations of housewrights. But a radically new way of putting buildings together appeared in the early 1830s, probably first developed by carpenters struggling to keep pace with the rapid growth of the settlement of Chicago on the tree-poor Illinois prairie. “Balloon framing” replaced the massive timber frame with a structural skin of numerous light, weight-bearing members, later standardized as two-by-fours, which were simply nailed together, not intricately joined. Carpenters could put up a balloon frame more quickly and could use much smaller-dimensioned lumber. Balloon framing was adopted first by builders in fast-growing Western cities and commercial towns, for whom speed and economizing on materials were highly important. It was slower to arrive in older, Eastern cities and took even longer to arrive in the countryside, where it did not really begin to replace the old ways until after 1860. Eventually rapid construction with lighter lumber triumphed almost everywhere; traditional timber framing and log construction had almost disappeared by the end of the nineteenth century. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

REPLICA OF CABIN

EMERSON’S SHANTY Digging his shanty’s cellar hole so soon after digging the cellar hole for the Thoreau family home in the “Texas” district of Concord near the RR station, Thoreau began at a point at which a woodchuck had loosened the sandy soil, and dug the hole six feet square and seven feet deep with sloping sides.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN During a heavy thundershower either of the spring or of the fall (Thoreau does not specify which),

WALDEN: In one heavy thunder shower the lightning struck a large pitch-pine across the pond, making a very conspicuous and perfectly regular spiral groove from top to bottom, an inch or more deep, and four or five inches wide, as you would groove a walking-stick. I passed it again the other day, and was struck with awe on looking up and beholding that mark, now more distinct than ever, where a terrific and resistless bolt came down out of the harmless sky eight years ago. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN April 1, Tuesday: The Alcott family’s “Hillside” that eventually would become the Hawthorne family’s “The Wayside” had in January come to be owned by trustees for Mrs. Amos Bronson Alcott (until 1852). At this point the family moved in, and the house would provide a home for Mr. and Mrs. Alcott and their four daughters until, on November 17, 1848, they would relocate by train to a basement apartment on Dedham Street in the South End of Boston. OLD HOUSES

Bronson Alcott immediately proceeded to cut Horatio Cogswell’s wheelwright shop into two halves and tack these onto the main house as wings. He also combined several small rooms into a larger kitchen, built new stairs, cleaned out the well and installed a new pump, and constructed a shower stall apparatus in which buckets of water were raised overhead with pulleys and counterweights and dumped mechanically over the bather.

It rained and melted the remaining ice on Walden Pond, which had been dark-colored and saturated with water.

WALDEN: In 1845 Walden was first completely open on the 1st of April; in ’46, the 25th of March; in ’47, the 8th of April; in ’51, the 28th of March; in ’52, the 18th of April; in ’53, the 23rd of March; in ’54, about the 7th of April. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Early in the day it was very foggy, and as Henry Thoreau chopped young pines into studs for his shanty, using his borrowed axe, he heard a stray goose groping about over the pond and cackling as if lost, or like the spirit of the fog. (In the famous 1962 John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance advertisement illustration by Tom Covell, however, he is listening to the distant drumming of a Ruffed Grouse Bonasa umbellus in the forest.) TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Incidentally, in case one wonders why Thoreau was not utilizing the construction technique known as balloon framing in the construction of his shanty, Professor Walter Roy Harding has asserted that the reason was that actually balloon framing is used only for houses of more than one story. This is inaccurate, and one wonders who might have told Harding such a fabulation. Houses of one story, and split-levels, equally with houses of multiple stories, get conventionally framed and braced in the balloon manner. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Mid-April: Henry Thoreau framed his shanty at the pond. Here is an illustration of a young feller, a “today” young feller, preparing a member for the frame of Thoreau’s shanty in the authentic manner, using a hewing ax which has a short handle and a head that is rather flat on one side, to flatten one side of a timber:

Thoreau’s mention of the fall of Troy reminds one of Virgil’s AENEID and the flight of Æneas from the burning city clutching the lares and penates, protective statuettes of the household gods.

Some have faulted Thoreau for spelling the name of the thieving William Seley as “Seeley” rather than “Seley” but it seems this was a legitimate Scotch/Irish spelling (since there had been a “Captain Seeley” involved in the “Great Swamp Fight.”) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

WALDEN: By the middle of April, for I made no haste in my work, but PEOPLE OF rather made the most of it, my house was framed and ready for the WALDEN raising. I had already bought the shanty of James Collins, an Irishman who worked on the Fitchburg Railroad, for boards. James Collins’ shanty was considered an uncommonly fine one. When I called to see it he has not at home. I walked about the outside, at first unobserved from within, the window was so deep and high. It was of small dimensions, with a peaked cottage roof, and not much else to be seen, the dirt being raised five feet all around as if it were a compost heap. The roof was the soundest part, though a good deal warped and made brittle by the sun. Door-sill there was none, but a perennial passage for the hens under the door board. Mrs. C. came to the door and asked me to view it from the inside. The hens were driven in by my approach. It was dark, and had a dirt floor for the most part, dank, clammy, and aguish, only here a board and there a board which would not bear removal. She lighted a lamp to show me the inside of the roof and the walls, and also that the board floor extended under the bed, warning me not to step into the cellar, a sort of dusty hole two feet deep. In her own words, they were “good boards overhead, good boards all around, and a good window,” –of two whole squares originally, only the cat had passed out that way lately. There was stove, a bed, and a place to sit, an infant in the house where it was born, a silk parasol, gilt- framed looking-glass, and a patent new coffee mill nailed to an oak sapling, all told. The bargain was soon concluded, for James had in the mean while returned. I to pay four dollars and twenty-five cents to-night, he to vacate at five to-morrow morning, selling to nobody else meanwhile; I to take possession at six. It were well, he said, to be there early, and anticipate certain indistinct but wholly unjust claims on the score of ground rent and fuel. This he assured me was the only encumbrance. At six I passed him and his family on the road. One large bundle held their all, –bed, coffee- mill, looking-glass, hens,– all but the cat, she took to the woods and became a wild cat, and, as I learned afterward, trod in a trap CAT set for woodchucks, and so became a dead cat at last. I took down this dwelling the same morning, drawing the nails, and removed it to the pond side by small cartloads, spreading the boards on the grass there to bleach and warp back again in the sun. One early thrush gave me a note or two as I drove along the woodland path. I was informed treacherously by a young Patrick that neighbor Seeley, an Irishman, in the intervals of the carting, transferred the still tolerable, straight, and drivable nails, staples, and spikes to his pocket, and then stood when I came back to pass the time of day, and look freshly up, unconcerned, with spring thoughts, at the devastation; there being a dearth of work, as he said. He was there to represent spectatordom, and help make this seemingly insignificant event one with the removal of the gods of Troy.

JAMES COLLINS WILLIAM SELEY HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

EMERSON’S SHANTY

TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN April 30, Wednesday: The Ellery Channings had agreed to pay the Browns of Concord $600.00 for 20 acres of woods and fields on the slope of Ponkawtasset Hill, a mile out of Concord on the Carlisle road, and was shopping for a laborer to construct a cottage and barn on this land for them. Waldo Emerson recorded “Ellery has just bought his land. Mr. Thoreau is building himself a solitary house by Walden Pond.”

EMERSON’S SHANTY TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Brigham Young “got married with” Emmeline Free. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Two uncles and his father having died leaving him as their heir, William Chapman Hewitson suddenly found himself with significant wealth (he would take up residence at Hampstead and devote himself to scientific research, and three years later would be in residence in a home specially designed for him by the architect John Dobson in Oatlands in Surrey near the Thames River leading into London).

An Elizabethan royal palace had been nearby the home Hewitson would have constructed for him at Oatlands, although due to demolitions and fires over the centuries, other smaller houses had taken the place of the regal structure that had been depicted on this 1825 meat platter:

Early May: Henry Thoreau hired a horse and pulled stumps in Waldo Emerson’s 11-acre plot, for firewood as well as to clear it, and then plowed 21/2 acres to plant in Phaseolus vulgaris var. humilis common small navy pea bush white beans.14 This clearing of the exhausted farmland beyond the Concord Alms House and Poor Farm, which had been timbered some time before and had lain fallow for some 17 years partly restoring its fertility, HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN was Thoreau’s deal with Emerson by which he would be allowed to build a cabin for his occupancy in Emerson’s woodlot where it touched on Walden Pond. Thoreau then bought the shanty of a departing family

of impoverished Irish immigrants, the James Collinses who were moving on at the completion of work on the railway, standing near the new tracks, for its materials, tore it apart, and hauled the recovered boards some rods

14. Brad Dean has calculated that to plant 7 miles of rows, each row 15 rods in length, spaced 3 feet apart, the dimensions of the beanfield would have been 247.5 by 447 feet or 110,632.5 square feet, and that this amounts to 2.534 acres or slightly over a hectare.

These are beans that ripen prior to harvest and are threshed dry from the pods. Only the ripe seeds reach market. The main types are grown as follows: (1) the Pea or Navy which Henry was growing; (2) Medium type, which includes Pinto, Great Northern, Sutter, Pink Bayo, and Small Red or Mexican Red; (3) Kidney; and (4) Marrow. Seeds vary in size from about 1/3-inch long in Thoreau’s pea or navy bean to 3/4-inch in the Kidney. All these plants are of bush type. They are usually cut or pulled when most pods are ripe, and then vines and pods are allowed to dry before threshing. This is a bean thought to have originated in Central America from southern Mexico to Guatemala and Honduras. Evidence of the common bean has been found in two widely separated places. Large seeded common beans were found at Callejon de Hualylas in Peru, and small seeded common beans were found in the Tehuacan Valley in Mexico, with both finds carbon-dating as earlier than 5,000 BCE. This crop is associated with the maize and squash culture which predominated in pre-Columbian tropical America. In our post-Columbian era this bean has come to be grown in all areas of the world.

However, that’s only the literal bean, not the metaphorical or literary bean, and once upon a time in Europe, there had been a form of commercial counting in use very much like the abacus of the East, in which beans were used. In those days to “know how many beans make up five” was to be commercially numerate. –Sort of like today knowing how to count one’s change. It might be suggested therefore that Thoreau’s determination to know beans was a play upon this archaic usage in which not knowing one’s beans amounted to innumeracy, and in addition a play upon the common accusation “You don’t know beans about xxxxx!” It might also be suggested that this is scatological humor similar to Shakespeare’s — the following is from his “Comedy of Errors”: A man may break a word with you sir; and words are but wind; Ay, and break it in your face, so he break it not behind. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN along the hilltop and down to Walden Pond on a hand-cart of some sort, to dry in the sun:

A 19th-Century Irish shanty in the Merrimack Valley TIMELINE OF WALDEN THE BEANFIELD

WALDEN: At length, in the beginning of May, with the help of some PEOPLE OF of my acquaintances, rather to improve so good an occasion for WALDEN neighborliness than from any necessity, I set up the frame of my house. No man was ever more honored in the character of his raisers than I. They are destined, I trust, to assist at the raising of loftier structures one day. I began to occupy my house on the 4th of July, as soon as it was boarded and roofed, for the boards were carefully feather-edged and lapped, so that it was perfectly impervious to rain; but before boarding I laid the foundation of a chimney at one end, bringing two cartloads of stones up the hill from the pond in my arms. I built the chimney after my hoeing in the fall, before a fire became necessary for warmth, doing my cooking in the mean while out of doors on the ground, early in the morning; which mode I still think is in some respects more convenient and agreeable than the usual one. When it stormed before my bread was baked, I fixed a few boards over the fire, and sat under them to watch my loaf, and passed some pleasant hours in that way. In those days, when my hands were much employed, I read but little, but the least scraps of paper which lay on the ground, my holder, or tablecloth, afforded me as much entertainment, in fact answered the same purpose as the Iliad.

BRONSON ALCOTT ELLERY CHANNING WALDO EMERSON EDMUND HOSMER EDMUND HOSMER, JR. JOHN HOSMER ANDREW HOSMER JAMES BURRILL CURTIS GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN The “acquaintances” who participated in this rustic “raising”15 ceremony on the Walden Pond shore were: • Bronson Alcott • Ellery Channing • Waldo Emerson • Edmund Hosmer • Hosmer’s sons Edmund Hosmer, Jr., John Hosmer, and Andrew Hosmer •the brothers George William Curtis and James Burrill Curtis

Emerson of course resided in the Coolidge mansion just on the other side of the poorhouse farm (Gleason F7) and was the owner of the woodlot in which this shanty was being erected, and would be the owner of that shanty, and the Curtis brothers, having come from Brook Farm to Ponkawtasset Hill (Gleason D7) a year earlier, and the Alcotts, having only recently returned to Concord from their Fruitlands near Harvard, Massachusetts to reside near the Edmund Hosmer home on a road leading toward Lincoln (Gleason G9/66), were of course quite conveniently situated to come over to the pond for this neighborly little ceremony. Index to the Text

Index to the Subtext

15.“No man was ever more honored in the character of his raisers than I.” I would maintain that WALDEN is chock-full of references to the gallows, references that nowadays we don’t “get” simply because we no longer live in the sort of culture, in which public execution is an unchallenged holiday convention. For instance, I would maintain that this particular paragraph, apparently so innocent, includes an implicit reference to being hanged. While the raisers of a house frame are the friends and neighbors who push with poles and pull with ropes as a frame is being lifted from its temporary horizontal position to its permanent vertical position, the raisers of a person may by extension be the outraged citizens who are pulling on the rope that elevates a criminal by the neck toward the extending horizontal branch of a tree. This is not the sort of gallows humor which would have gone unnoticed in the first half of the 19th Century, not in America it wouldn’t. This is an implicit reference to Thoreau’s Huguenot ancestors of honored memory, who rather than tugging together upon the indecent public end of that hanging rope, in la belle France, had sometimes found themselves tugging alone upon the noose at the decent end. But there is more on this topic at:

GALLOWS HUMOR HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

WALDEN: It was a singular experience that long acquaintance which I cultivated with beans, what with planting, and hoeing, and harvesting, and threshing, and picking over, and selling them, –the last was the hardest of all,– I might add eating, for I did taste. I was determined to know beans. When they were growing, I used to hoe from five o’clock in the morning till noon, and commonly spent the rest of the day about other affairs. Consider the intimate and curious acquaintance one makes with various kinds of weeds, –it will bear some iteration in the account, for there was no little iteration in the labor,– disturbing their delicate organizations so ruthlessly, and making such invidious distinctions with his hoe, levelling whole ranks of one species, and sedulously cultivating another. That’s Roman wormwood, –that’s pigweed, –that’s sorrel, –that’s piper- grass, –have at him, chop him up, turn his roots upward to the sun, don’t let him have a fibre in the shade, if you do he’ll turn himself t’other side up and be as green as a leek in two days. A long war, not with cranes, but with weeds, those Trojans who had sun and rain and dews on their side. Daily the beans saw me come to their rescue armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of their enemies, filling up the trenches with weedy dead. Many a lusty crest-waving Hector, that towered a whole foot above his crowding comrades, fell before my weapon and rolled in the dust. Those summer days which some of my contemporaries devoted to the fine arts in Boston or Rome, and others to contemplation in India, and others to trade in London or New York, I thus, with the other farmers of New England, devoted to husbandry. Not that I wanted beans to eat, for I am by nature a Pythagorean, so as far as beans are concerned, whether they mean porridge or voting, and exchanged them for rice; but, perchance, as some must work in fields if only for the sake of tropes and expression, to serve a parable-maker one day. It was on the whole a rare amusement, which, continued too long, might have become a dissipation. Though I gave them no manure, and did not hoe them all once, I hoed them unusually well as far as I went, and was paid for it in the end, “there being in truth,” as Evelyn says, “no compost or lætation whatsoever comparable to this continual motion, repastination, and turning of the mould with the spade.” “The earth,” he adds elsewhere, “especially if fresh, has a certain magnetism in it, by which it attracts the salt, power, or virtue (call it either) which gives it life, and is the logic of all the labor and stir we keep about it, to sustain us; all dungings and other sordid temperings being but the vicars succedaneous to this improvement.” Moreover, this being one of those “worn-out and exhausted lay fields which enjoy their sabbath,” had perchance, as Sir Kenelm Digby thinks likely, attracted “vital spirits” from the air. I harvested twelve bushels of beans. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

But to be more particular; for it is complained that Mr. Colman has reported chiefly the expensive experiments of gentlemen farmers; my outgoes were,– For a hoe, ...... $0 54 Ploughing, harrowing, and furrowing, ...7 50,Too much. 1 Beans for seed, ...... 3 12 /2 Potatoes “ ...... 1 33 Peas “ ...... 0 40 Turnip seed, ...... 0 06 White line for crow fence, ...... 0 02 Horse cultivator and boy three hours, ...1 00 Horse and cart to get crop, ...... 0 75 ------1 In all, ...... $14 72 /2 My income was, (patrem familias vendacem, non emacem esse oportet,) from Nine bushels and twelve quarts of beans sold,$16 94 Five “ large potatoes, ...... 2 50 Nine “ small “ ...... 2 25 Grass, ...... 1 00 Stalks, ...... 0 75 ------In all, ...... $23 44 Leaving a pecuniary profit, as I have elsewhere said, 1 of $8 71 /2. This is the result of my experience in raising beans. Plant the common small white bush bean about the first of June, in rows three feet by eighteen inches apart, being careful to select fresh round and unmixed seed. First look out for worms, and supply vacancies by planting anew. Then look out for woodchucks, if it is an exposed place, for they will nibble off the earliest tender leaves almost clean as they go; and again, when the young tendrils make their appearance, they have notice of it, and will shear them off with both buds and young pods, sitting erect like a squirrel. but above all harvest as early as possible, if you would escape frosts and have a fair and saleable crop; you may save much loss by this means. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at least, that husbandry was once a sacred art; but it is pursued with irreverent haste and heedlessness by us, our object being to have large farms and large crops merely. We have no festival, nor procession, nor ceremony, not excepting our Cattle-shows and so called Thanksgivings, by which the farmer expresses a sense of the sacredness of his calling, or is reminded of its sacred origin. It is the premium and the feast which tempt him. He sacrifices not to Ceres and the Terrestrial Jove, but to the infernal Plutus rather. By avarice and selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber. Cato says that the profits of agriculture are particularly pious or just, (maximeque pius quæstus,) and according to Varro the old Romans “called the same earth Mother and Ceres, and thought that they who cultivated it led a pious and useful life, and that they alone were left of the race of King Saturn.” We are wont to forget that the sun looks on our cultivated fields and on the prairies and forests without distinction. They all reflect and absorb his rays alike, and the former make but a small part of the glorious picture which he beholds in his daily course. In his view the earth is all equally cultivated like a garden. Therefore we should receive the benefit of his light and heat with a corresponding trust and magnanimity. What though I value the seed of these beans, and harvest that in the fall of the year? This broad field which I have looked at so long looks not to me as the principal cultivator, but away from me to influences more genial to it, which water and make it green. These beans have results which are not harvested by me. Do they not grow for woodchucks partly? The ear of wheat, (in Latin spica,” obsoletely speca, from spe, hope,) should not be the only hope of the husbandman; its kernel or grain (granum, from gerendo, bearing,) is not all that it bears. How, then, can our harvest fail? Shall I not rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary of the birds? It matters little comparatively whether the fields fill the farmer’s barns. The true husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only his first but his last fruits also. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

This further experience also I gained. I said to myself, I will not plant beans and corn with so much industry another summer, but such seeds, if the seed is not lost, as sincerity, truth, simplicity, faith, innocence, and the like, and see if they will not grow in this soil, even with less toil and manurance, and sustain me, for surely it has not been exhausted for these crops. Alas! I said this to myself; but now another summer is gone, and another, and another, and I am obliged to say to you, Reader, that the seeds which I planted, if indeed they were the seeds of those virtues, were wormeaten or had lost their vitality, and so did not come up. Commonly men will only be brave as their fathers were brave, or timid. This generation is very sure to plant corn and beans each new year precisely as the Indians did centuries ago and taught the first settlers to do, as if there were a fate in it. I saw an old man the other day, to my astonishment, making the holes with a hoe for the seventieth time at least, and not for himself to lie down in! But why should not the New Englander try new adventures, and not lay so much stress on his grain, his potato and grass crop, and his orchards? –raise other crops than these? Why concern ourselves so much about our beans for seed, and not be concerned at all about a new generation of men? We should really be fed and cheered if when we met a man we were sure to see that some of the qualities which I have named, which we all prize more than those other productions, but which are for the most part broadcast and floating in the air, had taken root and grown in him. Here comes such a subtile and ineffable quality, for instance, as truth or justice, though the slightest amount or new variety of it, along the road. Our ambassadors should be instructed to send home such seeds as these, and Congress help to distribute them over all the land. We should never stand upon ceremony with sincerity. We should never cheat and insult and banish one another by our meanness, if there were present the kernel of worth and friendliness. We should not meet thus in haste. Most men I do not meet at all, for they seem not to have time; they are busy about their beans. We would not deal with a man thus plodding ever, leaning on a hoe or a spade as a staff between his work, not as a mushroom, but partially risen out of the earth, something more than erect, like swallows alighted and walking on the ground.– “And as he spake, his wings would now and then Spread, as he meant to fly, then close again,” so that we should suspect that we might be conversing with an angel. Bread may not always nourish us; but it always does us good, it even takes stiffness out of our joints, and makes us supple and buoyant, when we knew not what ailed us, to recognize any generosity in man or Nature, to share any unmixed and heroic joy. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

End of May:As Henry Thoreau would later report, by the end of May: TIMELINE OF WALDEN

WALDEN: My house was on the side of a hill, immediately on the edge of the larger wood, in the midst of a young forest of pitch pines and hickories, and half a dozen rods from the pond, to which a narrow footpath led down the hill. In my front yard grew the strawberry, blackberry, and life-everlasting, johnswort and golden-rod, shrub-oaks and sand-cherry, blueberry and ground-nut. Near the end of May, the sand-cherry, Cerasus pumila, adorned the sides of the path with its delicate flowers arranged in umbels cylindrically about its short stems, which last, in the fall, weighed down with good sized and handsome cherries, fell over in wreaths like rays on every side. I tasted them out of compliment to Nature, though they were scarcely palatable. The sumach, Rhus glabra, grew luxuriantly about the house, pushing up through the embankment which I had made, and growing five or six feet the first season. Its broad pinnate tropical leaf was pleasant though strange to look on. The large buds, suddenly pushing out late in the spring from dry sticks which had seemed to be dead, developed themselves as by magic into graceful green and tender boughs, an inch in diameter; and sometimes, as I sat at my window, so heedlessly did they grow and tax their weak joints, I heard a fresh and tender bough suddenly fall like a fan to the ground, when there was not a break of air stirring, broken off by its own weight. In August, the large masses of berries, which, when in flower, had attracted many wild bees, gradually assumed their bright velvety crimson hue, and by their weight again bent down and broke the tender limbs. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

To Thoreau, the underground tubers of the ground-nut tasted better boiled than roasted. Here is an example of the flower of the foliage, vine, flower, and leguminous seedpod of the plant as it grew in Thoreau’s “front yard” by the pond: HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN The ground-nut Apios americana Medic. is probably the most famous edible wild plant of eastern North America. For native Americans from Ontario and Québec in the north to the Gulf of Mexico and from the prairies to the Atlantic coast it was a major food resource, and these legumes can still be found growing at village sites. European intrusives also often depended upon the ground-nut, so in the 1580s the colonists of Sir Walter Raleigh’s settlement on Roanoke Island off the coast of Virginia sent samples of the plant to Queen Elizabeth I. In 1607, Captain John Smith wrote of the plant’s utility. The settlers at Plymouth survived on ground-nut tubers in 1623 when their corn supply was exhausted. Ground-nut was so important to the whites along the Connecticut River that in 1654, the town of Southampton decreed that native Americans who attempted to dig ground-nut on “English-Lands” were to be put in the stocks, and for a repeat offense, were to be publicly whipped. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN May: A silhouette of Emily E. Dickinson was executed by the Amherst divinity student who had been Emily’s French instructor at Amherst Academy, Charles Temple.16

In Lincoln, Massachusetts, birth of a daughter to Mary Field and John Field, as would be mentioned in

16. Charles Temple was a son of the Reverend David Temple, who had been sent out in 1822 as a missionary of the Michigan Foreign Missionary Society. He had been born at Valetta, Malta to Mrs. Rachel Burbank Dix Temple on July 10, 1824 and had come to the United States from Smyrna on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey to study at Amherst College from 1842 to 1845. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN 17 WALDEN:

WALDEN: But therein, as I found, dwelt now John Field, an PEOPLE OF Irishman, and his wife, and several children, from the broad- WALDEN faced boy who assisted his father at his work, and now came running by his side from the bog to escape the rain, to the wrinkled, sibyl-like, cone-headed infant that sat upon its father’s knee as in the palaces of nobles, and looked out from its home in the midst of wet and hunger inquisitively upon the stranger, with the privilege of infancy, not knowing but it was the last of a noble line, and the hope and cynosure of the world, instead of John Field’s poor starveling brat.

JOHN FIELD

TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Summer: James Burrill Curtis spent the summer of this year (as in the previous year) studying and farming at Concord. He had made friends with Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry Thoreau.

Toward the end of this summer, it would appear, Ellery Channing would be sleeping not in his own rental cottage on Punkatasset Hill but under Henry’s cot in Thoreau’s (Emerson’s) shanty at Walden Pond:18

WALDEN: I took a poet to board for a fortnight about those times, PEOPLE OF which caused me to be put to it for room. He brought his own WALDEN knife, though I had two, and we used to scour them by thrusting them into the earth. He shared with me the labors of cooking. I was pleased to see my work rising so square and solid by degrees, and reflected, that, if it proceeded slowly, it was calculated to endure a long time. The chimney is to some extent an independent structure, standing on the ground and rising through the house to the heavens; even after the house is burned it still stands sometimes, and its importance and independence are apparent. This was toward the end of summer. It was now November.

ELLERY CHANNING

17. Note that “cone-headed,” an accurate medical description of a neonate condition, is not an epithet of derision. 18. Thoreau’s shanty measured but 10’ x 15’. Is that big enough for two people? In 1620, when the English settlers constructed their initial post-and-beam homes at Plymouth, these family dwellings commonly consisted of one room with a loft, and commonly measured 12’ x 14’. In 1770, when Thomas Jefferson began the 13-year building project of his mansion at Monticello, he first had his slaves construct a 14’ x 15’ brick building in which he would live while supervising the construction. During his 5-year stay in the house, he had his slaves prepare a 2nd floor bedroom and then brought his new bride to live there. After the great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 the US Army built 5,610 tiny redwood and fir “Relief Houses” as homes for nearly 20,000 refugees. The refugee shacks, as they came to be known, were available in three sizes, the most common being 10’ x 14’. (By late 1908, most of the refugees had been relocated and the shacks were being carted by horse to locations around the city and converted into rental cottages, garages, storage spaces, and shops.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

The furniture of the shanty, some of which Thoreau made himself, consisted of: •bed • 3-legged table •desk • three chairs • looking-glass three inches in diameter • pair of tongs and andirons •kettle •skillet • frying-pan • dipper • wash-bowl • two knives and forks • three plates • one cup • one spoon • jug for oil • jug for molasses • japanned lamp TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

In later life Jane Hosmer would narrate her memories of visits to Thoreau’s shanty at Walden Pond, telling how Thoreau would sit at his desk, her father Edmund Hosmer would sit in an adjacent chair, and she and the other children would sit on “the bunk,” while the discussion would center upon philosophy or upon Scandinavian mythology. She would have been at the time about 10 years of age. The other Hosmer children along for this woodland excursion might have been 8-year-old Henry and 6-year-old Abigail. She would claim that later on this inspired her to translate Greek and Roman myths into her earlier models of Thor, Woden, and Yggdrasill.

Dwight MacKerron has made an attempt to reformat some of the mentions in WALDEN, as poetry: When I return to my house I find that visitors have been there and left their cards, a bunch of flowers, a wreath of evergreen, a name in pencil on a yellow walnut leaf or a chip. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

They who come rarely to the woods take some little piece of the forest into their hands to play with by the way. One has peeled a willow wand, woven it into a ring, and dropped it on my table. I could always tell if visitors had called in my absence, either by the bended twigs or grass, or the print of their shoes, some slight trace left, as a flower dropped, or a bunch of grass plucked and thrown away, even as far off as the railroad.

Here is another such attempt by Dwight to render the prose of WALDEN into poetry: Evening Song In warm evenings I frequently sat in the boat playing the flute, and saw the perch, which I seemed to have charmed, hovering around me, and the moon travelling over the ribbed bottom, strewed with the wrecks of the forest. Formerly I had come to this pond, from time to time, in dark summer nights, with a companion, and making a fire close to the water’s edge, which we thought attracted the fishes, we caught pouts with a bunch of worms strung on a thread; and when we had done, far in the night, threw the burning brands high into the air like skyrockets, which, coming down into the pond, were quenched with a loud hissing, and we were suddenly groping in total darkness. Through this, whistling a tune, we took our way to the haunts of men again. But now I had made my home by the shore. Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the family had all retired, I have returned to the woods, and, partly with a view to the next day’s dinner, spent the hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand. Anchored in forty feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore, surrounded sometimes by thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the moonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging sixty feet of line as I drifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration along it, some life prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain blundering purpose there, and slow to make up its mind. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN At length you slowly raise, pulling hand over hand, some horned pout squeaking and squirming to the upper air. It was very queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element which was scarcely more dense. ...Two fishes as it were with one hook.

Amy Belding Brown has also constructed a poem out of this material: Evening Song Warm evenings when I played my flute to charm the perch and track the silent moon past ribbed pond bottoms from my boat, I recalled other times and old companions, dark summer nights beside a fire by water’s edge. We believed it drew the fish, and so we caught fat pouts with worms strung on a thread. When done, we threw the burning brands high in the air. Like rockets, they fell into the pond and hissed out, so we groped again through dark. Sometimes, after sitting in a parlor in the town until the family had retired, I went back to woods and spent the midnight hours fishing, serenaded by the fox and owl and some bird creaking in a nearby tree. In moonlight, thirty rods from shore, I watched perch and shiners dimple surface with their silver tails and, with a line, spoke to mystery fish forty feet below. I drifted, waiting for the tug of talk, the slight vibration of life prowling in dull uncertain blundering intent. At length I raised some horned pout in squeaking squirm to upper air. How strange, when my thoughts wandered, to feel this faint tug back to Nature. It seemed as if I might the next time cast my line both upward, to the air, and down into the element of water, and therein catch two kinds of fish with but a single hook. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Our national birthday, Friday the 4th of July: This was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 41st birthday, and the flag was gaining another star as the State of Florida was entering the Union as our 27th state, making the score in this land of the free and home of the brave to amount to 14 states for human slavery versus 13 states agin it:

Ordinance of the Convention of Texas.

In Washington DC, the cornerstone of Jackson Hall was being laid and a good time was being enjoyed by all these American patriots who were equating patriotism with inebriation, but on the grounds south of the Executive Mansion, some drunken celebrant fired off a dozen rockets into the crowd, killing James Knowles and Georgiana Ferguson and injuring several others — collateral damage due to friendly fire.

In Ithaca, New York, a celebration cannon, evidently overcharged with powder, blew apart, killing three. TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Ex-president John Tyler delivered an oration at William and Mary College.

In Nashville, Tennessee, the corner-stone of the State House was laid. CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY

What to the slave is the 4th of July? On this day and the next Frederick Douglass was lecturing in Athol, Massachusetts. Henry Thoreau began to sleep in the open frame of the new shanty “as soon as it was boarded and roofed…” not only on the anniversary of independence, but also on the day on which the US took the Texas territory from Mexico. Had he remained in Concord that day, he would have been subjected not only to offensive parades with flag-waving, but also to much offensive pro-war oratory. TIMELINE OF WALDEN EMERSON’S SHANTY

WALDEN: When first I took up my abode in the woods, that is, began to spend my nights as well as days there, which, by accident was on Independence Day, or the fourth of July, 1845, my house was not finished for winter, but was merely a defence against the rain, without plastering or chimney, the walls being of rough weather-stained boards, with wide chinks, which made it cool at night.The upright white hewn studs and freshly planed door and window casings gave it a clean and airy look, especially in the morning, when its timbers were saturated with dew, so that I fancied that by noon some sweet gum would exude from them. To my imagination it retained throughout the day more or less of this auroral character, reminding me of a certain house on a mountain which I had visited the year before. This was an airy and unplastered cabin, fit to entertain a travelling god, and where a goddess might trail her garments. The winds which passed over my dwelling were such as sweep over the ridges of mountains, bearing the broken strains, or celestial parts only, of terrestrial music.The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it. Olympus is but the outside of the earth every where. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

We need not presume that he intended the date to have any metaphorical significance, as in the idea that moving to the shanty was his Declaration of Independence from human society. On this day of Thoreau’s removal, an article appeared in the New-York Daily Tribune calling for a return to “the narrow, thorny path where Integrity leads.” This article was authored in full awareness of the course Thoreau was following in Concord, for this sentiment had been penned by Margaret Fuller.

Years later, on May 1, 1850 to be exact, Thoreau recollected an incident of this day, that “The forenoon that I moved to my house –a poor old lame fellow who had formerly frozen his feet –hobbled off the road –came & stood before my door with one hand on each door post looking into the house & asked for a drink of water. I knew that rum or something like it was the only drink he loved but I gave him a dish of warm pond water which was all I had, nevertheless, which to my astonishment he drank, being used to drinking.”

Thoreau lived HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

“At Walden, July, 1845, to fall of 1847, then at R.W.E.’s to fall of 1848, or while he was in Europe.”

At about this time, more or less, a number of people’s acquaintance’s lives were changing: for instance, Giles Waldo, whom Thoreau had chummed around with in New-York, was sailing to become vice consul at Lahaina in the Sandwich Islands, and George Partridge Bradford was abandoning the private school he had attempted to set up in Waldo Emerson’s barn to begin a private school in Roxbury MA.

Thoreau wrote the following sometime after he moved to his new shanty at Walden Pond, about the drumming of the ruffed grouse:

After July 4: {one-fifth page blank} When I behold an infant I am impressed with a sense of antiquity, and reminded of the sphinx or Sybil. It seems older than Nestor or Jove himself, and wears the wrinkles of Saturn. Why should the present impose upon us so much! I sit now upon a stump whose rings number centuries of growth– If I look around me I see that the very soil is composed of just such stumps — ancestors to this. I thrust this stick many aeons deep into the surface — and with my heel scratch a deeper furrow than the elements have ploughed here for a thousand years– If I listen I hear the peep of frogs which is older than the slime of Egypt — or a distant partridge [Ruffed Grouse Bonasa umbellus (Partridge)] drumming on a log — as if it were the pulse-beat of the summer air. CURRENT YOUTUBE VIDEO I raise my fairest and freshest flowers in the old mould. –Why, what we call new is not skin deep — the earth is not yet stained by it. It is not the fertile ground we walk upon but the leaves that flutter over our head The newest is but the oldest made visible to our eyes. We dig up the soil from a thousand feet below the surface and call it new, and the plants which spring from it.

After July 4: Night and day — year on year, / High & low — far and near, / These are our own aspects, / These are our own regrets…. / I hear the sweet evening sounds / From your undecaying grounds / Cheat me no more with time, / Take me to your clime. 1842, 1845, 1848: Night and day, year on year, / High and low, far and near, / These are our own aspects, / These are our own regrets…. / I hear the sweet evening sounds / From your undecaying grounds; / Cheat me no more with time, / Take me to your clime. (WEEK 389) (Johnson 388-9) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

July 6, Sunday: Frederick Douglass lectured in Hubbardstown (Hubbardston), Massachusetts.

Henry Thoreau recorded his purpose in moving out to the new shanty on Walden Pond: “I wish to meet the facts of life- the vital facts, which are the phenomena or actuality the Gods meant to show us – face to face, and so I came down here Life? Who knows what it is, what it does? If I am not quite right here, I am less wrong than before; and now let us see what they will have.”

TIMELINE OF WALDEN EMERSON’S SHANTY

On the last leaves of a book of ITALIAN EXERCISES, the Concord schoolteacher Miss Martha Emmeline Hunt was keeping a journal of sorts. On this day just prior to throwing herself into the Concord River, her jottings included the following: True spirits should exult, rather than despond. A Cato lacked one thing to greatness, a patience to live on. Rise up, O! Lord, in all the strength thy God has given thee, rise and resist. — Struggle on. — That thou hast struggled through darker hours, let this bear thee up.... Heaven knows the leaden weights that press down the bursting soul.... Let me but rest myself in God, and [no further writing] That evening she left her boarding house and started to walk to her family home, which was about a hundred rods from the Concord River. In the dusk she turned down a bypath to the river, and remained near the river in the dark. Her father heard her come into the house after midnight. She commented that she was planning to start walking to her school early the next morning, before the heat of the day came on.

July 6th I wish to meet the facts of life –the vital facts, which where the phenomena or actuality the Gods meant to show us, –face to face, And so I came down here. Life! who knows what it is –what it does? If I am not quite right here I am less wrong than before –and now let us see what they will have. The preacher, instead of vexing the ears of drowsy farmers on their day of rest, at the end of the week, (for sunday always seemed to me like a fit conclusion of an ill spent week and not the fresh and brave beginning of a new one) with this one other draggletail and postponed affair of a sermon, from thirdly to 15thly, should teach them with a thundering voice –pause & simplicity. stop– Avast– Why so fast? In all studies we go not forward but rather backward with redoubled pauses, we always study antiques –with silence and reflection. Even time has a depth, and below its surface the waves do not lapse and roar. I wonder men can be so frivolous almost as to attend to the gross form of negro slavery – there are so many keen and subtle masters, who subject us both. Self-emancipation in the West Indies of a man’s thinking and imagining provinces, which should be more than his island territory One emancipated heart & intellect– It would knock off the fetters from a million slaves. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN August 23, Saturday: Edgar Allan Poe’s ““The Tell-Tale Heart” was published in The Broadway Journal.

In England, John Lindley reported that “A fatal malady has broken out amongst the potato crop. On all sides we hear of the destruction.” FAMINE

There had since Wednesday been showers and thunderstorms from Maine to New-York, breaking what had been in eastern Massachusetts a severe drought. The lightning strikes on this day in the vicinity of Littleton, ten miles to the northwest of Walden Pond, both in the morning storm and in the afternoon storm, were particularly devastating, initiating several woodlot fires and several structure fires (such as the Tremont Hotel), stunning cattle in the fields, killing a couple of people, etc. On this afternoon Henry Thoreau got caught in a rainshower and thunderstorm, as he would report in WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, and sought refuge in the isolated shanty of a local Irish immigrant family. The infant of the family would be described in WALDEN as still “cone-headed” by recent passage through the birth canal, and that girl baby had been born in May of this year:19

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.

Sat Aug 23d I set out this afternoon to go a fishing –for pickerel to eke out my scanty fare of vegetables– From Walden I went through the woods to Fair Haven –but by the way the rain came on again and my fates compelled me to stand a half hour under a pine –piling boughs over my head, and wearing my pocket handkerchief for an umbrella –and when at length I made one cast over the pickerel weed, the thonder gan romblen in the Heven with that gristly steven, that Chaucer tells of –(the gods must be proud with such forked flashes and such artillery to rout a poor unarmed fisherman) I made haste to the nearest hut for a shelter. This stood a half a mile off the road and so much the nearer to the pond– There dwelt a shiftless Irishman John Field & his wife –and many children from the broad faced boy that ran by his father’s side to escape the rain to the

19. Note that “cone-headed,” an accurate medical description of a neonate condition, is not an epithet of derision. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN wrinkled & Sybil like –crone-like infant, not knowing whether to take the part of age or infancy that sat upon its father’s knee as in the palaces of nobles and looked out from its home in the midst of wet and hunger inquisitively upon the stranger with the privilege of infancy The young creature not knowing but it might be the last of a line of kings instead of John Fields poor starveling brat –or I should rather say still knowing that it was the last of a noble line and the hope and cynosure of the world. An Honest hard working –but shiftless man plainly was John Field. And his wife she too was brave to cook so many suceeding dinners in the recesses of that lofty stove –with round greasy face and bare breast –still thinking to improve her condition one day –with the never absent mop in hand –and yet no effects of it visible anywhere– The chickens like members of the family stalked about the room –too much humanized to roast well– They stood and looked in my eye or pecked at my shoe– He told me his story –how hard he worked bogging for a neighbor –ten dollars an acre –and the use of the land with manure for one year– And the little broad faced son worked cheerfully at his fathers side the while not knowing alas how poor a bargain he had made. Living –John Field –alas –without arithmetic.– Failing to live– Do you ever fish said I– Oh yes– I catch a mess when I am lying by –good perch I catch– what your bait– I catch shiners with fish worms & bait the perch with them. You’d better go now John, said his wife with with glistening hopeful face– But poor John Field disturbed but a couple of fins while I was catching a fair string –& he said it was his luck –and when he changed seats –luck changed seats too. Thinking to live by some derivative old country mode in this primitive new country e.g. to catch perch –with shiner. I find an instinct in me conducting to a mystic spiritual life –and also another –to a primitive savage life– Toward evening — as the world waxes darker I am permitted to see the woodchuck stealing across my path, and tempted to seize and devour it. The wildest most desolate scenes are strangely familiar to me Why not live a hard and emphatic life? not to be avoided –full of adventures and work! Learn much –in it. travel much though it be only in these woods I some-times walk across a field with unexpected expansion and long-missed content –as if there were a field worthy of me. The usual daily boundaries of life are dispersed and I see in what field I stand. When on my way this after noon shall I go down this long hill in the rain to fish in the pond “I ask myself”– and I say to my-self yet roam far –grasp life & conquer it– learn much –& live– Your fetters are knocked off –you are really free. Stay till late in the night –be unwise and daring– See many men far and near –in their fields and cottages before the sun set –though as if many more were to be seen– And yet much rencontre shall be so satisfactory and simple that no other shall seem possible Do not repose every night as villagers do– The noble life is continuous and unintermitting At least, live with a longer radius– Men come home at night only for the next field or street –where their house hold echoes haunt –and their life pines and is sickly because it breathes its own breath. Their shadows morning & evening reach farther than their daily steps. But come home from far –from ventures & perils –from enterprise and discovery –& crusading –with faith and experience and character. Do not rest much. Dismiss prudence –fear –conformity – Remember only –what is promised. Make the day light you and the night hold a candle –though you be falling from heaven to earth –“from morn to dewy eve a summer’s day.” for Vulcan’s fall occupied a day but our highest aspirations and performances fill but the interstices of time. Are we not reminded in our better moments that we have been needlessly husbanding somewhat –perchance – our little God-derived capital –or title to capital guarding it by methods we know? but the most diffuse prodigality a better wisdom teaches –that we hold nothing –we are not what we were– By usurers craft –by Jewish methods –we strive to retain and increase the divinity in us –when the greater part of divinity is out of us. Most men have forgotten that it was ever morning– But a few serene memories –healthy & wakeful natures there are who assure us that the Sun rose clear, heralded by the singing of birds MEMNON This very day’s sun which rose before memnon was ready to greet it. In all the dissertations –on language –men forget the language that is –that is really universal –the inexpressible meaning that is in all things & every where with which the morning & evening teem. As if language were especially of the tongue. Of course with a more copious hearing or understanding –of what is published the present languages will be forgotten. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN The rays which streamed through the crevices will be forgotten when the shadow is wholly removed. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

Walden “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN A Sunday in early September: Joseph Hosmer, Jr. related, long afterward, that “Early in September, 1845, (can it be so long,) on his [Henry Thoreau’s] invitation I spent a Sunday at his lake side retreat, as pure and delightful as with my mother. The building was not then finished, the chimney had no beginning — the sides were not battened, or the walls plastered. EMERSON’S SHANTY TIMELINE OF WALDEN

A 19th-Century Irish shanty in the Merrimack Valley It stood in the open field, some thirty rods from the lake, and the “Devil’s Bar,” and in full view of it.... The entrance to the cellar was thro’ a trap door in the center of the room. The king- post was an entire tree, extending from the bottom of the cellar to the ridge-pole, upon which we descended, as the sailors do into the hold of a vessel.... The cooking apparatus was primitive and consisted of a hole made in the earth and inlaid with stones, upon which the fire was made, after the manner at the sea-shore, when they have a clam-bake. When sufficiently hot remove the smoking embers and place on the fish, frog, etc. Our bill of fare included roasted horn pout, corn, beans, bread, salt, etc. Our viands were nature’s own, “sparkling and bright.” ... The beans had been previously cooked. The meal for our bread was mixed with lake water only, and when prepared it was spread upon the surface of a thin stone used for the purpose and baked, — (as illustrated.) ... When the bread had been sufficiently baked the stone was removed, then the fish placed over the hot stones and roasted — some in wet paper and some without– and when seasoned with salt, were delicious.

George William Curtis and James Burrill Curtis were brothers who lived for a time on the Hosmer farm on Lincoln Road. They had helped Henry Thoreau build his shanty on Walden Pond and Thomas Blanding HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN suggests that they are likely candidates for the following tale from “The Village” in WALDEN:

WALDEN: Several times, when a visitor chanced to stay into the PEOPLE OF evening, and it proved a dark night, I was obliged to conduct him WALDEN to the cart-path in the rear of the house, and then point out to him the direction he was to pursue, and in keeping which he was to be guided rather by his feet than his eyes. One very dark night I directed thus on their way two young men who had been fishing in the pond. They lived about a mile off through the woods, and were quite used to the route. A day or two after one of them told me that they wandered about the greater part of the night, close by their own premises, and did not get home till toward morning, by which time, as there had been several heavy showers in the mean while, and the leaves were very wet, they were drenched to their skins. I have heard of many going astray even in the village streets, when the darkness was so thick that you could cut it with a knife, as the saying is. Some who live in the outskirts, having come to town a-shopping in their wagons, have been obliged to put up for the night; and gentlemen and ladies making a call have gone half a mile out of their way, feeling the sidewalk only with their feet, and not knowing when they turned. It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods any time.

JAMES BURRILL CURTIS GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS Since George William Curtis has related a similar incident, it seems likely that he was the companion mentioned in “The Ponds”:

WALDEN: In warm evenings I frequently sat in the boat playing the PEOPLE OF flute, and saw the perch, which I seemed to have charmed, hovering WALDEN around me, and the moon travelling over the ribbed bottom, which was strewed with the wrecks of the forest. Formerly I had come to this pond adventurously, from time to time, in dark summer nights, with a companion, and making a fire close to the water’s edge, which we thought attracted the fishes, we caught pouts with a bunch of worms strung on a thread; and when we had done, far in the night, threw the burning brands high into the air like skyrockets, which, coming down into the pond, were quenched with a loud hissing, and we were suddenly groping in total darkness. Through this, whistling a tune, we took our way to the haunts of men again. But now I had made my home by the shore.

GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

However, Thoreau’s friend George would later remember this as having happened, not at the pond, but on the Concord River.

During a heavy thundershower either of the spring or of the fall (Thoreau does not specify which),

Early November: Henry Thoreau built his chimney. Evidently, also by this time he had installed his 2 secondhand windows each made up of something like 24 oblongs of crown glass, which he had purchased somewhere for HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN $2.43.

BRONSON ALCOTT ELLERY CHANNING WALDO EMERSON EDMUND HOSMER EDMUND HOSMER, JR. JOHN HOSMER ANDREW HOSMER JAMES BURRILL CURTIS GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS

WALDEN: Before winter I built a chimney, and shingled the sides of my house, which were already impervious to rain, with imperfect and sappy shingles made of the first slice of the log, whose edges I was obliged to straighten with a plane. I have thus a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide by fifteen long, and eight-feet posts, with a garret and a closet, a large window on each side, two trap doors, one door at the end, and a brick fireplace opposite.

EMERSON’S SHANTY TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN November 12, Wednesday: Henry Thoreau began sleeping at the new Thoreau boardinghouse on Texas Street while finishing his shanty on the pond and waiting for the plaster to dry. (It would have been uncomfortably moist inside the structure while that plaster was still uncured. To ensure that the setting plaster did not crack or disintegrate, Thoreau would have needed to keep an eye on the temperature and be ready to go to the shanty and start a fire in the fireplace at any point at which the weather was veering toward freezing. He does not mention this in his journal and some have inferred on the basis of this negative evidence that it did not happen — but then, there are many, many mundane matters of which Henry kept no record in his journal, which was functioning in effect as a writer’s tool rather than as any sort of “Dear Diary.”) EMERSON’S SHANTY TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Left house on account of Plastering wed. Nov. 12 [1845] at night – returned sat. Dec 6th. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN November 25, Tuesday: A Piano Concerto by Adolf von Henselt was performed for the initial time, in Dresden, with Clara Schumann at the piano.

From WALDEN, we know that the ground was already covered with snow:

WALDEN: At length the winter set in in good earnest, just as I had finished plastering, and the wind began to howl around the house as if it had not had permission to do so till then. Night after night the geese came lumbering in in the dark with a clangor and a whistling of wings, even after the ground was covered with snow, some to alight in Walden, and some flying low over the woods toward Fair Haven, bound for Mexico. Several times, when returning from the village at ten or eleven o’clock at night, I heard the tread of a flock of geese, or else ducks, on the dry leaves in the woods by a pond-hole behind my dwelling, where they had come up to feed, and the faint honk or quack of their leader as they hurried off. In 1845 Walden froze entirely over for the first time on the night of the 22nd of December, Flint’s and other shallower ponds and the river having been frozen ten days or more; in ’46, the 16th; in ’49, about the 31st; and in ’50, about the 27th of December; in ’52, the 5th of January; in ’53, the 31st of December. The snow had already covered the ground since the 25th of November, and surrounded me suddenly with the scenery of winter. I withdrew yet farther into my shell, and endeavored to keep a bright fire both within my house and within my breast. My employment out of doors now was to collect the dead wood in the forest, bringing it in my hands or on my shoulders, or sometimes trailing a dead pine tree under each arm to my shed. An old forest fence which had seen its best days was a great haul for me. I sacrificed it to Vulcan, for it was past serving the god Terminus. How much more interesting an event is that man’s supper who has just been forth in the snow to hunt, nay, you might say, steal, the fuel to cook it with! His bread and meat are sweet. There are enough fagots and waste wood of all kinds in the forests of most of our towns to support many fires, but which at present warm none, and, some think, hinder the growth of the young wood. There was also the drift-wood of the pond. In the course of the summer I had discovered a raft of pitch-pine logs with the bark on, pinned together by the Irish when the railroad was built. This I hauled up partly on shore. After soaking two years and then lying high six months is was perfectly sound, though waterlogged past drying. I amused myself one winter day with sliding this piecemeal across the pond, nearly half a mile, skating behind with one end of a log fifteen feet long on my shoulder, and the other on the ice; or I tied several logs together with a birch withe, and then, with a longer birch or alder which had a hook at the end, dragged them across. Though completely waterlogged and almost as heavy as lead, they not only burned long, but made a very hot fire; nay, I thought that they burned better for the soaking, as if the pitch, being confined by the water, burned longer as on a lamp. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN During the first autumn at the pond, Henry Thoreau’s journal says that he “Left house on account of plastering, Wednesday, November 12th at night; returned Saturday, December 6th.” Various commentators have suggested that it was foolish to leave plaster to set up in the cold. They have not, however, produced evidence that that was what Henry did. On the basis of what Henry tells us in WALDEN, quoted above, he did keep the shanty heated while his plaster was drying — these various commentators may have been poor readers but Henry was not a village idiot. It would have been insufferably hot inside the shanty on account of the “bright fire” kept burning constantly in his fireplace, it would have been as humid as Hong Kong during a monsoon in there on account of the water evaporating from the plaster, and in addition it would have been unbearably stinky on account of the horsehair used to stiffen the plaster — and that is ample reason why for this period he was sleeping at the Thoreau boardinghouse. In WALDEN he describes how he was already collecting firewood, and was already burning this firewood, for that drying-out purpose, and indeed he writes of his “bright fire.” EMERSON’S SHANTY TIMELINE OF WALDEN

WALDEN: I did not plaster till it was freezing weather. I brought over some whiter and cleaner sand for this purpose from the opposite shore of the pond in a boat, a sort of conveyance which would have tempted me to go much farther if necessary. My house had in the mean while been shingled down to the ground on every side. In lathing I was pleased to be able to send home each nail with a single blow of the hammer, and it was my ambition to transfer the plaster from the board to the wall neatly and rapidly. I remembered the story of a conceited fellow, who, in fine clothes, was wont to lounge about the village once, giving advice to workmen. Venturing one day to substitute deeds for words, he turned up his cuffs, seized a plasterer’s board, and having loaded his trowel without mishap, with a complacent look toward the lathing overhead, made a bold gesture thitherward; and straightway, to his complete discomfiture, received the whole contents in his ruffled bosom. I admired anew the economy and convenience of plastering, which so effectually shuts out the cold and takes a handsome finish, and I learned the various casualties to which the plaster is liable. I was surprised to see how thirsty the bricks were which drank up all the moisture in my plaster before I had smoothed it, and how many pailfuls of water it takes to christen a new hearth. I had the previous winter made a small quantity of lime by burning the shells of the Unio fluviatilis, which our river affords, for the sake of the experiment; so that I knew where my materials came from. I might have got good limestone within a mile or two and burned it myself, if I had cared to do so.

LIMESTONE HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN November 29, Saturday: Two works for solo voice and orchestra by Hector Berlioz were performed for the initial time, in Vienna: Le chasseur danois to words of de Leuven, and the boléro Zaïde to words of de Beauvoir.

Waldo Emerson paid Abel Moore and John Hosmer $1,239.56 for a little more than 41 acres of woodland on Walden Pond, and Henry Thoreau signed the deed as principal witness to the transaction.20 I, too, have a new plaything, the best I ever had — a wood-lot.... I bought a piece of more than forty acres, on the border of a little lake half a mile wide and more, called Walden Pond.

Emerson would have Thoreau divide the 41 acres into 35 woodlots in the winter of 1849-1850. He would sell one acre to the new Fitchburg Railroad and, according to page 33 of Emerson’s manuscript journal fragment “Trees,” when the railroad wanted more land he would hold out for $100.00 an acre.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN

December 5: Lacking support in his own cabinet for repeal of the Corn Laws, Sir Robert Peel resigned as prime minister. Although Queen Victoria would choose John Russell, Lord Russell to succeed him, he would prove unable to form a government (Peel would therefore remain until the following June).

20. The border between this enlarged woodlot and another man’s land would cause constant problems, and Emerson finally sued this landowner for chopping down his trees but lost and was forced to pay damages. Whether this other landowner was in the right or in the wrong is not now any easier to determine than it was then. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN December 6, Saturday: US envoy John Slidell reached Mexico City but no one in authority would meet with him.

Henry Thoreau had been sleeping at the new Thoreau boardinghouse on Texas Street since November 12th, while waiting for the plaster to dry in the shanty at the pond. EMERSON’S SHANTY TIMELINE OF WALDEN

At this point it had become dry enough for sleeping there to be comfortable:

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Left house on account of Plastering wed. Nov. 12 at night –returned sat. Dec 6th– Man does not live long in this world without finding out the comfort there is in a house the domestic comforts –which originally belong to the house –more than to the family. Man was not made so large limbed and tough but that he must seek to narrow his world and wall in a space such as fitted him. He found himself all bare and out of doors (and out doors is there still, and has remained all bare and unchanged, serene and wintry by turns since Adam) and though this was pleasant enough in serene and warm weather by day light –the rainy seasons and the winters would perchance have nipped his race in the bud –if he had not first of all clothed himself with the shelter of a house of some kind. Adam and Eve according to the fable wore the bower before other clothes. Where is home –without a house? Though the race is not so degenerated but A man might possibly live in a cave today and keep himself warm by furs Yet as caves and wild beasts are not plenty enough to accommodate all at the present day –it were certainly better to accept the advantages which the invention and industry of mankind offer. In thickly settled civilized communities boards & shingles lime & brick are cheaper and more easily come at than suitable caves.– or the whole logs or bark in sufficient quantity –or even clay or flat stones. A tolerable house for a rude and hardy race that lived much out of doors was once made here without any of these materials. According to the testimony of the first settlers of Boston an Indian wigwam was as comfortable in winter as an English house with al its wainscoating. And they had advanced so far, as to regulate the effect of the wind by a mat suspended over the hole in the roof, which was moved by a string. Such a lodge was in the first instance erected in a day or two and every family had one –and taken down and put up again in a few hours. Thus (to try our civilization by a fair test) in the ruder states of society every family owns a shelter as good as the best –and sufficient for its ruder and simpler wants –but in modern civilized society –though the birds of the air have their nests and woodchucks and foxes their holes –though each one is commonly the owner of his coat and hat though never so poor –yet not more than one man in a thousand owns a shelter– but the 999 pay an annual tax for this outside garment of all –indispensable summer and winter which would buy a village of Indian wigwams and contributes to keep them poor as long as they live. But, answers one, by simply paying this annual tax the poorest man secures an abode which is a palace compared to the Indian’s. An annual rent of from 20 to 60 or 70 dollars entitle him to the benefit of all the improvements of centuries. Rumford fire place –Back plastering– Venitian blinds –copper pump Spring lock – &c &c– But while civilization has been improving our houses she has not equally improved the men who should occupy them. She has created palaces but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings– The mason who finishes the cornice of the palace returns at night perchance to a hut no better than a wigwam. If She claims to have made a real advance in the welfare of man –she must show how she has produced better dwellings without making them more costly– And the cost of a thing it will be remembered is the amount of life it requires to be exchanged for it. An average house costs perhaps 1500 dollars and to earn this sum will require from 15 to 20 years of the day-laborer’s life even if he is not incumbered with a family –so that he must spend more than half his life before a wigwam can be earned– And if we suppose he he pays a rent instead this is but a doubtful choice of evils Would the savage have been wise to exchange his wigwam for a palace on these terms? When I consider my neighbors –the farmers of Concord for instance, who are least as well off as the other classes, what are they about? For the most part I find that they have been toiling 10 20 or thirty years to pay for their farms and we set down on half of that toil to the cost of their houses, and commonly they have not yet paid for them. This is the reason they are poor and for similar reasons we are are all poor in respect to a thousand savage comforts though surrounded by luxuries. But most men do not know what a house is –and the mass are actually poor all their days because they think they must have such an one as their neighbors– As if one were to wear any sort of coat the tailor might cut out for him –or gradually leaving off palm leaf hat and cap of woodchuck skin should complain of hard times because he cannot by him a crown.– {One-fourth page blank} It reflects no little dignity on Nature –the fact that the Romans once inhabited her.– That from this same unaltered hill, forsooth, the Roman once looked out upon the sea –as from a signal station. –The vestiges of military roads –of houses and tessellated courts and baths– Nature need not be ashamed of these relics of her children.– The heroes’ cairn– One doubts at length whether his relations or nature herself raised the hill. The whole earth is but a hero’s cairn. How often are the Romans flattered by the Historian and Antiquary their vessels penetrated into this frith and up that

The earth Which seems so barren once gave birth To heroes — who oerran her plains, Who plowed her seas and reaped her grains HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN —— river of some remote isle –their military monuments still remain on the hills and under the sod of the valleys– The oft repeated Roman story is written in still legible characters in every quarter of the old world, and but today a new coin is dug up which repeats or confirms their fame. Some “Judaea Capta” –with silent argument and demonstration puts at rest whole pages of history {One-fourth page blank} Some make the Mythology of the Greeks to have been borrowed from that of the Hebrews –which however is not to be proved by analogies –the story of Jupiter dethroning his father Saturn, for instance from the conduct of Cham towards his father Noah, and the division of the world among the three brothers– But the Hebrew fable will not bear to be contrasted with the (Grecian (?). The latter is infinitely more sublime and divine. The one is a history of mortals –the other a history of gods & heroes –therefore not so ancient. The one God of the Hebrews is not so much of a gentleman not so gracious & divine not so flexible and Catholic does not exert so intimate an influence on nature than many a one of the Greeks. he is not less human though more absolute and unapproachable The Grecian were youthful and living gods –but still of godly –or divine race and had the virtues of gods– The Hebrew, had not all of the divinity that is in man –no real love for man –an inflexible justice The attribute of the one god –has been infinite power –not grace –not humanity –nor love –even –wholly Masculine –with no sister Juno –no Apollo no Venus in him VENUS I might say that the one God was not yet Apotheosized –not yet become the current material of poetry– The Wisdom of some of those Greek fables is remarkable The God Apollo (Wisdom –Wit Poetry) condemned to serve –keep the sheep of King Admetus– So is poetry allied to the State To AEacus Minos, Radamanthus, Judges in hell, only naked men came to be judged– As Alex. Ross comment “In this world we must not look for Justice; when we are stript of all, then shall we have it. For here something will be found about us that shall corrupt the Judge.” – When the island of AEgina was depopulated by sickness at the instance of AEacus Jupiter turned the ants into men –ie. –made men of the inhabitants who lived meanly like ants. The hidden significance of these fables which has been detected –the ethics running parallel to the poetry and history –is not so remarkable –as the readiness with which they may be made to express any Truth They are the skeletons of still older and more universal truths than any whose flesh and blood they are for the time made to wear– It is like striving to make the sun & the wind and the sea signify the propositions of our day. Piety –that carries its father on its shoulders. Music was of 3 kinds –mournful –martial & effeminate –Lydian –Doric & Phrygian– Its inventors Amphion – Thamiras –& Marsias– Amphion was bred by shepherds. He caused the stones to follow him & built the walls of Thebes by his music– All orderly and harmonious or beautiful structures may be said to be raised to a slow music. Harmony was begotten of Mars & venus. Antaeus was the son of Neptune & the Earth– All physical bulk & strength is of the earth & mortal when it loses this point d’appui it is weakness; it cannot soar. And so vice versa you can intepret this fable to the credit of the earth. They all provoked or challenged the Gods –Amphion –Apollo & Diana and was killed by them– Thamiras the Muses who conquered him in music, took away his eyesight & melodious voice –and broke his lyre. Marsyas took up the flute which Minerva threw away –challenged Apollo –was flayed alive by him & his death mourned by Fauns Satyrs & Dryads whose tears produced the river which bears his name. The fable which is truly and naturally composed –so as to please the imagination of a child –harmonious though strange like a wild flower –is to the wise man an apothegm and admits his wisest interpretation. When we read that Bacchus made the Tyrrhenian mariners mad, so that they leapt into the sea mistaking it for “a meadow full of flowers”, “and so became dolphins –we are not concerned about the historical truth of this, but rather a higher poetical truth. We seem to hear the music of a thought and care not if our intellect be not gratified The mythologies –those vestiges of noble poems the world’s inheritance –still reflecting some of their original hues –like the fragments of clouds tinted by the departed sun –the wreck of poems –a retrospect as the loftiest fames. Some fragment will still float into the latest summer day –and ally this hour to the morning of creation. They are materials and hints for a history of the rise and progress of the race. How from the condition of ants we arrived at the condition of men, how the arts were invented gradually– Let a thousand surmises shed some light on this history. We will not be confined by historical –even geological periods –which would allow us to doubt of a progress in human events– If we rise above this wisdom for the day –we shall expect this morning of the race –in which they have been supplied with the simplest necessaries –with corn and wine and honey – and oil –and fire –and articulate speech and agricultural and other arts –reared up by degrees from the condition of ants will be succeeded by a day of equally progressive splendor –that in the lapse of gods summers –other divine agents and godlike man will assist to elevate the race of men as much above its present condition Aristeus “found out honey and oil”, “He obtained of Jupiter and Neptune, that the pestilential heat of the dog days, wherein was great mortality, should be mitigated with wind.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN December 22, Monday: From WALDEN, we know that Walden Pond froze on the night of the 22d:

FLINT’S POND WALDEN: In 1845 Walden froze entirely over for the first time on the night of the 22nd of December, Flint’s and other shallower ponds and the river having been frozen ten days or more; in ’46, the 16th; in ’49, about the 31st; and in ’50, about the 27th of December; in ’52, the 5th of January; in ’53, the 31st of December. The snow had already covered the ground since the 25th of November, and surrounded me suddenly with the scenery of winter. I withdrew yet farther into my shell, and endeavored to keep a bright fire both within my house and within my breast. My employment out of doors now was to collect the dead wood in the forest, bringing it in my hands or on my shoulders, or sometimes trailing a dead pine tree under each arm to my shed. An old forest fence which had seen its best days was a great haul for me. I sacrificed it to Vulcan, for it was past serving the god Terminus.

Winter 1845-1846 December 22

Winter 1846-1847 December 16

Winter 1847-1848

Winter 1848-1849

Winter 1849-1850 December 31

Winter 1850-1851 December 27

Winter 1851-1852

Winter 1852-1853 January 5

Winter 1853-1854 December 31

Winter 1854-1855

Winter 1855-1856

TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1846

Waldo Emerson asked Henry Thoreau to add a chimney to the Emerson barn, as part of creating a schoolroom and sleeping chamber for Sophia Foord while she was tutoring the Emerson and Alcott children.

Thoreau surveyed Walden Pond, indicating Bare Peak, Wooded Peak, Sandbar, and the site of his shanty. The area of the pond is listed as 61 acres and 3 rods, its circumference as 1.7 miles, its greatest length as 175½ rods, and its greatest depth as 102 feet. The Concord Free Public Library now has 3 copies of this. It is the plot which he would have tipped into his bound volume of his lyceum lectures, WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN between pages 285 and 287 (per the current Princeton numbering).

TIMELINE OF WALDEN

There’s an interesting little factoid about this survey being tipped into the WALDEN volume. It wasn’t all that usual, in this time period, for books to be illustrated in such a manner! Such an inclusion, in the period, amounted to “multimedia high tech”! –Take a moment and think about that!21 Most of the works published by Ticknor and Fields during the 1840s and 1850s were not illustrated in any way, but illustrations did play an important role in some. Two groups of publications from the 1850s are especially notable for their illustrations — juvenile works and literary works by the firm’s most respected authors. The more lavishly illustrated were juvenile works, which might contain as many as twelve relief wood engravings, while many literary works were regularly issued with an expensive intaglio steel-engraved frontispiece portrait. The illustrations in juveniles were usually based on the text and made the work more vivid and appealing to a young audience, whereas the portrait frontispieces in the second group served to dignify and assert the literary merit of the works they produced. Other works published by the firm during these decades were also illustrated or decorated in some way. These included textbooks: the two primary school readers by Josiah F. Bumstead each had an inserted woodcut frontispiece; and the first part of Thomas 21. Winship, Michael. AMERICAN LITERARY PUBLISHING IN THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY: THE BUSINESS OF TICKNOR AND FIELDS. Cambridge, England; NY: Cambridge UP, 1995. (Take a moment and reflect, however, that in 1789 the Reverend Gilbert White had used a pond survey as an illustration in his THE NATURAL HISTORY AND ANTIQUITIES OF SELBORNE.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

H. Palmer’s THE MORAL INSTRUCTOR had small vignettes and type ornaments printed throughout the text. Several scientific and medical works —such as Wendell Phillips’s AN ELEMENTARY TREATISE ON MINERALOGY and J. Mason Warren’s edition of Walter H. Walshe’s THE ANATOMY, PHYSIOLOGY, PATHOLOGY, AND TREATMENT OF CANCER— depended on the illustrations to transmit information. In addition, a number of the firm’s literary works, especially poetry, were pleasantly decorated with small vignettes or type ornaments. Longfellow’s THE GOLDEN LEGEND had a single small vignette of a cross, designed by Hammatt Billings, on the title page; Oliver W. Holmes’s POEMS and Richard H. Stoddard’s SONGS OF SUMMER have numerous decorative vignettes and ornamental head- or tailpieces throughout the text. The illustrations and decorations in the publications of Ticknor and Fields were reproduced by three methods. The most common used blocks produced in relief. Small vignettes and ornaments produced by this method were printed with the text, as occasionally were full-page illustrations, but more commonly relief wood engravings were printed on separate leaves and inserted during binding. The portrait frontispieces in the firm’s literary works were produced by a second method, using intaglio metal plates. Intaglio printing is done on a rolling press, separately from the text, and these frontispieces were always printed on inserted leaves. Illustrations reproduced by a third method, lithography, appeared only rarely in works published by Ticknor and Fields before 1860. In the 1840s lithography was used for the technical illustrations in a few medical and scientific works published by the firm, and in the 1850s only the engraved map in Henry D. Thoreau’s WALDEN and the illuminated paper wrapper used on some copies of William H.C. Hosmer’s THE MONTHS —a commission work— were lithographed. Again, lithographic illustrations were printed separately from the text on a special press and inserted during binding. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN That is worth repeating. In the 1850s only the engraved map in WALDEN and the illuminated paper wrapper used on some copies of one other book were lithographed! Such lithography was at that point the very high- tech cutting edge of publication technology. It was, in that period, everything that multimedia amounted to. We might miss such a fact nowadays, if it were not forcefully brought to our attention, but what a novel thing that survey map of Walden Pond tipped into the volume actually was! HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

View Henry Thoreau’s personal working drafts of his surveys courtesy of AT&T and the Concord Free Public Library: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/Thoreau_Surveys.htm

(The official copy of this survey of course had become the property of the person or persons who had hired this Concord town surveyor to do their surveying work during the 19th Century. Such materials have yet to be recovered.)

View this particular personal working draft of a survey in fine detail: HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/133a.htm

WALDEN: One afternoon I amused myself by watching a barred owl (Strix nebulosa) sitting on one of the lower dead limbs of a white- OWL pine, close to the trunk, in broad daylight, I standing within a rod of him. He could hear me when I moved and cronched the snow with my feet, but could not plainly see me. When I made most noise he would stretch out his neck, and erect his neck feathers, and open his eyes wide; but their lids soon fell again, and he began to nod. I too felt a slumberous influence after watching him half an hour, as he sat thus with his eyes half open, like a cat, winged brother of the cat. There was only a narrow slit left between CAT their lids, by which he preserved a peninsular relation to me; thus, with half-shut eyes, looking out from the land of dreams, and endeavoring to realize me, vague object or mote that interrupted his visions. At length, on some louder noise or my nearer approach, he would grow uneasy and sluggishly turn about on his perch, as if impatient at having his dreams disturbed; and when he launched himself off and flapped through the pines, spreading his wings to unexpected breadth, I could not hear the slightest sound from them. Thus, guided amid the pine boughs rather by a delicate sense of their neighborhood than by sight, feeling his twilight way as it were with his sensitive pinions, he found a new perch, where he might in peace await the dawning of his day. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Publication of a new collection of William Cullen Bryant’s poems, illustrated. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN (Here is an illustration of the poet, weary of trying to find another rhyme for “moon” and “June.”)

Horace Rice Hosmer would recollect much later, of this period while Henry Thoreau was taking up residence at the pond, to “Dr.” Samuel Arthur Jones, that Thoreau had been for certain sure no recluse: “He was visited by all sorts of people, at all hours — I put up many a luncheon to go there, as I worked in a Restaurant at the time. I did this for Geo Ripley of the N.Y. Tribune who did not like Henry’s Bill of Fare. I was where all the news and gossip of the town centered at night, and my ears were open.” Upon being challenged on this by Jones, Hosmer would add: “The place where I worked was part restaurant, part Grocery. There was fruit, confectionery, pies, cake, gingerbread &c. One man came a number of times for fried turnovers and cheese, cake &c, which he took away in a basket. He said he could not stand Thoreau’s living, or food. I was told that it was a man who wrote for the N.Y. Tribune, and his name was Ripley.” However that may have been, “When Benj [his older brother Benjamin Gardner “Benj” Hosmer, born in 1816, who had attended school with the Thoreau boys and was “a nervous, wiry fellow, with jet black hair and eyes,” who was “loving and quick tempered”] visited Henry at Walden in 1846 he walked from Bedford (some 7 miles distant) and was coolly received. Henry said that ‘he had not time for friendship,’ and closed the volume. I remembered it, and only met him in the woods and fields with a pride equal to his own. I never hesitated to pass him without speaking unless I had something to ask about, or to show. There was never a word of introduction or ceremony when we met, or parted.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN January 20, Tuesday: Waldo Emerson lectured in Lowell, Massachusetts. This was the 2d lecture of his 7-lecture “Representative Men” series, “Plato, or the Philosopher.” THE LIST OF LECTURES

The United States of America having just declared war upon Mexico, in the issue of this day the Concord Freeman not only crowed with delight that the steamship Hibernia had made it from Liverpool to Boston in merely 19 days including a stopover in the port of Halifax, but also fulminated in opposition to the pernicious attitudes of pacifism:

We have had enough cant and nonsense from peace societies and their advocates about the expense of our army and navy and the needlessness of fortifications.

Our Perennial Quest to Do Harm So Good Will Come

Extermination of the Pequot Tribe 1634-1637 “King Phillip’s” Race War 1675-1676 Secession from Britain 1776-1783 The War of 1812 1812-1815 The Revolution of the Texians 1835-1836 War on Mejico 1846-1848 Race War in the Wild West 1862-1863 Secession from the Union 1862-1865 War to End War 1916-1919 Stopping Hitler 1940-1945 The Korean Police Action 1950-1953 Cuban Missile Crisis 1962 Helping South Vietnam be Free 1959-1975 yada xxxx yada yada xxxx yada yada yada xxxx HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

“To be active, well, happy, implies rare courage. To be ready to fight in a duel or a battle implies desperation, or that you hold your life cheap.” — Henry Thoreau

Miss Prudence Ward wrote a letter to someone which included a remark about Henry Thoreau’s activities out at Walden Pond: Henry T has built him a house of one room a little distance from Walden pond & in view of the public road. There he lives cooks, eats, studies & sleeps & is quite happy. He has many visitors, whom he receives with pleasure & does his best to entertain. We talk of passing the day with him soon. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Fiddler’s Green has provided a “cabin cutout” to be downloaded over the Internet22 and cut out of hard cardstock: EMERSON’S SHANTY

22. http://www.fiddlersgreen.net/buildings/new-england/thoreau/cabin.htm HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

January 22, Thursday: The final of the 7 lectures in Waldo Emerson’s 1845/1846 lecture series in Boston (this would become the initial lecture of the series “Goethe, or the Writer”). THE LIST OF LECTURES

England’s efforts to repeal the Corn Laws so that the people might be fed, and Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington’s opposition to such crowd-pleasing antics, gave rise to an amusing cartoon: HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN To provide a demonstration of his journeyman skills as a surveyor, Henry Thoreau did a survey of Walden Pond:

(he would have this tipped into his bound volume of his lyceum lectures, WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, now between pages 285 and 287 per the current Princeton numbering). HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

WALDEN: As I was desirous to recover the long lost bottom of Walden Pond, I surveyed it carefully, before the ice broke up, early in ’46, with compass and chain and sounding line. There have been many stories told about the bottom, or rather no bottom, of this pond, which certainly had no foundation for themselves. It is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it. I have visited two such Bottomless Ponds in one walk in this neighborhood. Many have believed that Walden reached quite through to the other side of the globe. Some who have lain flat on the ice for a long time, looking down through the illusive medium, perchance with watery eyes into the bargain, and driven to hasty conclusions by the fear of catching cold in their breasts, have seen vast holes “into which a load of hay might be driven,” if there were any body to drive it, the undoubted source of the Styx and entrance to the Infernal Regions from these parts. Others have gone down from the village with a “fifty-six” and a wagon load of inch rope, but yet have failed to find any bottom; for while the “fifty-six” was resting by the way, they we paying out the rope in the vain attempt to fathom their truly immeasurable capacity for marvellousness. But I can assure my readers that Walden has a reasonably tight bottom at a not unreasonable, though at an unusual, depth. I fathomed it easily with a cod-line and a stone weighing about a pound and a half, and could tell accurately when the stone left the bottom, by having to pull so much harder before the water got underneath to help me. The greatest depth was exactly one hundred and two feet; to which may be added the five feet which it has risen since, making one hundred and seven. This is a remarkable depth for so small an area; yet not an inch of it can be spared by the imagination. What if all ponds were shallow? Would it not react on the minds of men? I am thankful that this pond was made deep and pure for a symbol. While men believe in the infinite some ponds will be thought to be bottomless.

(Various bores of cannon were cast at the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich, England, to discharge various sizes of cast-iron ball. There were 6-pounders, 9-pounders, 12-pounders, 30-pound carronades with trunions, 32- pounders, 56-pounders, and 68-pounders. The heavier of these guns were of course not suitable for ships, but were useful for harbor defense. We have a record of a 56-pound cannonball being used in a shotput competition: THE 56-POUND SHOTPUT

That “56-pounder” at the end of a heavy rope, used by Concord folks in an attempt to sound out the bottomlessness of Walden Pond, had been one of those left over from shore defense. The humor of this is that they would have obtained a more sensitive and accurate reading by merely tying an ordinary 1-pound rock to the end of an ordinary codline — the vast amount of excess weight had only made their trial that much more inaccurate, in that after this massive cannonball was already resting on the bottom the necessarily thick and heavy wet rope would have been by its own weight continuing to draw itself downward, only to coil around the iron resting in the bottom muck.) TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

View Henry Thoreau’s personal working drafts of his surveys courtesy of AT&T and the Concord Free Public Library: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/Thoreau_Surveys.htm

View this particular personal working draft of a survey in fine detail: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_surveys/133a.htm

http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_surveys/133b.htm

Before March 13, Thursday: Henry Thoreau may well have lectured at the Concord Lyceum on his experiences at Walden Pond: “After I lectured here before this winter,23 I heard that some of my townsmen had expected of me some account of my life at the pond. This I will endeavor to give to-night.”

... From all points of the compass, from the earth beneath and the heavens above, have come these inspirations and been entered duly in the order of their arrival in the journal. Thereafter, when the time arrived, they were winnowed into lectures, and again, in due time, from lectures into essays.... TIMELINE OF WALDEN

23. February 4th, “Writings & style of Thomas Carlysle” (sic) in regard to CROMWELL and other Great Men of history, and in regard to the manner in which typical lists of Great Men exclude Jesus and exclude the working man: “Are we not all great men?” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Here is Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau’s famous drawing:

Here is Charles H, Overly’s version of Sister Sophia’s drawing:

March 13th The Songsparrow & Black bird heard today –the snow going off –the ice in the pond 1 foot thick. Men speak –or at least think much of cooperation nowadays –of working together to some worthy end– But what little there is, is as if it were not –being a simple result of which the means are hidden –a harmony inaudible to men– If a man has faith –he will cooperate with equal faith every where– If he has not faith he will continue to live like the rest of the world. To cooperate in the lowest & in the highest sense –thoroughly –is simply to get your living together. I heard it proposed lately that two young men should travel together over the world –the one making his way as he went, seeking his fortune, –before the mast –behind the plow –walking and sleeping on the ground –living from hand to mouth –and so come in immediate contact with all hands and nations –the other carrying a bill of exchange in his pocket as a resource in case of extremity– It was easy to see that they could not be companions to one another –or cooperate. They would part company at the first interesting crisis the most interesting point in their adventures I live about a mile from any neighbor no house is visible within a quarter of a mile or more– HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN May 14, Thursday: Waldo Emerson wrote to Thomas Carlyle about his “new plaything, the best I ever had — a woodlot” and described his plans for a writerly tower atop the hill overlooking Walden Pond: I, too, have a new plaything, the best I ever had — a wood-lot. Last Fall I bought a piece of more than forty acres, on the border of a little lake half a mile wide and more, called Walden Pond.... In these May days, when maples, poplars, oaks, birches, walnut, pine are in their spring glory, I go thither every afternoon, and cut with my hatchet an Indian path through the thicket all along the bold shore, and open the finest pictures. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Monte Video, Seat of Daniel Wadsworth, Esq.

June 12, Friday night: There was a severe frost that ruined much of Henry Thoreau’s cash crop of beans, and his garden of tomatoes, squash, corn, and potatoes for this year, which anyway was smaller than the previous year — and which anyway would not without manuring have produced nearly as much as the one-time crop he had achieved in the previous year on this depleted soil. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN After June 12, 1846: There was a frost on the night of June 12th which killed my beans tomatoes & squashes-and my corn & potatoes to the ground.

We have been unable as yet to corroborate, from weather records kept by other local farmers, that this frost of the night of June 12th had similarly harmed their crops. It may therefore have been the sort of frost that killed off only the more marginal plants, ones that were not being adequately nourished.

A hypothesis is that it would have been after this crop failure that Thoreau turned to day labor, as he would many years later describe in his journal, and, as a result, injure himself:

October 4, Sunday: A.M. ...While I lived in the woods I did various jobs about the town, –some fence- building, painting, gardening, carpentering, etc., etc. One day a man came from the east edge of the town and said that he wanted to get me to brick up a fireplace, etc., etc., for him. I told him that I was not a mason, but he knew that I had built my own house entirely and would not take no for an answer. So I went. It was three miles off, and I walked back and forth each day, arriving early and working as late as if I were living there. The man was gone away most of the time, but had left some sand dug up in his cow-yard for me to make mortar with. I bricked up a fireplace, papered a chamber, but my principal work was whitewashing ceilings. Some were so dirty that many coats would not conceal the dirt. In the kitchen I finally resorted to yellow-wash to cover the dirt. I took my meals there, sitting down with my employer (when he got home) and his hired men. I remember the awful condition of the sink, at which I washed one day, and when I came to look at what was called the towel I passed it by and wiped my hands on the air, and thereafter I resorted to the pump. I worked there hard three days, charging only a dollar a day. About the same time I also contracted to build a wood-shed of no mean size, for, I think, exactly six dollars, and cleared about half of it by a close calculation and swift working. The tenant wanted me to throw in a gutter and latch, but I carried off the board that was left and gave him no latch but a button. It stands yet, –behind the Kettle house. I broke up Johnny Kettle’s old “trow,” in which he kneaded his bread, for material. Going home with what nails were left in a flower bucket on my arm, in a rain, I was about getting into a hay-rigging, when my umbrella frightened the horse, and he kicked at me over the fills, smashed the bucket on my arm, and stretched me on my back; but while I lay on my back, his leg being caught over the shaft, I got up, to see him sprawling on the other side. This accident, the sudden bending of my body backwards, sprained my stomach so that I did not get quite strong there for several years, but had to give up some fence-building and other work which I had undertaken from time to time. I built the common slat fence for $1.50 per rod, or worked for $1.00 per day. I built six fences. TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS

July 23, Thursday or 24, Friday: Su fratelli, letizia si Canti for chorus and orchestra by Gioachino Rossini to words of Canonico Golfieri was performed for the initial time, at Piazza Maggiore, Bologna, to celebrate the installation of Pope Pius IX.

Henry Thoreau provoked Sheriff Sam Staples, who was under contract as the Concord tax farmer, into taking

him illegally to the Middlesex County Prison24and spent the night there, for having for several years (up to perhaps 9), following the example of Bronson Alcott, refused to pay certain taxes as useful for the perpetuation 24. The usual penalty for failure to pay the Massachusetts poll tax was property seizure and auction upon failure to display a stamped tax receipt, and was most certainly never imprisonment, but young Thoreau possessed few auctionable items and probably did not use a bank account. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN of domestic slavery and foreign wars.25

“RESISTANCE TO CIVIL GOVERNMENT”: It was formerly the custom in our village, when a poor debtor came out of jail, for his acquaintances to salute him, looking through their fingers, which were crossed to represent the grating of a jail window, “How do ye do?” My neighbors did not thus salute me, but first looked at me, and then at one another, as if I had returned from a long journey. I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker’s to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour —for the horse was soon tackled— was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen. This is the whole history of “My Prisons.” I have never declined paying the highway tax, because I am as desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject; and as for supporting schools, I am doing my part to educate my fellow-countrymen now. It is for no particular item in the tax- bill that I refuse to pay it.

25. During the one year 1845, in Massachusetts, the “poll tax” had been being reckoned as if it were a state tax, although in all other years it had been and would be reckoned as a municipality or county tax. As a town tax, and as a county tax, of course, it could hardly be considered to be in support of slavecatching or of foreign wars, since neither the Massachusetts towns nor the Massachusetts counties engaged in either slavecatching or the raising of armies. Also, even in the one year 1845, while this tax was being considered as a state tax, under the law no part of this revenue was to be used for the catching of fugitive slaves, and no foreign war was going on at the moment (the march upon Mexico had not yet fairly begun). Thoreau, therefore, in declining to pay voluntarily this tax bill, actually was not refusing to acknowledge slavery, as alleged, or a war effort, as alleged, but was refusing to recognize any political organization whatever. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN (I find it fascinating that Thoreau did not ever, in reminiscing about his famous night in the lockup, make any easy reference to the snippet of poetry that was quite as familiar to him as it is to all of us, from Richard Lovelace’s “To Althea from Prison.” –Thoreau wasn’t going for a hole-in-one!)

Walter Harding has tracked down what may well be the origin of the often-told but utterly spurious story, that Waldo Emerson came to visit Thoreau in his prison cell and expressed concern: he found a “Bringing Up Father” cartoon strip in the newspaper, in which Paddy was in jail for drunkenness, and when Jiggs asks him how come he was in jail Paddy retorts “How come you’re not?” Alcott has reported that Emerson’s reaction to the news of this was to find Thoreau’s stand to have been “mean and skulking, and in bad taste.” Therefore, is this not the point at which we can profitably ask, was Thoreau merely running away from his social responsibilities, as has been so often alleged, when he went out to live at Walden Pond? Let’s attach the humorous title “DECAMPING TO WALDEN POND: A GENDER 26 ANALYSIS BY MARTHA SAXTON” to the following quotation:

It seems, from exaggerated nineteenth-century sex definitions, that Victorians were afraid men and women might not be able to distinguish gender. So women were trussed, corseted, and bustled into immobility while men posed in musclebound attitudes of emotionless strength. this suppression of tenderness, warmth, and most expressions of feelings produced the male equivalent of the vapors. Louisa [May Alcott]’s teacher and secret love, Henry David Thoreau, decamped to Walden Pond rather than confront social demands that he be conventionally “male.”

Another member of the Thoreau family, we don’t know who, paid the tax for him, as the tax had previously been paid by Judge Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar when Alcott had almost been jailed on January 17, 1843. Jane Hosmer would recollect in a letter years later that on the evening of Henry’s imprisonment “Mrs Thoreau went down to the aunts ... and they were all concerned in the payment — Mrs. — Aunts Jane & Maria — though Maria was the one who went to the door ...” Although Emerson was irritated no end by such unseemly conduct, on the part of an associate, as failure to pay one’s share of the general tax burden, to his credit he did continue to press for publication of Thoreau’s A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS manuscript. However, at that time Thoreau was still preparing additions to the second draft.27

26. On page 226 of her LOUISA MAY: A MODERN BIOGRAPHY OF LOUISA MAY ALCOTT, Saxton accused Thoreau of “unrelenting misogyny” as her way of elaborating on Bronson Alcott’s remark of November 5, 1858 that Thoreau was “better poised and more nearly self-sufficient than other men.” This caused me to look back to her title page and inspect the date of publication and say to myself, “Yeah, this thing was published back in 1977, the bad old days when we thought we had to combat male sexism by nurturing prejudice against anyone with a penis.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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27. Lawrence, Jerome (1915-2004) and Robert Edwin Lee (1918-1994), THE NIGHT THOREAU SPENT IN JAIL: A PLAY. NY: Hill and Wang, 1971, Spotlight Dramabook #1223, c1970, c1972 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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I should make reference here to a snide remark that Albert J. von Frank has included at page 202 of his 1 AN EMERSON CHRONOLOGY. The sentence is as follows, in its entirety: “HENRY THOREAU EXPRESSED HIS OWN ANTI-POLITICS AMONTH LATER BY SPENDING A NIGHT IN JAIL FOR TAX EVASION, AN ACT THAT DREW EMERSON’S QUICK DISAPPROVAL, THOUGHT THE PRINCIPLES BEHIND THE ACT, AS THOREAU EXPLAINED IN ‘CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE,’ HAD MORE IN COMMON WITH EMERSON’S OWN POSITION THAN HE THEN SUSPECTED.” Now here are the things that I suppose to be quite wrongheaded about von Frank’s assertion, which would seem on its face simply to be praising Thoreau against Emerson: •“ANTI-POLITICS” Thoreau’s act was not an act of anti-politics but an act of politics. To privilege assent over dissent in such a manner constitutes an unconscionable expression of mere partisanship. •“TAX EVASION” Thoreau’s act was not the act of a tax evader. A tax evader is a cheater, who is trying through secrecy or deception to get away with something. Thoreau’s act was the deliberate public act of a man who would rather be imprisoned than assist in ongoing killing, and thus is in an entirely separate category from such cheating. To conflate two such separate categories, one of self-service and the other of self-abnegation, into a single category, in such manner, is, again, an unconscionable expression of prejudicial politics. •“HAD MORE IN COMMON” The implication here is that Emerson’s attitudes constitute the baseline for evaluation of Thoreau’s attitudes, so that Thoreau may be condescendingly praised for imitating Emerson whenever the two thinkers can be made to seem in agreement, while preserving the option of condemning him as a resistor or worse whenever these contemporaries seem at loggerheads. –But this is unconscionable.

Albert J. von Frank. AN EMERSON CHRONOLOGY. NY: G.K. Hall & Co. and Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1994 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Emerson to his journal:

These rabble at Washington are really better than the snivelling opposition. They have a sort of genius of a bold & manly cast, though Satanic. They see, against the unanimous expression of the people, how much a little well directed effrontery can achieve, how much crime the people will bear, & they proceed from step to step & it seems they have calculated but too justly upon your Excellency, O Governor Briggs. Mr Webster told them how much the war cost, that was his protest, but voted the war, & sends his son to it. They calculated rightly on Mr Webster. My friend Mr Thoreau has gone to jail rather than pay his tax. On him they could not calculate. The abolitionists denounce the war & give much time to it, but they pay the tax. The State is a poor good beast who means the best: it means friendly. A poor cow who does well by you — do not grudge it its hay. It cannot eat bread as you can, let it have without grudge a little grass for its four stomachs. It will not stint to yield you milk from its teat. You who are a man walking cleanly on two feet will not pick a quarrel with a poor cow. Take this handful of clover & welcome. But if you go to hook me when I walk in the fields, then, poor cow, I will cut your throat.

DANIEL WEBSTER We now understand that Sheriff Sam was considerably twisting the law under which he confined Thoreau for nonpayment of that $5 or $6 arrears of poll tax, and for his own convenience. For what the law of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts required him to do in regard to such a tax resistor, prior to debt imprisonment, was to attempt to seize and sell some of Thoreau’s assets, such as the books he had in storage in his parents’ boardinghouse in Concord. Sheriff Staples hadn’t been inclined to do this and at this point didn’t have time because he was leaving office — and the sad fact of the matter is that, since he was merely under contract as a “tax farmer,” had he vacated his position without collecting this money from the Thoreau family, Massachusetts would simply have deducted the sum from his final paycheck (bottom line, The Man always takes his cut). For here is that law, and it simply offers no support whatever for what Sheriff Staples did to put pressure on Thoreau: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Section 7. If any person shall refuse or neglect to pay his [poll] tax, the collector shall levy the same by distress and sale of his goods, excepting the good following, namely: • The tools or implements necessary for his trade or occupation; • beasts of the plow necessary for the cultivation of his improved lands; • military arms, utensils for house keeping necessary for upholding life, and bedding and apparel necessary for himself and family. Section 8. The collector shall keep the goods distrained, at the expense of the owner, for the space of four days, at the least, and shall, within seven days after the seizure, sell the same by public auction, for the payment of the tax and the charges of keeping and of the sale, having given notice of such sale, by posting up a notification thereof, in some public place in the town, forty eight hours at least before the sale. Section 11. If the collector cannot find sufficient goods, upon which it may be levied, he may take the body of such person and commit him to prison, there to remain, until he shall pay the tax and charges of commitment and imprisonment, or shall be discharged by order of law.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN

After July 24: In my short experience of human life I have found that the outward obstacles which stood in my way were not living men – but dead institutions It has been unspeakably grateful & refreshing to make my way through the crowd of this latest generation honest & dishonest virtuous & vicious as through the dewy grass –men are as innocent as the morning to the early riser –and unsuspicious pilgrim and many an early traveller which he met on his way

The early pilgrim blithe he hailed That o’er the hills did stray: And many an early husbandman, That he met on his way

& for all he knew they were all highwaymen – but the institutions as church –state –the school property &c are grim and ghostly phantoms like Moloch & Juggernaut because of the blind reverence paid to them. When I have indulged a poets dream of a terrestrial paradise I have not foreseen that any cossack or Chipeway –would disturb it –but some monster institution would swallow it– The only highway man I ever met was the state itself– When I have refused to pay the tax which it demanded for that protection I did not want itself has robbed me– When I have asserted the freedom it declared it has imprisoned me. I love mankind I hate the institutions of their forefathers– What are the sermons of the church but the Dudleian lectures –against long extinct perhaps always imaginary evils, which he dead generations have willed and so the bell still tolls to call us to the funeral service which a generation can rightly demand but once. It is singular that not the Devil himself –has been in my way but these cobwebs –which tradition says were originally spun to obstruct the fiend. If I will not fight –if I will not pray –if I will not be taxed –if I will not bury the unsettled prairie –my neighbor will still tolerate me and sometimes even sustains me –but not the state. And should our piety derive its origin still from that exploit of pius Aenaeus who bore his father Anchises on his shoulders from the ruins of Troy Not thieves & highwaymen but Constables & judges –not sinners but priests –not the ignorant but pedants & pedagogues –not foreign foes but standing armies –not pirates but men of war. Not free malevolence –but organized benevolence. For instance the jailer or constable as a mere man and neighbor –with life in him intended for this particular 3 score years & ten –may be a right worthy man with a thought in the brain of him –but as the officer & tool of HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN the state he has no more understanding or heart than his prison key or his staff– This is what is saddest that men should voluntarily assume the character & office of brute nature.– Certainly there are modes enough by which a man may put bread into his mouth which will not prejudice him as a companion & neighbor. There are stones enough in the path of the traveller with out a man’s adding his own body to the number. There probably never were worse crimes committed since time began than in the present Mexican war –to take a single instance– And yet I have not yet learned the name or residence and probably never should of the reckless vilain who should father them– all concerned –from the political contriver to the latest recruit possess an average share of virtue & of vice the vilainy is in the readiness with which men, doing outrage to their proper natures –lend themselves to perform the office of inferior & brutal ones. The stern command is –move or ye shall be moved –be the master of your own action –or you shall unawares become the tool of the meanest slave. Any can command him who doth not command himself. Let men be men & stones be stones and we shall see if majorities do rule. Countless reforms are called for because society is not animated or instinct enough with life, but like snakes I have seen in early spring –with alternate portions torpid & flexible –so that they could wriggle neither way. All men more or less are buried partially in the grave of custom, and of some we see only a few hairs upon the crown above ground. Better are the physically dead for they more lively rot. Those who have stolen estate to be defended slaves to be kept in service –who would pause with the last inspiration & perpetuate it –require the aid of institutions –the stereotyped and petrified will of the past But they who are something to defend –who are not to be enslaved themselves – –who are up with their time – ask no such hinderance THOMAS CARLYLE Carlyle’s is not the most lasting words nor the loftiest wisdom –but for his genius it was reserved at last to furnish expression for the thoughts that were throbbing in a million breasts– It has plucked the ripest fruit in the public garden– But this fruit now least concerned the tree that bore it –which was rather perfecting the bud at the foot of the leaf stalk. Carlyle is wonderfully true to the impressions on his own mind, but not to the simple facts themselves. He portrays the former so freshly and vividly –that his words reawaken and appeal to our whole Experience But when reinforced by this terrible critic we return to his page his words are found not to be coincident with the thing and inadequate and there is no host worthy to entertain the guest he has invited. On this remote shore we adventurously landed unknown to any of the human inhabitants to this day – But we still remember well the gnarled and hospitable oaks, which were not strangers to us, the lone horse in his pasture and the patient ruminating herd whose path to the river so judiciously chosen to overcome the difficulty of the ascent we followed and disturbed their repose in the shade. And the cool free aspect of the wild apple trees, generously proffering their fruit to the wayfarers though still green and crude. The hard round glossy fruit which if not ripe –still is not poison but New English –brought hither its ancestor by our ancestors once. And up the rocky channel of a brook we scrambled which had long served nature for the sluice in these parts leaping from rock –through tangled woods at the bottom of a ravine, darker and darker it grew and more hoarse, the murmur of the stream –until we reached the ruins of a mill where now the ivy grew and the trout glanced through the raceway and the flume. And the dreams and speculations of some early settler was our theme

But now “no war nor battle’s sound” Invades this peaceful battle ground but waves of Concord murmuring by With sweetly fluent harmony. But since we sailed, some things have failed And many a dream gone down the stream Here then a venerable shepherd dwellt ...... The Reverend Ezra Ripley Who to his flock his substance dealt And ruled them with a vigorous crook By precept of the sacred Book. But he the pierless bridge passed o’er And now the solitary shore Knoweth his trembling steps no more. Anon a youthful pastor came ...... Nathaniel Hawthorne Whose crook was not unknown to fame His lambs he viewed with gentle glance Dispersed o’er a wide expanse, And fed with “mosses from the Manse” We view the rocky shore where late With soothed and patient ear we sat Under our Hawthorne in the dale And listened to his Twice told Tale. It comes on murmuring to itself by the base of stately and retired mountains –through dark primitive woods – whose juices it receives and where the bear still drinks it– Where the cabins of settlers are still fresh and far HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN between, and there are few that cross its stream. Enjoying still its cascades unknown to fame perhaps unseen as yet by man –alone by itself –by the long ranges of the mountains of Sandwich and of Squam with sometimes MT. KEARSARGE the peak of Moose hillock the Haystack & Kearsarge reflected in its waters. Where the maple and the raspberry that lover of the mountains flourish amid temperate dews. Flowing as long and mysterious and untranslateable as its name Pemigewasset. By many a pastured Pielion and Ossa where unnamed muses haunt, and receiving the tribute of many an untasted Helicon Not all these hills does it lave but I have experienced that to see the sun set behind them avails as much as to have travelled to them. From where the old Man of the Mountain overlooks one of its head waters –in the Franconia Notch, taking the basin and the Flume in its way –washing the sites of future villages –not impatient. For every mountain stream is more than Helicon, tended by oreads dryads Naiads, and such a pure and fresh inspirit draught gift of the gods as it will take a newer than this New England to know the flavor of.

Such water do the gods distill And pour down hill For their new England men. A draught of this wild water bring And I will never taste the spring Of Helicon again. But yesterday in dew it fell This morn its streams began to swell And with the sun it downward flowed So fresh it hardly knew its road. Falling all the way, not discouraged by the lowest fall –for it intends to rise again. There are earth air fire & water –very well, this is water. down it comes that is the way with it. It was already water of Squam and Newfound lake and Winnipiseogee, and White mountain snow dissolved on which we were floating –and Smith’s and Bakers and Mad rivers and Nashua and Souhegan and Piscataquoag –and Suncook & Soucook & Contoocook –mingled in incalculable proportions –still fluid yellowish restless all with an inclination seaward but boyant. Here then we will leave them to saw and grind and spin for a season, and I fear there will be no vacation at low water for they are said to have Squam and Newfound lake and Winipiseogee for their mill ponds. By the law of its birth never to become stagnant for it has come out of the clouds, and down the sides of precipices worn in the flood through beaver dams broke loose not splitting but splicing and mending itself until it found a breatheing plaace in this lowland– No danger now that the sun will steal it back to heaven again before it reach the sea for it has a warrant even to recover its own dews into its bosom again with every eve We wandered on by the side and over the brows of hoar hills and mountains –& through notches which the stream had made –looking down one sunday morning over Bethlehem amid the bleating of sheep, and hearing as we walked the loud spoken prayers of the inhabitants –like crusaders strolled out from the camp in Palestine–28 And looking in to learning’s little tenement by the way –where some literate swain earns his ten dollars by the month –after the harvest –with rows of slates and well cut benches round –as well cut as farther south –not noticing the herd of swine which had poured in at the open door, and made a congregation– So we went on over hill and dale through the stumpy rocky –woody –bepastured country –until we crossed a rude wooden bridge over the Amonnoosuck and breathed the free air of the Unappropriated Land. Now we were in a country where inns begin– And we too now began to have our ins and outs– Some sweet retired house whose sign only availed to creak but bore no Phoenix nor golden eagle but such as the sun and rain had painted there – –a demi public demi private house –where each apartment seems too private for your use –too public for your hosts. One I remember where Landlord and lady hung painted as if retired from active life –upon the wall –remarkable one might almost say –if he knew not the allowed degrees of consanguinity for a family likeness –a singular deflexion of the nose turned each to each –so that the total variation could not have been better represented than in the picture. –But here at any rate the cream rose thick upon the milk –and there was refreshment One “Tilton’s Inn” tooo sheltered us which it were well worth remembering, in Thornton it was where towns begin to serve as gores only to hold the world together –reached late in the evening and left before the sun 28. We wandered on (by the side and over the brows of hoar hills and mountains — & through notches which the stream had with awe made — looking down ^one sunday morning over Bethlehem amid the bleating of sheep, and hearing as we walked the loud spoken prayers of the inhabi- where every house seemd to us a holy sepulchre tants — like crusaders strolled out from Richards as if we were the camp in Palestine — (T 74) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN rose. But the remembrance of an entertainment still remains and among publicans Tiltons name still stands conspicuous in our diary. But where we took our ease was not Canterbury street, no Four corners nor Five points –no trivial place where 3 roads meet but hardly one road held together– A dank forest path –more like an otter’s or a marten’s trail or where a beaver had dragged his trap than where the wheels of travel ever raised a dust. The pigeon sat secure above our heads high on the dead limbs of the pine reduced to robins size– The very yard of our hostelries was inclined upon the skirts of mountains and as we passed we looked up at angle at the stems of maples waving in the clouds –and late at evening we heard the drear bleating of innumerable flocks upon the mountains sides seeming to hold unequal parley with the bears Shuddered through the Franconia where the thermometer is spliced for winter use, saw the blue earth heaved into mountain waves from Agiocochook, and where the Umbagog Ossipee and Squam gleamed like dewy cobwebs in the sun– And like bright ribbons the streamlets of Connecticut Saco & adroscoggin “take up their mountain march– Went on our way silent & humble through the Notch –heard the lambs bleat in Bartlett on the mountains late at night –looked back on Conway peak –threaded the woods of Norway pine –and saw the Great Spirit smile in Winnipiseogee29 Varro advises to plant in Quincunx order in order not to “obstruct the beneficial effects of the sun and moon and air,” and adds “nuts, when they are whole, which you might comprize in one modius, because nature confines the kernels in their proper places, when they are broken, can hardly be held in a measure of a modius and a half.” Vines thus planted produce more fruit “more must and oil, and of greater value”. I read in Varro that “Caesar Vopiscus AEdilicius, when he pleaded before the Censors, said that the grounds of Rosea were the gardens [(sedes)] of Italy, in which a pole being left would not be visible the day after, on account of the growth of the herbage.” This soil was not remarkably fertile yet I was so well contented with myself it may be & with my entertainment –that I was really remind of this anecdote. In speaking of “the dignity of the herd” Varro suggests that the object of the Argonautic expedition was a ram’s fleece the gold apples of the Hesperides were by the ambiguity of language [] goats and sheep which Hercules imported –the stars and signs bear their names the AEgean sea has its name from the goat and mountains and straits have hence their names –sic. The Bosphorus Piso makes Italy to be from Vitulis– The Romans were shepherds “Does not the fine [mulcta, a mulgendo] that was by ancient custom paid in kind refer to this?” The oldest coins bore the figures of cattle and the Roman names Porcius –Ovinus Caprilius & the surnames Equitius, Taurus, Capra Vitulus. Vide Cato “Of purchasing an Estate –” “How an estate is to be planted –” &c in Lat & Eng.

29. our way Shuddered ^through that Fran- conia where the thermometer is spliced for winter use, saw the blue earth heaved into mountain waves from Agioco- chook, and where the Umbagog Ossipee and Squam gleamed like dewy cobwebs in the sun — And like bright ribbons the streamlets of Connecticut Saco & adroscoggin “take up their mountain march — Went on our way ^silent & humble through the Notch ^— heard the lambs bleat in Bartlett on the mountains holding unequal parley with the wolves & bears late at night — ^looked back on Conway peak — threaded the woods of Norway pine — and saw the Great Spirit smile ^in Winnipiseogee (T 76-77) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN I will insert here some commentary on this early draft of material that would wind up in the “Monday” chapter of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS:

A WEEK: If, for instance, a man asserts the value of individual liberty over the merely political commonweal, his neighbor still tolerates him, that is he who is LIVING NEAR him, sometimes even sustains him, but never the State. Its officer, as a living man, may have human virtues and a thought in his brain, but as the tool of an institution, a jailer or constable it may be, he is not a whit superior to his prison key or his staff. Herein is the tragedy; that men doing outrage to their proper natures, even those called wise and good, lend themselves to perform the office of inferior and brutal ones. Hence come war and slavery in; and what else may not come in by this opening? But certainly there are modes by which a man may put bread into his mouth which will not prejudice him as a companion and neighbor.

The following is, if I recall correctly and can trust my notes, from William Bronk’s THE BROTHER IN ELYSIUM: IDEAS OF FRIENDSHIP AND SOCIETY IN THE UNITED STATES (1980), pages 104-106: The crux of the matter is that Thoreau believed that all evil did come in through the opening formed when any man might so betray his own nature as to lend himself to perform an inhuman office. While it might be contended that good and evil are something to be done at will and according to will, without reference to our own constitutions, — that we are of indifferent or irrelevant moral quality ourselves, and are able to choose between a good act and an evil one and so determine by the excess of one kind of action over the other our own moral quality and the moral quality of the world, yet it was Thoreau’s contention that the process by which good and evil came into being was more exacting and natural, less arbitrary than this. He believed that it was always necessary to make the choice between good and evil whenever such a choice was presented, but he also believed that in most cases, the choice was not presented, and that evil resulted in some mysterious way without anyone’s willing it, or being aware of it, and even to everyone’s surprise and chagrin. Thoreau accounted for this phenomenon by saying that being is more important and more effective than doing. Anything therefore might happen to us which was consistent with the nature we took for ourselves, even though the process by which the happening came about was so subtle or so complicated that we missed the apprehension of it, even after its end. If. as Thoreau said, we do outrage to our proper nature, — if we take our identity from the state, then we become liable to the evils of the state, and have no defense against war and slavery, since it has none. It is only by refusing to do the office of inferior and brutal natures that we can hope to escape, on our own part, treatment which in its brutality is suited to inferior natures. We must be treated according to the nature which we determine shall be ours. We can win or lose, or act in any other way, only in accordance with terms we set for ourselves. The identity which Thoreau wished us to find, which left no opening for the evil we claimed to deplore, was most certainly not to be found in the state; and neither was it to be found in any other external form, for its essence was personal. It was to be found only through that steady communion with one’s deepest desires and insights, HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN which was called silence. He found no evil and little that was ambiguous in silence. It is easier to see now, of course, why Thoreau rejected philanthropy and reform, since to find one’s identity, to become personal, was truly to ennoble one’s being; it was to enjoy those moments of serene and self-confident life which were better than whole campaigns of daring; it was to combat evil directly by leaving no opening by which it could enter. Philanthropy’s method was less direct. It offered the goodness of actions as an excuse and substitute for being. Reform was an attempt to avoid a change in true form by changing the surface only.

IT IS NO COINCIDENCE THAT IT IS MORTALS WHO CONSUME OUR HISTORICAL ACCOUNTS, FOR WHAT WE ARE ATTEMPTING TO DO IS EVADE THE RESTRICTIONS OF THE HUMAN LIFESPAN. (IMMORTALS, WITH NOTHING TO LIVE FOR, TAKE NO HEED OF OUR STORIES.)

August 1, Saturday: Margaret Fuller embarked on the steamer Cambria for England and Europe, to be foreign correspondent for the New-York Herald Tribune at $10.00 per dispatch (her traveling companions were Marcus and Rebecca Buffum Spring).30

On the island of Norderney, where Clara Schumann and Robert Schumann had gone for a vacation, Clara suffered what was probably a miscarriage.

A Mormon battalion led by Colonel James Allen arrived at Fort Leavenworth in the Kansas Territory.

As reported in the Concord Freeman, the Woman’s Anti-Slavery Society of Concord held in Walden Woods its annual commemoration of the 1834 emancipation of the slaves of the British West Indies by William Wilberforce. According to the paper, the group included the anti-paganist Reverend William Henry Channing of Boston:

Rev. W.H. Channing of Boston..., Mr. Lewis Hayden, formerly a slave, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Esq. and Rev. Mr. Skinner, the Universalist clergyman of this place. Rev. Mr. Channing, in his address, if we are correctly informed, went for the formation of a new Union and a new Constitution, and dissolution of all fellowship with slaveholding!

ABOLITIONISM In all likelihood, Henry Thoreau’s recent night in the local lockup for refusing to pay his poll tax was not a topic of conversation at this celebration in and near Thoreau’s (Emerson’s) shanty. We note that there is a

WALDEN “STACK OF THE ARTIS 30. After the Springs returned to America, they and Fuller would continue to be dear friends and would keep up a correspondence. Presumably it was through the Springs that Walt Whitman kept informed of Fuller’s activities: “I never met Margaret Fuller, but I knew much about her those years.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN comment in WALDEN that reflects the subject of this meeting at the pond: TIMELINE OF WALDEN PEOPLE OF WALDEN: I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, WALDEN I may almost say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both north and south. It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself. Talk of a divinity in man! Look at the teamster on the highway, wending to market by day or night; does any divinity stir within him? His highest duty to fodder and water his horses! What is his destiny to him compared with the shipping interests? Does not he drive for Squire Make-a-stir? How godlike, how immortal, is he? See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate. Self-emancipation even in the West Indian provinces of the fancy and imagination, –what Wilberforce is there to bring that about?

WILLIAM WILBERFORCE JOSEPH ADDISON “CATO, A TRAGEDY” Although we have no direct evidence that Thoreau was present, the consensus opinion of Thoreau scholars is that, most definitely, he would have been present for this occasion. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN December 2, Wednesday: Emily Dickinson resumed her studies at the Amherst Academy.

A deed of sale was witnessed by Henry Thoreau, for purchase for $1,239.56 of 41 acres at Walden Pond by

Waldo Emerson. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

By this point in time Thoreau had finished his draft account of his visit to Maine, the one into which his readings in Herman Melville’s TYPEE had been interpolated. Eventually this reading would show up in the HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN published WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, in masked form as follows:

WALDEN: The manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely whimsical. Of two patterns which differ only by a few threads more or less of a particular color, the one will be sold readily, the other lie on the shelf, though it frequently happens that after the lapse of a season the latter becomes the most fashionable. Comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called. It is not barbarous merely because the printing is skin- deep and unalterable.

Dec 2nd 23 geese in the pond this morn. flew over my house about 10 ’oclock in morn within gun shot. The ground has been covered with snow since Nov. 25th {Three-fourths page missing} {leaf missing} add lest one ray more than usual come into our eyes –a little information from the western heavens –and where are we?– ubique gentium sumus!– where are we as it is? Who shall say what is? He can only say how he sees. One man sees 100 stars in the heavens –another sees 1000– There is no doubt of it –but why should they turn HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN their backs on one another, & join different sects– As for the reality no man sees it –but some see more and some less– what ground then is there to quarrel on? No man lives in that world which I inhabit –or ever came rambling into it– Nor did I ever journey in any other man’s– Our differences have frequently such foundation VENUS as if venus should roll quite near to the orbit of the earth one day –and two inhabitants of the respective planets should take the opportunity to lecture one another I have noticed that if a man thinks he needs 1000 dollars & cant be convinced that he does not –he will be found to have it. If he lives & thinks a thousand dollars will be forthcoming –though it be to by shoe-strings –they have got to come. 1000 mills will be just as hard to come to one who finds it equally hard to convince himself that he needs them. — — Of Emerson’s Essays I should say that they were not poetry –that they were not written exactly at the right crisis though inconceivably near to it. Poetry is simply a miracle & we only recognize it receding from us not coming toward us– It yields only tints & hues of thought like the clouds which reflect the sun –& not distinct propositions– In poetry the sentence is as one word –whose syllables are words– They do not convey thoughts but some of the health which he had inspired– It does not deal in thoughts –they are indifferent to it– A poem is one undivided unimpeded expression –fallen ripe into literature The poet has opened his heart and still lives– And it is undividedly and unimpededly received by those for whom it was matured –but mortal eye can never dissect it– while it sees it is blinded. The wisest man –though he should get all the academies in the world to help him cannot add to or subtract one syllable from the line of poetry. If you can speak what you {Three leaves missing} and crownings. As the youth studies minutely the order and the degrees in the imperial procession and suffered none of its effect to be lost on him –so the man at last secured a rank in society which satisfied his notion of fitness & respectability He was defrauded of so much which the savage boy enjoys. Indeed he himself has occasion to say in this very autobiography, when at last he escapes into the woods without the gates –“Thus much is certain, that only the undefinable, wide-expanding feelings of youth and of uncultivated nations are adapted to the sublime, which, whenever it may be excited in us through external objects, since it is either formless, or else moulded into forms which are incomprehensible, must surround us with a grandeur which we find above our reach.” He was even too well-bred to be thoroughly bred. He says that he had had no intercourse with the lowest class of his townsmen– The child should have the full advantage of ignorance as well as of knowledge –& is fortunate if he gets his share of neglect and exposure. “The law of nature break the rules of art” He further says of himself “I had lived among painters from my childhood, and had accustomed myself to look at objects, as they did, with reference to art.” This was his peculiarity in after years. His writings are not the inspiration of nature into his soul –but his own observations rather.”

After December 2: When I am stimulated by reading the biographies of literary men to adopt some method of educating myself and directing my studies –I can only resolve to keep unimpaired the freedom & wakefulness of my genius. I will not seek to accomplish much in breadth and bulk and loose my self in industry but keep my celestial relations fresh. No method or discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert– What is a course of History –no matter how well selected –or the most admirable routine of life –and fairest relation to society –when one is reminded that he may be a Seer that to keep his eye constantly on the true and real is a discipline that will absorb every other. How can he appear or be seen to be well employed to the mass of men whose profession it is to climb resolutely the heights of life –and never lose a step he has taken Let the youth seize upon the finest and most memorable experience in his life –that which most reconciled him to his unknown destiny –and seek to discover in it his future path. Let him be sure that that way is his only true and worthy career. Every mortal sent into this world has a star in the heavens appointed to guide him– Its ray he cannot mistake– It has sent its beam to him either through clouds and mists faintly or through a serene heaven– He knows better than to seek advice of any. This world is no place for the exercise of what is called common sense. This world would be denied. Of how much improvement a man is susceptible –and what are the methods? When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with planetary motion or say rather like a comet –for the beholder knows not if with that velocity and that direction it will ever revisit this system –its steam-cloud like a banner streaming behind like such a fleecy cloud as I have seen in a summer’s day –high in the heavens unfolding its wreathed masses to the light –as if this travelling and aspiring man would ere long take the sunset sky for his train in livery when he travelled – When I have heard the iron horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth –with his feet and breathing fire and smoke– It seems to me that the earth has got a race now that deserves to inhabit it. If all were as it seems, and men made the elements their servants HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN for noble ends. If the cloud that hangs over the engine were the perspiration of heroes or as innocent and beneficent an omen as that which hovers over the parched fields of the farmer. If the elements did not have to lament their time wasted in accompanying men on their errands. If this enterprise were as noble as it seems. The stabler was up early this winter morning by the light of the stars to fodder and harness his steed –fire was awakened too to get him off– If the enterprise were as innocent as it is early– For all the day he flies over the country stopping only that his master may rest– If the enterprise were as disinterested as it is unwearied.– And I am awakened by its tramp and defiant snort at midnight while in some far glen it fronts the elements encased in ice and snow and will only reach its stall to start once more If the enterprise were as important as it is protracted. No doubt there is to follow a moral advantage proportionate to this physical one Astronomy is that department of physics which answers to Prophesy the Seer’s or Poets calling It is a mild a patient deliberate and contemplative science. To see more with the physical eye than man has yet seen to see farther, and off the planet –into the system. Shall a man stay on this globe without learning something –without adding to his knowledge –merely sustaining his body and with morbid anxiety saving his soul. This world is not a place for him who does not discover its laws. Dull Despairing and brutish generations have left the race where they found it or in deeper obscurity and night –impatient and restless ones have wasted their lives in seeking after the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life– These are indeed within the reach of science –but only of a universal and wise science to which an enlightened generation may one day attain. The wise will bring to the task patience humility (serenity) –joy – resolute labor and undying faith.I had come over the hills on foot and alone in serene summer days travelling early in the morning and resting at noon in the shade by the side of some stream and resuming my journey in the cool of the evening– With a knapsack on my back which held a few books and a change of clothing, and a stout staff in my hand. I had looked down from Hoosack mountain where the road crosses it upon the village of North Adams in the valley 3 miles away under my feet –showing how uneven the earth sometimes is and making us wonder that it should ever be level and convenient for man, or any other creatures than birds. As the mountain which now rose before me in the Southwest so blue and cloudy was my goal I did not stop long in this village but buying a little rice and sugar which I put into my knapsack and a pint tin dipper I began to ascend the mt whose summit was 7 or 8 miles distant by the path. My rout lay up a long and spacious valley sloping up to the very clouds, between the principle ridge and a lower elevation called the Bellows. There were a few farms scattered along at different elevations each commanding a noble prospect of the mountains to the north, and a stream ran down the middle of the valley, on which near the head there was a mill It seemed a very fit rout for the pilgrim to enter upon who is climbing to the gates of heaven– now I crossed a hay field, and now over the brook upon a slight bridge still gradually ascending all the while with a sort of awe and filled with indefinable expectations as to what kind of inhabitants and what kind of nature I should come to at last– And now it seemed some advantage that the earth was uneven, for you could not imagine a more noble position for a farm and farm house than this vale afforded farther or nearer from its head, from all the seclusion of the deepest glen overlooking the country from a great elevation –between these two mountain walls. It reminded me of the homesteads on Staten Island, on the coast of New Jersey– This island which is about 18 miles in length, and rises gradually to the height of 3 or 400 feet in the centre, commands fine views in every direction, whether on the side of the continent or the ocean –and southward it looks over the outer bay of New York to Sandy Hook and the Highlands of Neversink, and over long island quite to the open sea toward the shore of europe. HUGUENOTS There are sloping valleys penetrating the island in various directions gradually narrowing and rising to the central table land and at the head of these the Hugenots the first settlers placed their houses quite in the land in healthy and sheltered places from which they looked out serenely through a widening vista over a distant salt prairie and then over miles of the Atlantic –to some faint vessel in the horizon almost a days sail on her voyage to Europe whence they had come. From these quiet nooks they looked out with equal security on calm and storm on fleets which were spell bound and loitering on the coast for want of wind and on tempest & shipwreck. I have been walking in the interior seven or eight miles from the shore, in the midst of rural scenery where there was as little to remind me of the ocean as amid these N H hills when suddenly through a gap in the hills –a cleft or “Clove road”, as the Dutch settlers called it I caught sight of a ship under full sail over a corn field 20 or thirty miles at sea. The effect was similar to seeing the objects in a magic lantern, passed back and forth by day-light since I had no means of measuring distance. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Late 1846 to September 1847: An initial version of the ms for WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, which now we refer to as “Draft A.”

TIMELINE OF WALDEN Henry Thoreau’s journal preserves what appears to be a fragment of what would become his introductory remarks for his “A History of Myself” lecture before the Concord Lyceum:

I have heard an Owl lecture with a perverse show of learning upon the solar microscope — and chanticlere upon nebulous stars When both ought to have been sound asleep in a hollow tree — or upon a hen roost. When I lectured here before this winter I heard some of my towns men had expected of me some account of my life at the pond –this I will endeavor to give tonight.

It seems to be indicated in WALDEN that this following material pertinent to a visit from Bronson Alcott had occurred during this winter of 1846-1847, his 2d winter at the shanty on the pond, the winter for which he installed a stove to supplement or replace his fireplace; however, in fact, part of it is in his journal for May 9, 1853, word for word: [next screen] HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

WALDEN: I should not forget that during my last winter at the pond there was another welcome visitor, who at one time came through the village, through snow and rain and darkness, till he saw my lamp through the trees, and shared with me some long winter evenings. One of the last of the philosophers, –Connecticut gave him to the world,– he peddled first her wares, afterwards, as he declares, his brains. These he peddles still, prompting God and disgracing man, bearing for fruit his brain only, like the nut its kernel. I think that he must be the man of the most faith of any alive. His words and attitude always suppose a better state of things than other men are acquainted with, and he will be the last man to be disappointed as the ages revolve. He has no venture in the present. But though comparatively disregarded now, when his day comes, laws unsuspected by most will take effect, and masters of families and rulers will come to him for advice.– “How blind that cannot see serenity!” A true friend of man; almost the only friend of human progress. An Old Mortality, say rather an Immortality, with unwearied patience and faith making plain the image engraven in men’s bodies, the God of whom they are but defaced and leaning monuments. With his hospitable intellect he embraces children, beggars, insane, and scholars, and entertains the thought of all, adding to it commonly some breadth and elegance. I think that he should keep a caravansary on the world’s highway, where philosophers of all nations might put up, and on his sign should be printed. “Entertainment for man, but not for his beast. Enter ye that have leisure and a quiet mind, who earnestly seek the right road.” He is perhaps the sanest man and has the fewest crotchets of any I chance to know; the same yesterday and tomorrow. Of yore we had sauntered and talked, and effectually put the world behind us; for he was pledged to no institution in it, freeborn, ingenuus. Whichever way we turned, it seemed that the heavens and the earth had met together, since he enhanced the beauty of the landscape. A blue-robed man, whose fittest roof is the overarching sky which reflects his serenity. I do not see how he can ever die; Nature cannot spare him. Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and whittled them, trying our knives, and admiring the clear yellowish grain of the pumpkin pine. We waded so gently and reverently, or we pulled together so smoothly, that the fishes of though were not scared from the stream, nor feared any angler on the bank, but came and went grandly, like the clouds which float through the western sky, and the mother-o’-pearl flocks which sometimes form and dissolve there. There we worked, revising mythology, rounding a fable here and there, and building castles in the air for which earth offered no worthy foundation. Great Looker! Great Expecter! to converse with whom was a New England Night’s Entertainment. Ah! such discourse we had, hermit and philosopher, and the old settler I have spoken of, –we three,– it expanded and racked my little house; I should not dare to say how many pounds’ weight there was above the atmospheric pressure on every circular inch; it opened its seams so that they had to be calked with much dulness thereafter to stop the consequent leak; –but I had enough of that kind of oakum already picked. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN VERSION A

WALDEN: IN VERSION A THIS FOLLOWS MISSING LEAF #153: If I listen to the faintest but constant suggestions of my which are certainly true, genius,^ I see not to what even extremes or^ insanity, it would lead me — and yet that way as I grow more resolute and faithful my road lies The faintest assured objection which one healthy man feels will at length prevail over the arguments and customs of mankind. No man ever followed his genius till it misled him. Though the result were bodily weakness, yet no man perhaps can say that the consequences were to be regretted, for these were a life in conformity to higher principles. If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, –more elastic, more immortal, more starry, –that your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We can easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, it is a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched. But practically I am only but^ half-converted by my own arguments for I still fish HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

December 16, Wednesday: Franz Liszt arrived in Bucharest for two weeks of concerts. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

After the weather cleared, the snowshoers, later dubbed the “Forlorn Hope,” set out: Stanton, Luis, and Salvador; Franklin Ward Graves, his daughters Mary and Sarah, and Sarah’s husband Jay Fosdick; William and Sarah Foster, Sarah’s sister, Harriet Pike, and their two younger brothers, Lemuel and William Murphy; Amanda McCutchen; William Eddy; Patrick Dolan; Antonio the teamster; “Dutch Charley” Burger. William Murphy and Burger turned back the first day, but the 15 others continued. They were weak from hunger and had few provisions.

From WALDEN, we know that Walden Pond froze on the night of the 16th:

WINTER DEC 2 1845- EMB 2 1846 ER WINTER DEC 1 1846- EMB 6 1847 ER WINTER 1847- 1848 WINTER 1848- 1849 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

WINTER DEC 3 1849- EMB 1 1850 ER WINTER DEC 2 1850- EMB 7 1851 ER WINTER 1851- 1852 WINTER JAN- 5 1852- UARY 1853 WINTER DEC 3 1853- EMB 1 1854 ER WINTER 1854- 1855 WINTER 1855- 1856

TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1847

February 3, Wednesday: The citizens of San Francisco held a meeting to raise funds for a Donner-summit rescue party. A force of more than 300 US soldiers and some 65 volunteers under Colonel Sterling Price surrounded and assaulted a Catholic church in Taos Pueblo the thick adobe walls of which insurgents had transformed into a fortress. After 150 were killed, 400 surrendered. It would appear that James Pierson Beckwourth was part of this attack force.

Henry Thoreau may or may not have delivered a WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS lecture, and this may or may not have been in Concord.31 TIMELINE OF WALDEN NOTE: The only mention of such a lecture is in Franklin Benjamin Sanborn’s typescript titled “Thoreau at Concord Lyceum” at the Abernethy Collection at VtMiM. Sanborn alleged that Prudence Ward’s diary indicated that Thoreau was to lecture in Concord on this evening; however, according to Concord Lyceum records (THE MASSACHUSETTS LYCEUM DURING THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE, page 162) the Concord lecture was 31. From Bradley P. Dean and Ronald Wesley Hoag’s “Thoreau’s Lectures before WALDEN: An Annotated Calendar.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN delivered by C.C. Hazewell of Concord and the Lincoln Lyceum did not offer a lecture on this date (THE MASSACHUSETTS LYCEUM DURING THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE, page 213). Thoreau did lecture on February 10th and again on February 17th, so most likely the Ward/Sanborn report is a misunderstanding although it may indicate that a Thoreau lecture was rescheduled to accommodate Hazewell.

DATE PLACE TOPIC

January 19, Tuesday, 1847, at 7PM Lincoln MA; Brick or Centre School House “A History of Myself” (?) February 3, Wednesday, 1847 Concord (?) February 10, Wednesday, 1847, at 7PM Concord; Unitarian Church, Vestry “A History of Myself” (I) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

February 10, Wednesday: Brigham Young “got married with” Jane Terry.

Lecture 1032

DATE PLACE TOPIC

February 3, Wednesday, 1847 Concord (?) February 10, Wednesday, 1847, at 7PM Concord; Unitarian Church, Vestry “A History of Myself” (I) February 17, Wednesday, 1847, at 7PM Concord; Unitarian Church, Vestry “A History of Myself” (II)

32. From Bradley P. Dean and Ronald Wesley Hoag’s THOREAU’S LECTURES BEFORE WALDEN: AN ANNOTATED CALENDAR. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Narrative of Event: As discussed in the entry on lecture 8 above, at least some of Henry Thoreau’s neighbors on the evening of 4 February 1846 were more interested in hearing about his life at Walden Pond than about Thomas Carlyle’s graces as a writer. Thus, in a preliminary journal draft of this 10 February 1847 lecture, he remarked, “When I lectured here before [last] winter I heard that some of my towns men had expected of me some account of my life at the pond — this I will endeavor to give tonight” (JOURNAL 1, 1837-1844, ed. Elizabeth Hall Witherell et al. [1981], page 142). The Concord Lyceum’s record of the event is typically brief: “Concord Feb 10 1847 A lecture was 33 delivered by H. D. Thoreau of Concord. Subject — HISTORY OF HIMSELF. A. G. Fay Sec[retary].” His lecture was the eleventh of sixteen at the Concord Lyceum that season (MASSACHUSETTS LYCEUM, page 162).

TIMELINE OF WALDEN

33. Cameron, Kenneth Walter. THE MASSACHUSETTS LYCEUM DURING THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE. Hartford CT: Transcendental Books, 1969, page 162. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Advertisements, Reviews, and Responses: Professor Walter Roy Harding says that this lecture “was received so well that, quite out of keeping with the regular practice of the lyceum, he was asked to repeat it a week later for those who had missed it” (THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU: A BIOGRAPHY, page 187). Indeed, Miss Prudence Ward reported in a letter later that month,

“Henry repeated his lecture to a very full audience …. It was an uncommonly excellent lecture — tho, of course few would adopt his notions — I mean as they are shown forth in his life. Yet it was a very useful lecture, and much needed” (quoted in THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU, pages 187-88). Thoreau did, in fact, give a lecture on the same topic one week later, on 17 February 1847. Whether it was a repetition of the first lecture or a continuation of the topic in a different lecture is not clear. Although Ward’s remark would appear to support the notion that the first early WALDEN lecture was simply repeated, Thoreau almost certainly had in hand by this date the second of what was already or what was soon to become his three-lecture “Walden; or, Life in the Woods” course. If he did not deliver that second lecture on 17 February 1847, he did not deliver it to his fellow townspeople at all. Yet he refers directly to “we inhabitants of Concord” in the surviving manuscript of the second lecture.34 We conjecture, therefore, that Harding’s remark about Thoreau being asked to repeat the first lecture was extrapolated solely from Ward’s remark but that Ward misspoke and actually meant that Thoreau delivered a lecture on the same topic as he had the previous week: his life in the woods. In any event, it appears that both lectures were well received. Description of Topic: See entry to lecture 9 above.

34.Shanley, THE MAKING OF WALDEN, WITH THE TEXT OF THE FIRST VERSION, page 155. Also, see the quotation cited in note 4 of lecture 11 below. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Lecture 1135

DATE PLACE TOPIC

February 10, Wednesday, 1847, at 7PM Concord; Unitarian Church, Vestry “A History of Myself” (I) February 17, Wednesday, 1847, at 7PM Concord; Unitarian Church, Vestry “A History of Myself” (II) January 3, Monday, 1848, at 7PM Concord; Unitarian Church, Vestry “An Excursion to Ktaadn”

35. From Bradley P. Dean and Ronald Wesley Hoag’s THOREAU’S LECTURES BEFORE WALDEN: AN ANNOTATED CALENDAR. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Narrative of Event: The records of the Concord Lyceum state, “Concord Feb 17 1847 A lecture was delivered by Henry D Thoreau of Concord. Subject — Same as last week. A. G. Fay Sec[retary]”36 The lecture was the twelfth of the season’s sixteen offerings.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN Advertisements, Reviews, and Responses: See lecture 10 for a discussion of Miss Prudence Ward’s favorable comments on this lecture, which she reported, perhaps erroneously, to be a repetition of Thoreau’s lecture of the previous week. Lyceums very rarely allowed repeat performances, and at this time Henry Thoreau almost certainly had a draft of the 2d of his 3 early WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS lectures. But whether Prudence was right or wrong about the duplication, this second lecture attracted “a very full audience,” as Ward reported (quoted in Walter Roy Harding’s THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU, page 187), and was well received.

Two other letters, one by Waldo Emerson and one by Bronson Alcott, ambiguously refer to one or another of these lecture performances, with a slight favoring of the 17 February possibility. In a 28 February 1847 letter to Margaret Fuller, Emerson comments, “Mrs Ripley [Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley] & other members of the opposition came down the other night to hear Henry’s Account of his housekeeping at Walden Pond, which he

36.Cameron, Kenneth Walter. THE MASSACHUSETTS LYCEUM DURING THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE. Hartford CT: Transcendental Books, 1969, page 162. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN read as a lecture, and were charmed with the witty wisdom which ran through it all.”37 The Alcott letter, to his daughter Anna Alcott, was penned on a “Wednesday Night” in February 1847, the day of one of the two lectures. In a response to Anna’s query about how she might help her mother and father through the family’s present difficult circumstances, Alcott assures her that self-improvement guided by her own conscience is the path to follow. He concludes with a tantalizingly cryptic endorsement of the lecture she would hear that evening. His apparent familiarity with what Thoreau will say suggests that he either had had private access to the material or had already heard it delivered, either as a private reading or a public lecture. If the latter, his opportunities would have been in Lincoln on 19 January, assuming that Thoreau gave his “History of Myself” lecture then, or in Concord on 10 February, assuming the unusual: that Thoreau did deliver the same lecture on both the 10th and 17th. Alcott’s letter to Anna reads in part:38 Your Note was the first thing I saw this morning, when I came in to make my study fire: and I was glad to find, all I knew, of your earnest desire to help us in these times of trial, confirmed in your own handwriting. You wish me to tell you what you can do to lighten your mother’s cares, and give your father a still deeper enjoyment in yourself, and your sisters .... Life is a lesson we best learn and almost solely too, by living. The Conscience within is the best, and, in the end, the only Counseller .... Tis that first of all duties[,] Self-improvement, to which end life, and the world, and your friends are all given. I think I speak truly when I say that you wish this most of all things .... As for me, and my thoughts — Great is my Peace, if in going at night to my Pillow, I have the sense of having earned my faculties, or limbs even, by thinking One Thought, speaking one word, doing one deed, that my task master approves, or the nearest or remotest Person or Time shall adopt, repeat, or enjoy. — Dear Anna, this from your thoughtful, yet careful-minded Father. For the rest, our friend Henry shall answer and explain in the Lecture you hear this evening.

Description of Topic: Very likely the 2d of Thoreau’s two earliest “Walden; or, Life in the Woods” lectures, the text of this lecture is, for the most part, the second fifty-odd pages (paged “1” through “53” using Thoreau’s pagination on the manuscript leaves) of “the text of the first version” of WALDEN recovered by J. Lyndon Shanley.39 The following sentence suggests the sense of immediacy the lecture likely created among Thoreau’s auditors: “I trust that none of my hearers will be so uncharitable as to look into my house now — after hearing this, at the end of an unusually dirty winter, with critical housewife’s eyes, for I intend to celebrate the first bright & unquestionable spring morning by scrubbing my house with sand until it is as white as a lily — or, at any rate, as the washer-woman said of her clothes, as white as a ‘wiolet.’”40 As with the first of his two lectures, Thoreau continued to revise this text and published it seven-and-a-half years later as the second chapter of WALDEN, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” although several paragraphs of the lecture text consist of passages published in the “Reading” and “Sounds” chapters.

37.THE LETTERS OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 9 volumes to date, ed. Ralph L. Rusk and Eleanor M. Tilton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939; 1990), 3:377-78. 38.THE LETTERS OF A. BRONSON ALCOTT, pages 128-29. 39.Shanley, THE MAKING OF WALDEN, WITH THE TEXT OF THE FIRST VERSION, pages 137-57. 40.Shanley, THE MAKING OF WALDEN, page 153. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

February 19, Friday: An undated letter from Margaret Fuller on the sights she was seeing in Europe and the public people41 she was meeting was printed as a column by the New-York Tribune: ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

According to The Concord Freeman, “Ice King” Frederic Tudor’s work crew was harvesting between 800 and 1,000 tons of ice per day from the surface of Walden Pond.

On one or another morning Waldo Emerson mused about the prospect of profiting from Walden Pond (not very realistically, since no part of the surface of said pond was within the plotlines of his abutting woodlot):

I woke up this morning & find the ice in my pond promised to be a revenue. It was as if somebody had proposed to buy the air that blew over my field.

April 8, Thursday: The ice on Walden Pond was completely melted:

During this month Boston vessels would be offloading ice (and watermelons as well, although I have no idea where they might have been mature during this season) at Veracruz, Mexico in support of our expeditionary troops. The price of ice there would be one dollar the pound. Some of this ice might very well have been from Walden Pond! MEXICAN WAR

After April 8: {Twelve pages missing} but it was all gone out of the river –and he dropped down without obstruction from Sudbury where he lived –to Fair Haven pond –which he found unexpectedly was a firm field of ice– It was a very warm spring day and he was astonished to see such a body of {Four-fifths page missing} Saw a woodchuck out 30 March snow fell 8 inches deep next day. heard a hyla Ap. 6th pond ice melted Ap 8th 1847 —— On the 15th March 142 years before this compelled her to rise from childbed –time to put on one shoe –dashed out the {Four-fifths page missing}{Leaves missing}

41. The term “celebrities” would not be first used, by Emerson, until the following year. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Robin Hood ballads, for instance, which I can recommend to travel by. Sweavens are swift, sayd lyttle John, As the wind blows over the hill; For if it be never so loud this night, To-morrow it may be still.” And so it went up hill & down till a stone interrupted the line, when a new verse was chosen. His shoote it was but loosely shot, Yet flewe not the arrowe in vaine, For it met one of the sheriffe’s men, And William-a-Trent was slaine.” There is, however, this consolation to the most way worn traveller, upon the dustiest road, that the path his feet describe is so perfectly symbolical of human life –now climbing the hills, now descending into the vales. From the summits he beholds the heavens and the horizon. from the vales he looks up to the heights again. He is treading his old lessons still, & though he may be very wary & travel worn, it is yet sincere experience. Thus we went on our way passing through Still river village –at sundown –seen from whence the Wachusett was already lost once more amid the blue fabulous mts in the horizon.– Listening to the evening song of the robin in the orchards –& contrasting the equanimity of nature with the bustle & impatience of man– His words & actions presume always a crisis near at hand, but she is forever silent & unpretending.– Without stopping to tell all o our adventures let it suffice to say that we reached the banks of the Concord on the third morning after our departure –before the sun had climbed many degrees into the heavens And now when we look again Westward from the hills of concord Wachusett and Monadnock have retreated once more among the blue & fabulous mts of the horizon –though our eyes rest on the very rocks where we boiled our hasty pudding amid the clouds.

July: At the age of 23 Thomas Wentworth Higginson graduated from the Divinity School of Harvard College and was ordained. The young men being ordained on Visitation Day spoke in alphabetical order, and he was 7th in line to deliver his sermon on “The Clergy and Reform.” The sermon, well received by some in attendance such as the Reverend Theodore Parker and Edward Everett Hale, would become a “rock of offense” for some of the listeners because its message was the repulsive one that in order to achieve a love like that of Christ we would need to develop fully our capacity for moral indignation at the wrongs of society. After two trial Sunday visits, the young firebrand reverend would be called by the Unitarian Church of Newburyport MA to serve as their pastor — a decision the Whigs of this congregation would promptly regret.

The newly anointed minister married with Mary Channing.

Waldo Emerson wrote about Henry Thoreau in his journal:

T. sometimes appears only as a gen d’arme, good to knock down a cockney with, but without that power to cheer & establish, which makes the value of a friend. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Our national birthday, Sunday the 4th of July:42 William Johnson of Natchez, a free black man who was himself a slavemaster (!) as well as being a barber and a successful businessman, kept a diary of short entries, hardly missing a day between 1836 and 1851. This diary has seen publication as William Johnson’s NATCHEZ, THE ANTE-BELLUM DIARY OF A FREE NEGRO, ed. William Ransom Hogan and Edwin Adams Davis (1951, 1979, and a Louisiana State UP paperback in 1993). Here is one of a series of Johnson’s 4th-of-July entries: “Nothing going on very Lively to day altho tis the 4th. Old Roan and the Sorril mare wran off from the Commons to day Some time.” CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY

The Boston Daily Evening Transcript notified its readers that in the mornings since June 16th, the local Fitchburg RR passenger train had been making two morning back-and-forth runs, an afternoon back-and-forth run and an evening back-and-forth run between Concord and Charlestown, Massachusetts. It had been choo- chooing off from Concord at 6:25AM in the morning and turning back toward Concord at 7AM, and setting off from Concord again at 8AM and heading back toward Concord at 11AM. Likewise, in the afternoons and evenings, it had been setting off from Concord for Charlestown at 12:30PM and heading back toward Concord at 5PM, and setting off from Concord for Charlestown again at 6PM and heading back toward Concord at 7PM. Its transits presumably took about half an hour. This local train and crew presumably was spending its nights in Concord. Also, passenger trains had been leaving Fitchburg for Charlestown via Concord at 1AM, 11AM, and 5PM, and leaving Charlestown for Fitchburg at 6:30AM, 11AM, and 4:30PM. All these trains stopped at Fresh Pond, Mount Auburn, the Arsenal, and Watertown Village. Apparently, not counting the freight traffic, one or another passenger train would be choo-chooing past Walden Pond fourteen times daily during this period: • 3AM (approximately) Fitchburg east toward Charlestown • 6:30AM Concord east toward Charlestown •6:55AM Charlestown west toward Fitchburg •7:25AM Charlestown west toward Concord • 8:05AM Concord east toward Charlestown • 11:25AM Charlestown west toward Concord, and Charlestown west toward Fitchburg (two trains, one of which is local, heading in the same westerly direction on the same tracks at the same time, presumably for safety in sight of each other or even linked together since trains at that time did not have any braking systems whatsoever and could only roll gradually to a stop) • 12:35PM Concord east toward Charlestown • 1PM (approximately) Fitchburg east toward Charlestown •4:55PM Charlestown west toward Fitchburg •5:25PM Charlestown west toward Concord • 6:05PM Concord east toward Charlestown • 7PM (approximately) Fitchburg east toward Charlestown •7:25PM Charlestown west toward Concord

“[The railroad will] only encourage the common people to move about needlessly.” — Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington

42. This was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 43rd birthday. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

September 6, Monday: Henry Thoreau moved back to the Thoreau family boardinghouse, essentially abandoning the shanty by Walden Pond. EMERSON’S SHANTY TIMELINE OF WALDEN

The two-act playlet “Walden, the Ballad of Thoreau,” which has allegedly been performed to date at more than 6,700 colleges and schools (www.waldenplay.com), amounts to an invented conversation between Thoreau and Emerson set during the final two days Thoreau spent in his cabin before leaving Walden Pond.

On page 16 of his reconstruction of Thoreau’s attitude toward time and eternity, Dr. Alfred I. Tauber concludes that it was by this point that he had arrived at his Augustinian “mature understanding of time and his ‘place’ in nature.”43 When Thoreau left Walden Pond in September 1847, he had fully embraced his mature understanding of time and his “place” in nature. Specifically, Thoreau’s understanding of the full immediacy of the present is the most sensitive measure of his metaphysics of nature. I contrast his understanding of “time” as restricted to the present (the Augustinian notion that past and future exist only in the mind) and serving as a human category of temporality with his notion of “eternity.” Thoreau’s recognition that nature’s flux is immediate and ever-present, existing in an eternal now, represents a crucial metaphysical insight, and his strategies for integrating the ceaseless evolution of the cosmos and himself revolve around efforts to HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN “capture” time either in self-conscious understanding or in the total eclipse of mythical revelry. Time’s apprehension or suspension becomes the foundation of his own reckoning of his selfhood and thereby introduces the basic themes of this study. Imagining that Thoreau had moved directly into the Emerson household rather than moving home first, Russell Connor has fantasized a coffeetable nonbook which might perhaps be titled A BOOK OF MORNINGS AFTER and one of the “mornings-after” that he imagines is the morning after the day of September 6, 1847 in Concord MA:

“I lived there for two years and two months [and two days]. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.”

Here is Mr. Connor’s attempt at fabricating an entry for that morning of September 7th: The day after returning to the household of Ralph Waldo Emerson in Concord, following two years spent in a hut on Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau finds a note at breakfast. Dear Henry: We understand how you must miss the sounds that were the companions of your solitude. Even at 3 o’clock in the morning, we marveled at your mimicry of whippoorwills, the trill of a sparrow, the distant mooing of a cow, the trump of bullfrogs (my favorite). Lidian considers your hooting owl more tragic than King Lear. We do feel the performance could bear up handsomely without the passing train. 43. My suggestion would be that we should not read Tauber here, to be making an assertion that this particular point in Thoreau’s life was of greatest significance, or marked an essential transition point. He does not ever assert, or even suggest, that Thoreau had not, at an earlier moment, already arrived at this appreciation. His intent is merely to establish what Thoreau thought, rather than to establish precisely when it had been that he first thought it. Likewise, my suggestion would be that we should not read page 26 to be making an assertion that Thoreau had been influenced by Augustine, since he confesses elsewhere that he is fully aware that there is no preserved record that Thoreau had ever glimpsed Augustine’s CONFESSIONS, and his focus is not so much on deriving the provenance of Thoreau’s discovery as on specifying the nature of it: Thoreau recognizes, as Augustine fourteen centuries before him, that there is indeed no such division of time as the past, present, and future. In a phenomenological sense, indeed existentially, we are only in the present, because, strictly speaking, only the present exists. We live in the present moment, and while the past is recalled or witnessed as artifact, that witness is experienced only in the present. The future, like the past, exists only as a mental construct only in the present moment. And then the imbroglio: the present is never held on to; it is always slipping by into the past, flowing from a future never quite here. Dr. Alfred I. Tauber. HENRY DAVI D THOREAU AND THE MORAL AGENCY OF KNOWING. Berkeley and Los Angeles CA; London, England: U of California P, 2001 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN We’re sleeping in. Welcome home,

Ralph. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1848

Spring: Henry Thoreau walked through the “deep cut” of the railroad: HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

WALDEN: Few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe the forms PEOPLE OF which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep WALDEN cut on the railroad through which I passed on my way to the village, a phenomenon not very common on so large a scale, though the number of freshly exposed banks of the right material must have been greatly multiplied since railroads were invented. The material was sand of every degree of fineness and of various rich colors, commonly mixed with a little clay. When the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a thawing day in the winter the sand begins to flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through the snow and overflowing it where no sand was to be seen before. Innumerable little streams overlap and interlace one with another, exhibiting a sort of hybrid product, which obeys half way the law of currents, and half way that of vegetation. As it flows it takes the forms of sappy leaves or vines, making heaps of pulpy sprays a foot or more in depth, and resembling, as you look down on them, the laciniated lobed and imbricated thalluses of some lichens; or you are reminded of coral, of leopards’ paws or birds’ feet, of brains or lungs or bowels, and excrements of all kinds. It is a truly grotesque vegetation, whose forms and color we see imitated in bronze, a sort of architectural foliage more ancient and typical than acanthus, chiccory, ivy, vine, or any vegetable leaves; destined perhaps, under some circumstances, to become a puzzle to future geologists. The whole cut impressed me as if it were a cave with its stalactites laid open to the light. The various shades of the sand are singularly rich and agreeable, embracing the different iron colors, brown, gray, yellowish, and reddish. When the flowing mass reaches the drain at the foot of the bank its spreads out flatter into strands, the separate streams losing their semi-cylindrical form and gradually becoming more flat and broad, running together as they are more moist, till they form an almost flat sand, still variously and beautifully shaded, but in which you can trace the original forms of vegetation; till at length, in the water itself, they are converted into banks, like those formed off the mouths of rivers, and the forms of vegetation are lost in the ripple marks on the bottom. The whole bank, which is from twenty to forty feet high, is sometimes overlaid with a mass of this kind of foliage, or sandy rupture, for a quarter of mile on one or both sides, the produce of one spring day. What makes this sand foliage remarkable is its springing into existence thus suddenly. When I see on the one side the inert bank, –for the sun acts on one side first,– and on the other this luxuriant foliage, the creation of an hour, I am affected as if in a peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me, –had come to where he was still at work, sorting on this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about. I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe, for this sandy overflow is something such a foliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body. You find thus in the HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea inwardly. The atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant by it. The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype. Internally whether in the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick lobe, a word especially applicable to the liver and lungs and the leaves of fat, , labor, lapsus, to flow or slip downward, a lapsing; , globus, lobe, globe, also lap, flap, and many other words,) externally a dry thin leaf, even as the f and v are a pressed and dried b. The radicals of lobe lb, the soft mass of the b (single lobed, or B, double lobed,) with a liquid l behind it pressing it forward. In globe, glb, the guttural g adds to the meaning the capacity of the throat. The feathers and wings of birds are still drier and thinner leaves. Thus, also, you pass from the lumpish grub in the earth to the airy and fluttering butterfly. The very globe continually transcends and translates itself, and becomes winged in its orbit. Even ice begins with delicate crystal leaves, as if it had flowed into moulds which the fronds of water plants have impressed on the watery mirror. The whole tree itself is but one leaf and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening earth, and towns and cities are the ova of insects in their axils. When the sun withdraws the sand ceases to flow, but in the morning the streams will start once more and branch and branch again into a myriad of others. You here see perchance how blood vessels are formed. If you look closely you observe that first there pushes forward from the thawing mass a stream of softened sand with a drop-like point, like the ball of the finger, feeling its way slowly and blindly downward, until at last with more heat and moisture, as the sun gets higher, the most fluid portion, in its effort to obey the law to which the most inert also yields, separates from the latter and forms for itself a meandering channel or artery within that, in which is seen a little silvery stream glancing like lightning from one stage of pulpy leaves or branches to another, and every and anon swallowed up in the sand. It is wonderful how rapidly yet perfectly the sand organizes itself as it flows, using the best material its mass affords to form the sharp edges of its channel. Such are the sources of rivers. In the silicious matter which the water deposits is perhaps the bony system, and in the still finer soil and organic matter the fleshy fibre or cellular tissue. What is man but a mass of thawing clay? The ball of the human finger is but a drop congealed. The fingers and toes flow to their extent from the thawing mass of the body. Who knows what the human body would expand and flow out to under a more genial heaven? Is not the hand a spreading palm leaf with its lobes and veins? The ear may be regarded, fancifully, as a lichen, umbilicaria, on the side of the head, with its lobe or drop. The lip (labium from labor (?)) laps or lapses from the sides of the cavernous mouth. The nose is a manifest congealed drop or stalactite. The chin is a still larger drop, the confluent drippings of the face. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The cheeks are a slide from the brows into the valley of the face, opposed and diffused by the cheek bones. Each rounded lobe of the vegetable leaf, too, is a thick and now loitering drop, larger or smaller; the lobes are the fingers of the leaf; and as many lobes as it has, in so many directions it tends to flow, and more heat or other genial influences would have caused it to flow yet farther. Thus it seemed that this one hillside illustrated the principle of all the operations of Nature. The Maker of this earth but patented a leaf. What Champollion will decipher this hieroglyphic for us, that we may turn over a new leaf at last? This phenomenon is more exhilarating to me than the luxuriance and fertility of vineyards. True, it is somewhat excrementitious in its character, and there is no end to the heaps of liver lights and bowels, as if the globe were turned wrong side outward; but this suggests at least that Nature has some bowels, and there again is mother of humanity. This is the frost coming out of the ground; this is Spring. It precedes the green and flowery spring, as mythology precedes regular poetry. I know of nothing more purgative of winter fumes and indigestions. It convinces me that Earth is still in her swaddling clothes, and stretches forth baby fingers on every side. Fresh curls springs from the baldest brow. There is nothing inorganic. These foliaceous heaps lie along the bank like the slag of a furnace, showing that Nature is “in full blast” within. The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit, –not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviæ from their graves. You may melt your metals and cast them into the most beautiful moulds you can; they will never excite me like the forms which this molten earth flows out into. And not only it, but the institutions upon it, are plastic like clay in the hands of the potter.

JEAN-FRANÇOIS CHAMPOLLION

Perry Miller had concluded that “all WALDEN is an adroit suspended anticipation of the climax of thawing sand and clay in the railroad cut.” More recently, Lawrence Buell dubbed this the “end point in Thoreau’s epic” because it “breathed life into the biblical formula of humankind’s earthy origins” by assigning priority to the life-giving role of the mineral kingdom over the descendant dukedoms of plants and animals.... Thoreau was mesmerized by streams of sediment giving rise to lobes, heaps, levees, and fans resembling foliage, leopard’s paws, lichen thalli, bowels, and brains.... “Few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe the forms which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep cut on the railroad through which I passed on my way to the village.” So begins Thoreau’s 2,500-word buildup to the climax of WALDEN. Flowing mixtures of water and sand exhibit “a sort of hybrid product, which obeys half way the law of currents, and half way that of vegetation. Flowing, it takes the forms of sappy leaves or vines.” Scholars have traced this inspiration back to Goethe’s ITALIAN JOURNEY, which Thoreau read and described in his 1837 JOURNAL.... By the time Thoreau left the pond in September 1847, HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN he had walked past the unstable Deep Cut countless times, had extended Goethe’s idea to its flowing sand, and had incorporated this extension into Version I of WALDEN, albeit with very limited scope: “As I go back and forth over the rail-road through the deep cut I have seen where the clayey sand like lava had flowed down when it thawed and as it streamed it assumed the forms of vegetation ... unaccountably interesting and beautiful.” This one sentence was all he wrote before dropping his WALDEN for several years.... By June 13 [1851] he had credited the artistry to the work of the universal potter, working with human clay ... during the last three consecutive days of December [1853], he watched the “artist” at work in his laboratory with deeper insight than ever before: “The earth I tread on is not a dead, inert mass. It is a body, has a spirit, is organic, and fluid to the influence of its spirit, and to whatever particle of that spirit is in me. She is not dead, but sleepeth ... this fundamental fertility near to the principle of growth ... So the poet’s creative moment is when the frost is coming out in the spring ... Even the solid globe is permeated by the living law. No doubt all creatures that live on its surface are but parasites.” Robert Richardson credits this final JOURNAL entry as the inspiration for Thoreau’s return to the WALDEN manuscript after his long hiatus. But Thoreau was not done yet, returning to the Deep Cut on March 1852 to write his most physically exacting observations of sand flowage, and to broaden the scale to the deltas of rivers. Motivating his return may have been the search for physical causes, because only now does he explore the fluid mechanics of what’s taking place, detailing: the thermally driven phase change from ice to liquid; the capillary tension of water; granular liquefaction; the control of slurry viscosity in causing either lobation or channelization; its shear strength as a function of water content; the flow rate as driven by slope; and the conditions fostering meandering. The difference between his symbolic descriptions of early 1851 and the rheological descriptions of early 1852, for the same phenomenon in the same place, exemplify his continuing shift toward physical science during this crucial year of his transition.... Thoreau was ... enthusiastic on February 2, 1854, when the phenomenon returned with a vengeance. “That sand foliage! It convinces me that Nature is still in her youth, -that florid fact about which mythology merely mutters, -that the very soil can fabulate as well as you or I. It stretches forth its baby fingers on every side. Fresh curls spring forth from its bald brow. There is nothing inorganic. This earth is not, then, a mere fragment of dead history, strata upon strata, like the leaves of a book, an object for a museum and an antiquarian, but living poetry, like the leaves of a tree, — not a fossil earth, but a living specimen.... The very earth, as well as the institutions upon it, is plastic like potter’s clay in the hands of the artist. These florid heaps lie along the bank like the slag of a furnace, showing that nature is in full blast within....” “There is nothing inorganic.” Surely, this is WALDEN’s most important line. Life springs from non-life. Walden Woods springs from the sand, which springs from the stone, which springs from the “slag” of Earth’s crust. The English writer Robert Chambers had proposed this controversial idea as early as 1844 in his VESTIGES OF CREATION, published just as Thoreau began his famous experiment in deliberate living. The idea that every living HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN thing on earth –including its human institutions– is the consequence of the planet’s “great central life,” its geothermal “furnace” running “full blast within,” still running steadily after four billion years worth of heat-driven tectonism and life-driven evolution. Thoreau’s insight regarding this origin of life and its corollary of continuous creation stood in direct diametric opposition to the “dead history” of catastrophism, then the prevailing paradigm. Earth itself, he saw, was a single “living specimen.” A week later, on February 8, 1854, Thoreau linked the sand foliage to the rebirth of spring: “This is the frost coming out of the ground; this is spring. It precedes the green and flowery spring, as mythology does ordinary literature and poetry.” Noticing on March 1 that “the sand foliage is now in its prime,” he returned for one last look on March 2. That evening, he hurdled over the final technical details to reach the core of his philosophy of Nature: the spontaneous emergence of order from disorder, of cosmos from chaos, of life from non-life: “How rapidly and perfectly it organizes itself! ... The atoms have already learned the law ... No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, which labors with the idea inwardly.” Earth’s crust, Thoreau now plainly saw, was not the residue of something that has happened. It is the ultimate raw material for everything that is happening in the present moment. Ancient rock must be destroyed so that new rock can rise again. This was James Hutton’s central idea: that creation is a never-ending loop of construction and destruction. The pitch pines of Walden Woods may seem parasitic upon its mineral soil, but only in the sense of having come later in time. In the grand scheme of things, the rocks need the plants to make the residues needed to make new rock. Pines are players on par with minerals. And the growth of every oak tree branching upward and outward from its acorn is analogous to the growth of the tree of life bifurcating from its first microbial ancestor to the amazing biodiversity on Earth today. During the passage of deep time, the branching was always toward a “higher and higher level of complexity, order, and information,” concluded Sven Jørgensen in his review of evolutionary thermodynamics, a book I found especially helpful. Thoreau’s merger of the ceaseless annual cycle of rebirth at the yearly scale with the ceaseless cycles of Huttonian revolutions at the billion-year-scale, turned his planet into living poetry. In every moment, its rocks are giving rise to unconsolidated earth, which is giving rise to primary producers (plants), which are supporting consumers (animals), which are supporting individual human lives and their societies. These last two cycle one after another, as every cemetery and archaeological site reveals. The same is true of the fossil record, as every fossiliferous outcrop shows. The whole Earth and everything it contains was, is, and will be forever coming and going. Thoreau worked on this sand foliage section of WALDEN from his first to last draft.... Thoreau’s challenging question about the “invisible fluid” was answered by Ilya Prigogine, who won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977 for his ideas about the spontaneous emergence of order, seemingly from nowhere. In decreasing complexity, Thoreau’s flock of birds, the sand foliage at the Deep Cut, and whirlpools HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN in the Sudbury River were all what Prigogine called “dissipative structures,” because they survive by dissipating the ambient energy field around them. More loosely, they are called “emergent phenomena.” Conceptually, each is a local island of order within the greater sea of growing disorder that surrounds and nourishes them. Mathematically, each is a discrete, nonlinear, dynamical system that thresholds into and out of existence when the ambient energy flux falls within certain limits: its domain restricted in some way. A stream whirlpool, for example, is a local island of order drawing energy from the river’s loss of gravitational potential energy, which is a manifestation of increasing disorder. The whirlpool disappears when the current becomes either too strong or too weak, a frothing rapid or a tranquil laminar flow, respectively. Thoreau’s sand foliage at the Deep Cut was also driven by the loss of gravitational potential energy, and was present only when the slurry energetics were just right. The fern frond he must have seen in the ditch below the Deep Cut was also a dissipative burning up its fuel. This thermodynamic commonality links the actual foliage of the fern with the pseudo foliage of the sand. Energetically, the fern, being more complex, is further from the common equilibrium state to which both must eventually fall: to death on the one hand and to destruction on the other. Fundamentally, both are heading toward the same place of renewal.... By the time WALDEN was submitted, Thoreau was beginning to see the emergent properties of nature everywhere: “The free, bold touch of Nature,” he called it. “Give any material, and Nature begins to work it up into pleasing forms, even the ugliness of gray scum on the ice.” Writer Joyce Carol Oates once reflected on the emergence of the sand foliage at the Deep Cut. Through its “fantastical designs on the embankment we are led to see how mysticism is science, science mysticism, poetry merely common sense.” At this point we have fathomed to the bottom of Thoreau’s bathymetric inductions to reach his ur-theory of nature, that it makes sense on its own terms. And at the Deep Cut, we have fathomed down through the hierarchical complexity of life to its inorganic geothermal origin, to the living rock.

Friendship has this peculiarity that it can never be talked about. It is never established –as an understood relation– Friends are never committed. What it would say can never be expressed. All words are gossip– what has speech to do with it. When a man approaches his friend who is thus transfigured to him, even his own hoarse salutation sounds prosaic and ridiculous and makes him least happy in his presence. –It is an exercise of the purest imagination and the rarest faith– I will be so related to thee– I will spend truth on thee– the friend responds through his nature and life and treats his friend with the same divine civility– There is friendship –but without confession –in silence as divine – If the other is dull or engrossed by the things of the world and does not respond to this lofty salute –or from a lower platform –hears imperfectly– That friendship is by necessity a profound secret which can never be revealed– It is a tragedy that cannot be told. None ever knows what was meant. There is no need that a man should confess his love of nature –and no more his love of man.– In any case what sentence is it indispensable should be framed and uttered Why a few sounds. True love does not quarrel for slight reasons –such mistakes as mutual friends can explain away –but alas only for adequate & fatal & everlasting reasons, which can never be set aside. That person is transfigured is God in the human form –henceforth– The lover asks no return but that the beloved will religiously accept & wear and not disgrace this apotheosis Whatever virtue or greatness we can conceive we ascribe to that one –of that at least his nature is capable –though he may {leaves missing} Yet a fault may appear greater than it is in many ways. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN I have never seen a person –who could bear criticism –who could not be flattered who would not bribe his judge.– Who would bear that truth should be loved always better than themselves —— Mythology is ancient history or biography The oldest history still memorable becomes a mythus– It is the fruit which history at last bears– The fable so far from being false contains only the essential parts of the history– What is today a diffuse biography –was anciently before printing was discovered – –a short & pithy tradition a century was equal to a thousand years. To day you have the story told at length with all its accompaniments In mythology you have the essential & memorable parts alone –the you & I the here & there the now & then being omitted– In how few words for instance the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard & Heloise instead of a volume They would have made a mythus of it among the fables of their gods and demigods or mortals –and then have stuck up their names to shine in some corner of the firmament– And who knows what Greeks may come again at last to mythologize their Love.– and our own deeds. How many Vols folio must the life and labors of Prometheus have filled if perchance it fell in days of cheap printing!– What shape at length will assume the fable of Columbus –to be confounded at last with that of Jason –& the expedition of the Argonauts –and future Homers quoted as authority. And Franklin there may be a line for him in the future Classical dictionary recording what that demigod did.– & referring him to some new genealogy – I see already the naked fables scattered up & down the history of modern –Europe– A small volume of mythology preparing in the press of time– The hero tell –with his bow –Shakspeare –the new Apollo –– Cromwell –napoleon. The most comprehensive the most pithy & significant book is the mythology Few phenomena give me more delight in the spring of the year than to observe the forms which thawing clay and sand assume on flowing down the sides of a deep cut on the rail road through which I walk. The clay especially assumes an infinite variety of forms– There lie the sand and clay all winter on this shelving surface an inert mass but when the spring sun comes to thaw the ice which binds them they begin to flow down the bank like lava – These little streams & ripples of lava like clay over flow & interlace one another like some mythological vegetation –like the forms which I seem to have seen imitated in bronze– What affects me is the presence of the law –between the inert mass and the luxuriant vegetation what interval is there? Here is an artist at work – as it were not at work but –a-playing designing – – It begins to flow & immediately it takes the forms of vines –or of the feet & claws of animals –or of the human brain or lungs or bowels– Now it is bluish clay now clay mixed with reddish sand –now pure iron sand –and sand and clay of every degree of fineness and every shade of color– The whole bank for a quarter of a mile on both sides is sometimes overlaid with a mass of plump & sappy verdure of this kind– I am startled probably because it grows so fast –it is produced in one spring day. The lobe of these leaves –perchance of all leaves –is a thick –now loitering drop like the ball of the finger larger or smaller so perchance the fingers & toes flow to their extent from the thawing mass of the body –& then are congealed for a night. –Whither may the sun of new spring lead them on– These roots of ours– In the mornings these resting streams start again and branch & branch again into a myriad others– Here it is coarse red sand & even pebbles –there fine adhesive clay– –And where the flowing mass reaches the drain at the foot of the bank on either side it spreads out flatter in to sands like those formed at the mouths of rivers –the separate streams losing their semicilindrical form-and gradually growing more and more flat –and running together as it is more moist till they form an almost flat sand –variously & beautifully shaded –& in which you can still trace the forms of vegetation till at length in the water itself they become the ripple marks on the bottom The lobes are the fingers of the leaf as many lobes as it has in so many directions it inclines to flow –more genial heat or other influences in its springs might have caused it flow farther. –So it seemed as if this one hill side contained an epitome of all the operations in nature. So the stream is but a leaf What is the river with all its branches –but a leaf divested of its pulp – – but its pulp is intervening earth –forests & fields & town & cities– What is the river but a tree an oak or pine –& its leaves perchance are ponds & lakes & meadows innumerable as the springs which feed it. I perceive that there is the same power that made me my brain my lungs my bowels my fingers & toes working in other clay this very day– I am in the studio of an artist. This cut is about a quarter of a mile long –& 30 or 40 feed deep –and in several places clay occurs which rises to within a dozen feet of the surface.– Where there is sand only the slope is great & uniform –but the clay being more adhesive inclines to stand out longer from the sand as in boulders –which are continually washing & coming down. Flowing down it of course runs together and forms masses and conglomerations but if flowed upward it would disperesed itself more –& grow more freely –& unimpeded In the next 9 miles which completed the extent of the voyage for this day We rowed across several small lakes –poled up numerous rapids & thoroughfares, and carried over 4 portages– I will give the names and distances for the benefit of future tourists 1st after leaving Ambejijis lake –a a quarter of a mile of rapids to the Portage or carry of 90 rods around Ambejisjis Falls. —— Than a mile & a half through Passamagamet lake, which is narrow & river like to the falls of the same name – HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Ambejisjis stream coming in on the right —— Then 2 miles through Katepskonegan lake.– to the carry of 90 rods around Katepskonegan Falls –which name signifies “carrying place” –Passamagamet stream coming in on the left —— Then 3 miles through Pockwockomus lake –a slight expansion of the river to the carry of 40 rods around the falls of the same name Katepskonegan stream coming in on the left —— The 3/4 of a mile through Aboljacarmegus lake, similar to the last to the portage of 40 rods aroud the fall of the same name —— Then 1/2 mile of rapid water to the Sowadnehunk dead water & the Aboljacknagesic stream. This is generally the order of names as you ascend the river &c v 81 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN May 19, Friday: Horace Greeley published a letter by Henry Thoreau in The New-York Daily Tribune, and coincidentally Thoreau was sending off another letter to Greeley on this date:

Concord May 19th 1848. My Friend Greeley,

I received from you fifty dollars to-day. For the last five years I have supported myself solely by the labor of my hands – I have not received one cent from any other source, and this has cost me so little time, say a month in the spring and another in the autumn, doing the coarsest work of all kinds, that I have probably enjoyed more leisure for literary pursuits than any contemporary. For more than two years past I have lived alone in the woods, in a good plastered and shingled house entirely of my own building, earning only what I wanted, and sticking to my proper work. The fact is man need not live by the sweat of his brow unless he sweats easier than I do he needs so little. For two years and two months all my expenses have amounted to but 27 cents a week, and I have fared gloriously in all respects. If a man must have money, and he needs but the smallest amount, the true and independent way to earn it is by day-labor with his hands at a dollar a day – I have tried many ways and can speak from experience.– Scholars are apt to think themselves privileged to complain as if their lot was a peculiarly hard one. How much have we heard about the attainment of knowledge under difficulties of poets starving in garrets depending on the patronage of the wealthy and finally dying mad. It is time that men sang another song – There is no reason why the scholar who professes to be a little wiser than the mass of men, should not do his work in the ditch occasionally, and by means of his superior wisdom make much less suffice for him – A wise man will not be unfortunate. How then would you know but he was a fool? This money therefore comes as a free and even unexpected gift to me My Friend Greeley, I know not how to thank you for your kindness to thank you is not the way – I can only assure you that I see and appreciate it – To think that while I have been sitting comparatively idle here, you have been so active in my behalf! You have done well for me. I only wish it had been in a better cause – Yet the value of good deeds is not affected by the unworthiness of their object.– Yes that was the right way, but who would ever have thought of it? I think it might not have occurred even to some what of a business man. I am not one in the common sense at all that is I am not acquainted with the forms – I might have way-laid him perhaps. I perceive that your way has this advantage too, that he who draws the draft determines the amount which it is drawn for. You prized it well, that was the exact amount.

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If more convenient the Maine article might be printed in the form of letters; you have only to leave off at the end of a day, and put the date before the next one. I shall certainly be satisfied to receive $25.00 for it that was all I expected if you took it but I do not by any means consider you bound to pay me that the article not being what you asked for, and being sent after so long a delay. You shall therefore, if you take it, send me 25 dollars now, or when you have disposed of it, whichever is most convenient that is, after deducting the necessary expenses which I perceive you must have incurred. This is all I ask for it. The carrier it is commonly who makes the money – I am concerned to see that you as carrier make nothing at all but are in danger of losing a good deal of your time as well as some of your money. So I get off or rather so I am compelled to go off muttering my ineffectual thanks – But believe me, my Friend, the gratification which your letter affords me is not wholly selfish. Trusting that my Good Genius will continue to protect me on this accession of wealth, I remain

Yours

Henry Thoreau

P.S. My book is swelling again under my hands, but as soon as I have leisure I shall see to those shorter articles. So look out. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do.

Summer: From mid-1848 to late Summer 1849, Drafts B and C of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS: TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Draft B was partly a fair copy of Draft A with some additions; revisions interlined in this draft suggest that Henry Thoreau had begun to view the manuscript as a book rather than as a series of lectures;

however, Draft C involved some rewriting. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN November 7, Tuesday: Presidential election day. The candidates were the Whig Zachary Taylor, the Democrat Lewis Cass, and the Free Soil Party candidate Martin Van Buren. Until this point the Whigs had been the expectable victors in Massachusetts elections. However, dramatic “Free-Soil” gains over the Whigs in this election marked the beginning of a long period of political instability. From this point until December 1853, when the tenuous aggregation of the Free-Soilers, Know-Nothings, temperance one-issue people, and Irish Catholics with the Democratic Party would begin to unravel, this uneasy coalition would have to hope for divisions within the Whig Party in order to achieve any victory at the Massachusetts polls. THE 2D GREAT AMERICAN DISUNION

This defeat marked the end of Martin Van Buren’s political career. Henry Clay had been betrayed by his friends and denied the Whig nomination. He commented ironically, in a speech at New Orleans, in regard to the presidential candidacy of the uncouth General Zachary Taylor, “I wish I could slay a Mexican” (what he meant was that maybe, could he have brought himself to be similarly uncouth, it might have been him that the Whigs nominated). There would be an echo of Clay’s sarcastic political remark “I wish I could slay a Mexican” in Henry Thoreau’s WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS: “I felt as if I could spit a Mexican with a good relish.” TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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WALDEN: On gala days the town fires its great guns, which echo PEOPLE OF like popguns to these woods, and some waifs of martial music WALDEN occasionally penetrate thus far. To me, away there in my beanfield at the other end of the town, the big guns sounded as if a puff ball had burst; and when there was a military turnout of which I was ignorant, I have sometimes had a vague sense all the day of some sort of itching and disease in the horizon, as if some eruption would break out there soon, either scarlatina or canker- rash, until at length some more favorable puff of wind, making haste over the fields and up the Wayland road, brought me information of the “trainers.” It seemed by the distant hum as if somebody’s bees had swarmed, and that the neighbors, according to Virgil’s advice, by a faint tintinnabulum upon the most sonorous of their domestic utensils, were endeavoring to call them down into the hive again. And when the sound died quite away, and the hum had ceased, and the most favorable breezes told no tale, I knew that they had got the last drone of them all safely into the Middlesex hive, and that now their minds were bent on the honey with which it was smeared. I felt proud to know that the liberties of Massachusetts and of our fatherland were in such safe keeping; and as I turned to my hoeing again I was filled with an inexpressible confidence, and pursued my labor cheerfully with a calm trust in the future. When there were several bands of musicians, it sounded as if the village was a vast bellows, and all the buildings expanded and collapsed alternately with a din. But sometimes it was a really noble and inspiring strain that reached these woods, and the trumpet that sings of fame, and I felt as if I could spit a Mexican with a good relish, –for why should we always stand for trifles?– and looked round for a woodchuck or a skunk to exercise my chivalry upon. These martial strains seemed as far away as Palestine, and reminded me of a march of crusaders in the horizon, with a slight tantivy and tremulous motion of the elm-tree tops which overhang the village. This was one of the great days; though the sky had from my clearing only the same everlastingly great look that it wears daily, and I saw no difference in it.

VIRGIL FELICIA DOROTHEA HEMANS WAR ON MEXICO

After the election of a Whig as president, Zachary Taylor, the friends of Nathaniel Hawthorne, such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell, took up a subscription for his support.

William J. Brown of Providence, Rhode Island would recollect a tactful speech he made (we will forgive him if what he would report later is perhaps more like the speech he could have made, would have made, should have made, than like the speech he actually did make, as such is a common failing among aged recollectors), as follows: PAGES 94-95: The Law and Order party broke up, the colored voters went over to the Whig party, the most of the Law and Order party being Whigs, still claiming our support. Their candidate for President was a slaveholder, Zachary Taylor. We did not like the HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN idea of voting for a slaveholder, and called a meeting on South Main Street to see what we should do. I opposed the meeting being held in that part of the city, fearing it would prove injurious to my interest. I was in that part of the city working at shoe making, my custom was good, and I knew that if I attended that meeting and spoke in favor of the Whig candidate, I should lose their custom and perhaps get hurt. I could not speak in favor of the Democratic candidate for I was opposed to that party. I was obliged to attend the meeting in the third ward. I was at my wit’s ends to know what to do. I attended the meeting and found the place packed with people, and about one hundred and fifty people filled out to the hall door. The meeting was opened when I arrived, Mr. Thomas Howland presiding as chairman. I went in and took the farthest corner of the room. George C. Willis was called, and took his position in front of the stage; addressing the chairman, he remarked, that we were in a very curious position; we must be decided in favor of one party or the other, and his opinion was of the two evils, we must choose the least; and his choice was in favor of Zachary Taylor, the Whig candidate. Several others spoke, and in harsh terms denounced the Democratic party. I was then called, and tried to decline, but the call came from every one, Brown, Brown. I was compelled to speak. I arose, addressed the president, and told the audience we were called together to settle a very grave question, which as citizens, it was our duty to decide which of the two parties we were to support. We were not to decide upon the man, but the party. If we were to decide on the candidate, it would be not to cast a vote for Taylor, for he is a slaveholder; and this I presume is the feeling of every colored voter, but we are identified with the Whig party, and it is the duty of every colored person to cast his vote for the Whig party, shutting his eyes against the candidate; as he is nothing more than a servant for the party; but I wish it understood that I am not opposed to either party as such; because I believe there are good and bad men in both parties. I have warm friends in the Democratic party, which I highly esteem, and who would take pleasure at any time in doing me a favor. Some of them are my best customers; but in speaking of the party, those men know well the duty demanded of them by their party, and would not neglect it for the sake of accommodating me. I blame no man for carrying out the principles of his party. He has a perfect right to do so, for this is a free country, and we all have a right alike to enjoy our own opinion; there being two parties we are stirred up to action. It makes lively times, and I hope the times will continue to be lively, and our meetings to increase in number, for the more we have, and the larger the attendance upon them, the more my business will increase, for the more shoes that are worn out in attending these meetings, the more custom I shall have. I sat down amid loud cheering. It was a bitter pill for us to vote for a man who was a slaveholder; but placing him in the light of a servant for the party, and we identified with that party, we managed to swallow it down whole. After voting to sustain Zachary Taylor as a candidate for the next Presidential election, we closed the meeting. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Lecture44

DATE PLACE TOPIC

March 1848 (?) Lexington MA; Robbins Building (?) “Economy” (?) November 22, Wednesday, 1848, at 7:30PM Salem MA; Lyceum Hall “Student Life in New England, Its Economy” December 20, Wednesday, 1848, at 7:30PM Gloucester MA; Town Hall “Economy — Illustrated by the Life of a Student”

44. From Bradley P. Dean and Ronald Wesley Hoag’s THOREAU’S LECTURES BEFORE WALDEN: AN ANNOTATED CALENDAR. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Narrative of Event: On May 19, 1848, Henry Thoreau wrote a letter to his friend Horace Greeley, the editor of the widely read New-York Tribune (THE CORRESPONDENCE OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU, pages 223-25). In it he included a long paragraph on the economy of his life in the woods at Walden Pond, a paragraph that paraphrased portions of “Economy,” his first “Walden; or, Life in the Woods” lecture. Much impressed, Greeley printed the slightly revised passage in his newspaper, along with some of his own laudatory remarks, under the title “A Lesson for Young Poets.” [You will find Greeley’s 25 May 1848 article on the following screen.] HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

We are continually receiving letters from young gentlemen who deem themselves born to enlighten the world in some way — to “strike the sounding lyre,” or from the Editorial tripod dispense wisdom and guidance to an instructed and admiring world. These generally want to know why they cannot be employed in our establishment, or find a publisher for their poems, or a chance in some shape to astonish mankind and earn a livelihood by letters. — To this large and increasing class, we wish to propound one question: “Suppose all who desire to live by Literature or Trade could find places, who would hoe the needful corn or dig the indispensible potatoes?” — But we purposed in beginning to ask their attention to the following extract from a private letter we have just received from a very different sort of literary youth — a thorough classical scholar, true poet (though he rarely or never wrote verses,) and never sought to make a livelihood by his writings, though there are not six men in America who can surpass them. We feel indeed honored by his friendship, and in the course of a private letter we have just received from him he casually says: “For the last five years, I have supported myself solely by the labor of my hands. I have not received one cent from any other source; and this has cost me so little time — say, a month in the Spring and another in the Autumn — doing the coarsest work of all kinds, that I have probably enjoyed more leisure for literary pursuits than any contemporary. For more than two years past, I have lived alone in the woods, in a good plastered and shingled house entirely of my own building, earning only what I wanted, and sticking to my proper work. The fact is, Man need not live by the sweat of his brow — unless he sweats easier than I do — he needs so little. For two years and two months, all my expenses have amounted to but 27 cents a week, and I have fared gloriously in all respects. If a man must have money — and he needs but the smallest amount — the true and independent way to earn it is by day-labor with his “Scholars are apt to think themselves privileged to complain as if their lot were a peculiarly hard one. How much have we heard about the attainment of knowledge under difficulties — of poets starving in garrets — of literary men depending on the patronage of the wealthy, and finally dying mad! It is time that men sang another song. — There is no reason why the scholar, who professes to be a little wiser than the mass of men, should not do his work in the ditch occasionally, and, by means of his superior wisdom, make much less suffice for him. A wise man will not be unfortunate. How otherwise would you know that he was not a fool?” — We trust our friend will pardon the liberty we have taken in printing the foregoing, since we are sure of effecting signal good thereby. We have no idea of making a hero of him. Our object is simply to shame the herd of pusillanimous creatures who whine out their laziness in bad verses, and execrate the stupidity of publishers and readers who will not buy these maudlin effusions at the paternal estimate of their value, and thus spare them the dire necessity of doing something useful for a living. It is only their paltriness that elevates our independent friend above the level of ordinary manhood, and whenever they shall rise to the level of true self- respect, his course will no longer be remarkable. “What!” says one of them, “do you mean that every one must hoe corn or swing the sledge — that no life is useful or honorable but one of rude manual toil.” — No, Sir; we say no such thing. — If any one is sought out, required, demanded, for some vocation specially intellectual, let him embrace it and live by it. But the general rule is that Labor — that labor which produces food and clothes and shelter — is every man’s duty and destiny, for which he should be fitted, in which he should be willing to do his part manfully. But let him study, and meditate, and cultivate his nobler faculties as he shall find opportunity; and when ever a career of intellectual exertion shall open before him, let him embrace it if he be inclined and qualified. But to coin his thoughts into some marketable semblance, disdain useful labor of the hands because he had a facility of writing, and go crying his mental wares in the market, seeking to exchange them for bread and clothes — this is most degrading and despicable. Shall not the world outgrow such shabbiness? HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Greeley’s article attracted much national attention and comment (for discussion, see lecture 20 below). Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was living in Salem at the time, may have informed the managers of the local lyceum that Thoreau was the anonymous author of the paragraph in the Tribune and that the paragraph was part of a lecture Thoreau had written about his life in the Walden Woods. In any event, soon after the Tribune article appeared, the managers voted to invite Thoreau to deliver this lecture. The invitation, however, didn’t reach him until October, when Hawthorne himself, as the new corresponding secretary of the Salem Lyceum, sent the following letter on the twenty-first:45 The Managers of the Salem Lyceum, some time ago, voted that you should be requested to deliver a Lecture before that Institution, during the approaching season. I know not whether Mr Chever, the late corresponding Secretary, communicated the vote to you; at all events, no answer has been received, and, as Mr Chever’s succesor in office, I am instructed to repeat the invitation. Permit me to add my own earnest wishes that you will accept it — and also, laying aside my official dignity, to express my wife’s desire and my own that you will be our guest, if you do come. In case of your compliance, the Managers would be glad to know at what time it will best suit you to deliver the Lecture.

Hawthorne added in a postscript, “I live at No 14, Mall Street — where I shall be very happy to see you. The stated fee for Lectures is $20.” Very likely this was the first lecture Thoreau was actually paid to deliver.

After receiving Thoreau’s acceptance, Hawthorne wrote to him again on 20 November46 to request his almost immediate presence in Salem: I did not sooner write you, because there were pre-engagements for the two or three first lectures, so that I could not arrange matters to have you come during the present month. But, as it happens, the expected lectures have failed us; and we now depend on you to come this very next Wednesday. I shall announce you in the paper of tomorrow, so you must come. I regret that I could not give you longer notice. We shall expect you on Wednesday, at No 14 Mall. Street.

After his signature, Hawthorne added two more thoughts:47 If it is utterly impossible for you to come, pray write me a line so that I may get it Wednesday morning. But, by all means, come. This Secretaryship is an intolerable bore. I have travelled thirty miles, this wet day for no other business. Short notice notwithstanding, Thoreau answered Hawthorne’s call and, two days after the letter was penned, gave the second lecture in a course of twenty before the Salem Lyceum. Other lecturers that year included Daniel Webster, Louis Agassiz, Theodore Parker, Waldo Emerson, Charles Sumner, and Horace Mann, Sr. (THE MASSACHUSETTS LYCEUM DURING THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE, page 19).

The day after his lecture, Thoreau accompanied Hawthorne to Craigie House, the Cambridge home of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, where they dined with Longfellow and Ellery Channing II.

45.CORRESPONDENCE, pages 230-31. 46.CORRESPONDENCE, page 233. 47.CORRESPONDENCE, pages 233-34. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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On 21 November Hawthorne had written to Longfellow about Thoreau, remarking, “You would find him well worth knowing: he is a man of thought and originality; with a certain iron-poker-ishness, and uncompromising stiffness in his mental character, which is interesting, though it grows wearisome on close and frequent acquaintance.”48 Longfellow, however, had likely already formed his own impression of Thoreau, for the two men had dined together at Emerson’s house only a week earlier (Walter Roy Harding’s THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU: A BIOGRAPHY, page 237).

Advertisements, Reviews, and Responses: On the last day of October and throughout the first half of November 1848, the Salem Register, Salem Observer, and Salem Tri-Weekly Gazette announced a partial list of “eminent lecturers” who would appear in

48.Samuel Longfellow, THE LIFE OF HENRY WORDSWORTH LONGFELLOW, 2 volumes (Boston: Ticknor, 1886), 2:136. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN the course. Among them were Webster, Agassiz, Horace Mann, Sr., Emerson, and “Henry S. Thoreau, of Concord, N.H.” (For the Wednesday evening lectures, the “whole number of tickets has been limited to six hundred and thirty,” the Register reported.) Although Hawthorne had told Thoreau he would advertise Thoreau’s appearance at the Salem Lyceum in the local newspapers beginning on 21 November, we have been unable to locate any advertisements in Salem newspapers for that or the following day.

The Salem Observer on 25 November 1848 carried the following review, praising Thoreau’s lecture, identifying him as the reclusive scholar of New-York Tribune fame, and remarking — not uncharitably — Thoreau’s likeness to Emerson: Mr. Thoreau, of Concord, gave his auditors a lecture on Wednesday evening, sufficiently Emersonian to have come from the great philosopher himself. We were reminded of Emerson continually. In thought, style & delivery, the similarity was equally obvious. There was the same keen philosophy running through him, the same jutting forth of “brilliant edges of meaning” as Gilfillan has it. Even in tone of voice, Emerson was brought strikingly to the ear; and in personal appearance also, we fancied some little resemblance. The close likeness between the two would almost justify a charge of plagiarism, were it not that Mr. Thoreau’s lecture furnished ample proof of being a native product, by affording all the charm of an original. Rather than an imitation of Emerson, it was the unfolding of a like mind with his; as if the two men had grown in the same soil and under the same culture. The reader may remember having recently seen an article from the N. Y. Tribune describing the recluse life led by a scholar, who supported himself by manual labor, and on a regime which cost only twenty seven cents a week, making it necessary to labor but six weeks to provide sufficient of the necessaries of life to serve the balance of the year. Mr. Thoreau is the hero of that story — although he claims no heroism, considering himself simply as an economist. The subject of this lecture was Economy, illustrated by the experiment mentioned. — This was done in an admirable manner, in a strain of exquisite humor, with a strong under current of delicate satire against the follies of the times. Then there were interspersed observations, speculations, and suggestions upon dress, fashions, food, dwellings, furniture, &c.&c., sufficiently queer to keep the audience in almost constant mirth, and sufficiently wise and new to afford many good practical hints and precepts. The performance has created “quite a sensation” amongst the Lyceum goers. Another newspaper review of sorts was the summary of the then-concluding lecture season in the area by a correspondent to the Boston Daily Evening Traveller. Without specifying which of Thoreau’s Salem lectures was intended — he had given another there on 28 February 1849 — the correspondent on 16 March 1849 cited “a delectable compound of oddity, wit and transcendentalism, from Mr. Thoreau, of Concord,” among a few other worthy presentations.

Notably, on the day of Thoreau’s second Salem lecture that season, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, in a letter to HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Mrs. Mary Peabody Mann, praised his earlier November delivery as follows:49 This evening Mr. Thoreau is going to lecture and will stay with us. His lecture before was so enchanting; such a revelation of nature in all its exquisite details of wood-thrushes, squirrels, sunshine, mists and shadows, fresh, vernal odors, pine-tree ocean melodies, that my ear rang with music, and I seemed to have been wandering through copse and dingle! Mr. Thoreau has risen above all his arrogance of manner, and is as gentle, simple, ruddy, and meek as all geniuses should be; and now his great blue eyes fairly outshine and put into shade a nose which I once thought must make him uncomely forever. Description of Topic: During the twenty-one months that had elapsed since Thoreau’s delivery of “History of Myself” in mid- February 1847, he had carefully revised his earlier “Walden; or, Life in the Woods” manuscript. As J. Lyndon Shanley points out, “The effect and apparent intention of his work … was to tidy up and to increase the clarity and force of the first version, which he had written at the pond.”50 Shanley also notes that the second version of the manuscript is not much longer than the first (both versions contained the text of three lectures, although Thoreau never delivered a third lecture from the earlier manuscript) and that Thoreau’s handwriting in the 51 second version “is the most clearly formed in the whole manuscript” of WALDEN. But because Shanley sees the WALDEN manuscript almost solely as an evolving book, he failed to consider why the earlier (Shanley’s “version I”) and later (his versions II and III) manuscripts are about the same length and why Thoreau wrote the later of the two manuscripts more carefully. The reason is not that Thoreau was simply revising a book manuscript but that he was using the earlier version of the manuscript, version I, as the basis for preparing the reading drafts for a course of three lectures, versions II and III. Once written, he apparently planned to keep those reading drafts intact as lectures so that he could read from them while continuing to expand the larger “Walden; or, Life in the Woods” manuscript into a book. If that was indeed his plan, it was well-founded, for the first lecture in that course, his early “Economy” lecture, shares with his early “Life without Principle” lecture the honor of being his most frequently delivered lecture, each being delivered nine times.

The lecture Thoreau delivered in Salem on this date is much shorter than but nonetheless quite similar to the “Economy” chapter of WALDEN. A small amount of material in the lecture was subsequently omitted from the published chapter. For example, a close summary of a later delivery of this same lecture text published in the Portland Transcript of 31 March 1849 (see lecture 20 below) includes the paraphrase, “Here we walked

49.Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, MEMORIES OF HAWTHORNE (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1897), pages 92-93. 50.Shanley, THE MAKING OF WALDEN, page 28. 51.In THE MAKING OF WALDEN, page 28, Shanley makes what we regard as a misleading distinction between versions II and III of the WALDEN manuscript. After noting that Thoreau “revised [version II] and then wrote version III so close upon II that they almost seem one piece,” Shanley says, “It is certain, however, that there are two versions here and that Thoreau wrote III after II; not only are the ink and handwriting different, but also III contains revisions of parts of II” (p. 28). We submit that Thoreau wrote version II sequentially, from front to back, as three clear-text reading drafts for lecturing and that version III represents various types of revisions to those reading drafts. For instance, the first eight pages of version II are not extant, but the first five pages of version III are. Because the pin perforations in the center-left margins of the leaf containing version II, page 9, match exactly the pin perforations of the leaves containing version III, page 5, Thoreau clearly used both versions in a single text at one time, and we can surmise that he derived the text of version III, pages 1-5, from revising the text on the now non-extant pages 1-8 of version II. Generally speaking, Thoreau’s organic or incremental method of composition, by which we mean the way he added material to and suppressed material from his constantly evolving texts over time rather than simply rewrote his revised texts, renders misleading almost any description employing mechanical terms, such as “draft,” “stage,” or “version.” For descriptions and discussions of Thoreau’s method of composition, see William L. Howarth, THE LITERARY MANUSCRIPTS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974), pages xxix-xxx; Bradley P. Dean, “Reconstructions of Thoreau’s Early ‘Life without Principle’ Lectures,” STUDIES IN THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE 1987, pages 288-91; and Dean, “The Sound of a Flail: Reconstructions of Thoreau’s Early ‘Life without Principle’ Lectures,” M.A. thesis, Eastern Washington University, 1984, pages 99-118. Copies of Dean’s thesis are available at WaChenE; CtU; the Thoreau Textual Center, CU-SB; and the Thoreau Society Archives, MCo. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN cautiously about the earth, but in Typee trees grew to the height of 60 feet, and the natives easily ran up to their tops.”

With just a few exceptions, the manuscript pages Thoreau read from in Salem are now housed at CSmH (HM 924). Many of those pages refer to the “audience” or those who “hear” the “lecture,” whereas in the published version of those passages in WALDEN the corresponding references are to “readers” or those who “read” the “book.” Thoreau also made a few minor changes for this lecture, or possibly a later delivery of this lecture, to accommodate his audience. For instance, where he had originally written “I have travelled a good deal in Concord,” he interlined over “Concord” in pencil “my native town”; and elsewhere in the manuscript he changed “this town” (Concord) to “this city” (either Salem or a later venue). TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Lecture52

DATE PLACE TOPIC

November 22, Wednesday, 1848, at 7:30PM Salem MA; Lyceum Hall “Student Life in New England, Its Economy” December 20, Wednesday, 1848, at 7:30PM Gloucester MA; Town Hall “Economy — Illustrated by the Life of a Student” January 3, Wednesday, 1849,at 7PM Concord; Unitarian Church, Vestry “White Beans and Walden Pond”

52. From Bradley P. Dean and Ronald Wesley Hoag’s THOREAU’S LECTURES BEFORE WALDEN: AN ANNOTATED CALENDAR. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Narrative of Event: The circumstances of Henry Thoreau’s invitation to lecture in, and resulting visit to, Gloucester are not known; however, the success of his nearby Salem lecture a month before probably was the catalyst. The records of the Gloucester Lyceum show that Thoreau’s 20 December 1848 lecture was the third in a course of ten that included presentations by Waldo Emerson, Charles Sumner, and the Reverend William Henry Channing.53 Interestingly, Thoreau, Emerson, and Arthur S. Train each received fifteen dollars for their lectures, while the seven other speakers were given twelve dollars each.54

Advertisements, Reviews, and Responses: The Gloucester News and Semi-Weekly Messenger reported on 20 December 1848, “Mr. Thoreau lectures before the Lyceum this evening. This lecturer is one of the eccentric characters of the age, of whom Ralph W. Emerson predicted a few years since, that ‘He would be heard from.’ From the notices we have seen of Mr. Thoreau, we think an original and highly entertaining lecture may be expected.”

Notwithstanding the high expectations, two full reviews in local papers suggest that the lecture that had played so well in Salem was less well received in Gloucester. The 23 December Gloucester Telegraph took umbrage at Tho- reau’s suggestion that “there were probably many present who were in debt for some of their dinners and clothes, and were then and there cheating their creditors out of an hour of borrowed time” by noting that “If such was the case, we can only regret that any patrons of the Gloucester Lyceum are of that complexion.” Thoreau’s remarks about Concord were greeted with equal skepticism by this extraordinarily literal-minded reviewer: “The lecturer gave a very strange account of the state of affairs at Concord. In the shops and offices were large numbers of human beings suffering tor- tures to which those of the Bramins are mere pastimes. We cannot say whether this was in jest or in earnest. If a joke, it was a most excruciating one — if true, the attention of the Home Missionary Society should be directed to that quarter forthwith.” Other excerpts from this review suggest that the lecture, despite a few high spots, was generally

53.Manuscript notebook, Records of the Glouster Lyceum, MGl. 54.Manuscript notebook, Records of the Glouster Lyceum, MGl. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN perceived as a failure for its suspect philosophy: The lecturer spoke at considerable length of society, men, manners, travelling, clothing, etc., often “bringing down the house” by his quaint remarks. Now and then there was a hard hit at the vices and follies of mankind, which “told” with considerable effect. There were hits, too, not remarkably hard .... From the details which he gave of indoor life, we should suppose that his housekeeping was in rather a primitive style. Compared with this, Robinson Crusoe must have fared sumptuously every day. We know of no benefit likely to accrue to society from it, other than that yeast is a superfluous article. The experience of the lecturer had taught him that a man may live very comfortably by six weeks labor per annum. Probably this is no new thing to many, for there is a good deal of living with less labor than that, though perhaps questionable independence. He concluded with some remarks about the benevolent and reforming spirit of the day, of which he seemed to entertain a very poor opinion. Much of it was described as a moral simoon from whose approach he should flee for dear life. No immediate diminution to the numbers of our benevolent societies need be apprehended. Neither may a material alteration in their character be anticipated from an infusion of the ideal reforming spirit described. We believe that concerning this lecture there are various opinions in the community. With all deference to the sagacity of those who can see a great deal where there is little to be seen — hear much where there is hardly anything to be heard — perceive a wonderful depth of meaning where in fact nothing is really meant, we would take the liberty of expressing the opinion that a certain ingredient to a good lecture was, in some instances, wanting.

A review in the Gloucester News, also published on December 23, 1848, praised the entertainment value of the lecture but pronounced it educationally worthless; the reviewer also expressed irritation with Thoreau’s pre- sumedly intentional aping of Emerson’s manner. Because almost all of this review constitutes an appraisal of the lecture rather than just a summary, the entire article is quoted here [GO TO REVIEW].

In a letter to his cousin-in-law George Augustus Thatcher, penned apparently on December 26, 1848, Thoreau remarked on his Gloucester notoriety, “I hear that the Gloucester paper has me in print again, and the Republican — whatever they may say is not to the purpose only as it serves as an advertisement of me. There are very few whose opinion I value” (THE CORRESPONDENCE OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU, page 234).

The Salem Observer marked Thoreau’s neighboring lecture with this observation on 23 December 1848: “H. S. Thoreau lectured in Gloucester on Wednesday evening.”

Description of Topic: See “ECONOMY”. Also see REVIEW. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Lyceum. The lecture on Wednesday evening was delivered by Henry S. Thoreau of Concord, as he announced, on the subject of economy. We conceived his object to be an attempt to prove that there is no necessity for mankind to labor but a small portion of their time, to earn the necessaries of life; and to show how their moral, intellectual and physical condition may be improved. In his introduction, which was somewhat long, he attacked with keen but good natured sarcasm, the customs and fashions of the present age, and ridiculed with much force the folly of men, who voluntarily undertake labors more than Herculean, and absolutely interminable, in pursuit of an object that can be attained with comparatively little cost and exertion. To illustrate his theory, he gave a humorous account of his doings, during a period of more than two years, spent in seclusion, on the shores of a pond in Concord. This sketch of a hermit’s life was highly entertaining, being interspersed with beautiful descriptions of natural scenery, well told anecdotes, many philosophical digressions, and quaint sentiments[.] He proved by his experiment that a man can build a house with his own hands, in a few months, that will afford him all the shelter, warmth and comfort a mortal actually needs, at an expense of only about twenty-five or thirty dollars; that good, wholesome food, sufficient for one hermit can be procured for four cents a week; that to pay all the needful expenses of such a life, it is necessary to labor only six weeks in a year. The remainder of his time may be devoted to reading, and the development of his moral and intellectual nature. We would not object to live on Mr. Thoreau’s plan a year or two, but in the present state of society, its general adoption would be rather impracticable, had men a taste for it; but only the ardent devoted lover of nature could endure it three weeks. Mr. Thoreau and a few other men in the world, can despise the pleasures of society, worship God out doors in old clothes, can hear his voice in the whistling or gently sighing wind, and read eloquent sermons from the springing flowers; but the great mass of men do, and, will always laugh at such pursuits. The lecturer’s remarks on the actual cost of living, were not at all startling, — there are, we have been often told, families of eight or ten souls in this town, who live a year on one hundred and fifty dollars, which falls considerably within Mr. T.’s estimate. We were pleased with his observations on philanthropy; doing good, he said, does not agree with his constitution; and if he should see a man coming towards his house with such intentions towards himself, he would run for his life. — There are many people in this world whose spiritual constitutions seem to lack all the elements of good, and when they undertake to be philanthropic, if they do not burn buildings in heaven and make deserts on earth, or commit any other havoc, ascribed to Phaethon by Mr. Thoreau, and not mentioned in Ovid, — they scorch the souls of the hapless victims of their charity, and exert an influence fatal as the Sirce, on whatever they approach. Mr. Thoreau’s lecture certainly lacked system, and some of his flights were rather too lofty for the audience; but in originality of thought, force of expression, and flow of genuine humor, he has few equals. His frequent and apposite classical allusions allowed that he is well versed in ancient lore, and possesses a retentive memory. His style and enunciation — alternately dwelling on, and jerking out his words — are decidedly Emersonian, and it is evident that in this respect, he is an imitator; a consideration which always detracts much from the force of genius: the affectation of another’s style creates in the mind feelings akin to those which arise on beholding an ambitious urchin dressed in his father’s coat and boots. We guess Mr. Thoreau often relieved the “tedium” of his secluded life by frequent intercourse with his neighbor, Mr. Emerson. Some of the lecturer’s Latin Antitheses, and quaint puns, we fear, were not exactly appreciated; and many local allusions might have been omitted, having no interest for a Gloucester audience. On the whole, though the lecture was entertaining and original, it was not calculated to do much good, and we think may be considered rather a literary curiosity, than a practical dissertation on economy. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1849

The disturbed former minister Joel Tyler Headley, “the autocrat of all quacks” per Edgar Allen Poe, made a couple of trips into the woodland mountains of upstate New York and described his quest for mental health in the wilderness in THE A DIRONDACK; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS (numerous expanded versions of this wildly popular Baker and Scribner book would be published over the following 3 decades).

TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN James Thomas Fields’s POEMS were published in Boston by the firm in which he was becoming a junior partner, the firm of William D. Ticknor & Co. JAMES T. FIELD’S POEMS

Ellery Channing’s THE WOODMAN, AND OTHER POEMS (Boston: James Munroe & company). THE WOODMAN, &C., &C.

This volume would be in Henry Thoreau’s personal library. He would include a portion of “Baker Farm” and a portion of “Walden Spring” in WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, and a portion of “Old Sudbury Inn” in his journal for the autumn of this year. TIMELINE OF WALDEN BAKER FARM. 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. Cell of seclusion, Haunt of old time, Rid of confusion, Empty of crime, Landscape! where the richest element Is a little sunshine innocent; In thy insidious marsh, In thy cold opaque wood, Thy artless meadow, And forked orchard's writhing mood, Still Baker Farm! There lies in them a fourfold charm. Alien art thou to God and Devil! Man too forsakes thee, No one oms to revel On thy rail-fenced lea, HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Save gleaning Silence gray-headed, Who drains the frozen apple red, Thin jar of winter’s jam, Which he will with gipsy sugar cram. And here a Poet builded, In the completed years, For behold a trivial cabin That to destruction steers. Should we judge it was built? Rather by kind nature spilt To interfere with circumstance, And put a comma to the verse And west trends blue Fairhaven bay, O’er whose stained rocks the white pines sway, And south slopes Nobscot grand, And north the still Cliffs stand. Pan of unwrinkled cream, May some Poet dash thee in his churn, And with thy beauty mad, Verse thee in rhymes that burn; Thy beauty, — the beauty of Baker Farm! In the drying field, And the knotty tree, In hassock and bield, And marshes at sea! Thou art expunged from to-day, Rigid in parks of thy own, Where soberly shifts the play, And the wind sighs in monotone. Debate with no man hast thou, With questions art never perplexed, As tame at the first sight as now, In thy plain, russet gabardine dressed. I would hint at thy religion, Hadst thou any, Piny fastness of wild pigeon, Squirrel's litany,. Never thumbed a gilt Prayer Book, Here the cawing, sable rook! Art thou orphan of a deed, Title that a court can read, Or dost thou stand For the entertaining land, That no man owns, Pure grass and stones? Idleness is in the preaching, Simpleness is all the teaching, Churches in the steepled woods, Galleries in green solitudes, Fretted never by a noise, Eloquence that each enjoys. Here humanity may trow, It is feasible to slough The corollary of the village, Lies, thefts, clothes, meats, and tillage! Come, ye who love, And ye who hate, Children of the Holy Dove, And Guy Faux of the State, And hang conspiracies, From the tough rafters of the trees! Still Baker Farm! So fair a lesson thou dost set, Commensurately wise, HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Lesson no one may forget. Consistent sanctity, Value that cannot be spent, Volume that cannot be lent, Passable to me and thee, For Heaven thou art meant!

WALDEN SPRING. Whisper ye leaves your lyrics in my ear, Carol thou glittering bird thy summer song, And flowers, and grass, and mosses on the rocks, And the lull woods, lead me in sober aisles, And may I seek this happy day the Cliffs, When fluid summer melts all ores in one, Both in the air, the water; and the ground. And so I walked beyond the last, gray house, And o’er the upland glanced, and down the mead, Then turning went into the oaken copse,— Heroic underwoods that take the air With freedom, nor respect their parent’s death. Yet a few steps, then welled a cryptic spring, Whose temperate nectar palls not on the taste, Dancing in yellow circles on the sand, And carving through the ooze a crystal bowl. Here sometime have I drank a bumper rare, Wetting parched lips, from a sleek, emerald leaf, Nursed at the fountain's breast, and neatly filled The forest-cup, filled by a woodland hand, That from familiar things draws sudden use, Strange to the civic eye, to Walden plain. And resting there after my thirst was quenched, Beneath the curtain of a civil oak, That muses near this water and the sky, I tried some names with which to grave this fount. And as I dreamed of these, I marked the roof, Then newly built above the placid spring, Resting upon some awkward masonry. In truth our village has become a butt For one of these fleet railroad shafts, and o'er Our peaceful plain, its soothing sound is — Concord, Four times and more each day a rumbling train Of painted cars rolls on the iron road, Prefigured in its advent by sharp screams That Pandemonium satisfied should hear. The steaming tug athirst, and lacking drink, The railroad eye direct with fatal stroke Smote the spring's covert, and by leaden drain Thieved its cold crystal for the engine's breast. Strange! that the playful current from the woods, Should drag the freighted train, chatting with fire, And point the tarnished rail with man and trade.

OLD SUDBURY INN. Who set the oaks Along the road? Was it not nature's hand, Old Sudbury Inn! where I have stood And wondered at the sight, The oaks my delight?

And the elms, All boldly branching to the sky, And the interminable forests, Old Sudbury Inn! that wash thee nigh On every side, With a green and rustling tide: The oaks and elms, HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN And the surrounding woods, And Nobscot rude, Old Sudbury Inn! creature of moods, That I could find Well suited to the custom of my mind. Most homely seat! Where nature eats her frugal meals, And studies to outwit, Old Sudbury Inn! that thy inside reveals, Long mayst thou be, More than a match for her and me. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Draft C paragraph for page 54 of WALDEN: this started as material penciled at the bottom of Draft C leaf #87 and the bottom of leaf #89 (a leaf from Draft B carried forward into Draft C). The thing about Thoreau’s argument in regard to the economics of rail travel is, he knows perfectly well that such an argument is not pertinent when the objective is the meeting of a schedule, such as when there is someone waiting for you in a distant town. Thoreau often used the railroad for such purposes, as in traveling to deliver lectures, and he had no qualms over an inconsistency in this regard. Thoreau’s argument cannot be defeated by such quibbles over consistency because it is not really an economic argument about wasting money at all. It is a spiritual argument about wasting the present moment which is all we ever have of life. What is being attacked is not thriftlessness, the sort of habit a prudent Poor Richard would grasp as a poor habit, but a habit much more dangerous, an attitude which causes waste of life. Thus Thoreau’s blazing amazing non-sequitur, about the Englishman who had to go to India in order to get up garret and become a poet when he might better have been up garret all along, is not a non-sequitur at all, as it would be were we to take seriously the Poor Richard wrapper in which this advice is packaged.

Such is the universal law, which no man can ever outwit, and even with regard to the railroad ^even we may say it is as broad as it is long & if you want to make a railroad round the world for mankind you must grade the whole surface. Men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all will at length ride nowhere ^somewhere, in next to no time, and for nothing; no doubt they will ^can ride at last who shall have earned their fare, but they will probably have lost their elasticity and desire to travel by that time. Every day it happens that when the bell rings mankind ^a crowd rushes to the station house ^depot, the conductor shouts “all aboard,” Whiz-tiz-siz-burz, and the cars are off. But when the smoke blows away and the vapor condenses, it is perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over; and it is called, and is, “a melancholy accident.” This spending of the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part, reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once. “But!” exclaim a million Irishmen starting up from all the shanties in the land, spade in hand, “is not this railroad which we have built a good thing?” Yes, I answer, comparatively good, that is, you might have done worse; but I wish, as you are brother of mine, that you could have spent your time better than digging in this dirt.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

WALDEN: Such is the universal law, which no man can ever outwit, and with regard to the railroad even we may say it is as broad as it is long. To make a railroad round the world available to all mankind is equivalent to grading the whole surface of the planet. Men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the depot, and the conductor shouts, “All aboard!” when the smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over, –and it will be called, and will be, “A melancholy accident.” No doubt they can ride at last who shall have earned their fare, that is, if they survive so long, but they will probably have lost their elasticity and desire to travel by that time. This spending of the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once. “What!” exclaim a million Irishmen starting up from all the shanties in the land, “is not this railroad which we have built a good thing?” Yes, I answer, comparatively good, that is, you might have done worse; but I wish, as you are brother of mine, that you could have spent your time better than digging in this dirt. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Lecture55

DATE PLACE TOPIC

December 20, Wednesday, 1848, at 7:30PM Gloucester MA; Town Hall “Economy — Illustrated by the Life of a Student” January 3, Wednesday, 1849, at 7PM Concord; Unitarian Church, Vestry “White Beans and Walden Pond” February 28, Wednesday, 1849, at 7:30PM Salem MA; Lyceum Hall “Student Life, Its Aims and Employments”

55. From Bradley P. Dean and Ronald Wesley Hoag’s THOREAU’S LECTURES BEFORE WALDEN: AN ANNOTATED CALENDAR. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Narrative of Event: According to the records of the Concord Lyceum, “Jany 3d 1849 Lecture by D. H. Thoreau Concord. Subject: WHITE BEANS & WALDEN POND” (THE MASSACHUSETTS LYCEUM DURING THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE, page 163). Henry Thoreau’s lecture was the fifth in a course of nineteen, although, as Thomas Blanding has argued, Thoreau may have been “a last minute substitute.”56 The evidence for this conclusion is a journal entry by James Lorin Chapin of Lincoln, who on 3 January 1849 wrote, “I had calculated to have gone to the Lyceum but heard that the man who was expected could not come and so I did not go. Have spent most of the evening in reading, but feel so drowsy that I think I cannot sit up longer than nine o’clock.”57 Chapin could not have meant that he had planned to go to the Lincoln Lyceum because it met only on Tuesdays and, in fact, had met the previous evening, 2 January (MASSACHUSETTS LYCEUM, page 218).

TIMELINE OF WALDEN Advertisements, Reviews, and Responses: None known.

Description of Topic: With the exception of a few that have been lost or scattered, the manuscript pages Thoreau read from are at CSmH (HM 924) and contain passages that he later used in the “Sounds” and “The Bean-Field” chapters of WALDEN. Also see entries for lecture 15 above about the three-lecture “Walden; or, Life in the Woods” course and lecture 19 below about James Lorin Chapin’s journal entry after hearing a later delivery of this same lecture.

February 8, Thursday: Henry Thoreau was written to by William Davis Ticknor of William D. Ticknor & Co in Boston. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Boston Feb. 8. 1849 Henry D Thoreau Esq Concord 56.Blanding, “Thoreau’s Local Lectures,” 23. 57.Quoted in Blanding, “Thoreau’s Local Lectures,” 23. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Mass. Dear Sir, We find on looking over publishing matters that we cannot well undertake anything more at present. If however you feel inclined we will publish “Walden or Life in the Woods” on our own a/c, say One Thousand copies, allowing you 10 pr.ct. copyright on the Retail Price on all that are sold. The style of printing & binding to be like Emersons Essays. Respy Ticknor & Co.

1832-1834 Allen & Ticknor 1834-1843 William D. Ticknor 1843-1849 William D. Ticknor & Co. 1849-1854 Ticknor, Reed & Fields 1854-1868 Ticknor and Fields 1868-1871 Fields, Osgood & Co. 1871-1878 James R. Osgood & Co. 1878-1880 Houghton, Osgood, & Co. 1880-1908 Houghton, Mifflin, & Co. 1908-2007 Houghton Mifflin Company 2007-???? Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

February 20, Tuesday: Henry Thoreau was written to by Bronson Alcott in Boston.

{No MS — printed copy MEMOIR OF BRONSON ALCOTT, page 461}12 WEST STREET, BOSTON, Feb. 20, 1849. DEAR SIR, — I send you herewith the names of a select company of gentlemen, esteemed as deserving of better acquaintance, and disposed for closer fellowship of Thought and Endeavor, who are hereby invited to assemble at No. 12 West Street, on Tuesday, the 20th of March next, to discuss the advantages of organizing a Club or College for the study and diffusion of the Ideas and Tendencies proper to the nineteenth century; and to concert measures, if deemed desirable, for promot- ing the ends of good fellowship. The company will meet at 10 A.M. Your presence HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN is respectfully claimed by Yours truly, A. BRONSON ALCOTT.

That evening Margaret Fuller was reporting in the New-York Tribune on republican Rome: Rome, Evening of Feb. 20, 1849. It is said you cannot thoroughly know any place till you have both summered and wintered in it; but more than one summer and winter of experience seems to be needed for Rome. How I fretted last winter, during the three months’ rain, and sepulchral chill, and far worse than sepulchral odors, which accompanied it! I thought it was the invariable Roman winter, and that I should never be able to stay here during another; so took my room only by the month, thinking to fly so soon as the rain set in. And lo! it has never rained at all; but there has been glorious sun and moon, unstained by cloud, always; and these last days have been as warm as May, — the days of the Carnival, for I have just come in from seeing the Moccoletti. The Republican Carnival has not been as splendid as the Papal, the absence of dukes and princes being felt in the way of coaches and rich dresses; there are also fewer foreigners than usual, many having feared to assist at this most peaceful of revolutions. But if less splendid, it was not less gay; the costumes were many and fanciful, — flowers, smiles, and fun abundant. This is the first time of my seeing the true Moccoletti; last year, in one of the first triumphs of democracy, they did not blow oat the lights, thus turning it into an illumination. The effect of the swarms of lights, little and large, thus in motion all over the fronts of the houses, and up and down the Corso, was exceedingly pretty and fairy-like; but that did not make up for the loss of that wild, innocent gayety of which this people alone is capable after childhood, and which never shines out so much as on this occasion. It is astonishing the variety of tones, the lively satire and taunt of which the words Senza moccolo, senza mo, are susceptible from their tongues. The scene is the best burlesque on the life of the “respectable” world that can be imagined. A ragamuffin with a little piece of candle, not even lighted, thrusts it in your face with an air of far greater superiority than he can wear who, dressed in gold and velvet, erect in his carriage, holds aloft his light on a tall pole. In vain his security; while he looks down on the crowd to taunt the wretches senza mo, a weak female hand from a chamber window blots out his pretensions by one flirt of an old handkerchief. Many handsome women, otherwise dressed in white, wore the red liberty cap, and the noble though somewhat coarse Roman outline beneath this brilliant red, by the changeful glow of million lights, made a fine effect. Men looked too vulgar in the liberty cap. How I mourn that my little companion E. never saw these things, that would have given him such store of enchanting reminiscences for all his after years! I miss him always on such occasions; formerly it was through him that I enjoyed them. He had the child’s heart, had the susceptible fancy, and, naturally, a fine discerning sense for whatever is individual or peculiar. I missed him much at the Fair of St. Eustachio. This, like the Carnival, was last year entirely spoiled by constant rain. I HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN never saw it at all before. It comes in the first days, or rather nights, of January. All the quarter of St. Eustachio is turned into one toy-shop; the stalls are set out in the street and brightly lighted, up. These are full of cheap toys, — prices varying from half a cent up to twenty cents. The dolls, which are dressed as husband and wife, or sometimes grouped in families, are the most grotesque rag-babies that can be imagined. Among the toys are great quantities of whistles, tin trumpets, and little tambourines; of these every man, woman, and child has bought one, and is using it to make a noise. This extempore concert begins about ten o’clock, and lasts till midnight; the delight of the numerous children that form part of the orchestra, the good-humored familiarity without the least touch of rudeness in the crowd, the lively effect of the light upon the toys, and the jumping, shouting figures that, exhibit them, make this the pleasantest Saturnalia. Had you only been there, E., to guide me by the hand, blowing the trumpet for both, and spying out a hundred queer things in nooks that entirely escape me! The Roman still plays amid his serious affairs, and very serious have they been this past winter. The Roman legions went out singing and dancing to fight in Lombardy, and they fought no less bravely for that. When I wrote last, the Pope had fled, guided, he says, “by the hand of Providence,” — Italy deems by the hand of Austria, — to Gaëta. He had already soiled his white robes, and defamed himself for ever, by heaping benedictions on the king of Naples and the bands of mercenaries whom he employs to murder his subjects on the least sign of restlessness in their most painful position. Most cowardly had been the conduct of his making promises he never meant to keep, stealing away by night in the coach of a foreign diplomatist, protesting that what he had done was null because he had acted under fear, — as if such a protest could avail to one who boasts himself representative of Christ and his Apostles, guardian of the legacy of the martyrs! He selected a band of most incapable men to face the danger he had feared for himself; most of these followed his example and fled. Rome sought an interview with him, to see if reconciliation were possible; he refused to receive her messengers. His wicked advisers calculated upon great confusion and distress as inevitable on the occasion; but, for once, the hope of the bad heart was doomed to immediate disappointment. Rome coolly said, “If you desert me, — if you will not hear me, — I must act for myself.” She threw herself into the arms of a few men who had courage and calmness for this crisis; they bade her think upon what was to be done, meanwhile avoiding every excess that could give a color to calumny and revenge. The people, with admirable good sense, comprehended and followed up this advice. Never was Rome so truly tranquil, so nearly free from gross ill, as this winter. A few words of brotherly admonition have been more powerful than all the spies, dungeons, and scaffolds of Gregory. “The hand of the Omnipotent works for us,” observed an old man whom I saw in the street selling cigars the evening before the opening of the Constitutional Assembly. He was struck by the radiant beauty of the night. The old people observe that there never has been such a winter as this which follows the establishment by the French of a republic. May the omens speed well! A host of enemies without are ready HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN to levy war against this long-suffering people, to rivet anew their chains. Still there is now an obvious tide throughout Europe toward a better order of things, and a wave of it may bear Italy onward to the shore. The revolution, like all genuine ones, has been instinctive, its results unexpected and surprising to the greater part of those who achieved them. The waters, which had flowed so secretly beneath the crust of habit that many never heard their murmur, unless in dreams, have suddenly burst to light in full and beautiful jets; all rush to drink the pure and living draught. As in the time of Jesus, the multitude had been long enslaved beneath a cumbrous ritual, their minds designedly darkened by those who should have enlightened them, brutified, corrupted, amid monstrous contradictions and abuses; yet the moment they hear a word correspondent to the original nature, “Yes, it is true,” they cry. “It is spoken with, authority. Yes, it ought to be so. Priests ought to be better and wiser than other men; if they were, they would not need pomp and temporal power to command respect. Yes, it is true; we ought not to lie; we should not try to impose upon one another. We ought rather to prefer that our children should work honestly for their bread, than get it by cheating, begging, or the prostitution of their mothers. It would be better to act worthily and kindly, probably would please God more than the kissing of relics. We have long darkly felt that these things were so; now we know it.” The unreality of relation between the people and the hierarchy was obvious instantly upon the flight of Pius. He made an immense mistake then, and he made it because neither he nor his Cardinals were aware of the unreality. They did not know that, great as is the force of habit, truth only is imperishable. The people had abhorred Gregory, had adored Pius, upon whom they looked as a saviour, as a liberator; finding themselves deceived, a mourning-veil had overshadowed their love. Still, had Pius remained here, and had courage to show himself on agitating occasions, his position as the Pope, before whom they had been bred to bow, his aspect, which had once seemed to them full of blessing and promise, like that of an angel, would have still retained power. Probably the temporal dominion of the Papacy would not have been broken up. He fled; the people felt contempt for his want of force and truth. He wrote to reproach them with ingratitude; they were indignant. What had they to be grateful for? A constitution to which he had not kept true an instant; the institution of the National Guard, which he had begun to neutralize; benedictions, followed by such actions as the desertion of the poor volunteers in the war for Italian independence? Still, the people were not quite alienated from Pius. They felt sure that his heart was, in substance, good and kindly, though the habits of the priest and the arts of his counsellors had led him so egregiously to falsify its dictates and forget the vocation with which he had been called. Many hoped he would see his mistake, and return to be at one with the people. Among the more ignorant, there was a superstitious notion that he would return in the night of the 5th of January. There were many bets that he would be found in the palace of the Quirinal the morning of the 6th. All these lingering feelings were finally extinguished by the advice of excommunication. As this may not have readied America, I subjoin a translation. Here I was obliged to make use of a manuscript copy; all the printed HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN ones were at once destroyed. It is probably the last document of the kind the world will see. MANIFESTO OF PIUS IX. “To OUR MOST BELOVED SUBJECTS: — “From this pacific abode to which it has pleased Divine Providence to conduct us, and whence we can freely manifest our sentiments and our will, we have waited for testimonies of remorse from our misguided children for the sacrileges and misdeeds committed against persons attached to our service, — among whom some have been slain, others outraged in the most barbarous manner, — as well as for those against our residence and our person. But we have seen nothing except a sterile invitation to return to our capital, unaccompanied by a word of condemnation for those crimes or the least guaranty for our security against the frauds and violences of that same company of furious men which still tyrannizes with a barbarous despotism over Rome and the States of the Church. We also waited, expecting that the protests and orders we have uttered would recall to the duties of fidelity and subjection those who have despised and trampled upon them in the very capital of our States. But, instead of this, a new and more monstrous act of undisguised felony and of actual rebellion by them audaciously committed, has filled the measure of our affliction, and excited at the same time our just indignation, as it will afflict the Church Universal. We speak of that act, in every respect detestable, by which, it has been pretended to initiate the convocation of a so-called General National Assembly of the Roman States, by a decree of the 29th of last December, in order to establish new political forms for the Pontifical dominion. Adding thus iniquity to iniquity, the authors and favorers of the demagogical anarchy strive to destroy the temporal authority of the Roman Pontiff over the dominions of Holy Church, — however irrefragably established through the most ancient and solid rights, and venerated, recognized, and sustained by all the nations, — pretending and making others believe that his sovereign power can be subject to controversy or depend on the caprices of the factious. We shall spare our dignity the humiliation of dwelling on all that is monstrous contained in that act, abominable through the absurdity of its origin no less than the illegality of its form and the impiety of its scope; but it appertains to the apostolic authority, with which, however unworthy, we are invested, and to the responsibility which binds us by the most sacred oaths in the sight of the Omnipotent, not only to protest in the most energetic and efficacious manner against that same act, but to condemn it in the face of the universe as an enormous and sacrilegious crime against our independence and sovereignty, meriting the chastisements threatened by divine and human laws. We are persuaded that, on receiving the impudent invitation, you were full of holy indignation, and will have rejected far from you this guilty and shameful provocation. Notwithstanding, that none of you may say he has been deluded by fallacious seductions, and by the preachers of subversive doctrines, or ignorant of what is contriving by the foes of all order, all law, all right, true liberty, and your happiness, we to-day again raise and utter abroad our voice, so that you may be more certain of the HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN absoluteness with which we prohibit men, of whatever class and condition, from taking any part in the meetings which those persons may dare to call, for the nomination of individuals to be sent to the condemned Assembly. At the same time we recall to you how this absolute prohibition is sanctioned by the decrees of our predecessors and of the Councils, especially of the Sacred Council-General of Trent, Sect. XXII. Chap. 11, in which the Church has fulminated many times her censures, and especially the greater excommunication, as incurred without fail by any declaration of whomsoever daring to become guilty of whatsoever attempt against the temporal sovereignty of the Supreme Pontiff, this we declare to have been already unhappily incurred by all those who have given aid to the above-named act, and others preceding, intended to prejudice the same sovereignty, and in other modes and under false pretexts have, perturbed, violated, and usurped our authority. Yet, though we feel ourselves obliged by conscience to guard the sacred deposit of the patrimony of the Spouse of Jesus Christ, confided to our care, by using the sword of severity given to us for that purpose, we cannot therefore forget that we are on earth the representative of Him who in exercise of his justice does not forget mercy. Raising, therefore, our hands to Heaven, while we to it recommend a cause which is indeed more Heaven’s than ours, and while anew we declare ourselves ready, with the aid of its powerful grace, to drink even to the dregs, for the defence and glory of the Catholic Church, the cup of persecution which He first wished to drink for the salvation of the same, we shall not desist from supplicating Him benignly to hear the fervent prayers which day and night we unceasingly offer for the salvation of the misguided. No day certainly could be more joyful for us, than that in which it shall be granted to see return into the fold of the Lord our sons from whom now we derive so much bitterness and so great tribulations. The hope of enjoying soon the happiness of such a day is strengthened in us by the reflection, that universal are the prayers which, united to ours, ascend to the throne of Divine Mercy from the lips and the heart of the faithful throughout the Catholic world, urging it continually to change the hearts of sinners, and reconduct them into the paths of truth and of justice.

“Gaëta, January 6, 1849.” The silliness, bigotry, and ungenerous tone of this manifesto excited a simultaneous movement in the population. The procession which carried it, mumbling chants, for deposit in places provided for lowest uses, and then, taking from, the doors of the hatters’ shops the cardinals’ hats, threw them into the Tiber, was a real and general expression of popular disgust. From that hour the power of the scarlet hierarchy fell to rise no more. No authority can survive a universal movement of derision. From that hour tongues and pens were loosed, the leaven of Machiavellism, which still polluted the productions of the more liberal, disappeared, and people talked as they felt, just as those of us who do not choose to be slaves are accustomed to do in America. “Jesus,” cried an orator, “bade them feed his lambs. If they have done so, it has been to rob their fleece and drink their blood.” “Why,” said another, “have we been so long deaf to the saying, HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN that the temporal dominion of the Church was like a thorn in the wound of Italy, which shall never be healed till that thorn is extracted?” And then, without passion, all felt that the temporal dominion was in fact finished of itself, and that it only remained to organize another form of government. ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

That evening Margaret Fuller was also reporting to the New-York Tribune from Rome on the uncertain future: Rome, Evening of Feb. 20, 1849. The League between the Italian States, and the Diet which was to establish it, had been the thought of Gioberti, but had found the instrument at Rome in Mamiani. The deputies were to be named by princes or parliaments, their mandate to be limited by the existing institutions of the several states; measures of mutual security and some modifications in the way of reform would be the utmost that could be hoped from this Diet. The scope of this party did not go beyond more vigorous prosecution of the war for independence, and the establishment of good, institutions for the several principalities on a basis of assimilation. Mazzini, the great radical thinker of Italy, was, on the contrary, persuaded that unity, not union, was necessary to this country. He had taken for his motto, GOD AND THE PEOPLE, and believed in no other powers. He wished an Italian Constitutional Assembly, selected directly by the people, and furnished with an unlimited mandate to decide what form was now required by the needs of the Peninsula. His own wishes, certainly, aimed at a republic; but the decision remained with the representatives of the people. The thought of Gioberti had been at first the popular one, as he, in fact, was the seer of the so-called Moderate party. For myself, I always looked upon him as entirely a charlatan, who covered his want of all real force by the thickest embroidered mantle of words. Still, for a time, he corresponded with the wants of the Italian mind. He assailed the Jesuits, and was of real use by embodying the distrust and aversion that brooded in the minds of men against these most insidious and inveterate foes of liberty and progress. This triumph, at least, he may boast: that sect has been obliged to yield; its extinction seems impossible, of such life-giving power was the fiery will of Loyola. In the Primate he had embodied the lingering hope of the Catholic Church; Pius IX. had answered to the appeal, had answered only to show its futility. He had run through Italy as courier for Charles Albert, when the so falsely styled Magnanimous entered, pretending to save her from the stranger, really hoping to take her for himself. His own cowardice and treachery neutralized the hope, and Charles Albert, abject in his disgrace, took a retrograde ministry. This the country would not suffer, and obliged him after a while to reassume at least the position of the previous year, by taking Gioberti for his premier. But it soon became evident that the ministry of Charles Albert was in the same position as had been that of Pius IX. The hand was powerless when the head was indisposed. Meantime the name of Mazzini had echoed through Tuscany from the revered lips of Montanelli; it reached the Roman States, and though at first propagated by foreign impulse, yet, as soon as understood, was HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN welcomed as congenial. Montanelli had nobly said, addressing Florence: “We could not regret that the realization of this project should take place in a sister city, still more illustrious than ours.” The Romans took him at his word; the Constitutional Assembly for the Roman States was elected with a double mandate, that the deputies might sit in the Constitutional Assembly for all Italy whenever the other provinces could send theirs. They were elected by universal suffrage. Those who listened to Jesuits and Moderates predicted that the project would fail of itself. The people were too ignorant to make use of the liberty of suffrage. But ravens now-a-days are not the true prophetic birds. The Roman eagle recommences her flight, and it is from its direction only that the high-priest may draw his augury. The people are certainly as ignorant as centuries of the worst government, the neglect of popular education, the enslavement of speech and the press, could make them; yet they have an instinct to recognize measures that are good for them. A few weeks’ schooling at some popular meetings, the clubs, the conversations of the National Guards in their quarters or on patrol, were sufficient to concert measures so well, that the people voted in larger proportion than at contested elections in our country, and made a very good choice. The opening of the Constitutional Assembly gave occasion for a fine procession. All the troops in Rome defiled from the Campidoglio; among them many bear the marks of suffering from the Lombard war. The banners of Sicily, Venice, and Bologna waved proudly; that of Naples was veiled with crape. I was in a balcony in the Piazza di Venezia; the Palazzo di Venezia, that sternest feudal pile, so long the head-quarters of Austrian machinations, seemed to frown, as the bands each in passing struck up the Marseillaise. The nephew of Napoleon and Garibaldi, the hero of Montevideo, walked together, as deputies. The deputies, a grave band, mostly advocates or other professional men, walked without other badge of distinction than the tricolored scarf. I remembered the entrance of the deputies to the Council only fourteen months ago, in the magnificent carriages lent by the princes for the occasion; they too were mostly nobles, and their liveried attendants followed, carrying their scutcheons. Princes and councillors have both fled or sunk into nothingness; in those councillors was no counsel. Will it be found in the present? Let us hope so! What we see to-day has much more the air of reality than all that parade of scutcheons, or the pomp of dress and retinue with which the Ecclesiastical Court was wont to amuse the people. A few days after followed the proclamation of a Republic. An immense crowd of people surrounded the Palazzo della Cancelleria, within whose court-yard Rossi fell, while the debate was going on within. At one o’clock in the morning of the 9th of February, a Republic was resolved upon, and the crowd rushed away to ring all the bells. Early next morning I rose and went forth to observe the Republic. Over the Quirinal I went, through the Forum, to the Capitol. There was nothing to be seen except the magnificent calm emperor, the tamers of horses, the fountain, the trophies, the lions, as usual; among the marbles, for living figures, a few dirty, bold women, and Murillo boys in the sun just as usual. I passed into the Corso; there were men in the liberty cap, — of HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN course the lowest and vilest had been the first to assume it; all the horrible beggars persecuting as impudently as usual. I met some English; all their comfort was, “It would not last a month.” “They hoped to see all these fellows shot yet.” The English clergyman, more mild and legal, only hopes to see them (i.e. the ministry, deputies, &c.) hung. Mr. Carlyle would be delighted with his countrymen. They are entirely ready and anxious to see a Cromwell for Italy. They, too, think, when the people starve, “It is no matter what happens in the back parlor.” What signifies that, if there is “order” in the front? How dare the people make a noise to disturb us yawning at billiards! I met an American. He “had no confidence in the Republic.” Why? Because he “had no confidence in the people.” Why? Because “they were not like our people.” Ah! Jonathan and John, — excuse me, but I must say the Italian has a decided advantage over you in the power of quickly feeling generous sympathy, as well as some other things which I have not time now to particularize. I have memoranda from you both in my note-book. At last the procession mounts the Campidoglio. It is all dressed with banners. The tricolor surmounts the palace of the senator; the senator himself has fled. The deputies mount the steps, and one of them reads, in a clear, friendly voice, the following words: — “FUNDAMENTAL DECREE OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL ASSEMBLY OF ROME. “ART. I. — The Papacy has fallen in fact and in right from the temporal government of the Roman State. “ART. II. — The Roman Pontiff shall have all the necessary guaranties for independence in the exercise of his spiritual power. “ART. III. — The form of government of the Roman State shall be a pure democracy, and will take the glorious name of Roman Republic. “ART. IV. — The Roman Republic shall have with the rest of Italy the relations exacted by a common nationality.” Between each of these expressive sentences the speaker paused; the great bell of the Capitol gave forth its solemn melodies; the cannon answered; while the crowd shouted, Viva la Republica! Viva Italia! The imposing grandeur of the spectacle to me gave new force to the emotion that already swelled my heart; my nerves thrilled, and I longed to see in some answering glance a spark of Rienzi, a little of that soul which made my country what she is. The American at my side remained impassive. Receiving all his birthright from a triumph of democracy, he was quite indifferent to this manifestation on this consecrated spot. Passing the winter in Rome to study art, he was insensible to the artistic beauty of the scene, — insensible to this new life of that spirit from which all the forms he gazes at in galleries emanated. He “did not see the use of these popular demonstrations.” Again I must mention a remark of his, as a specimen of the ignorance in which Americans usually remain during their flighty visits to these scenes, where they associate only with one another. And I do it the rather as this seemed a really thoughtful, intelligent man; no vain, vulgar trifler. He said, HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN “The people seem only to be looking on; they take no part.” What people? said I. “Why, these around us; there is no other people.” There are a few beggars, errand-boys, and nurse-maids. “The others are only soldiers.” Soldiers! The Civic Guard! all the decent men in Rome. Thus it is that the American, on many points, becomes more ignorant for coming abroad, because he attaches some value to his crude impressions and frequent blunders. It is not thus that any seed-corn can be gathered from foreign gardens. Without modest scrutiny, patient study, and observation, he spends his money and goes home, with a new coat perhaps, but a mind befooled rather than instructed. It is necessary to speak the languages of these countries, and know personally some of their inhabitants, in order to form any accurate impressions. The flight of the Grand Duke of Tuscany followed. In imitation of his great exemplar, he promised and smiled to the last, deceiving Montanelli, the pure and sincere, at the very moment he was about to enter his carriage, into the belief that he persevered in his assent to the liberal movement. His position was certainly very difficult, but he might have left it like a gentleman, like a man of honor. ‘T was pity to destroy so lightly the good opinion the Tuscans had of him. Now Tuscany meditates union with Rome. Meanwhile, Charles Albert is filled with alarm. He is indeed betwixt two fires. Gioberti has published one of his prolix, weak addresses, in which, he says, that in the beginning of every revolution one must fix a limit beyond which he will not go; that, for himself, he has done it, — others are passing beyond his mark, and he will not go any farther. Of the want of thought, of insight into historic and all other truths, which distinguishes the “illustrious Gioberti,” this assumption is a specimen. But it makes no difference; he and his prince must go, sooner or later, if the movement continues, nor is there any prospect of its being stayed unless by foreign intervention. This the Pope has not yet, it is believed, solicited, but there is little reason to hope he will be spared that crowning disgrace. He has already consented to the incitement of civil war. Should an intervention be solicited, all depends on France. Will she basely forfeit every pledge and every duty, to say nothing of her true interest? It seems that her President stands doubtful, intending to do what is for his particular interest; but if his interest proves opposed to the republican principle, will France suffer herself again to be hoodwinked and enslaved? It is impossible to know, she has already shown such devotion to the mere prestige of a name. On England no dependence can be placed. She is guided by no great idea; her Parliamentary leaders sneer at sentimental policy, and the “jargon” of ideas. She will act, as always, for her own interest; and the interest of her present government is becoming more and more the crushing of the democratic tendency. They are obliged to do it at home, both in the back and the front parlor; it would not be decent as yet to have a Spielberg just at home for obstreperous patriots, but England has so many ships, it is just as easy to transport them to a safe distance. Then the Church of England, so long an enemy to the Church of Rome, feels a decided interest with it on the subject of temporal possessions. The rich English traveller, fearing to see the HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Prince Borghese stripped of one of his palaces for a hospital or some such low use, thinks of his own twenty-mile park and the crowded village of beggars at its gate, and muses: “I hope to see them all shot yet, these rascally republicans.” How I wish my country would show some noble sympathy when an experience so like her own is going on. Politically she cannot interfere; but formerly, when Greece and Poland were struggling, they were at least aided by private contributions. Italy, naturally so rich, but long racked and impoverished by her oppressors, greatly needs money to arm and clothe her troops. Some token of sympathy, too, from America would be so welcome to her now. If there were a circle of persons inclined to trust such to me, I might venture to promise the trust should be used to the advantage of Italy. It would make me proud to have my country show a religious faith in the progress of ideas, and make some small sacrifice of its own great resources in aid of a sister cause, now. But I must close this letter, which it would be easy to swell to a volume from the materials in my mind. One or two traits of the hour I must note. Mazzarelli, chief of the present ministry, was a prelate, and named spontaneously by the Pope before his flight. He has shown entire and frank intrepidity. He has laid aside the title of Monsignor, and appears before the world as a layman. Nothing can be more tranquil than has been the state of Rome all winter. Every wile has been used by the Oscurantists to excite the people, but their confidence in their leaders could not be broken. A little mutiny in the troops, stimulated by letters from their old leaders, was quelled in a moment. The day after the proclamation of the Republic, some zealous ignoramuses insulted the carriages that appeared with servants in livery. The ministry published a grave admonition, that democracy meant liberty, not license, and that he who infringed upon an innocent freedom of action in others must be declared traitor to his country. Every act of the kind ceased instantly. An intimation that it was better not to throw large comfits or oranges during the Carnival, as injuries have thus been sometimes caused, was obeyed with equal docility. On Sunday last, placards affixed in the high places summoned the city to invest Giuseppe Mazzini with the rights of a Roman citizen. I have not yet heard the result. The Pope made Rossi a Roman citizen; he was suffered to retain that title only one day. It was given him on the 14th of November, he died the 15th. Mazzini enters Rome at any rate, for the first time in his life, as deputy to the Constitutional Assembly; it would be a noble poetic justice, if he could enter also as a Roman citizen. February 24. The Austrians have invaded Ferrara, taken $200,000 and six hostages, and retired. This step is, no doubt, intended to determine whether France will resent the insult, or whether she will betray Italy. It shows also the assurance of the Austrian that the Pope will approve of an armed intervention. Probably before I write again these matters will reach some decided crisis. ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Nathaniel Hawthorne had heard Thoreau lecture twice on Chapter 1 of WALDEN and Thoreau informed him in a letter on this date that, while writing WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, he had been thinking of Hawthorne as a reader. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Hawthorne would communicate later, however, to a noble acquaintance, that Thoreau was “not an agreeable person, and in his presence one feels ashamed of having any money, or a house to live in, or so much as two coats to wear, or of having written a book that the public will read – his own mode of life being so unsparing a criticism on all other modes, such as the world approves.”58

Hawthorne’s judgment would be that Thoreau “despises the world, and all that it has to offer, and, like other humorists, is an intolerable bore”: He despises the world, and all that it has to offer, and, like other humorists, is an intolerable bore. I shall cause it to be known to him that you sat up till two o’clock reading his book; and he will pretend that it is of no consequence, but will never forget it.... He is not an agreeable person, and in his presence one feels ashamed of having any money, or a house to live in, or so much as two coats to wear, or having written a book that the public will read — his own mode of life being so unsparing a criticism on all other modes, such as the world approves. — Hawthorne’s letter of November 18, 1854 to Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron Houghton (1809-1885), page 334 in Edward Mather’s NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE: A MODEST MAN (NY: Crowell, 1940)

58. In reading through Hawthorne’s materials, I have been gobstruck with the extent to which he was deploying the categories “agreeable,” “not agreeable,” and “disagreeable.” Circumstances are repeatedly categorized as in one of precisely these three diagnostic categories! The persons whom he encountered are repeatedly categorized as in one of precisely these three diagnostic categories! This seems to have been for him the utterly fundamental categorization of all reality! As a flaming sexist, everything female was of course “disagreeable.” As a flaming racist, everything black and everything connected in any way with blackness (such as Republicanism or abolitionism) was also “disagreeable.” However, I have been forced to the conclusion upon close reading that the distinction being made between the first two of these categories (“agreeable” versus “not agreeable”) was more of a class thing, and that that distinction had been different in kind from the disjunction he had been attempting between the outside two of these categories (“agreeable” versus “disagreeable”). It is almost as if he had been attempting a triage, a triage between the grand souls of Heaven with the more dicey souls floating somehow in Purgatory, versus demonic evils forever consigned to an Outer Darkness. It seems significant, therefore, that in the case of this communication with a member of the British nobility, Thoreau is merely allowed to float in limbo as “not an agreeable person” (one of the souls held in a Purgatory), rather than being utterly condemned to the flames as “disagreeable.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN February 28, Wednesday: 1st steamship entered San Francisco Bay, California.

Sophia Peabody Hawthorne wrote to her sister, Mrs. Mary Peabody Mann, describing how Henry Thoreau’s great blue eyes offset his uncomely nose: This evening Mr. Thoreau is going to lecture, and will stay with us. His lecture before was so enchanting; such a revelation of nature in all its exquisite details of wood-thrushes, squirrels, sunshine, mists and shadows, fresh, vernal odors, pine-tree ocean melodies, that my ear rang with music, and I seemed to have been wandering through copse and dingle! Mr. Thoreau has risen above all his arrogance of manner, and is as gentle, simple, ruddy, and meek as all geniuses should be; and now his great blue eyes fairly outshine and put into shade a nose which I once thought must make him uncomely forever. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN This was either Henry’s 1st, or his 3d, lecture, lecture on the general topic of his life in the woods, and it took place at Salem — either “Economy” or “Where I lived” (per a review quoted by Holtje), or “White Beans.”

His Aunt Maria Thoreau wrote to Miss Prudence Ward, “He is preparing his Book for the press, and the title is to be, Waldien (I don’t know how to spell it) or Life in the Woods”: Today Henry has gone to Salem to read another lecture they seem to be wonderfully taken with him there, and next month he is to go to Portland [Maine], to deliver the same, and George wants him to keep on to Bangor they want to have him there, and if their funds will hold out they intend to send for him, they give 25 dollars, and at Salem and Portland 20 — he is preparing his Book for the press and the title is to be, Waldien (I don’t know how to spell it) or life in the Woods. I think the title will take if the Book don’t. I was quite amused with what Sophia told me her mother said about it the other day, she poor girl was lying in bed with a sick head ache when she heard Cynthia (who has grown rather nervous of late) telling over her troubles to Mrs. Dunbar, after speaking of her own and Helen’s sickness, she says, and there’s Sophia she’s the greatest trial I’ve got, for she has complaints she never will get rid of, and Henry is putting things into his Book that never ought to be there, and Mr. Thoreau has faint turns and I don’t know what ails him, and so she went on from one thing to another hardly knew where to stop, and tho it is pretty much so, I could not help smiling at Sophia’s description of it. As for Henry’s book, you know I have said, there were parts of it that sounded to me very much like blasphemy, and I did not believe they would publish it, on reading it to Helen the other day Sophia told me she made the same remark, and coming from her, Henry was much surprised, and said she did not understand it, but still I fear they will not persuade him to leave it out. CYNTHIA DUNBAR THOREAU JOHN THOREAU, SR. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Here is Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau’s famous drawing:

Here is Charles H. Overly’s version of Sister Sophia’s drawing: HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Lecture59

DATE PLACE TOPIC

March 6, Tuesday, 1849, at 6:30PM Lincoln MA; Centre School House “White Beans and Walden Pond”

March 21, Wednesday, 1849, at 7:30PM Portland ME; Exchange Hall “ECONOMY”

April 20, Friday, 1849, at 7:30PM Worcester; City Hall “ECONOMY”

59. Bradley P. Dean and Ronald Wesley Hoag. “THOREAU’S LECTURES BEFORE WALDEN: AN ANNOTATED CALENDAR” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Narrative of Event: Henry Thoreau apparently received the invitation to deliver his first lecture in Portland sometime during the week of 9-16 February 1849. The letter would probably have come from Henry A. Jones or John M. Adams or both, who together were the “committee of arrangements” for the Portland Lyceum. On 9 February he wrote a letter to his cousin George A. Thatcher of Bangor and mentioned nothing about going to Portland, as he surely would have had he known at the time that he would be making the trip.60 He began his letter to Thatcher on the 16th, however, by saying that he was “going as far as Portland to lecture on the 3d Wednesday in 00 March,” adding, “By the way they pay me $25. ” (THE CORRESPONDENCE OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU, page 236). On the 16th of March, he wrote to Thatcher confirming his Portland lecture and thanking his cousin “for your exertions in my behalf with the Bangor Lyceum,” remarking that “unless I should hear that they want two lectures to be read in one week or nearer together, I shall have to decline coming this time” (CORRESPONDENCE, pages 240-41). Time was precious because he was then reading proof sheets for A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS; he never did lecture in Bangor.

A number of events may have prompted the invitation from the Portland Lyceum. For instance, one or more of the favorable newspaper reviews of his lectures in Salem on 22 November 1849 and in Gloucester on 20 December 1848 may have come to the attention of the managers of the Portland Lyceum. It seems more likely, though, that Waldo Emerson was responsible for the invitation. Emerson lectured before the Portland Lyceum on 31 January 1849,61 and he probably mentioned the success of Thoreau’s Salem and Gloucester lectures to the managers, who would then have convened at their weekly meeting on the evening of 7 February and voted to invite Thoreau to lecture before their Lyceum. They would have instructed their Corresponding Secretary to write a letter to Thoreau inviting him to lecture and arranging a date. If the secretary got the letter in the next day’s mail, Thoreau would probably have received it on or soon after 10 February, the day after he wrote the first of his two letters to Thatcher.

When the doors of Exchange Hall in Portland opened at 6:30 p.m. on 21 March to admit patrons to the Lyceum, conditions were not favorable for a successful lecture. A brisk southerly wind had blown in an equinoctial storm, and rain was pounding the roof of the hall and making a soup of the already muddy streets. Nevertheless, “quite a good audience” had assembled in the hall by 7:30 p.m., and Thoreau was introduced to them.62 He stepped up to the podium, saw a letter lying on it from his cousin George Thatcher, laid the letter aside or perhaps put it in his coat pocket, placed his lecture manuscript on the podium, and told the audience that “the lecture he was about to read was the first of a course entitled ‘Life in the woods,’ delivered before his fellow townsmen” of Concord, Massachusetts, and that the subject of the lecture “might be called Economy.”63 He then read his lecture for most of the next two hours, almost twice the length of the customary lyceum offering and a quantitative bargain, at least, for the twenty-five cents admission fee (or one dollar for the season). Just before leaving for Boston the day after the lecture, Thoreau wrote a response to the letter from Thatcher that he had found on the podium the night before, telling his cousin that he had “had a good audience” at the lecture “considering the weather, or not considering it.”64

Advertisements, Reviews, and Responses: Advertisements were carried on the day of the lecture in two Portland daily papers, the Eastern Argus and the Daily Advertiser. Both notices included a misquoted comment from a review of the same lecture — as delivered in Salem, Massachusetts, on 28 February — in the Boston Daily Evening Traveller of 14 March 1849. Whereas the Boston paper cited the lecture as a “delectable compound of oddity, wit, and transcendentalism,” both Portland papers quoted the Traveller as praising its “delectable compound of oddity, wit, and ne-plus ultraism.” Almost certainly, the alteration from transcendentalism to ne-plus ultraism was an editorial ploy intended to increase attendance by not alarming any potential auditors who shared the fairly 60. ALS from Thoreau to George Thatcher dated 9 February 1849, Collection of Mrs. Raymond Adams; quoted from a typescript at the Thoreau Textual Center, CU-SB. 61. William Charvat, EMERSON’S AMERICAN LECTURE ENGAGEMENTS: A CHRONOLOGICAL LIST (New York: New York Public Library, 1961), page 23. 62. MS Diary of William Willis, entry of 21 March 1849, MeP. 63. Quoted from the review of the lecture in the Portland Transcript, 31 March 1849. 64. ALS from Thoreau to George Thatcher dated 22 March 1849, MBU; quoted from a typescript at the Thoreau Textual Center, CU-SB. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN prevalent opinion that transcendentalism was just another name for moonshine. Whether readers knew what “ne-plus ultraism” meant is questionable, but, in any case, the Eastern Argus promised them that Thoreau’s lecture “will be worth hearing,” while the Advertiser assured that “A rare treat may be expected.” The Advertiser, oddly enough, identified the provider of this impending treat as one “Henry D. Shoreac” of Concord, Massachusetts.

Both papers termed Thoreau’s talk the “18th Lyceum Lecture,” presumably of that winter’s season. Thoreau was clearly a late addition to the roster. An advertisement in the 8 November 1848 Eastern Argus listed twelve lectures already booked, including one by Charles Sumner and no less than seven by Henry Giles. Another eight speakers had been “invited” or “conditionally engaged,” including Edward Everett, Horace Mann, Sr., and Emerson. There is no mention of Thoreau, although the ad assures that “all the funds will be expended.”

If what he read was ne-plus-ultraism, his audience seemed to enjoy it, even one William Willis, who saw the lecture for what it was. He went home afterwards and wrote in his diary: “Wednesday March 21. Equinoctial storm, fresh southerly wind & rain[.] lecture at Lyceum by Mr. Thoreau of Concord Mass. queer, transcendental & witty — quite a good audience notwithstanding the storm.”65 Another personal response apparently to this particular lecture was recorded by Joel Benton, who remarked in his memoirs, “Before ‘Walden’ was published I heard [Thoreau] give a lecture before a small audience, which began: ‘I have been a good deal of a traveler — about my native village,’ and went on with a very entertaining account of his experiments in living.”66 Although Benton does not specify a location, he lived in Portland, which argues for a Portland ascription.

Newspaper correspondents too liked what they had heard. Reviews of the lecture appeared the next day in the Eastern Argus and on 31 March in another Portland paper, the weekly Transcript: An Independent Family Journal of Literature, News &c. The Eastern Argus pronounced the lecture “unique, original, comical, and high-falutin” and likened it to the “dashing out of a comet that had broken loose from its orbit — hitting here and there, a gentle rap at this folly, and a severe one at that — but all in good nature.” Noted also was the fact that “It kept the audience wide awake, and most pleasantly excited for nearly two hours.”

Also favorable, and much more significant because of its detailed summary, is the 127-sentence review in the Transcript, in which all but the six-sentence first paragraph comprises a closely paraphrased outline of the lecture. Those prefacing six sentences make it clear that Thoreau’s lecture was as successful in Portland as it

65. MS Diary of William Willis, entry of 21 March 1849, MeP. 66. Joel Benton, PERSONS AND PLACES (New York: Broadway Publishing Co., 1905), pages 12-13. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN had been in Salem and Gloucester more than three months before: A man engaged in the fore-front of a battle can afterwards give but a poor description of the contest. He who gazes from a safe eminence may hope to do better, but if his vision be rendered indistinct by distance, rising exhalations or vapory mists, he may imagine triumphs where none have occurred, or disasters where victory has been secured. In his lecture Mr. Thoreau took us with him to his lonely retreat, and pointed out some of the principal features of the great battle of life, of which the earth is the scene. — But he saw them in the colorings given by his own mental vision — sometimes clear and lifelike, sometimes picturesque, and anon grotesque, sometimes humorous and playful, but always genial, and without misanthropy or malice. It was refreshing to go out of the beaten track, and follow an original mind in its wanderings among life’s labyrinths, and it was amusing to witness the play of fancy and strokes of wit which were scattered along its course. The lecture was the pepper, salt, and mustard of the course [of at least eighteen lectures], and certainly gave an excellent relish to the whole. While the summary that follows this appraisal is full enough to reveal the portions of the “Economy” chapter of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS that Thoreau was reading as a lecture in the first months of 1849, the limitations of its accuracy may be suggested by its reference to “Walcott Pond.”

Further on in the same issue of the Transcript, the editors mentioned that “Much editorial matter [had given] place to the reports of the Lyceum lectures” in that week’s issue of the newspaper, and they continued with these observations: “The report of Mr. Thoreau’s lecture, although very imperfect, conveys a tolerably good idea of the highly unique and amusing character of that production. Despite the no very slight touches of transcendentalism, there is much in it to furnish food for thought, as well as mirth.” A belated testimonial to the local success of Thoreau’s lecture is the invitation he received eighteen months later to lecture there again. On 18 October 1850 Thoreau received an invitation from Josiah Pierce, Jr., “to lecture before the ‘Portland Lyceum’ on some Wednesday evening during the next winter” (THE CORRESPONDENCE OF HENRY DAVI D THOREAU, page 267). Pierce was one of the three members on the Lyceum’s Managing Committee, and he told Thoreau why they were inviting him to lecture in Portland again: “Your former animating and interesting discourse is fresh in the memory of [the Lyceum’s] members, and they are very anxious to have their minds again invigorated, enlivened, and instructed by you” (CORRESPONDENCE, page 267). He accepted the invitation and delivered “An Excursion to Cape Cod” there on January 15, 1851.

Interestingly enough, reviews of Thoreau’s 21 March 1849 Portland lecture soon traveled well beyond Portland. Horace Greeley, who lectured before the Portland Lyceum just five days after Thoreau, apparently had a look at the notes from which the as yet unpublished Transcript review was being put together. On 2 April, after his return to New York City, Greeley published a quite similar, though briefer, account of Thoreau’s lecture along with a few of his own comments in his newspaper, the New-York Daily Tribune. Greeley’s article HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN reads: HENRY D. THOREAU of Concord, Mass. has recently been lecturing on ‘Life in the Woods,’ in Portland and elsewhere. There is not a young man in the land — and very few old ones — who would not profit by an attentive hearing of that lecture. Mr. Thoreau is a young student, who has imbibed (or rather refused to stifle) the idea that a man’s soul is better worth living for than his body. Accordingly, he has built him a house ten by fifteen feet in a piece of unfrequented woods by the side of a pleasant little lakelet, where he devotes his days to study and reflection, cultivating a small plat of ground, living frugally on vegetables, and working for the neighboring farmers whenever he is in need of money or additional exercise. It thus costs him some six to eight week’s rugged labor per year to earn his food and clothes, and perhaps an hour or two per day extra to prepare his food and fuel, keep his house in order, &c. — He has lived in this way four years, and his total expenses for last year were $41 25, and his surplus earnings at the close were $13 21, which he considers a better result than almost any of the farmers of Concord could show, though they have worked all the time. By this course, Mr. Thoreau lives free from pecuniary obligation or dependence on others, except that he borrows some books, which is an equal pleasure to lender and borrower. The man on whose land he is a squatter is no wise injured nor inconvenienced thereby. If all our young men would but hear this lecture, we think some among them would feel less strongly impelled either to come to New-York or go to California. Greeley never heard Thoreau’s “Economy” lecture, at least not so far as we have been able to determine, and the Transcript report was not published until 31 March, four days after Greeley left Portland and just two days before the Tribune article appeared. Yet Greeley uses specific figures in his account of the Portland lecture, figures which are not strictly accurate, but which are close enough to the ones reported in the Transcript to suggest that Greeley took his figures from the Transcript editor’s hastily scrawled notes.

Horace Greeley’s article on Thoreau’s first Portland lecture had far-reaching consequences. It was reprinted in papers ranging from the New Bedford Daily Mercury, on 6 April, to the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post, on 14 April. The Tribune itself had a very large readership and a nationwide circulation, so many thousands of people all over the country must have read the article. They would also have read the first response to the article, which was written on the very day the article appeared, 2 April, but which was not published until 7 April, when it appeared in the Tribune under the headline “How to Live — Mr. Thoreau’s Example.” The response was a letter addressed “To the Editor of the Tribune” and signed “Timothy Thorough” — an assumed name, no doubt. The writer told Greeley that he “felt a little surprise at seeing such a performance [as Thoreau’s life in the Walden Woods] held up as an example for the young men of this country,” and he supposed that he “must have mistaken the sense of [Greeley’s] article.” So he asked Mrs. Thorough, his wife, HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN what she could make of it — and she told him exactly what she thought: She will have it that the young man [Thoreau] is either a whimsy or else a good-for-nothing, selfish, crab-like sort of chap, who tries to shirk the duties whose hearty and honest discharge is the only thing that in her view entitles a man to be regarded as a good example. She declares that nobody has a right to live for himself alone, away from the interests, the affections, and the sufferings of his kind. Such a way of going on, she says, is not living, but a cold and snailish kind of existence, which, as she maintains, is both infernal and infernally stupid. Horace Greeley appended his “Reply” to Mr. Thorough’s letter, pointing out, as so many have since, that “Nobody has proposed or suggested that it becomes everybody to go off into the woods” and live as Thoreau did at the pond, and Greeley added his impression “that Mr. Thoreau has set all his brother aspirants to self- culture, a very wholesome example, and showed them how, by chastening their physical appetites, they may preserve their proper independence without starving their souls.”

This spirited exchange between the Thoroughs and Greeley was bound to attract attention. One of the people who probably read it was the editor of Thoreau’s hometown newspaper, the Yeoman’s Gazette. If he did read it, though, it apparently did not dampen the hometown pride and enthusiasm he felt after reading Greeley’s article earlier in the week. Under the banner headline “Our Townsman — Mr. Thoreau,” the editor asserted that Thoreau “is a gentleman of rare attainments” and that “All the good things which the Tribune says of this gentleman are richly deserved.”67 Apparently other editors also agreed with Greeley’s assessment of the lecture Thoreau read in Portland: the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post reprinted Greeley’s article without comment in its columns on 14 April, and the Youth’s Companion reprinted it, also without comment, over three months later, on 19 July.

Of course, not all those who read Greeley’s article on Thoreau’s Portland lecture thought highly of the ideas in the lecture or of Greeley’s comments. We have already seen what Mr. and Mrs. Thorough thought of them, and they were not alone in their views. The Philadelphia North American and U.S. Gazette, a Democratic, or conservative, newspaper that frequently feuded with the much more liberal Tribune, also reprinted Greeley’s article on 14 April 1849, but with surprisingly long, relentlessly scathing commentary; and a large portion of this commentary appeared verbatim, along with Greeley’s article, in the Washington, D.C., Daily National Intelligencer on 19 April 1849. In both the original commentary and the reprinted portion, Thoreau is characterized as an “idle young student ... laboring no more than barely to maintain his own single, selfish

67. Clipping in the Collection of Mrs. Raymond Adams. In the clipping the editor also pointed out that “the Tribune is mistaken in supposing [Thoreau] still continues this course of life, or that he continued it for four years. Mr. Thoreau lived upon the banks of our beautiful Walden Pond for two years, where he wrote some of the most interesting and instructive lectures we have ever heard, and where he became as ‘conversant with beans’ as any man living, because he cultivated them extensively.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN existence”; and in both stories, the following remarks appear:68 At first blush this strange life seems beautiful in itself and worthy of imitation; but like the scenery of the stage it is better when regarded at a distance than when closely approached .... The would-be hermit of Concord may or may not be a worldly-disappointed man: better for him that he were, than that he should deliberately sit down in the woods, a Timon without a cause, to reject and despise the common charities and duties, the pleasures and the pains of life, among his fellow men .... What is such solitary life, after all, but a voluntary abandonment of civilization and return to barbarism? Reason this subject as they may, those who encourage such economic and philosophic perversion of life, encourage idleness and the most egoistic meanness, and the exemplification is given by the young student himself.

The North American and U.S. Gazette story added, among other indictments: Such a life affords no example that can be imitated or ought to be imitated, — that can be or ought to be tolerated, or spoken of in any terms short of censure. Such a life is, indeed, above all other lives, A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying NOTHING: It is a tale told by an idiot — it is a life lived by an idiot.

Large portions of this commentary appeared as filler in several other newspapers around the country — in New York City, Albany, and Newark, for example — but not a word of it was calculated to enhance Thoreau’s reputation as a lecturer — or as anything else, for that matter, except perhaps a misanthropic oddball.69

However, not everyone who read one of the newspaper summaries of Thoreau’s Portland lecture disagreed with the views he expressed, as we know from the testimony of a young woman named Mary, who lived on the western side of Maine and subscribed to the Portland Transcript. Mary read the three-column review of “Economy” in the Transcript and wrote to the editors the following week, saying, “I was well pleased with your excellent paper of the 31st of March, and especially with the account you gave of Mr. Thoreau’s lecture.” After giving her opinion about the way Thoreau lived — the thrust of which was basically “to each his own” and “more power to him” — Mary said that Thoreau’s account of the way he lived reminded her of “a very small woman with a pleasant countenance, and three small children and a little dog” who had come to her town the preceding summer and who lived in much the same fashion Thoreau did at the pond. After telling this woman’s story — about how she set up housekeeping next to a small stream, did her cooking outdoors, and

68. In regard to this newspaper’s deployment of the concept of perversion, please note that this term had formally entered out medical terminology some seven years earlier, when it was defined in Dunglison’s MEDICAL LEXICON as being one of the four modifications of function in disease, the other three modifications of function being augmentation, diminution, and abolition. 69. Kenneth Walter Cameron gathered these articles in “Damning National Publicity for Thoreau in 1849,” American Transcendental Quarterly, number 2 (2d Quarter 1969): 18-27. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN similar sorts of things — Mary told the editors, “Now Sirs, it is my opinion [that] if this poor widow’s story and character had such a narrator as Mr Thoreau, it would far exceed many of the stories with which ‘All Europe rings from side to side.’"70

Finally, in a 19 August 1854 review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, the Portland Transcript recalled Thoreau’s 1849 lecture in praising both the book and his erstwhile lecture from which it grew: In a lecture which he delivered before our Lyceum, he gave some of the experiences of this episode in his life — and this book is that lecture revisited and extended. It is the same quaint production of a crooked genius — only, a good deal more so. Beneath all its seemingly paradoxical philosophy, however, there is a stream of true thought, in which some of the illusions of civilization are clearly shown. We only wish some of our good dames who make themselves such complete slaves to their furniture and their “best rooms,” would read Mr. Thoreau’s chapter on household economy. We think they might gather a few ideas there that might be of great advantage to them. Description of Topic: See “ECONOMY”. The 127-sentence summary of the lecture in the Transcript establishes conclusively that Thoreau read from the manuscript that J. Lyndon Shanley refers to as versions II and III, and that is now at CSmH (HM 924). TIMELINE OF WALDEN

March 22, Thursday: Annie, the 5th child of Anna Murray Douglass and Frederick Douglass, was born free.

Henry Thoreau wrote to George Thatcher in Portland, Maine revealing his intention, “I shall advertise another, ‘Walden, or Life in the Woods,’ in the first...”. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Portland March 22nd –49 Dear George, The first thing I saw on being introduced to the Portland Lyceum last evening was your letter lying on the desk, but I had already received your first in Concord, and moreover had written to you, so that this note oc- casioned me no disappointment, I had a good audience, considering the weather, or not considering it, it seemed to me [ ] Mr Emerson follows me here. I am just in the midst of printing my book which is likely to turn out much larger than I expected. I shall ad- 70. This article is reprinted in Gary Scharnhorst, “Mary from Maine on ‘Economy’ in Portland, 1849,” Thoreau Society Bulletin, number 210 (Fall 1994): 1-2. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN vertise another— “Walden or Life in the Woods” in the first, which, by the way, I call “A Week on the Concord and Mer- rimack Rivers.” When I get through with this business, [If] nothing else occurs to prevent

Page 2 I shall enjoy a visit to you and to Maine very much, but I do not promise myself as yet, nor do I wish you or Maine to promise yourselves to me. I leave for Boston in a few moments. Remember me to all friends— Yours in haste Henry D. Thoreau PS. I thank you again and again for you exertions in my behalf.

{written perpendicular to text at bottom of page:} H. D. Thoreau March, 1849 To Geo A Thatcher

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.

Walden “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN April 20, Friday: Henri-Frédéric Amiel, who would be referred to as the “Swiss Thoreau,” back in Genève, made an entry in his JOURNAL INTIME: “It is six years to-day since I last left Geneva. How many journeys, how many impressions, observations, thoughts, how many forms of men and things have since then passed before me and in me! The last seven years have been the most important of my life: they have been the novitiate of my intelligence, the initiation of my being into being. Three snowstorms this afternoon. Poor blossoming plum-trees and peach trees! What a difference from six years ago, when the cherry-trees, adorned in their green spring dress and laden with their bridal flowers, smiled at my departure along the Vaudois fields, and the lilacs of Burgundy threw great gusts of perfume into my face!...” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Lecture71

DATE PLACE TOPIC

March 21, Wednesday, 1849, at 7:30PM Portland, Maine; Exchange Hall “Economy” April 20, Friday, 1849, at 7:30PM Worcester’s City Hall “Economy” April 27, Friday, 1849, at 7:30PM Worcester’s Brinley Hall “Life in the Woods” (II)

71. From Bradley P. Dean and Ronald Wesley Hoag’s THOREAU’S LECTURES BEFORE WALDEN: AN ANNOTATED CALENDAR. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Narrative of Event: In the spring of 1849 Henry Thoreau gave his first three lectures in Worcester on 20 and 27 April, and on 3 May. Commentators have linked these lectures with the unspecified sponsorship of his friend H.G.O. Blake, which is a reasonable assumption, but a letter of invitation from Blake does not exist, nor do newspaper articles or other sources mention his influence. On 17 April 1849, Thoreau did write to Blake as follows: “It is my intention to leave Concord for Worcester, via Groton, at 12 o’clock on Friday of this week. Mr. Emerson tells me that it will take about two hours to go by this way. At any rate I shall try to [secure] 3 or 4 hours in which to see you & Worcester before the lecture” (THE CORRESPONDENCE OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU, page 242). These lectures, the only time in his entire career when Thoreau can be said to have delivered an entire course of lectures, were not part of the 1848-49 lecture course of the Worcester Lyceum, a fact perhaps further arguing for the good offices of his friend and admirer, Blake.

Advertisements, Reviews, and Responses: The review of the lecture in the 25 April Worcester Palladium, here quoted in part, suggests a more favorable reaction by the general audience than by the reviewer, who apparently had not actually heard Thoreau lecture: LIFE IN THE WOODS. A sylvan philsopher (Mr Thoreau of Concord,) delivered a lecture at the City Hall Friday evening. His discourse was intended as an autobiography of two years of life in the woods; — an experiment by the lecturer to illustrate, not perhaps so much the absurdity of the present organization and customs of society, as the ease with which a man of resolution and stern expedients may have ample leisure for the cultivation of his intellectual powers and the acquisition of knowledge. This sylvan philosopher, after leaving college, (perhaps a little charmed by some “representative” man1) betook himself to the woods, where they slope down to the margin of a lakelet …. His lecture was a history of his experience; and is said to have been witty, sarcastic, and amusing. Such philosophers illustrate the absurdities the human mind is capable of. What would a forest of them be good for? Nothing but curiosities for people to look after, as they pay their shilling to see a menagerie. They are watches without any pointers; their springs and wheels are well adjusted, and perform good service; but nobody is the wiser for it, as they do not tell the time of day. They are a train of carwheels; they run well, and in good time, but can carry no passengers or luggage. A wheel-barrow, with an Irishman for its vitals, renders the world a far better service. ______

1 An allusion to Emerson, who had delivered a course of lectures on “Representative Men” throughout New England and in England during the preceding years and would the following year publish the course as a book of the same title.

In view of the final paragraph in this review, the following reference in the 28 April Salem Observer is rather HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN perplexing: MR. THOREAU, of Concord, “the forest seer, The minstrel of the natural year,” as he is well called by Emerson in his “Wood-notes,” has delivered his lecture upon the Scholar’s Life in the Woods, in Worcester. It is favorably noticed by the Palladium. Subsequently, in a 3 May review of Thoreau’s 2d Worcester lecture, a reporter for the Worcester Daily Spy gave hearsay testimony that the 20 April first lecture had been a success with the general audience: “Being absent from town on the evening when the first lecture was given, we did not have the good fortune to hear it — a circumstance we regretted, because the commendations we hear of it assure us that it would have been a source of enjoyment to us.” According to Professor Walter Roy Harding, “Aunt Maria Thoreau, having heard about the Palladium account [of Thoreau’s lecture], was sure that Worcester had had enough of her nephew, and confessed that she was as disgusted with what he had to say as the Palladium had been” (THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU: A BIOGRAPHY, page 242).

Description of Topic: See “Economy”. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Lecture72

DATE PLACE TOPIC

April 20, Friday, 1849, at 7:30PM Worcester’s City Hall “Economy” April 27, Friday, 1849, at 7:30PM Worcester’s Brinley Hall “Life in the Woods” (II) May 3, Thursday, 1849, at 7:30PM Worcester’s Brinley Hall “White Beans and Walden Pond”

72. From Bradley P. Dean and Ronald Wesley Hoag’s THOREAU’S LECTURES BEFORE WALDEN: AN ANNOTATED CALENDAR. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Narrative of Event: The 2d of Henry Thoreau’s 3 Worcester lectures in the spring of 1849 took place on Friday, 27 April, in Brinley Hall, a location later described by the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson as “the natural home of abolitionists and reformers” and “the military, social, theatrical, and political center of the universe, so far as Worcester was concerned.”73 When Thoreau lectured there in 1849, it was also an edifice in need of renovations that it would not receive for more than another year.74

Advertisements, Reviews, and Responses: On 26 and 27 April, notices of Thoreau’s imminent lecture appeared in the Worcester Daily Spy, placed there perhaps by H.G.O. Blake. The former read: “HENRY D. THOREAU. This sylvan philosopher will deliver the second of his very agreeable lectures, in Brinley Hall, to morrow evening. It will be an intellectual entertainment that should not be neglected. — We would suggest that the attendance of a numerous audience will give no offence to the lecturer.” The latter read: “Remember that the lecture of H. D. Thoreau will be given at Brinley Hall this evening. It will undoubtedly be an intellectual treat of no ordinary character, — one of those, which, while they interest and please us [in] the delivery, leave us with the consciousness that we are the wiser and better for them. We should be pleased to see a full house on the occasion.”

The Worcester Palladium review on 2 May was more favorable than that for the first lecture a week earlier (see lecture 21 above) but took exception to an implied imitation of Waldo Emerson and allegedly forced eccentricity. The lecture, said the reviewer: was a continuation of his history of two years of “life in the woods;” a mingled web of sage conclusions and puerility — wit and egotistical effusions — bright scintillations and narrow criticisms and low comparisons. He has a natural poetic temperament, with a more than ordinary sensibility to the myriad of nature’s manifestations. But there is apparent a constant struggle for eccentricity. It is only when the lecturer seems to forget himself, that the listener forgets that there is in the neighborhood of “Walden Pond” another philosopher whose light Thoreau reflects; the same service which the moon performs for the sun. Yet the lecturer says many things that not only amuse the hour, but will not be easily forgotten. He is truly one of nature’s oddities; and would make a very respectable Diogenes, if the world were going to live its life over again, and that distinguished citizen of antiquity should not care to appear upon the stage.

On 3 May, the Worcester Daily Spy published an article briefly announcing Thoreau’s third lecture (see lecture

73.Quoted in Edward Kimball, ed., BRINLEY HALL ALBUM AND POST 10 SKETCHBOOK (Worcester: F. S. Blanchard and Co., 1896), page 17. 74.The Worcester Palladium of 5 June 1850 describes in considerable detail the extensive renovations to Brinley Hall that had been completed only a few days before. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN 23 below) and praising his first (see lecture 21 above). Most of the article, however, was devoted to the following disaffected critique of his second lecture: [W]e are free to say, that in hearing the second lecture, we were disappointed. We had looked for a bold, original thinker, who would give us the results of his observations and reflections, with a vigor, freshness, and independence, which would win our respect and admiration, even though it might not convince us. We said that we were disappointed. This lecturer evidently is not deficient in ability, and might very probably attain to a more respectable rank, if he were satisfied to be himself, Henry D. Thoreau, and not aim to be Ralph Waldo Emerson or any body else. But, so far as manner, at least was concerned, the lecture was a better imitation of Emerson than we should have thought possible, even with two year’s seclusion to practice in. In the ideas, too, there was less of originality than we had looked for, and recollections of Carlyle as well as of Emerson, were repeatedly forced upon the mind. The style was mostly Emersonian, with occasional interludes, in which the lecturer gave us glimpses of himself beneath the panoply in which he was enshrouded, and we are perverse enough to confess ourself better pleased with him as Thoreau than as Emerson, so far as these opportunities afforded us the means of judging. We are no admirers of the cynicism, whether real or affected, of the school to which we suppose the lecturer belongs. It strikes us that one who is capable of such high enjoyments, as they sometimes profess, from the contemplation of the works of creation in their lower manifestations, might, if his mind were rightly constituted, find increased pleasure in communion with the last, best, and highest subject of creative power, even though in most individual cases, it may fail to come up to the standard for which it was designed. The lecturer stated that he never had more than three letters that were worth the postage. That might possibly be accounted for by his limited correspondence, or by the character of his correspondents, or even by the relative estimate which he may put upon the amount of the root of evil which is required to pay the postage of a letter. At any rate, there is one consolation for him in the case — that probably another year will not pass away without a reduction in the rates of letter postage.

Worth mentioning here also is a review of WALDEN that appeared in the Worcester Palladium on 16 August 1854, a commentary that invokes and implicitly comments on the Worcester lectures, pronouncing Thoreau HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN much more agreeable on the printed page than in person. It says in part: We do not suppose any of our readers need be informed who Thoreau is; but if any are ignorant of his name or existence, this book will be their best introduction. Looked upon as one of the Concord oddities, as a wayward genius, many have smiled and turned away their heads as they would at a clown who for a moment might make them stare and laugh, but leave them no wiser in the end. A few interested themselves in the Walden philosopher, amused with his quaintness, struck with the sense of some of his philosophy, and pleased with his originality. Almost the only opportunity he has given the public to become acquainted with him, has been through the medium of lectures. These will be eclipsed in popularity by the book which has many decided advantages over the lectures. A man can write about himself with better effect than he can talk about himself. The pen is a more modest communicator than the tongue, and is not so easily charged with egotism …. It cannot be complained against the book that it is not practical in its theories. Does not its author tell us of every board that built his house? Also the cost of the laths, the windows, the chimney, and the food he eats? He shows us that life is too hard work now-a-days; that it grows harder and more perplexing the farther it advances from primitive simplicity. With portions of the volume the public are familiar, but the whole of it is well worth being acquainted with.

Description of Topic: See lectures 18 and 21 above. For this particular delivery of the lecture, Thoreau modified the sentence in his reading draft about wedging “our feet downward … through New York and Boston and Concord and Salem, through church and state,” by erasing “Salem,” which he had interlined earlier (see lecture 18 above) and interlining “Worcester” in its stead.”7576 TIMELINE OF WALDEN

75.CSmH (HM 924, version II, leaf paged “25"). 76. During this month’s visits to Worcester, Thoreau met for the 1st time the witty tailor Theophilus Brown who would become one of his best friends. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN May 30, Wednesday: As the last Wednesday in May, this was Election Day.

Prussia adopted a 3-class suffrage.

Richard Wagner left Zurich for Paris.

James Munroe and Co. published Henry Thoreau’s A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS with the notice in its endpapers, “Will soon be published, WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. By Henry D. Thoreau.”

TIMELINE OF A WEEK TIMELINE OF WALDEN The author had included comments on the captivity narrative of Hannah Emerson Duston in the “Thursday” chapter,77 recycling some material about the validity of historicizing which he had originally created while contemplating the captivity narrative of Mistress Mary Rowlandson of Lancaster after hiking past the rocky terrain on which Rowlandson had been ransomed and which he had previously incorporated into “A Walk to

77. The version of the Reverend Cotton Mather, the version of Friend John Greenleaf Whittier, the Nathaniel Hawthorne version, and the Thoreau version of the Duston captivity narrative may now best be contrasted in Richard Bosman’s CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE OF HANNAH DUSTON RELATED BY COTTON MATHER, JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER, NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE AND HENRY DAVID THOREAU, FOUR VERSIONS OF EVENTS IN 1697, INTERSPERCED WITH THIRTY-FIVE WOOD-BLOCK PRINTS BY RICHARD BOSMAN (San Francisco CA: Arion Press, 1987). Also see Arner, Robert. “The Story of Hannah Duston: Cotton Mather to Thoreau.” American Transcendental Quarterly 18 (1973):19-23. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Wachusett”:

On beholding a picture of a New England village as it then appeared, with a fair open prospect, and a light on trees and river, as if it were broad noon, we find we had not thought the sun shone in those days, or that men lived in broad daylight then. We do not imagine the sun shining on hill and valley during Philip’s war, nor on the war-path of Paugus, or Standish, or Church, or Lovell, with serene summer weather, but a dim twilight or night did those events transpire in. They must have fought in the shade of their own dusky deeds.

CAPTIVITY AND RESTAURATION

Bob Pepperman Taylor has, in his monograph on the political content of Thoreau’s ideas AMERICA’S BACHELOR UNCLE: THOREAU AND THE AMERICAN POLITY. (Lawrence KA: UP of Kansas, 1996), provided a most interesting analysis of Thoreau’s accessing of the Duston story. The author starts his chapter “Founding” by offering 3 Waldo Emerson sound bytes by way of providing us with a typically trivial Emersonian take on the concepts of nature and freedom: “The old is for slaves.” “Do not believe the past. I give you the universe a virgin today.” “Build, therefore, your own world.”

Professor Taylor points up in his monograph how tempted Emerson scholars have been, to presume that Thoreau would have shared such a perspective on nature and freedom, and offers C. Roland Wagner as a type case for those who have fallen victim to such an easy identification of the two thinkers. Here is Wagner as he presented him, at full crank: Thoreau’s uncompromising moral idealism, despite its occasional embodiment in sentences of supreme literary power, created an essentially child’s view of political and social reality. Because his moral principles were little more than expressions of his quest for purity and of hostility to any civilized interference with the absolute attainment of his wishes, he was unable to discriminate between better and worse in the real HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN world. Taylor’s comment on this sort of writing is that if Thoreau holds an understanding of nature and freedom similar to that found in Emerson’s writings, we cannot expect a social and political commentary of any real sophistication or significance. In this event, it is easy to think that Thoreau is little more than a self-absorbed egoist. There are good reasons to believe, however, that Thoreau’s views are significantly different than Emerson’s on these matters. In fact, these differences can be dramatically illustrated by looking at Thoreau’s first book, A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. In this work Thoreau immerses himself in American colonial history, specifically investigating the relationship between Indian and European settler. Far from encouraging us to escape our past, to cut ourselves off from our social legacies and the determinative facts of our collective lives, Thoreau provides us with a tough, revealing look at the historical events and conditions and struggles that have given birth to contemporary American society ... what is thought of as a painfully personal and apolitical book is actually a sophisticated meditation on the realities and consequences of the American founding. In other words, Taylor is going to offer to us the idea that Emerson was not, and Thoreau was, a profound political thinker. He goes on in this chapter “Founding” to further elaborations upon the overlooked sophistication of the political analysis offered by Thoreau in A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS: Thoreau begins his book with the following sentence: “The Musketaquid, or Grass-ground River, though probably as old as the Nile or Euphrates, did not begin to have a place in civilized history, until the fame of its grassy meadows and its fish attracted settlers out of England in 1635, when it received the other but kindred name of Concord from the first plantations on its banks, which appears to have been commenced in a spirit of peace and harmony.” Out of respect for historical chronology, Thoreau presents the Indian before the English name for the river. The river itself and, by implication, the native inhabitants are of ancient lineage, while “Concord” and the people responsible for this name are relative newcomers. In the second sentence of text, Thoreau explains that the Indian name is actually superior to the English, since it will remain descriptively accurate as long as “grass grows and water runs here,” while Concord is accurate only “while men lead peacable lives on its banks” — something obviously much less permanent than the grass and flowing water. In fact, the third sentence indicates that “Concord” has already failed to live up to its HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN name, since the Indians are now an “extinct race.”

A WEEK: The Musketaquid, or Grass-ground River, though probably as old as the Nile or Euphrates, did not begin to have a place in civilized history, until the fame of its grassy meadows and its fish attracted settlers out of England in 1635, when it received the other but kindred name of CONCORD from the first plantation on its banks, which appears to have been commenced in a spirit of peace and harmony. It will be Grass-ground River as long as grass grows and water runs here; it will be Concord River only while men lead peaceable lives on its banks.

Thoreau wastes no time in pointing out that regardless of the “spirit of peace and harmony” that first moved the whites to establish a plantation on this river, relations between the natives and the settlers soon exhibited very little concord indeed. In these opening sentences Thoreau presents us with an indication of a primary problem motivating his trip down the Concord and Merrimack Rivers: he hopes to probe the nature of the relationship between Indian and white societies and to consider the importance of this relationship for understanding our America. Joan Burbick, one of the few to recognize the primacy of the political theme underlying Thoreau’s voyage, writes that in this book Thoreau “tries to forge the uncivil history of America.” We know the end of the story already: one “race” annihilates the other. Part of Thoreau’s intention is to not let us forget this critical truth about our society, to remind us that our founding is as bloody and unjust as any, try as we may to put this fact out of sight and tell alternative stories about our past. As the story progresses throughout the book, however, we see that another intention is to explain the complexity and ambiguity of the historical processes that led to and beyond this bloody founding. The history Thoreau presents is “uncivil” in two senses: first, and most obviously, it is about violent, brutal, uncivil acts; second, it is not the official or common self-understanding that the nation wants to hold. Thoreau’s journey is not only aimed at personal self- discovery, despite the obvious importance of that theme for the book. On the contrary, the opening sentences and the problems they pose suggest that Thoreau is first and foremost interested in a project of discovery for the nation as a whole, the success of which will depend upon looking carefully at the relationship between settler and native. The project of self-discovery is to be accomplished within the context of this larger social history. Thoreau’s personal and more private ruminations are set quite literally between ongoing discussions of events from the colonial life of New England. We are never allowed to forget for very long that our contemporary private lives are bounded by, in some crucial sense defined within, the possibilities created by this earlier drama of Indian and colonist. Duston is taken from childbed by attacking Indians, sees “her infant’s brain dashed out against an apple-tree,” and is held captive with her nurse, Mary Neff, and an English boy, Samuel Lennardson. She is told that she and her nurse will be taken to an Indian settlement where they will be forced to “run the gauntlet naked.” To avoid this fate, Duston instructs the boy to ask one of the men how to best kill an enemy and take a scalp. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN The man obliges, and that night Duston, Neff, and Lennardson use this information to kill all the Indians, except a “favorite boy, and one squaw who fled wounded with him to the woods” — the victims are two men, two women, and six children. They then scuttle all the canoes except the one needed for their escape. They flee, only to return soon thereafter to scalp the dead as proof of the ordeal. They then manage to paddle the sixty or so miles to John Lovewell’s house and are rescued. The General court pays them fifty pounds as bounty for the ten scalps, and Duston is reunited with her family, all of whom, except the infant, have survived the attack. Thoreau ends the story by telling us that “there have been many who in later times have lived to say that they had eaten of the fruit of that apple tree,” the tree upon which Duston’s child was murdered. Striking as it is, many of the themes of this story are repetitive of what has come before, a powerful return to the material from the opening chapters, primarily the violence in “Monday.” Thus, Thoreau starkly conveys the grotesque violence on both sides of the conflict, and he concludes here, as he did earlier, that we are the beneficiaries, even the products, of these terrible events — it is we, of course, who have “eaten of the fruit of that apple-tree.” But this story is different too. Most obviously, it is a story in which women and children, traditional noncombatants, play a crucial role. The brutality in the Lovewell campaigns is between men who voluntarily assume the roles of warrior and soldier. The brutality in the Duston story is aimed primarily at those who are most innocent, children. And this brutality, like that among male combatants, is not confined to one side. The Indians murder Duston’s infant, but she, in turn, methodically kills six children and attempts to kill the seventh (the “favorite boy” was a favorite within his family, not to Duston). In addition, this murder of children is conducted not only by men but by women and children as well. The violence and hostility between Indian and settler have reached a point at which all traditional restraints have vanished, where the weakest are fair game and all members of the community are combatants. Here, not in the Revolution, is the climax of the American founding. In this climax all colonists and Indians, even women and children, are implicated, and the entire family of Indians, not just the male warriors, is systematically killed off. This frenzy of violence, of escalating atrocity and counteratrocity, of total war, is the natural culmination of the processes Thoreau has been describing throughout the book. The Duston story represents the victory of the colonists and the final destruction of the Indians. Thoreau is returning down the river to his own home, as Duston had to hers 142 years earlier. His investigation into the nature of the American founding, his “uncivil history,” is mainly complete. Consider Thoreau’s use of the Hannah Emerson Duston story as the climax of a historical process set in motion by the collision of incompatible societies. He is appalled by the events, but he also understands that they are the culmination of huge political conflicts that are greater than the individual players. Professor Taylor goes on in this chapter “Founding” about the political content of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS to consider each drama of Indian and colonist recounted there by Thoreau, culminating in the last and perhaps most powerful of these major tales, that of the Duston odyssey in “Thursday”: HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN It is instructive to contrast this analysis with Cotton Mather’s simple praise of Duston as a colonial heroine and with Hawthorne’s shrieking condemnation of her when he calls her “this awful woman,” “a raging tigress,” and “a bloody old hag” on account of her victims being primarily children. Thoreau’s analysis is considerably more shrewd than either Mather’s or Hawthorne’s, and Thoreau resists the temptation of either of these simpler and much less satisfactory moral responses. Thoreau’s conclusion about our political interconnectedness is built upon a hard-boiled and realistic political analysis combined with a notable moral subtlety. As we have seen, Thoreau believes that the forms of life represented by Indian and colonist are simply and irrevocably incompatible; the structure of each requires a mode of production and a social organization that makes it impossible to accommodate the other. This argument is compelling ... the Hannah Emerson Duston story in A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS represented for Thoreau the final destruction of the Indians at the hands of the white settlers. Joan Burbick, one of the few to recognize the primacy of the political theme underlying Thoreau’s story of a riverine quest, points up the fact that in his A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS Thoreau was attempting to “forge the uncivil history of America.” Here is our narrative as it is supposed to get itself narrated, within a basic-rate Western Union telegraph message of eleven words: 1 One 2 race 3 must 4 snuff 5 the 6 others 7 White 8 to 9 play 10 and 11 win Thoreau is not going to allow his readers to indulge in any foundation myth that can serve as a legitimation scenario, but instead he is going to remind us that our founding as been quite as vicious, quite as bloody as any other. Thus we find, in the pages of his book, that when he refers to the three extraordinarily notorious Indian- killers Captain Myles Standish of the Plymouth Colony, Captain Benjamin Church of King Phillip’s War, and Captain John Lovewell of the 18th Century, he does so by deployment of one single, solitary, unremarkable descriptor: “sturdy.” These problematic individuals were, simply, sturdy men. They did what in their time seemed to need to be done, to wit, exterminate entire families of people, man, woman, and child, who threateningly differ from one’s own sort. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

A WEEK: On the thirty-first day of March, one hundred and forty- PEOPLE OF two years before this, probably about this time in the afternoon, A WEEK there were hurriedly paddling down this part of the river, between the pine woods which then fringed these banks, two white women and a boy, who had left an island at the mouth of the Contoocook before daybreak. They were slightly clad for the season, in the English fashion, and handled their paddles unskilfully, but with nervous energy and determination, and at the bottom of their canoe lay the still bleeding scalps of ten of the aborigines. They were Hannah Dustan, and her nurse, Mary Neff, both of Haverhill, eighteen miles from the mouth of this river, and an English boy, named Samuel Lennardson, escaping from captivity among the Indians. On the 15th of March previous, Hannah Dustan had been compelled to rise from childbed, and half dressed, with one foot bare, accompanied by her nurse, commence an uncertain march, in still inclement weather, through the snow and the wilderness. She had seen her seven elder children flee with their father, but knew not of their fate. She had seen her infant’s brains dashed out against an apple-tree, and had left her own and her neighbors’ dwellings in ashes. When she reached the wigwam of her captor, situated on an island in the Merrimack, more than twenty miles above where we now are, she had been told that she and her nurse were soon to be taken to a distant Indian settlement, and there made to run the gauntlet naked. The family of this Indian consisted of two men, three women, and seven children, beside an English boy, whom she found a prisoner among them. Having determined to attempt her escape, she instructed the boy to inquire of one of the men, how he should despatch an enemy in the quickest manner, and take his scalp. “Strike ’em there,” said he, placing his finger on his temple, and he also showed him how to take off the scalp. On the morning of the 31st she arose before daybreak, and awoke her nurse and the boy, and taking the Indians’ tomahawks, they killed them all in their sleep, excepting one favorite boy, and one squaw who fled wounded with him to the woods. The English boy struck the Indian who had given him the information, on the temple, as he had been directed. They then collected all the provision they could find, and took their master’s tomahawk and gun, and scuttling all the canoes but one, commenced their flight to Haverhill, distant about sixty miles by the river. But after having proceeded a short distance, fearing that her story would not be believed if she should escape to tell it, they returned to the silent wigwam, and taking off the scalps of the dead, put them into a bag as proofs of what they had done, and then retracing their steps to the shore in the twilight, recommenced their voyage.

THOMAS HUTCHINSON HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

A WEEK: In the words of the old nursery tale, sung about a hundred PEOPLE OF years ago, — A WEEK “He and his valiant soldiers did range the woods full wide, And hardships they endured to quell the Indian’s pride.” In the shaggy pine forest of Pequawket they met the “rebel Indians,” and prevailed, after a bloody fight, and a remnant returned home to enjoy the fame of their victory. A township called Lovewell’s Town, but now, for some reason, or perhaps without reason, Pembroke, was granted them by the State. “Of all our valiant English, there were but thirty-four, And of the rebel Indians, there were about four-score; And sixteen of our English did safely home return, The rest were killed and wounded, for which we all must mourn. “Our worthy Capt. Lovewell among them there did die, They killed Lieut. Robbins, and wounded good young Frye, Who was our English Chaplin; he many Indians slew, And some of them he scalped while bullets round him flew.” Our brave forefathers have exterminated all the Indians, and their degenerate children no longer dwell in garrisoned houses nor hear any war-whoop in their path. It would be well, perchance, if many an “English Chaplin” in these days could exhibit as unquestionable trophies of his valor as did “good young Frye.” We have need to be as sturdy pioneers still as Miles Standish, or Church, or Lovewell. We are to follow on another trail, it is true, but one as convenient for ambushes. What if the Indians are exterminated, are not savages as grim prowling about the clearings to-day? — “And braving many dangers and hardships in the way, They safe arrived at Dunstable the thirteenth (?) day of May.” But they did not all “safe arrive in Dunstable the thirteenth,” or the fifteenth, or the thirtieth “day of May.”

METACOM MYLES STANDISH BENJAMIN CHURCH CAPTAIN JOHN LOVEWELL

When the Reverend George Ripley would review A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS, he would profess to be disturbed at what he took to be Thoreau’s irreverent stance:78

...he asserts that he considers the Sacred Books of the Brahmins in nothing inferior to the Christian Bible ... calculated to shock and pain many readers, not to speak of those who will be utterly repelled by them.

Thoreau inscribed a copy of his book for the Reverend Orestes Augustus Brownson, writing on the front free endpaper: “Rev O.A. Brownson with the Regards of the author.” This copy is now in the rare book collection of the University of Detroit and it is to be noted that after page 272 the text is unopened. Brownson had not read past that point: HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

78. In 1853 or 1854, in the creation of Draft F of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, Henry Thoreau would tack in what would be in effect a response to the Reverend George Ripley’s reaction to A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS:

I do not say that the Reverend Ripley will realize all this; but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

(Well, OK, what he would insert would not be so specific as this, actually he would distance the remark through the deployment of cartoon characters: instead of “the Reverend Ripley” he wrote “John or Jonathan.”) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1850

A “villa book” was published, THE ARCHITECTURE OF COUNTRY HOUSES by Andrew Jackson Downing. Would Henry Thoreau ever consult this as a source for his architectural remarks in WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS?

REPLICA OF SHANTY

EMERSON’S SHANTY

Also during this year, in Dublin, James M’Glashan published Joel Tyler Headley’s LIFE IN THE WOODS; OR,THE ADIRONDACK, a report on the author’s having spent the summers of 1847 and of 1848 in the Adirondacks.79 TIMELINE OF WALDEN

79. Forget it: Thoreau had already chosen his subtitle “Life in the Woods.” He did not derive it from this book of similar title published in this year in Dublin. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN According to J. Lyndon Shanley’s THE MAKING OF WALDEN (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1957, page 30), it was undoubtedly in the 1850-1851 period that Henry Thoreau went back through his WALDEN manuscript and interlined in Draft B and Draft C all or most of the quotations from Chinese and Indian sources. THOREAU AND CHINA

At this point the first word of the manuscript became the word “When,” the word which would eventually be referred to, by Professor Robert M. Thorson, as “a white lie”:

WALDEN: WHEN I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.

The very first word in WALDEN is a white lie. “When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods.” In REVISING MYTHOLOGIES, Stephen Adams and Donald Ross build on the previous work of Lyndon Shanley to document –in excruciating detail– that the bulk of the final version of WALDEN was written after Thoreau left the pond, with “most of the important changes occurring after 1852.” They further contend that the book has two separate narratives, the first being the “false economics of Concord” leading to “spiritual anesthesia,” and the second being the “basic poetic metaphor” of organicism. For my purposes, this is a fancy way of saying that WALDEN–Part I was early and has little to do with natural science. And that WALDEN–Part II is late and has everything to do with it. The essayist who wrote Part I lived at the pond and spent much of his time there writing A WEEK and other works with neoclassical and transcendental themes. The field scientist who wrote Part II lived with his parents in town, sojourned widely over miles of territory each day, and –in early 1852– decided to use his observations of natural phenomena to upgrade his dormant WALDEN manuscript, most of which was then social critique. During this later stage, Thoreau’s modus operandi was to walk away from the village each afternoon, move outward into nature in whatever direction his inner compass suggested, and then drench himself in outdoor sensations until something caught his attention. At that point, his intellect would automatically engage, scientifically at first, and then poetically. On those days, Walden Pond was only one of many bright stars in the broader galaxy of his sojourning space. But on those nights and subsequent mornings –when sitting at his desk in his garret on Main Street– the pond became a potent literary black hole that drew everything inward and downward from his broader experience, concentrating the results.

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THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

This is “reaching” a little bit, I fear, for rather than categorizing that 1st word “When” as a lie, we might prefer to say that at the point at which Thoreau changed the initial sentence of his Draft B to begin with the word “When” –sometime before or during Summer 1849– the bulk of the pages of the manuscript had in fact been Draft A with some Draft B additions, and Draft A dates at the very latest to September 1847 while Thoreau was moving back from his shanty at the pond, into the loft room of the Thoreau family’s boardinghouse in town. In other words, when it was written in pencil on this sheet of paper, it had been in no sense anything but the literal truth. We might as well add that the sentence “I lived there two years and two months” was another such “white lie,” because in very fact the author had lived there two years, two months, and two days. Rather than categorize this word “When” as a lie, therefore, we might better categorize it as something which through oversight would later fall through the cracks, neglecting to get itself updated as the manuscript grew and grew under Thoreau’s nurturing hand. (I am a bit sensitized to this word “lie” because Professor Walter Harding in his manifestly defective annotated edition of WALDEN had considered Thoreau’s words “a mile from any neighbor” to have constituted a material falsehood because –without offering any corroboration whatever– he was opinioning as of 1995 something new that no commentator however discerning had ever before noticed, that the Irish families of the laborers who had created the railroad embankments and tracks must have still been in residence in their shanties alongside the tracks within conversational hearing of Thoreau’s shanty.)

US Navy Lieutenant Charles Henry Davis’s “A Memoir upon the Geological Action of Tidal and Other Currents of the Ocean” saw publication in the MEMOIRS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES (Boston), 4th series, part I (1849-1850), on pages 117-156:

CAPE COD: The light-house keeper said that when the wind blowed PEOPLE OF strong on to the shore, the waves ate fast into the bank, but when CAPE COD it blowed off they took no sand away; for in the former case the wind heaped up the surface of the water next to the beach, and to preserve its equilibrium a strong undertow immediately set back again into the sea which carried with it the sand and whatever else was in the way, and left the beach hard to walk on; but in the latter case the undertow set on, and carried the sand with it, so that it was particularly difficult for shipwrecked men to get to land when the wind blowed on to the shore, but easier when it blowed off. This undertow, meeting the next surface wave on the bar which itself has made, forms part of the dam over which the latter breaks, as over an upright wall. The sea thus plays with the land holding a sand-bar in its mouth awhile before it swallows it, as a cat plays with a mouse; but the fatal gripe is CAT sure to come at last. The sea sends its rapacious east wind to rob the land, but before the former has got far with its prey, the land sends its honest west wind to recover some of its own. But, according to Lieutenant Davis, the forms, extent, and distribution of sand-bars and banks are principally determined, not by winds and waves, but by tides.

CHARLES HENRY DAVI S HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

May 31, Friday: In processing a journal entry he had made on this date into his WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS manuscript, Henry Thoreau would be creating an enduring confusion between, on the one hand, Sippio Brister of Lincoln who had been a slave of the Hoar family and who had died in 1822 at the age of 78, and, on the other, Brister Freeman who had been the slave of Dr. John Cuming of Concord and who had died in 1820 at the age of 64, his wife Fenda Freeman, and the three Freeman children of Brister’s Hill in Concord.80 TIMELINE OF WALDEN

May 31, 1850: Close by stood a stone with this inscription In memory of Sippio Brister a man of Colour who died Nov 1. 1820 AEt. 64.

Walden “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project

80. Thoreau’s “Former Inhabitants” chapter includes some thumbnail characterizations of erstwhile neighbors, with which Thoreau “repeopled the woods and lulled myself asleep.” Thoreau has attired these Concord folk in classic robes: In his imagination Brister Freeman has become the Roman general Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Major (234-183BCE) of the Punic Wars who defeated Hannibal at Zama, Wyman the younger is said to have been read about in Scripture, the Hugh Quoil who thought of himself as a veteran of foreign war is made to hang a fresh woodchuck pelt on his house to be “a trophy of his last Waterloo.” Refer to WALDEN, page 257 of the Princeton edition, material added to Version E in late 1852 and in 1853 and further revised in 1853-1854. There were precisely two books published during this period which dealt in such considerate terms with the lives of ordinary persons of color, WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS and the initial 1854 version of NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS AN AMERICAN SLAVE. WRITTEN BY HIMSELF which is ordinarily attributed to the authorship of Frederick Douglass. We may note that at the time of the writing of WALDEN there were at least two black families in Concord, and Thoreau carefully refrains from calling attention to these families. We may presume that an adequate reason for such silence was that such literary attentions would not only have been as unwelcome to them as to Concord whites, but could not have done them any good and might very well have done them harm. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Brister’s Spring on Brister’s Hill in Walden Woods pertained to Brister Freeman of Concord and not to Sippio Brister of Lincoln

Thoreau also recorded that according to William Wheeler of Lincoln, “a few years ago one Felch a Phrenologist by leave of the select men dug up — and took away two skulls” from the remains of the five grenadiers killed on April 19th near the “Ephraim Hartwell” Tavern during the retreat to Boston, that had there been interred. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN To-day May 31st a red and white cow being uneasy broke out of the steam mill pasture & crossed the bridge & broke into Elija Woods grounds– When he endeavored to drive her out by the bars she boldly took to the water wading first through the meadows full of ditches & swam across the river about forty rods wide at this time & landed in her own pasture again– She was a buffaloe crossing her Mississippi– This exploit conferred some dignity on the herd in my eyes–already dignified–& reflectedly on the river–which I looked on as a kind of Bosphorus. I love to see the domestic animals reassert their native right’s–any evidence that they have not lost their original wild habits & vigor.

There is a sweet wild world which lies along the strain of the wood thrush [Wood Thrush Catharus mustelina] –the rich intervales which border the stream of its song–more thoroughly genial to my nature than any other. The blossoms of the tough & vivacious shruboak are very handsome. I visited a retired–now almost unused graveyard in Lincoln to-day where (5) British soldiers lie buried who fell on the 19th April ’75. Edmund Wheeler–grandfather of William–who lived in the old house now pulled down near the present–went over the next day & carted them to this ground– A few years ago one Felch a Phrenologist by leave of the select men dug up–and took away two skulls The skeletons were very large– probably those of grenadiers. Wm Wheeler who was present–told me this– He said that he had heard old Mr. Child, who lived opposite–say that when one soldier was shot he leaped right up his full length out of the ranks & fell dead. & he Wm Wheeler–saw a bullet hole through & through one of the skulls.

The water was over the Turnpike below Master Cheney’s when I returned.

May 31: {One-third page missing} main there is a correspondence–that the fences–to a considerable extent will be found to mark natural divisions– Mowing–(upland & meadow) pasture woodland–& the different kinds of tillage– There will be found in the farmers motive for setting a fence here or there some conformity to natural limits– These artificial divisions no doubt have the effect of increasing the area & variety to the traveller– These various fields taken together seem more extensive than a single prairie of the same size would. The farmer puts his wall along the edge of his cornfield– Unless the land is very minutely divided the divisions will correspond to nature.– If the divisions corresponded to natural ones, I think that {One-third page missing}

NO-ONE’S LIFE IS EVER NOT DRIVEN PRIMARILY BY HAPPENSTANCE

Walden “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN 75 July: Herman Melville read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE. He purchased, for $0. , David Dudley Field’s and Professor Chester Dewey’s HISTORY OF THE COUNTY OF BERKSHIRE, MASSACHUSETTS; IN TWO PARTS. THE FIRST BEING A GENERAL VIEW OF THE COUNTY; THE SECOND, AN ACCOUNT OF THE SEVERAL TOWNS. BY GENTLEMEN IN THE COUNTY, CLERGYMEN AND LAYMEN, which had been printed by Samuel W. Bush in Pittsfield in 1829 (on page 39 of this volume the moths that ate their way out of a table made of apple wood may be found, which would later eat their way out of Henry Thoreau’s WALDEN’s concluding chapter, and then out of Melville’s “The Apple-Tree Table: or, Original Spiritual Manifestations”).81 BERKSHIRE, MASSACHUSETTS TIMELINE OF WALDEN

WALDEN: Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer’s kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts, –from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb, –heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board,– may unexpectedly come forth amidst society’s most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!

ENTOMBED LIFE

In 1806, a strong and beautiful bug ate out of a table made from an apple tree, which grew on the farm of Maj. Gen. Putnam, in Brooklyn, Conn., and which was brought to Williamstown when his son, Mr. P.S. Putnam, removed to that town. It was cut down in 1786, sixty-five years after it was transplanted, and if the tree was then fifteen years old, it was 80 years old when cut down. As the cortical layers of the leaf of the table are about sixty, and extend within about five of the heart, as the inner ones are quite convex, about fifteen layers have been cut off from the outside. In 1814, a third bug made his way out, the second having appeared two or three years before. The last bug came forth from nearest the heart, and 45 cortical layers distant, on the supposition of its age, from the outside. The tree had now been cut down 28 years. Of course, the egg must have been deposited in the wood seventy-three years before. This bug eat about three inches along the grain, till it emerged into the light. The eating of the insect was heard for weeks before 81. Berkshire County is technically not a county, since it has no governmental services of its own, but is a district association that covers the entire mountainous western end of the state of Massachusetts, including the towns of Adams, Alford, Becket, Cheshire, Clarksburg, Dalton, Egremont, Florida, Great Barrington, Housatonic, Hancock, Hinsdale, Lanesborough, Berkshire, Lee, Lenox, Dale, Mount Washington, New Ashford, New Marlborough, North Adams, Otis, Peru, Pittsfield, Richmond, Sandisfield, Savoy, Ashley Falls, Stockbridge, Glendale, Interlaken, Tyringham, Washington, West Stockbridge, Williamstown, and Windsor. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN its appearance. These facts were given by Mr. Putnam, in whose possession the table still remains, and were first published in the Repertory at Middlebury, Vt., in 1816. One of the bugs, preserved for some time by the Rev. Dr. Fitch, “was about an inch and one fourth long, and one third inch in diameter; colour, dark glistening brown, with tints of yellow. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1851

E.B. O’Callaghan’s THE DOCUMENTARY HISTORY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK was published in Albany, including some material in Volume IV, on pages 31-32, dating to the year 1650, which Henry Thoreau would be able to use in description of the 1st white homes of Concord. From the Economy chapter of WALDEN:

WALDEN: Old Johnson, in his “Wonder-Working Providence,” speaking of the first settlers of this town, with whom he was contemporary, tells us that “they burrow themselves in the earth for their first shelter under some hillside, and, casting the soil aloft upon timber, they make a smoky fire against the earth, at the highest side.” They did not “provide them houses,” says he, “till the earth, by the Lord’s blessing, brought forth bread to feed them,” and the first year’s crop was so light that “they were forced to cut their bread very thin for a long season.” The secretary of the Province of New Netherland, writing in Dutch, in 1650, for the information of those who wished to take up land there, states more particularly, that “those in New Netherland, and especially in New England, who have no means to build farm houses at first according to their wishes, dig a square pit in the ground, cellar fashion, six or seven feet deep, as long and as broad as they think proper, case the earth inside with wood all round the wall, and line the wood with the bark of trees or something else to prevent the caving in of the earth; floor this cellar with plank, and wainscot it overhead for a ceiling, raise a roof of spars clear up, and cover the spars with bark or green sods, so that they can live dry and warm in these houses with their entire families for two, three, and four years, it being understood that partitions are run through those cellars which are adapted to the size of the family. The wealthy and principal men in New England, in the beginning of the colonies, commenced their first dwelling houses in this fashion for two reasons; firstly, in order not to waste time in building, and not to want food the next season; secondly, in order not to discourage poor laboring people whom they brought over in numbers from Fatherland. In the course of three or four years, when the country became adapted to agriculture, they built themselves handsome houses, spending on them several thousands.”

EDWARD JOHNSON

EMERSON’S SHANTY TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Lecture82

DATE PLACE TOPIC

January 15, Wednesday, 1851, at 7:30PM Portland ME; Temple Street Chapel “An Excursion to Cape Cod” 82. From Bradley P. Dean and Ronald Wesley Hoag’s THOREAU’S LECTURES BEFORE WALDEN: AN ANNOTATED CALENDAR. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

DATE PLACE TOPIC

January 22, Wednesday, 1851 Medford MA “Economy” April 1851 (?) Bedford MA (?) (?) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Narrative of Event: All that is known of this lecture delivery is that on his way to Medford, Henry Thoreau stopped in Boston to visit Bronson Alcott, whose diary entry for January 22, 1851 is of interest.83 Thoreau passed this morning and dined with me. He was on his way to read a paper at Medford this evening — his “Life in the Woods at Walden”; and as refreshing a piece as the Lyceum will get from any lecturer going at present in New England — a whole forest, with forester and all, imported into the citizen’s and villager’s brain. A sylvan man accomplished in the virtues of an aboriginal civility, and quite superior to the urbanities of cities, Thoreau is himself a wood, and its inhabitants. There is more in him of sod and shade and sky lights, of the genuine mold and moistures of the green grey earth, than in any person I know. Self dependent and sagacious as any denizen of the elements, he has the key to every animal’s brain, every flower and shrub; and were an Indian to flower forth, and reveal the secrets hidden in the wilds of his cranium, it would not be more surprising than the speech of this Sylvanus. He belongs to the Homeric age, and is older than fields and gardens; as virile and talented as Homer’s heroes, and the elements. He seems alone, of all the men I have known, to be a native New Englander, — as much so as the oak, or granite ledge; and I would rather send him to London or Vienna or Berlin, as a specimen of American genius spontaneous and unmixed, than anyone else. I shall have occasion to use him presently in these portraits. We must grind him into paint to help brown and invigorate Channing’s profile, when we come to it. Here is coloring for half a dozen Socialisms. It stands out in layers and clots, like carbuncles, to give force and homeliness to the otherwise feminine lineaments. This man is the independent of independents — is, indeed, the sole signer of the Declaration, and a Revolution in himself — a more than ’76 — having got beyond the signing to the doing it out fully. Concord jail could not keep him safely: Justice Hoar paid his tax, too; and was glad to forget it thereafter, till now, his citizenship, and omit his existence, as a resident, in the poll list. Lately he has taken to surveying as well as authorship, and makes the compass pay for his book on “The Concord and Merrimac[k] Rivers,” which the public is slow to take off his hands. I went with him to his publishers, Monroe and Co., and learned that only about two hundred of an edition of a thousand copies were sold. But author and book can well afford to wait. Advertisements, Reviews, and Responses: None known.

Description of Topic: See “Economy”. We assume that this is the only time Thoreau delivered one of his “Walden; or, Life in the Woods” in Medford and that he would therefore have delivered “Economy,” the first of the three lectures, the other two being more-or-less contextually dependent upon the first. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

83.Bronson Alcott, JOURNALS, pages 238-39. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Spring: Lysander Spooner visited New-York, to discover that he had been hopelessly outdistanced by his competitor for recognition Barnabas Bates. He would be informed frankly by Joshua Leavitt that the postal reformers could not understand why they should feel any obligation to someone like him — who had engaged in a business for profit and then failed. Duh.

At the age of 19 Franklin Benjamin Sanborn visited Boston a 2d time.

After a hiatus Henry Thoreau began to work again upon his WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS manuscript (Draft C becoming Draft D). TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1852

The fundamental and profound idea, that the quantity of energy in the universe available for useful work was a quantity which was perpetually being depleted without renewal, with a consequent inevitable increase of randomness construed as disorder, a quantity which would eventually decrease to zero as the universe became flat and static, burst upon our intellectual world as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Once this was conceived of, degeneration began to seem utterly inevitable. From this point in our intellectual trajectory forward none of our thoughts about the end and purpose of life would be the same as before — except of course for our thoughts about racial purity and the inexorable advance of amalgamation, which would in a strange manner be subtly reinforced by this new idea of the general amalgamation and degeneration of the universe. (“Do God’s work on earth by persecuting those of mixed race!” would morph into “Protect our planet by persecuting those of mixed race!”)

Hermann Ludwig von Helmholtz measured the speed of the transmission of a nerve impulse in the frog. He was the first to discover the speed of the signal. This year Helmholtz would also publish an important paper on the theory of color. THE SCIENCE OF 1852

REVISED EDITION of Elijah Hinsdale Burritt’s THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE HEAVENS, AND CLASS BOOK OF ASTRONOMY: ACCOMPANIED BY A CELESTIAL ATLAS.... (New York: F.J. Huntington and Mason & Law) by a Methodist minister, the Reverend Hiram Mattison, Professor of Natural Philosophy in the Falley Seminary (February 11, 1811-November 24, 1868).

A Great Auk was sighted on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland (no more would ever be seen).

This year 1852 is being used by Professor Robert M. Thorson to mark conveniently a profound turning point in the life of Henry Thoreau — the transitional period between 1849 and 1859 in which our guy would exit from his role as merely HenryT the Transcendentalist by refashioning himself into HenryS the Scientist. As late as 1849, Thoreau was still describing natural laws using the transcendental language of correspondence: “The laws of earth are for the feet, or inferior man; the laws of heaven are for the head, or superior man ... Happy the man who observes the heavenly and terrestrial law in just proportion.” Here, it is important to recognize that he is distinguishing two distinct sets of laws, those for the soul or spirit (heavenly), and those for nature or the body (terrestrial). Within the net ten years, and through a long and difficult process, Thoreau abolished the heavenly laws by pulling them down to earth. These he combined with terrestrial laws to create one unified set overseen by one ineffable “universal intelligence.” For me, this marks the end of Thoreau’s transcendental stage.... In systems theory, Thoreau’s mind could be classified as an “intransitive” system because it had two equally viable equilibrium states: the poetic and the scientific. During the summer of 1852 he was tottering on the threshold between these two states when he wrote his widely quoted statement that “every poet has trembled on the verge of science.” The backdrop for this statement was not Thoreau the poet being seduced by science, but Thoreau the scientist being pushed to the brink of poetry. At the time, he was culminating a month-long investigation of three-dimensional meandering in stream channels. Each day, he had been getting up HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN earlier and earlier to explore how rivers work and, in the process, experience that intellectual rush of outdoor discovery that office-bound writers like myself can only dream of. Eventually, he put what he learned to good use, writing: “He is the richest who has the most use for nature as raw material of tropes and symbols with which to describe his life.” Translation? The better the science, the better the poetry.

Professor Robert M. Thorson has also issued a tentative diagnosis of Thoreau’s condition, that Henry may have been a victim of “Asperger’s Syndrome.” I have therefore written to him, offering a suggestion, and have taken offense at the fact that he has neglected to respond: To: [email protected] Professor Thorson, in regard to the idea that Thoreau was a hermit, and in regard to the idea that Thoreau was an anarchist, I have developed comprehensive lists of New Englanders who were alive during his lifetime, who were known to others locally as hermits, or as anarchists. I have then investigated these lives, both to make careful comparisons between them and Thoreau’s life, and to check to see whether Thoreau had been in any contact with any of them. My conclusion was that there really were no points of similarity, between Thoreau’s life and the lives of these people known during his era as hermits or as anarchists, and that he had never had any recorded contact with any of these individuals. I would suggest, in regard to your tentative diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome, that we ought now to follow a similar procedure. Who among his contemporaries in New England might we now identify as the prime suspects for Asperger’s Syndrome? Would he be the only such suspect, or would there be an extended list of suspects? Would he be the type case in his society during his period, or would his case be one of the more marginal and tentative cases? You have entered the lists in what actually is a cottage industry. Over the decades many, many individuals have brought forward psychiatric classifications for Thoreau. I have not made a tabulation, but my sense of it is that every possible diagnosis has at one point or another been marshaled. There have been diagnoses of him as a depressive, as having a mother fixation, as having a hostility to the father figure, as homosexual, the list goes on and on. Although Hans Asperger first published in German in regard to the syndrome in 1944, it did not become an accepted diagnostic category until 1994. We should presume, then, that we are unlikely to find much discussion prior to 1994. So far, the only other proposed candidate who was alive in New England during Thoreau’s florut, that I have been able to identify, is Emily Dickinson: People who died during Thoreau’s childhood, who have since been assigned a marginal-Asperger’s diagnosis: Jane Austen, 1775-1817 Thomas Jefferson, 1743-1826 Ludwig van Beethoven, 1770-1827 Kaspar Hauser, circa 1812-1833 People whose lives significantly overlapped with Thoreau’s, who have since been assigned a marginal-Asperger’s diagnosis: Anton Bruckner, 1824-1896 Emily Dickinson, 1830-1886 Mark Twain, 1835-1910 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900 Ludwig II, King of Bavaria, 1845-1886 Alexander Graham Bell, 1847-1922 Thomas Edison, 1847-1931 Vincent Van Gogh, 1853-1890 Oliver Heaviside, 1850-1925 Nikola Tesla, 1856-1943 George Bernard Shaw, 1856-1950 Gustav Mahler, 1860-1911

It has been asserted that 1852 was “Thoreau’s annus mirabilis, the year his months of living deliberately yielded a magnificent harvest.” Waldo Emerson commented in his journal, during this period, with a singular lack of the usual condescension, that:

Henry Thoreau’s idea of the men he meets, is, that they are his old thoughts walking. It is all affectation to make much of them, as if he did not long since know them thoroughly.

In the previous century, in the year 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau had had his annus mirabilis, the year his months of living deliberately yielded a magnificent harvest. So — just what was the relationship of Thoreau the American nature-boy with that Swiss nature-boy of the previous century? We can discover precisely the answer to this one, by considering Thoreau’s one solitary reference to Rousseau, a reference which would occur during this year:

February 17, Tuesday: Perhaps the peculiarity of those western vistas was partly owing to the shortness of the days when we naturally look to the heavens & make the most of the little light.– When we live an arctic life. When the woodchopper’s axe reminds us of twilight at 3 o’clock. P m. When the morning & the evening literally make the whole day– When I travelled as it were between the portals of the night–& the path was narrow as well as blocked with snow. Then too the sun has the last opportunity to fill the air with vapor. I see on the Walden road that the wind through the wall is cutting through the drifts leaving a portion adhering to the stones. It is hard for the traveller when in a cold & blustering day the sun and wind come from the same side– Today the wind is North W. or W by N & the sun from the S W. The apothecia of lichens appears to be a fungus.– all fruit. I saw Patrick Riorden carrying home an armful of faggots from the woods to his shanty on his shoulder. How much more interesting an event is that man’s supper who has just been forth in the snow to hunt or perchance to steal the fuel to cook it with. His bread & meat must be sweet. It was something to hear that the women of Waltham used the Parmelia saxatilis? in dying If you would read books on botany go to the fathers of the science– Read Linnaeus at once, & come down from him as far as you please– I lost much time reading the Florists. It is remarkable how little the mass of those interested in botany are acquainted with Linnaeus. His Philosophia Botanica which Rousseau Sprengel & others praised so highly – I doubt if it has ever been translated into English.– It is simpler more easy to understand & more comprehensive – than any of the hundred manuals to which it has given birth– A few pages of cuts representing the different parts of plants with the botanical names attached – is worth whole volumes of explanation. According to Linnaeus’s classification, I come under the head of the Miscellaneous Botanophilists. “Botanophili sunt, qui varia de vegetabilibus tradiderunt, licet ea non proprie ad scientiam Botanicam spectant” – either one of the Biologi (Panegyrica plerumque exclamarunt) or Poetae. CAROLUS LINNAEUS This was the year in which Thoreau originated, in pencil, his parable of the artist of Kouroo, in which he depicts time HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN as an illusion with which we need to make no compromise:

WALDEN: There was an artist in the city of Kouroo who was disposed PEOPLE OF to strive after perfection. One day it came into his mind to make WALDEN a staff. Having considered that in an imperfect work time is an ingredient, but into a perfect work time does not enter, he said to himself, It shall be perfect in all respects, though I should do nothing else in my life. He proceeded instantly to the forest for wood, being resolved that it should not be made of unsuitable material; and as he searched for and rejected stick after stick, his friends gradually deserted him, for they grew old in their works and died, but he grew not older by a moment. His singleness of purpose and resolution, and his elevated piety, endowed him, without his knowledge, with perennial youth. As he made no compromise with Time, Time kept out of his way, and only sighed at a distance because he could not overcome him. Before he had found a stock in all respects suitable the city of Kouroo was a hoary ruin, and he sat on one of its mounds to peel the stick. Before he had given it the proper shape the dynasty of the Candahars was at an end, and with the point of the stick he wrote CANDAHARS? the name of the last of that race in the sand, and then resumed his work. By the time he had smoothed and polished the staff Kalpa KALPA? was no longer the pole-star; and ere he had put on the ferule and the head adorned with precious stones, Brahma had awoke and slumbered many times. But why do I stay to mention these things? When the finishing stroke was put to his work, it suddenly expanded before the eyes of the astonished artist into the fairest of all the creations of Brahma. He had made a new system in making a staff, a world with full and fair proportions; in which, though the old cities and dynasties had passed away, fairer and more glorious ones had taken their places. And now he saw by the heap of shavings still fresh at his feet, that, for him and his work, the former lapse of time had been an illusion, and that no more time had elapsed than is required for a single scintillation from the brain of Brahma to fall on and inflame the tinder of a mortal brain. The material was pure, and his art was pure; how could the result be other than wonderful?

ARTIST OF KOUROO

(One of our unanswered questions about Thoreau’s writing is how he came to identify the North Star as named “Kalpa.” Was this simply a misunderstanding — or did he have access to some Hindu astronomical text of which we have lost track?) TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Henry Thoreau added the hoot owl to the “Sounds” chapter of his WALDEN manuscript.

Draft D of the first two paragraphs of the Hollowell Farm ruminations, destined for the 2d chapter of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS:

The nearest that I came to actual possession was when I bought the Hollowell farm ^place, and had begun to sort my seeds, and collected materials with which to make a wheelbarrow to carry it on or off with; but before the owner gave me a deed of it, his wife –every man has such a wife– changed her mind and wished to keep it, and he offered me ten dollars to release him. Now, to tell ^ speak the truth, I had not ^ but ten cents in the world, and it surpassed my arithmetic to tell, if I was that man who had ten cents, or ^who had a farm, or ^who had ten dollars, or all together. However, I let him keep the ten dollars and the farm too^, for I had carried it far enough; or rather, to be generous, I sold him the farm for just what I gave for it, and, as he was a poor man ^not a rich man, made him a present of ten dollars, and still had my ten cents, and seeds, and materials for a wheelbarrow left. I found thus that I had been a rich man without any damage to my poverty. But I retained the landscape, and I have since annually carried it off, –what it yielded,– ^carried off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow. With respect to landscapes I may say that,– “I am monarch of all I survey, My right there is none to dispute.”

I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the most valuable part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed that he had got a few wild apples only. Why, the owner does not know it for many years when a poet has put his farm in rhyme, has fairly ^the most admirable kind of invisible fence, has fairly impounded it, milked it, skimmed it, and got all the cream, and left the farmer only the skimmed milk.

It was in this year that Thoreau determined to add his poem “It is no dream of mine” to his WALDEN manuscript, by excision of the section of that poem which dealt with his standing on his legs and voiding his HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN dregs of the pure wine of liquid joy into the self-renewing purity of Walden Pond:

^Nevertheless, of all the characters I have known, ^perhaps Walden wears best, and best preserves its purity. ^Many men have been likened to it, but few deserve that honor. Though the woodchoppers have laid bare first this shore and then that, and the Irish have built their sties by it, and the railroad has infringed ôn its border, and the ice-men have skimmed it once in the winter, it is absolutely êssentially îtself unchanged, the same water which my youthful eyes fell on^; all the change is in me. It has not acquired one permanent wrinkle after all its ripples. Though I have changed, it has not. It is perennially young, and I may stand and see a swallow dip apparently to pick an insect from its surface as of yore. It struck me âgain tonight, as if I had not seen it almost daily for more than twenty years, –Why, here is Walden, the same woodland lake that I discovered so many years ago; where a forest was cut down last winter another is springing up by its shore as lustily as ever; the same thought is welling up to its surface that was then; it is the same liquid joy and happiness to itself and its Maker, ay, and it may be to me. It is the work of a brave man ^surely, in whom there was no guile! ^He rounded this water with his hand, and deepened and clarified it in his thought, and in his will he bequeathed it to Concord. I see by its face that it is visited by the same reflection; and I can almost say, Walden, is it you? It is a real place, Boston, I tell it to your face. And no dream of mine, To ornament a line; I cannot come nearer to God and Heaven Than I live to Walden even. It is a part of me which I have not profaned I live by the shore of me detained. Laden with my dregs I stand on my legs While all my pure wine I to nature consign I am its stony shore, And the breeze that passes o’er; In the hollow of my hand Are its water and its sand, And its deepest resort Lies high in my thought.

—Which is unfortunate, for this may well be the niftiest description of a guy taking a piss in a pond HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN that is to be found anywhere in our literature. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

January 8, Thursday: Henry Thoreau read from his WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS MS, Draft C, to Miss Mary Moody Emerson. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

January 8, Thursday: I notice that almost every track which I made yesterday in the snow – perhaps 10 inches deep – has got a dead leaf in it – though none is to be seen on the snow around. Even as early as 3 o’clock these winter afternoons the axes in the woods sound like night fall as if – like the sound of a twilight labor. Reading from my MSS to Miss Emerson this evening & using the word God in one instance in perchance a merely heathenish sense – she inquired hastily in a tone of dignified anxiety– “Is that god spelt with a little g?” Fortunately it was. (I had brought in the word god without any solemnity of voice or connexion.) I perceive that the livid lettuce leaved lichen which I gathered the other day – has dried almost an ash or satin with no green about has bleached.

Herman Melville wrote to Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: My Dear Mrs Hawthorne I have hunted up the finest Bath I could find, gilt-edged and stamped, whereon to inscribe my humble acknowledgement of your highly flattering letter of the 29th Dec: — It really amazed me that you should find any satisfaction in that book. It is true that some men have said they were pleased with it, but you are the only woman — for as a general thing, women have small taste for the sea. But, then, since you, with your spiritualizing nature, see more things than other people, and by the same process, refine all you see, so that they are not the same things that other people see, but things which while you think you but humbly discover them, you do in fact create them for yourself — Therefore, upon the whole, I do not so much marvel at your expressions concerning Moby Dick. At any rate, your allusion for example to the “Spirit Spout” first showed to me that there was a subtile significance in that thing — but I did not, in that HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN case, mean it. I had some vague idea while writing it, that the whole book was susceptible of an allegoric construction, & also that parts of it were — but the speciality of many of the particular subordinate allegories, were first revealed to me, after reading Mr Hawthorne’s letter, which, without citing any particular examples, yet intimated the part-&-parcel allegoricalness of the whole. But, My Dear Lady, I shall not again send you a bowl of salt water. The next chalice I shall commend, will be a rural bowl of milk. And now, how are you in West Newton? Are all domestic affairs regulated? Is Miss Una content? and Master Julien satisfied with the landscape in general? And does Mr Hawthorne continue his series of calls upon all his neighbors within a radius of ten miles? Shall I send him ten packs of visiting cards? And a box of kid gloves? and the latest style of Parisian handkerchief? — He goes into society too much altogether — seven evenings out, a week, should content any reasonable man. Now, Madam, had you not said anything about Moby Dick, & had Mr Hawthorne been equally silent, then had I said perhaps, something to both of you about another Wonder- (full) Book. But as it is, I must be silent. How is it, that while all of us human beings are so entirely disembarrased in censuring a person; that so soon as we would praise, then we begin to feel awkward? I never blush after denouncing a man: but I grow scarlet, after eulogizing him. And yet this is all wrong; and yet we can’t help it; and so we see how true was that musical sentence of the poet when he sang — “We can’t help ourselves” For tho’ we know what we ought to be; & what it would be very sweet & beautiful to be; yet we can’t be it. That is most sad, too. Life is a long Dardenelles, My Dear Madam, the shores whereof are bright with flowers, which we want to pluck, but the bank is too high; & so we float on & on, hoping to come to a landing-place at last — but swoop! we launch into the great sea! Yet the geographers say, even then we must not despair, because across the great sea, however desolate & vacant it may look, lie all Persia & the delicious lands roundabout Damascus. So wishing you a pleasant voyage at last to that sweet & far countree — Beleive Me Earnestly Thine— Herman Melville

I forgot to say, that your letter was sent to me from Pittsfield — which delayed it. My sister Augusta begs me to send her sincerest regards both to you & Mr Hawthorne. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN January 17, Saturday, or 22, Thursday: Per Leary, Henry Thoreau began the process of creative reshaping of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, onto 67 leaves of white and cream paper marked with the GOODWIN*HARTFORD anchor watermark, which following Ronald Earl Clapper we refer to as “Draft D.” For instance WALDEN 314, added into draft D of 1852:

We should be fortunate & blessed if we were so sane & in season, with our robes always tucked up, that we were able & could afford to live in the present without any definite or recognized object from day to day. If we could without be thus [?] always where God & Nature are, and not live on a tangent to the sphere, for the world is round. As an old poet says “Though man proposeth, God disposeth all.” What have we to boast of. We make ourselves the very sewers, the cloacae of nature. I too revive as does the grass after rain. We are never so floundering, our day is never so fair, but that the sun may come out a little brighter through mists and we yearn to live after a better fashion.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN WALDEN A ----> G This process would continue into September.

Henry Thoreau reminisced about the two young women who borrowed his dipper while he was living at the pond and then failed to bring it back:

January 17, Saturday, 1852: One day two young women–a sunday–stopped at the door of my hut and asked for some water. I answered that I had no cold water but I would lend them a dipper. They never returned the dipper–and I had a right to suppose that they came to steal. They were a disgrace to their sex and to humanity. ... Pariahs of the moral world– Evil spirits that thirsted not for water but threw the dipper into the DANTE lake.– Such as Dante saw. What the lake to them but liquid fire & brimstone. They will never know peace till they have returned the dipper– In all the worlds this is decreed. ...

A disgrace to their sex and to humanity! —It really sounds as if these two had attempted to flirt with him. However, this is all of the incident that got into the book manuscript:

WALDEN: Many a traveller came out of his way to see me and the inside of my house, and, as an excuse for calling, asked for a glass of water. I told them that I drank at the pond, and pointed thither, offering to lend them a dipper. Far off as I lived, I was not exempted from that annual visitation which occurs, methinks, about the first of April, when every body is on the move; and I had my share of good luck, though there were some curious specimens among my visitors.

January 17, Saturday, 1852: ... Evergreens would be a good title for some of my things.– or Gill-go- over the Ground.– or Winter green–or Checker-berry. or Esnea lichens. &c &c Iter Canadense.... One day an innoffensive simple minded pauper from the almshouse–who with others I often saw used as fencing stuff standing or sitting on a bushel in the fields to keep cattle from straying–visited me. and expressed a wish to live as I did. He told me in the simplest manner–(and therefore quite superior to anything that is called HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN humility–it was too simple & truthful for that) that he was deficient in intellect these were his words–the Lord had made him so–and yet he supposed that the Lord cared for him as much as for another. Said he I have always been so from my childhood I never had much mind. It was the Lord’s will I suppose. I am weak in the head”– I was not like other children.” I have rarely been so fortunate as to meet a fellow man on such promising ground. It was so solemnly true–all that he said. The other day the 14th, as I was passing the further Garfield house beyond Holden’s with my pantaloons as usual tucked into my boots (there was no path beyond Holden’s) I heard some persons in Garfields shed but did not look round–and when I had got a rod or two beyond–I heard some one call out impudently from the shed– quite loud–something like “Ho’lloa–mister–what do you think of the walking?” I turned round directly and saw three men standing in the shed. I was resolved to discomfit them–that they should prove their manhood if they had any–and find something to say though they had nothing before.– that they should make amends to the universe by feeling cheap. They should either say to my face & eye what they had said to my back–or they should feel the meanness of having to change their tone. So I called out looking at one do you wish to speak to me Sir? no answer– So I stepped a little nearer & repeated the question– When one replied yes sir. So I advanced with alacrity up the path they had shovelled. In the meanwhile one ran into the house. I thought I had seen the nearest one– He called me by name faintly & with hesitation & held out his hand half unconsciously which I did not decline–and I inquired gravely if he wished to say anything to me, he could only wave me to the other & mutter my brother. I approached him & repeated the question. He looked as if he was shrinking into a nutshell–a pitiable object he was–he looked away from me while he began to frame some business some surveying that he might wish to have done I saw that he was drunk–that his brother was ashamed of him–and I turned my back on him in the outset of this indirect but drunken apology. IDA PFEIFFER When Madame Pfeiffer arrived in Asiatic Russia she felt the necessity–of wearing other than a travelling dress, when she went to meet the authorities–for as she remarks she “was now in a civilized country where – – people are judged of by their clothes.” This is another barbarous trait. It seemed that from such a basis as the poor weak headed pauper had laid–such a basis of truth & frankness– our intercourse might go forward to something better than the intercourse of sages. It was on the 4th of July that I put a few things into a hay-rigging some of which I had made myself, & commenced housekeeping. There is the worldwide fact that from the mass of men–the appearance of wealth–dress & equipage alone command respects,–they who yield it are the heathen who need to have missionaries sent to them–and they who cannot afford to live & travel but in this respectable way are if possible more pitiable still. In proportion as I have celestial thoughts, is the necessity for me to be out and behold the western sky before sunset these winter days. That is the symbol of the unclouded mind that knows neither winter nor summer. What is your thought like? That is the hue–that the purity & transparency and distance from earthly taint of my inmost mind–for whatever we see without is a symbol of something within–& that which is farthest off– is the symbol of what is deepest within. The lover of contemplation accordingly will gaze much into the sky.– Fair thoughts & a serene mind make fair days. The rain bow is the symbol of the triumph which succeeds to a grief that has tried us to our advantage– so that at last we can smile through our–tears– It is the aspect with which we come out of the house of mourning. We have found our relief in tears. As the skies appear to a man so is his mind. Some see only clouds there some prodigies & portents–some rarely look up at all, their heads like the brutes are directed toward earth. Some behold there serenity–purity beauty ineffable. The World run to see the panorama when there is a panorama in the sky which few go out to see. Methinks there might be a chapter–when I speak of hens in the thawy days & spring weather on the chips– called Chickweed. or Plantain. To sea-going men the very Mts are but boats turned upside down–as the North men in Norway speak of the “keel-ridge of the country” i.e. the ridge of the Mts which divide the waters flowing east & west Those western vistas through clouds to the sky–show the clearest heavens–clearer & more elysian than if the whole sky is comparatively free from clouds–for then there is wont to be a vapor more generally diffused especially near the horizon–which in cloudy days is absorbed as it were & collected into masses. And the vistas are clearer than the unobstructed cope of heaven. The endless variety in the forms & texture of the clouds! Some fine some coarse grained. I saw tonight over 2 head–stretching /31] across the sky what looked like the back bone with portions of the ribs of a fossil monster. Every form & creature is thus shadowed forth in vapor in the heavens. Saw a teamster coming up the Boston road this afternoon sitting on his load which was bags of corn or salt apperently behind 2 horses & beating his hands for warmth. He finally got off & walked behind to make his blood circulate faster– and I saw that he was a large man– But when I came near him I found that he was a monstrous man & dwarfed all whom he stood by–so that I did not know whether he was large or they were small. Yet though he stood so high he stooped considerably more than anybody I think of & he wore a flat glazed cap to conceal his hight. & when he got into the village he sat down on his bags again. I heard him remark to a boy that it was a cold day & it was. But I wondered that he should feel the cold so sensibly–for I thought it must take a long time to cool so large a body. I learned that it was Kimball of Littleton–that probably he was not 20. The family was not large Wild who took HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN the census–said so and that his sister said he could’nt do much” health & strength not much. It troubled him that he was so large–for people looked at him. There is at once something monstrous in the bad sense suggested by the sight of such a man. Great size is inhuman. It is as if a man should be born with the earth attached to him. I saw him standing upon a sled talking with the driver while his own team went on ahead. And I supposed from their comparative height that his companion was sitting–but he proved to be standing. Such a man is so much less human–that is what may make him sad. Those old Northmen were not like so many men in these days whom you can pass your hand through because they have not any back-bone. When Asmund was going to kill Harek of Thiottö with a thin hatchet, King Magnus said “‘Rather take this axe of mine’. It was thick, and made like a club. ‘Thou must know, Asmund,’ added he, ‘that there are hard bones in the old fellow’.” Asmund struck Harek on the head & gave him his death wound, but when he returned to the king’s house, it appeared that “the whole edge of the axe was turned with the blow”. It appears to me that at a very early age–the mind of man–perhaps at the same time with his body, ceases to be elastic. His intellectual power becomes something defined–& limited. He does not think expansively as he would stretch himself in his growing days– What was flexible sap hardens into heartwood and there is no further change. In the season of youth methinks man is capable of intellectual effort & performance which surpass all rules & bounds– As the youth lays out his whole strength without fear or prudence & does not feel his limits. It is the transition from poetry to prose. The young man can run & leap–he has not learned exactly how far–he knows no limits– The grown man does not exceed his daily labor. He has no strength to waste.

Some men are never where they For the most part, we are not where we are, but in a false position. By Through an infirmity of their our natures, they we suppose a case, and put themselves ourselves into it, and hence they we are in two cases, the actual and the supposed, at the same time, which is to be in a dilemma, and it is doubly difficult to get out. A few healthy & true men In healthy and true moments In sane moments we regard only the facts, the case that is…. Any truth is presentable. better than make-believe. (Clapper 862-7; WALDEN, 326-7)

[I]n an imperfect work time is an ingredient, but into a perfect work time does not enter…. [T]ime had been an illusion…. Some men are never where they For the most part, we are not where we are, but in a false position. By Through an infirmity of their our natures, they we suppose a case, and put themselves ourselves into it, and hence they we are in two cases, the actual and the supposed, at the same time, which is to be in a dilemma, and it is doubly difficult to get out. A few healthy & true men In healthy and true moments In sane moments we regard only the facts, the case that is…. Any truth is presentable. better than make-believe. (Clapper 862-7; WALDEN, 326-7)

Wherever I sat, there I might live, and the landscape radiated from me accordingly. (Clapper 256-7; WALDEN, 81)

March 4, Thursday: The editor of the National Antislavery Standard, Sydney Gay, prophesied that if the antislavery people resorted to violence, the perceived issue before the nation would deteriorate from “liberty versus slavery” into “rebellion versus order,” and that such a deterioration of the issue at hand would in effect “fasten upon a suffering people the very gigantic wrong which it was intended to remove.”

The Tasmanian Colonist reported that gold had been discovered near Fingal in Van Diemen’s Land.

March 4, Thursday: The gold-digger among the ravines of the MTS. is as much a gambler as his fellow in the saloons of San Francisco– What difference does it make whether you shake dirt or shake dice? If you win society is the loser. The gold-digger is the enemy of the honest laborer – whatever checks and compensations a Kind Fate? has provided. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN The humblest thinker who has been to the mines sees & says that gold digging is of the character of a lottery – that the reward is not proportionate to the labor – that the gold has not the same look, is not the same thing, with the wages of honest toil – but he practically forgets what he has seen – for he has seen only the fact – not the principle– He looks out for “the main chance” still–he buys a ticket in another lottery nevertheless, where the fact is not so obvious.84 It is remarkable that among all the teachers and preachers–there are so few moral teachers–. I find the prophets & preachers employed in excusing the ways of men.85 My most reverend seniors Doctors deacons & the illuminated86 – tell me with a smile betwixt an aspiration & a shudder not to be so tender about these things – to lump all that – i.e. make a lump of gold of it – I was never refreshed by any advice on this subject – the highest I have heard was grovelling. It is not worth the while for you to undertake to reform the world in this particular– They tell me not to ask how my bread is buttered – it will make me sick if I do – & the like.87 It is discouraging to talk with men who will recognize no principles. How little use is made of reason in this world! You argue with a man for an hour – he agrees with you step by step – you are approaching a triumphant conclusion – you think that you have converted him but ah no he has a habit – he takes a pinch of snuff – he remembers that he entertained a different opinion at the commencement of the controversy – & his reverence for the past compels him to reiterate it now. You began at the butt of the pole to curve it – you gradually bent it round and planted the other end in the ground – and already in imagination saw the vine curling round this segment of an arbor – under which a new generation was to recreate itself– –but when you had done just when the twig was bent it sprang back to its former stubborn and unhandsome position like a bit of whalebone. This world is a place of business – what an infinite bustle. I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the steam-engine. It interrupts my dreams. There is no Sabbath– It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once.88 Concord Fight! 2 killed on the patriots’ side – & Luther Blanchard wounded – ! Why here every ant was a Buttrick– “Fire for godsake, fire” – and thousands shared the fate of Davis & Hosmer – I have no doubt it was a principle they fought for–as much as our ancestors and not a three-penny tax on their tea.89

10 A M Up river on ice to Fair Haven Pond. The steam of the steam engine rises to heaven this clear morning The other day when the weather was thick I observed that it hugged the earth– Was the air lighter then? Some refer the music of the telegraph harp to the electricity passing along the wire! others to the air passing through the glasses. AEOLIAN HARP –The air is fresher & the sky clearer in the morning– We have this morning the clear cold continent sky of January. The river is frozen solidly & I do not have to look out for openings Now I can take that walk along the river highway & the meadow–which leads me under–the boughs of the maples & the swamp white oaks &c which in summer overhang the water–there I can now stand at my ease & study their phenomena–amid the sweet gale & button bushes projecting above the snow & ice. I see the shore from the water side– A liberal walk–so level & wide & smooth without under brush. I easily approach & study the boughs which usually overhang the water. In some places where the ice is exposed I see a kind of crystallized chaffy snow–like little bundles of asbestos on its surface.– I seek some sunny nook on the south side of a wood which keeps off the cold wind among the maples & the swamp white oaks which are frozen in–& there sit & anticipate the spring and hear the chicadees [BLACK-CAPPED CHICADEE PARUS ATRICAPILLUS] & the belching of the ice– The sun has got a new power in his rays after all–cold as the weather is– He could not have warmed me so much a month ago nor should I have heard such rumblings 84. Henry Thoreau would add a reference to PROVERBS and utilize this entry in his lecture “WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT” as:

[Paragraph 44] The gold-digger in the ravines of the mountains is as much a gambler as his fellow in the saloons of San Francisco. What difference does it make, whether you shake dirt or shake dice? If you win, society is the loser. The gold-digger is the enemy of the honest laborer, whatever checks and compensations there may be. It is not enough to tell me that you worked hard to get your gold. So does the Devil work hard. The way of transgressors may be hard in many respects.1 The humblest observer who goes to the mines sees and says that gold-digging is of the character of a lottery; the gold thus obtained is not the same thing with the wages of honest toil. But, practically, he forgets what he has seen, for he has seen only the fact, not the principle, and goes into trade there, that is, buys a ticket in what commonly proves another lottery, where the fact is not so obvious.

1. PROVERBS 13:15

85. Permuting Milton’s agenda of justifying the ways of God to men in Book I, line 26 of PARADISE LOST. 86. Echoing Shakespeare’s OTHELLO, 1.3.78-9. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN of the ice in December.– I see where a maple has been wounded the sap is flowing out–now then is the time to make sugar– If I were to paint the short days of winter–I should represent two towering icebergs approaching each other like promontories for morning & evening–with cavernous recesses & a solitary traveller wrapping his cloack about him & bent forward against a driving storm just entering the narrow pass– I would paint the light of a taper at mid-day–seen through a cottage window–half buried in snow & frost–and even some pale stars in the sky– & the sound of the wood cutters axe– The ice bergs with cavernous recesses. In the foreground should appear the harvest–& far in the background through the pass should be seen the sowers in the fields & other evidences of spring The ice-bergs should gradually approach & on the right & left the heavens should be shaded off from the light of mid day to midnight with its stars. The sun low in the sky. I look between my legs up the river across Fair Haven. Subverting the head we refer things to the heavens– the sky becomes the ground of the picture and where the river breaks through low hills which slope to meet each 1 other /4 of a mile off appears a mountain pass–so much nearer is it to heaven– We are compelled to call it something which relates it to the heavens rather than the earth. But I think that the mirage is not so great in the morning. Perhaps there is some advantage in looking at the landscape thus at this season–since it is a plainer white field hence to the horizon. 1 I cut my name on the Bee tree. Now–at 11 /2 perhaps, the sky begins to be slightly overcast– The N W is the god of the winter as the S W of the summer. Interesting the forms of clouds– Often as now like flames – or more like the surf curling before it breaks–reminding me of the prows of ancient vessels which have their pattern or prototype again in the surf as if the wind made a surf of the mist.– Thus as the fishes look up at the waves–we look up at the clouds. It is pleasant to see the reddish green leaves of the lambkill still hanging with fruit above the snow–for I am now crossing the shruboak plain to the cliffs. I find a place on the S side of this rocky hill where the snow is melted & the bare grey rock appears covered with mosses & lichens & beds of oak leaves in the hollows–where I can sit–& an invisible flame & smoke seems to ascend from the leaves & the sun shines with a genial warmth–& you can imagine the hum of bees amid flowers–that is a near approach to summer. A summer heat reflected from the dry leaves which reminds you of the sweet fern & those summer afternoons which are longer than a winter day. Though you sit on a mere oasis in the snow. I love that the rocks should appear to have some spots of blood on them. Indian blood at least–to be convinced that the earth has been crowded with men–living enjoying suffering–that races past away have stained the rocks with their blood– That the mould I tread on has been animated–aye humanized. I am the more at home. I farm the dust of my ancestors–though the chemists analysis may not detect it– I go forth to redeem the meadows they have become.– I compel them to take refuge in turnips.90 The snow is melting on the rocks–the water trickles down in shining streams–the mosses look bright–the first awakening of vegetation at the root of the saxifrage As I go by the farmer’s yard the hens cackle more solidly, as if eggs burdened the strain. A horse’s fore legs are handier than his hind ones–the latter but fall into the place which the former have found. They have the advantage of being nearer the head the source of intelligence– He strikes & paws with them– It is true he kicks with the hind legs–but that is a very simple & unscientific action–as if his whole body were a whiplash & his heels the snapper. The constant reference in our lives–even in the most trivial matters, to the super human is wonderful. If a portrait is painted–neither the wife’s opinion of the husband, nor the husband’s of the wife–nor either’s opinion of the artist not man’s opinion of man–is final and satisfactory. Man is not the final judge of the humblest work– though it be piling wood. The Queen & the chambermaid–the king & the hired-man–the Indian & the Slave– alike appeal to God. Each man’s mode of speaking of the sexual relation proves how sacred his own relations of that kind are. We do not respect the mind that can jest on this subject. If the husband & wife quarrel over their coffee–if the pie is underdone–if your partner treads on your toes– there is a silent appeal to the just & eternal Gods–or to time & posterity at least. 87. Thoreau would combine this with an entry made on October 26, 1853 and copy it into “WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT” as:

[Paragraph 45] It is remarkable that among all the preachers there are so few moral teachers. The prophets are employed in excusing the ways of men. Most reverend seniors, the illuminati of the age, tell me, with a gracious, reminiscent smile, betwixt an aspiration and a shudder, not to be too tender about these things, — to lump all that, that is, make a lump of gold of it. The highest advice I have heard on these subjects was grovelling. The burden of it was, — It is not worth your while to undertake to reform the world in this particular. Do not ask how your bread is buttered; it will make you sick, if you do, — and the like. A man had better starve at once than lose his innocence in the process of getting his bread. If within the sophisticated man there is not an unsophisticated one, then he is but one of the Devil’s angels. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Clearly, Thoreau could not have begun to reprocess the “Battle of the Ants” paragraphs he wrote into his journal in January of this year into Draft D of his WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS manuscript prior to this date of March 4th, for the above entry constitutes the end of the first paragraph in D. Here is my inferred, reconstructed intermediate unattested form of this battle of the ants, first half of paragraph 1 of 3, on its way

88. Thoreau would add a reference to the phrase “work, work, work” which he used in his letter of December 19, 1853 to H.G.O. Blake, a phrase which recurs in an anonymous contribution to Punch “Song of the Shirt,” and copy it into “WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT” as:

“WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT”: This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle! I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no Sabbath. It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work—work—work.

89. April 19, 1775. According to Lemuel Shattuck’s A HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF CONCORD;..., Luther Blanchard was a fifer in the Acton company, and was slightly wounded. Major John Buttrick was a farmer who lived to the north of the river, and Shattuck reported that he exclaimed “Fire, fellow-soldiers, for God’s sake, fire” after the first British volley had killed Captain Isaac Davis (1745-1775) and Abner Hosmer (1754-1775) of the Acton company. Major John Buttrick was the grandfather of Stedman Buttrick (1796-1874), the Concord justice of the peace, town treasurer, and county treasurer of Middlesex county, who had inherited the ancestral Buttrick farm in north Concord near the Concord River (map, A4). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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90. William M. White’s version of this is:

I love that the rocks should appear To have some spots of blood on them, Indian blood at least; To be convinced that the earth has been crowded with men, Living, enjoying, suffering, That races passed away have stained the rocks With their blood, That the mould I tread on has been animated, Aye, humanized.

I am the more at home.

I farm the dust of my ancestors, Though the chemist’s analysis may not detect it. I go forth to redeem the meadows they have become. I compel them to take refuge in turnips. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN out of the journal and into Draft D:

One day when I went out to my wood-pile ^, or rather my pile of stumps– ^, I observed two ^large ants– on the chips ^, the one red, the other much larger & ^, and black, fiercely contending with one another, and rolling over ând over on the chips. It was evidently a struggle for life & death which had grown out of a serious feud. Having once got hold they never let go of each other– ^, but struggled & ând wrestled & ând rolled on the chips each retaining his hold with mastiff-like pertinacity. Looking further ^farther, I found to my astonishment ^surprise that the chips were covered with such combatants — ^, that it was not a duellum but a bellum ^duellum, but a bellum, a war between two races of ants– ^, the red always pitted against the black– & ^, and frequently two reds ones to one black. They covered all the hills and vales in my wood-yard, and the ground was already strewn with the dead, both red and black. It was the only war which I have ever witnessed– ^, the only battle-field I ever trod while the battle was raging.– ^; internecine war.– The ^the red republicans & ând the black despots or imperialists. On every side they were engaged in deadly combat ^, yet without any noise that I could hear– ^, and never human soldiers fought so resolutely. I watched a couple in a little sunny valley amid the chips– ^, that were fast locked in each others ôther’s embraces– ^, now at noon^-day prepared to fight till the sun went down. The smaller red champion had fastened himself like a vice to his adversaries âdversary’s front¼– & ^, and through all the tumblings on that field never for an instant ceased to gnaw at one of his feelers near the root, having already caused the other to go by the board– ^; while the stronger black one dashed him from side to side– & ^, and, as I saw on looking nearer ^, had divested him of several of his members. None ^Neither manifested a ^the least disposition to retreat from the combat equal or unequal. It was evident that their battle-cry was conquer ^Conquer or die. They fought like mastiffs or bull^-dogs, who ^that will not let go though all their legs are cut off. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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And here is my inferred, reconstructed intermediate form of the battle of the ants, second half of the first long paragraph:

In the mean while their ^there came along a single red ant on the side hill of this valley– ^, evidently full of excitement– ^, who either had despatched his foe. or had not yet taken part in the battles– The latter the most probable ^battle; probably the latter, for he had lost none of his limbs. ^; whose mother had charged him to return with his shield or upon it. He saw this unequal combat from afar ^, –for the blacks were nearly twice the size of the red. ^,– He ^he drew near with rapid pace — till he stood on his guard within half an inch of the combatants– ^; then ^, watching his opportunity ^, he sprang upon the black warrior & ^, and commenced his operations near the root of his right fore-leg, leaving the other ^foe to select among his own members– ^; And ând so there were 3 ^three united for life & ûntil death ^--apparently. United for life — until death. As ^--, as if a new kind of attraction had been invented, which put all other locks & ând cements to shame.– I should not wonder more if ^have wondered by this time to find that they had their respective musical bands stationed on some êminent chip & ^, and playing their national airs the while ^, to cheer the dying combatants.– (Whose mother had charged him to return with his shield or upon it) I was myself excited somewhat even as if they had been men– ^. The more you think of it — ^, the less the difference. And certainly there is no other ^not the fight recorded in Concord ^history if in the history of the world that will bear a moment^’s comparison with this ^, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or the heroism and patriotism displayed. For numbers and for carnage it was an Austerlitz or Dresden. Concord Fight! Two killed on the patriots’ side, and Luther Blanchard wounded! Why here every ant was a Buttrick, EDMUND HOSMER –“Fire! for God’s sake fire!”– and thousands shared the fate of Davis and Hosmer. I have no doubt they had as just a cause — one or even both parties as our forefathers –& that the results will be as important & memorable– And there was far more patriotism & heroism– For numbers & for blood it was an Austerlitz — or Dresden. I saw no disposition to retreat ^that it was a principle they fought for, as much as our ancestors, and not a three-penny tax on their tea; and undoubtedly the results of this battle will be as important and memorable to those whom it concerns as those of the battle of Bunker Hill. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Here is my inferred, reconstructed intermediate form of the second of the three long paragraphs of the battle of the ants in WALDEN, as of this date leading out of Thoreau’s journal and in the direction of Draft D:

I took up the chip on which the 3 ^three I have particularly described were struggling ^, carried it into my house & ^, and placed it under a tumbler on my window^-sill, wishing to see the issue. Holding a microscope to the first^- mentioned red ant– ^ , I saw that ^, though he was assiduously gnawing at the near foreleg of his enemy ^, having severed his remaining feeler ^, his own breast was all torn away ^, exposing what vitals he had there to the jaws of the black warrior– ^, whose own breast-plate was apparently too thick for him– ^to pierce; and the dark carbuncles of his eyes shone with ferocity such as war only could excite. They strug^gled for half an hour longer under the tumbler ^, and when I looked again the black soldier had severed the heads of his foes from their bodies & ^, and the former ^still living heads were hanging on either side of him ^like ghastly trophies or ornaments, still apparently as firmly fastened as ever– ^, and he was endeavoring with feeble struggles– ^, being without feelers & ând with only one or two ^remnants of legs– & ^, and I know not how many other wounds– ^, to divest himself of them ^; which at length ^, after half an hour more ^, he had accomplished ^. I raised the tumbler & ^, and he went off over the window^-sill in that crippled state– ^. Whether he finally survived that combat^, & had a pension settled on him^, I do not know. But ^; but I thought that his industry would not be worth much thereafter. Which party was victorious I never learned ^, nor indeed EDMUND HOSMER could it be of much importance to mankind, nor the cause of the war; but ^. But I felt for the rest of that day as if I had had my feelings harrowed & excited êxcited and harrowed by witnessing the struggle ^, the ferocity & ând carnage ^, of a human-battle before my door. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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This is the final paragraph of the battle of the ants as it originated as an interlining in Draft D. Note that as of this point Thoreau has not yet fudged the date of his observation of the ant war in the manner in which the observation appears in WALDEN:

Since making this record I learn from Kirby and Spence that the battles of the ants have long been celebrated and the date of them recorded, though they state that “Huber is the only modern author that appears to have been witness to these combats.” “Æneas Sylvius,” say they, “after giving a very circumstantial account of one contested with great obstinacy by a great and small species on the trunk of a pear tree,” states that ^adds “‘This action was fought in the pontificate of Eugenius the Fourth, in the presence of Nicholas Pistoriensis, an eminent lawyer, who related the whole history of the battle with the greatest fidelity.’ A similar engagement between great and small ants is recorded by Olaus Magnus, in which the small ones, being victorious, are said to have buried the bodies of their own soldiers, but left those of their giant enemies a prey to the birds. This event happened previous to the expulsion of the tyrant Christiern the Second from Sweden.”

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April 6, Tuesday: When Henry Thoreau appeared to lecture as scheduled at Cochituate Hall in downtown Boston, a heavy snow was falling. He had come from the Boston Society of Natural History where he had checked out John Evelyn’s SYLVA, OR A DISCOURSE OF FOREST-TREES, AND THE PROPAGATION OF TIMBER.... TO WHICH IS ANNEXED POMONA.... ALSO KALENDARIUM HORTENSE.... JOHN EVELYN’S SYLVA

(see the following screen)

This lecture date had been set up by the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

Due to the snowstorm only 5 or 6 persons showed up, among whom was Doctor Walter Channing, the father HDT WHAT? INDEX

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of Ellery Channing of Concord. Bronson Alcott got the meeting moved to the Mechanics Apprentices Library next door, in hopes that some of the young men reading there could be persuaded to join the audience, but these HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN young men proved to be hard to interest in a lecture on “Reality.”

WALDEN: According to Evelyn, “the wise Solomon prescribed PEOPLE OF ordinances for the very distances of trees; and the Roman praetors have decided how often you may go into your neighbor’s land to WALDEN gather the acorns which fall on it without trespass, and what share belongs to that neighbor.”

JOHN EVELYN SOLON OF ATHENS

(This was a mistake. Thoreau should not have indicated the by-tradition-wise King Solomon of Judaea, for Evelyn had been referring in SYLVA, OR A DISCOURSE OF FOREST-TREES, to this by-tradition-wise originator of Athenian democracy.)

WALDEN: Though I gave them no manure, and did not hoe them all PEOPLE OF once, I hoed them unusually well as far as I went, and was paid WALDEN for it in the end, “there being in truth,” as Evelyn says, “no compost or lætation whatsoever comparable to this continual motion, repastination, and turning of the mould with the spade.” “The earth,” he adds elsewhere, “especially if fresh, has a certain magnetism in it, by which it attracts the salt, power, or virtue (call it either) which gives it life, and is the logic of all the labor and stir we keep about it, to sustain us; all dungings and other sordid temperings being but the vicars succedaneous to this improvement.” Moreover, this being one of those “worn-out and exhausted lay fields which enjoy their sabbath,” had perchance, as Sir Kenelm Digby thinks likely, attracted “vital spirits” from the air. I harvested twelve bushels of beans.

SIR KENELM DIGBY JOHN EVELYN

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THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN One of my most amusing impressions of Thoreau relates to a time when, in the Quixotism of youthful admiration, I had persuaded him to give a lecture in Boston, at my risk. He wrote (April 3, 1852) in a tone of timidity which may surprise those who did not know him, “I certainly do not feel prepared to offer myself as a lecturer to the Boston public, and hardly know whether more to dread a small audience or a large one. Nevertheless I will repress this squeamishness, and propose no alteration in your arrangements.” The scene of the lecture was to be a small hall in a court, now vanished, opening from Tremont street, opposite King’s Chapel, the hall itself being leased by an association of young mechanics, who had a reading-room opening out of it. The appointed day ushered in a furious snow-storm before which the janitor of the building retreated in despair, leaving the court almost blockaded. When Thoreau and I ploughed through, we found a few young mechanics reading newspapers; and when the appointed hour came, there were assembled only Mr. Alcott, Dr. Walter Channing and at most three or four ticket-holders. No one wished to postpone the affair and Mr. Alcott suggested that the thing to be done was to adjourn to the reading-room, where, he doubted not, the young men would be grateful for the new gospel offered; for which he himself undertook to prepare their minds. I can see him now, going from one to another, or collecting them in little groups and expounding to them, with his lofty Socratic mien, the privileges they were to share. “This is his life; this is his book; he is to print it presently; I think we shall all be glad, shall we not, either to read his book or to hear it?” Some laid down their newspapers, more retained them; the lecture proved to be one of the most introspective chapters from “Walden.” A few went to sleep, the rest rustled their papers; and the most vivid impression which I retain from the whole enterprise is the profound gratitude I felt to one auditor (Doctor Walter Channing), who forced upon me a five-dollar bill towards the expenses of the disastrous entertainment.91

April 6, Tuesday: Last night a snow storm & this morning we find the ground covered again 6 or 8 inches deep–& drifted pretty badly beside. The conductor in the cars which have been detained more than an hour–says it is a dry snow up country– Here it is very damp. 92 PHILIP CAFARO ON VIRTUE IN WALDEN PAGE 47: [I]n the chapter “The Bean-Field,” Thoreau quotes seventeenth-century horticulturist John Evelyn’s assertion that “the earth ... especially if fresh, has a certain magnetism in it, by which it attracts the salt, power, or virtue (call it either) which gives it life, and is the logic of all the labor and stir we keep about it, to sustain us.” Clearly a field cannot act morally! For Evelyn, as for Thoreau, “virtue” implies power: that force through which a field or a man may flourish and bring forth the proper fruits. Thoreau quotes a similar archaic use of “virtue” by Cato the Elder. Virtue is thus essentially active for Thoreau; as he had written earlier, “even virtue is no longer such if it be stagnant.” In the modern view, the virtues are valuable largely because they limit our self-assertion and keep us from doing what we should not do. The modest person will not brag about his achievements, 91. The Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s “Glimpses of Authors” (Brains I, December 1, 1891, page 105) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN the honest person will not lie for personal advantage, the just person will not take more than her fair share. The ancient view instead stresses that actively cultivating the virtues is key to our self-development and happiness. They allow us to do what we should do and become better people. Thoreau echoes this life- affirming view when he writes: “The constant inquiry which Nature puts is Are your virtuous? Then you can behold me. Beauty — fragrance — music — sweetness — & joy of all kinds are for the virtuous.” Thoreau, like the ancients, links his notion of virtue to personal flourishing. In WALDEN, he tries to show how the virtues of simplicity, integrity, and resolutions serve to focus and clarify our lives; how generosity and sympathy may improve our relations with our neighbors; how curiosity, imagination, and reverence help us appreciate the world around us. These connections between virtue and flourishing serve to specify genuine virtues and spell out their proper development and use.

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.

Bronson Alcott had proposed that the title for WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS ought to be “SYLVANIA.”

92. Philip Cafaro. THOREAU’S LIVING ETHICS: WALDEN AND THE PURSUIT OF VIRTUE. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2004 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN 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 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 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN 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 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 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN June 30, Wednesday: Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka arrived in Strasbourg having traveled up the Rhine from Cologne.

A new constitution calling for representative government in New Zealand was enacted by the British Parliament.

California elected Colonel John B. Weller to the US federal Senate, to succeed John C. Frémont.

Henry Thoreau made an entry in his journal which Professor Lawrence Buell considers to have been merely an anthropocentric echo of his mentor Emerson:

Professor Buell’s perfervid environmental imagination, on page 125 of THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMAGINATION, caused him to assert that He could not get past the Emersonian axiom that “nature must be viewed humanly to be viewed at all.”

One might have supposed that a proof text ought to be derived from the writings of the supposed mentor rather than from the writings of the supposed mentee — but I can discover by Boolean search through Emerson’s corpus no point at which this “mentor” has ever in any context deployed any “Emersonian axiom” containing such terminology as “viewed humanly” or “viewed at all.” In fact, there’s nothing remotely close to this! TIMELINE OF WALDEN

June 30. Nature must be viewed humanly to be viewed at all; that is, her scenes must be associated with humane affections, such as are associated with one’s native place, for instance. She is most significant to a lover. A lover of Nature is preeminently a lover of man. If I have no friend, what is Nature to me? She ceases to be morally significant.

7.30 P.M. — To stone bridge over Assabet. Moon nearly full; rose a little before sunset. Cat-mint (Nepeta cataria) in bloom. The lower shoots of the Andromeda calyculata are now six inches long, the upper from two to four. [Here Thoreau has placed a question mark in the margin.] The fruit is on the extremities of last year’s shoots in the midst of the persistent small leaves. The shrub oak acorns are as big as peas; principally cup. The moon appears full. At first a mere white cloud. As soon as the sun sets, begins to grow brassy or obscure golden in the gross atmosphere. It is starlight -bout half an hour after sunset to-night; i.e. the first stars appear. The moon is now brighter, but not so yellowish. Ten or fifteen minutes after, the fireflies are observed, at first about the willows on the Causeway, where the evening is further advanced. Sparrows quite generally, and occasionally a robin sings. (I heard a bobolink this afternoon.) The creak of the crickets is more universal and loud, and becomes a distinct sound. The oily surface of the river in which the moon is reflected looks most attractive at this hour. I see the bright curves made by the water-bugs in the moonlight, and a muskrat crossing the river, now at 9 o’clock. Finally the last traces of day disappear, about 9.30 o’clock, and the night fairly sets in. The color of the moon is more silvery than golden, or silvery with a slight admixture of golden, a sort of burnished cloud. The bass tree is budded. Haying has commenced. Some think the foliage of the trees is not so thick as last year, that the leaves have suffered from the wind. Is not this period more than any distinguished for flowers, when roses, swamp-pinks, morning-glories, arethusas, pogonias, orchises, blue flags, epilobiums, mountain laurel, and white lilies are all in blossom at once? HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

July: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s LA RÉVOLUTION SOCIALE DEMONTRÉE PAR LE COUP D'ÉTAT DU 2 DECEMBRE 1851, an appeal to Louis-Napoleon to work for the revolution by implementing social reforms.

Widower and single parent H.G.O. Blake and his longtime student Nancy Pope Howe Conant determined that they would marry.

Publication of Henry Thoreau’s “The Iron Horse” in Sartain’s Union Magazine, 11:66-68 — “Sounds” paragraphs 5-13. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN May-August: From May until August, the Reverend Samuel Joseph May was making a 2d inspection of the settlements of escaped slaves along the border inside Canadian territory, for the benefit of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Upon his return he would report that although these black Americans in exile were comparatively prosperous, the unpleasant truth was that the racial prejudice they were encountering in Canada was as extreme as any they had endured inside the United States of America.

When in August the warriors of the Yuma asked for peace talks, the troops of Lieutenant Thomas Sweeny approached with fixed bayonets and the native Americans felt they needed to retreat. However, they would HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN again request these peace talks.

Henry Thoreau’s “A Poet Buying a Farm” appeared in Sartain’s Union Magazine (this essay is related to the 1st, 2d, 3d, and 5th paragraphs of “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” with slight variations of wording and of punctuation, plus a snippet from “Sounds”). This magazine would then fold, and so we don’t know whether Thoreau would have wanted to continue with this sort of piecemeal publication:

WALDEN: At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house. I have thus surveyed the country on every side within a dozen miles of where I live. In imagination I have bought all the farms in succession, for all were to be bought, and I knew their price. I walked over each farmer’s premises, tasted his wild apples, discoursed on husbandry with him, took his farm at his price, at any price, mortgaging it to him in my mind; even put a higher price on it, –took every thing but a deed of it, –took his word for his deed, for I dearly love to talk, –cultivated it, and him too to some extent, I trust, and withdrew when I had enjoyed it long enough, leaving him to carry it on. This experience entitled me to be regarded as a sort of real-estate broker by my friends. Wherever I sat, there I might live, and the landscape radiated from me accordingly. What is a house but a sedes, a seat? –better if a country seat. I discovered many a site for a house not likely to be soon improved, which some might have thought too far from the village, but to my eyes the village was too far from it. Well, there I might live, I said; and there I did live, for an hour, a summer and a winter life; saw how I could let the years run off, buffet the winter through, and see the spring come in. The future inhabitants of this region, wherever they may place their houses, may be sure that they have been anticipated. An afternoon sufficed to lay out the land into orchard woodlot and pasture, and to decide what fine oaks or pines should be left to stand before the door, and whence each blasted tree could be seen to the best advantage; and then I let it lie, fallow perchance, for a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

WALDEN: My imagination carried me so far that I even had the refusal of several farms, –the refusal was all I wanted,– but I never got my fingers burned by actual possession. The nearest that I came to actual possession was when I bought the Hollowell Place, and had begun to sort my seeds, and collected materials with which to make a wheelbarrow to carry it on or off with; but before the owner gave me a deed of it, his wife –every man has such a wife– changed her mind and wished to keep it, and he offered me ten dollars to release him. Now, to speak the truth, I had but ten cents in the world, and it surpassed my arithmetic to tell, if I was that man who had ten cents, or who had a farm, or ten dollars, or all together. However, I let him keep the ten dollars and the farm too, for I had carried it far enough; or rather, to be generous, I sold him the farm for just what I gave for it, and, as he was not a rich man, made him a present of ten dollars, and still had my ten cents, and seeds, and materials for a wheelbarrow left. I found thus that I had been a rich man without any damage to my poverty. But I retained the landscape, and I have since annually carried off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow. With respect to landscapes,– “I am monarch of all I survey, My right there is none to dispute.”

HOLLOWELL FARM ALEXANDER SELKIRK WILLIAM COWPER

WALDEN: I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the most valuable part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed that he had got a few wild apples only. Why, the owner does not know it for many years when a poet has put his farm in rhyme, the most admirable kind of invisible fence, has fairly impounded it, milked it, skimmed it, and got all the cream, and left the farmer only the skimmed milk.

WALDEN: All that I could say, then, with respect to farming on a large scale, (I have always cultivated a garden,) was, that I had had my seeds ready. Many think that seeds improve with age. I have no doubt that time discriminates between the good and the bad; and when at last I shall plant, I shall be less likely to be disappointed. But I would say to my fellows, once for all, As long as possible live free and uncommitted. It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN September: From this month until sometime in 1853, Henry Thoreau would be preparing Version E of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, which included for the first time chapter divisions and titles.Here is the Draft E version TIMELINE OF WALDEN

of a paragraph that would end up on page 94:

For my part, I could easily dispense with the Post Office, if it were necessary ^do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it. To speak deliberately and critically, I never received but^more than one or two letters in my life ^–I wrote this some years ago– that were worth much more than the postage, much less the reading. ^The penny-post is, commonly, an institution through which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely offered in jest. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Thoreau’s 1850 reading from Rammohan Roy’s book of excerpts, titled TRANSLATION OF SEVERAL PRINCIPAL BOOKS, PASSAGES, AND TEXTS OF THE VEDS, AND OF SOME CONTROVERSIAL WORKS ON BRAHMUNICAL THEOLOGY, was utilized in two paragraphs in draft E of the WALDEN manuscript:

Yet^, for my own part, I was never unusually squeamish^, I assure you; I could sometimes eat a fried rat with good relish, if it were necessary. I am glad to have drunk water so long, for the same reason that I prefer the natural sky to an opium-eater’s heaven. I would fain keep sober always; and there are infinite degrees of drunkenness. I believe that it^water is the only drink for a wise man; ^wine is not so noble a liquor; and think of dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea! Âh, how low I fell fall when I was am tempted by them! Even music may be intoxicating. Such apparently slight causes destroyed Greece and Rome, and will destroy England and America. Of all ebriosity, I^who does not prefer to be intoxicated on^by the air I breathe?^he breathes? Î have found it to be the most serious objection to coarse labors long continued, that they compelled me to eat and drink coarsely also. But to tell the truth, I find myself at present somewhat less particular in these respects. I carry less religion to the table, ask no blessing; not because I am wiser than I was, but, I am obliged to confess, because, however much it is to be regretted, with years I have grown more coarse and indifferent. However, I do not regard^Perhaps these questions are entertained only in youth, as most believe of poetry. My practice is “nowhere,” my opinion is here. Nevertheless I am far from regarding myself as one of those privileged ones to whom the Ved refers when it says, that “he who has true faith in the Omnipresent Supreme Being may eat all that exists,” that is, is not bound to inquire what is his food, or who prepares it; and even in their case it is to be observed, as Rammohun Roy â Hindoo commentator has remarked, that the Vedant limits this privilege to “the time of distress.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Also:

I am conscious in myself of an animal nature which awakens when the spirit^my intellectual nature slumbers, but while the spirit^this is awake is inactive. We are conscious in ourselves of an animal, which awakens in proportion as our intellectual nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot wholly be expelled; like the worms which, even in life and health, occupy our bodies. It feeds and drinks, and reposes, and would fain gratify the most sensual appetite, in spite of the spiritîntellect It would seem as if I might withdraw from it, but could ^Possibly we may withdraw from it, but never change its nature. I fear that it may even enjoy a certain health of its own; that we may be well, yet not pure. I picked up the other day the lower jaw of a hog, with white and sound teeth and tusks, which suggested that there was an animal health and vigor distinct from the spiritual âs it is called. This creature succeeded by other means than temperance and purity. “That in which men differ from brute beasts,” says Mencius, “is a thing very inconsiderable; the common herd lose it very soon; superior men preserve it carefully.” Î do not know how it is with other men, but I find it very difficult to be chaste. Methinks I can be chaste in my relation to persons, and yet I do not find myself clean. I have ^frequent cause to be ashamed of myself. I am well, but I am not pure. What other sort of life would result if I were I cannot say. ^Who knows what sort of life would result if we had attained to purity? If I knew so wise a man as could teach me purity I would go to seek him forthwith. “A command over our passions, and over the external senses of the body, and good acts, are declared by the Ved to be indispensable in the mind’s approximation to God.” Yet I have experienced that the spirit can ^for the time pervade and control every member and function of the body, and transmute what in form may be the lowest and îs the grossest sensuality into HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

inspiration ^purity and devotion. The divine liquors^vital energies [G: vital energies^generative energy], which, when we are loose and debauched, defile and make us unclean and bestial, when we are continent and chaste, inspire and invigorate us ^ invigorates and inspires us [G: loose ^dissipates and make^s us unclean and bestial] [H: loose^, dissipates and makes us unclean], when we are continent invigorates and inspires us. A heroic and chaste man tastes his vigor sweet in his mouth. Chastity which includes all temperance and purity is the secret of genius] [E+: Chastity which includes all temperance and purity is the secret of genius] [G: A heroic and chaste man tastes his vigor sweet in his mouth. Chastity is the secret of genius ^Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are the but various fruits which succeed it.] Man flows at once to God as soon as the channel of purity, physical and moral^when the channel of purity is open. By turns my purity has inspired ^me and my impurity cast me ^our purity inspires and our impurity casts us down. He is a happy man^blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him day by day, and the spiritual ^man ^divine being established.

Thoreau modified what would be the conclusion of paragraph 11 of the “Higher Laws” chapter:

Perhaps there is no man^no human being ^none but has cause for shame on account of the inferior and brutish nature to which he is allied, though his superior divine nature be not subjected to it ^Perhaps ^I fear We are such gods or demigods only as fauns and satyrs, the divine allied to beasts, the creatures of instinct and appetite, and, to some extent, our very life is our disgrace.–

“How happy’s he who hath due place assigned To his beasts and disaforested his mind! *** Can use his horse, goat, wolf, and ev’ry beast, And is not ass himself to all the rest! Else man not only is the herd of swine, But he’s those devils too which did incline Them to a headlong rage, and made them worse.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN February 10, Thursday: Beginning on this day and continuing on the 11th, the 12th, the 18th, and the 19th, Henry Thoreau was surveying for John B. Moore. A survey shows land on Lexington Road that had been surveyed and divided by Thoreau in April 1850 and February 1853 for John B. Moore (who made a business of buying and draining swampland for farming), which had previously been the home of Willoughby Prescott (who was storing musket balls and cartridges, etc. for the militia on April 19, 1775), was resold to Ephraim Wales Bull, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bronson Alcott, and Charles Davis. The land stretched over the hill to Bedford Road and as far east as the Merriam land on the Old Bedford Road. At the end of the month Thoreau noted that, the ground having been bare of snow and he having a need to pay off his debt of $275 for self-publication of AWEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS, he had earned one dollar per day, surveying, for the past 76 days.

View Henry Thoreau’s personal working drafts of his surveys courtesy of AT&T and the Concord Free Public Library: HTTP://WWW.CONCORDLIBRARY.ORG/SCOLLECT/ THOREAU_SURVEYS/THOREAU_SURVEYS.HTM

View this particular personal working draft of a survey in fine detail: HTTP://WWW.CONCORDLIBRARY.ORG/SCOLLECT/ THOREAU_SURVEYS/94A.HTM

(This survey plot paper is now at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts.)

As part of Draft E of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, in addition to his surveying, Thoreau had added the troublingly unprecedented challenge “Nature is hard to be overcome, but she must be overcome. What avails it that you are Christian, if you are not purer than the heathen, if you deny yourself no more, if you are not more religious?”, publishing the news that he had become more than a simple nature-worshiper, and probing the wisdom of the old idea that although our way is through nature, the pole star we follow is in the heavens. This passage has always worried a certain class of interpreter, who has been hung up on Waldo Emerson’s advice that we are to “do our thing,” and thus unprepared to follow Thoreau’s development past the potential Pan-theism of remarks like his September 8, 1841 remark “in proportion as our love of Nature is deep and pure we are independent upon her.” Although Thoreau recognizes that the “new Adam” is going to fall, after Thoreau’s fall he is going to rise and “reach the skies” (February 9, 1851). He had definitely left behind the unreflective “Egyptian slime of health” in which he had been merely fatuous “nature looking into nature with such easy sympathy as the blue-eyed grass in the meadow looks in the face of the sky” (July 21, 1841), and had definitely as of the beginning of 1853 moved into a more complex and more reflective, doubled period of mature life. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN (In fact Thoreau had begun to be troubled on this point before 1851, for in an undated journal entry from 1850 he commented: “What is peculiar in the life of a man consists not in his obedience, but his opposition, to his instincts. In one direction or another he strives to live a supernatural life.” But the fullness of this conversion can not have come until sometime after this February 1843 period in his life, for we have a record by Lidian Emerson of a formal conversational debate at the Emersons in February 1843, with Charles Lane and Bronson Alcott, in which he forthrightly, pushingly, almost rudely maintained quite the contrary – as if he were intent on preventing his self-doubts about nature from coming forward in his mind.) THE ALCOTT FAMILY

Therefore a warning: If your morality consists of an impression that people ought to “live naturally,” be aware that after 1853 Thoreau would never more be of your ilk. After that point, the reason Thoreau wanted to be natural was so he could then rise above this as above a baseline. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN VERSION E

WALDEN, VERSION E: IN VERSION E THIS FOLLOWS MISSING LEAF #153: one listens If I listen^ to the faintest but constant his suggestions of my^ genius, which are certainly true, I he sees see^ not to what extremes or even insanity it would may lead him he grows lead me^ , and yet that way as I grow^ his more resolute and faithful my^ road lies The faintest assured objection which one healthy man feels will at length prevail over the arguments and customs of mankind. No man ever followed his genius till it misled him. Though the result were perhaps no one bodily weakness, yet no man perhaps^ can say that the consequences were to be regretted, for these were a life in conformity to higher principles. If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits is a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, —more^ more more starry, more elastic, more immortal, more starry^ immortal is , –that^ your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We can easily come to doubt if they exist. Perhaps We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. ^ the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, it is a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched. But practically I am only half-converted by my own arguments for I still fish HDT WHAT? INDEX

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THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1853

June 2, Thursday: A British fleet arrived in Besika Bay shortly followed by a French fleet, to counter any Russian designs against Turkey.

Giacomo Meyerbeer arrived in Paris from Berlin in hope of producing his new opera L’étoile du nord.

Henry Thoreau went out in his boat in the fog on the Assabet River and the Sudbury River, and dreamed up the epigraph for his WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS: TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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WALDEN: I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag PEOPLE OF as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, WALDEN if only to wake my neighbors up.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

CHANTICLEER

I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.

June 2. 3:30 A.M. When I awake I hear the low universal chirping or twittering of the chip-birds [Chipping Sparrow Spizella passerina], like the bursting bead on the surface of the uncorked day. First HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN come, first served! You must taste the first glass of the day’s nectar, if you would get all the spirit of it. Its fixed air begins to stir and escape. Also the robin’s morning song is heard as in the spring, earlier than the notes of most other birds, thus bringing back the spring; now rarely heard or noticed in the course of the day.

4 A.M. — To Nawshawtuct. I go to the river in a fog through which I cannot see more than a dozen rods, — three or four times as deep as the houses. As I row down the stream, the dark, dim outlines of the trees on the banks appear, coming to meet me out of the mist on the one hand, while they retreat and are soon concealed in it on the other. My strokes soon bury them behind me. The birds are wide awake, as if knowing that this fog presages a fair day. I ascend Nawshawtuct from the north side. I am aware that I yield to the same influence which inspires the birds and the cockerels, whose hoarse courage I hear now vaunted. So men should crow in the morning. I would crow like chanticleer in the morning, with all the lustiness that the new day imparts, without thinking of the evening, when I and all of us shall go to roost, — with all the humility of the cock, that takes his perch upon the highest rail and wakes the country with his clarion. Shall not men be inspired as much as cockerels? My feet are soon wet with fog. It is, indeed, a vast dew. And are not the clouds another kind of dew? Cool nights produce them. Now I have reached the hilltop above the fog at a quarter to five, about sunrise, and all around me is a sea of fog, level and white, reaching nearly to the top of this hill, only the tops of a few high hills appearing as distant. islands in the main. Wachusett is a more distant and larger island, an Atlantis in the west; there is hardly one to touch at between me and it. It is just like the clouds beneath you* as seen from a mountain. It is a perfect level in some directions, cutting the hills near their summits with a geometrical line, but puffed up here and there, and more and more toward the cast, by the influence of the sun. An early freight-train of cars is heard, not seen, rushing through the town beneath it. It resembles nothing so much as the ocean. You can get here the impression which the ocean makes, without ever going to the shore. Men –poor simpletons as they are– will go to a panorama by families, to see a Pilgrim’s Progress, perchance, who never vet made progress so far as to the top of such a hill as this at the dawn of a foggy morning. All the fog they know is in their brains. The seashore exhibits nothing more grand or on a larger scale. How grand where it rolls off northeastward (?) over Ball’s Hill like a glorious ocean after a storm, just lit by the rising sun! It is as boundless as the view from the highlands of Cape Cod. They are exaggerated billows, the ocean on a larger scale, the sea after some tremendous and unheard-of storm, for the actual sea never appears so tossed up and universally white with foam and spray as this now far in the northeastern horizon, where mountain billows are breaking on some hidden reef or bank. It is tossed up toward the sun and by it into the most boisterous of seas, which no craft, no ocean steamer, is vast enough to sail on. Meanwhile my hands are numb with cold and my wet feet ache with it. Now, at 5.15, before this southwest wind, it is already grown thin as gossamer in that direction, and woods and houses are seen through it, while it is heaped up toward the sun, and finally becomes so thick there that for a short time it appears in one place a dark, low cloud, such as else can only be seen from mountains; and now long, dark ridges of wood appear through it, and now the sun reflected from the river makes a bright glow in the fog, and now, at 5.30, I see the green surface of the meadows and the water through the trees, sparkling with bright reflections. Men will go further and pay more to see a tawdry picture on canvas, a poor painted scene, than to behold the fairest or grandest scene that nature ever displays in their immediate vicinity, though they may have never seen it in their lives. The triosteum a day or two. Cherry-birds are the only ones I see in flocks now. I can tell them afar by their peculiar fine springy note. The hickory is not yet blossomed. Sanicle [black snakeroot Sanicula marilandica] and waxwork just out. On Monday saw apparently fresh-broken tortoise eggs. Locust tree just opening.

July 29, Friday: Excerpts from WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS were published by Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune under, of all possible titles, A Massachusetts Hermit.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN

July 29: P.M. — To hibiscus, Beck Stow’s, and Brister’s Hill. Galcopsis Tetrahit, a good while. Vernonia, just opened, a few central ones. Polygonum hydropiperoides. At Vernonia Meadow I notice the beds of horse-mint now in flower, — bluish whorls of flowers, — now in its prime. Now is the time to gather thorough-wort. Cardinals are in their prime. The hibiscus is barely budded, but already the meadow-hay mowers have sheared close to it. Most fields are so completely shorn now that the walls and fence-sides, where plants are protected, appear unusually rich. I know not what aspect the flowers would present if our fields and meadows were untouched for a year, if the mower were not permitted to swing his scythe there. No doubt some plants contended long in vain with these vandals, and at last withdrew from the contest. About these times some hundreds of men with freshly HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN sharpened scythes make an irruption into my garden when in its rankest condition, and clip my herbs all as close as they can, and I am restricted to the rough hedges and worn-out fields which had little to attract them, to the most barren and worthless pastures. I know how some fields of johnswort and goldenrod look, left in the natural state, but not much about our richest fields and meadows. Those huckleberries near the hibiscus are remarkably glossy, fresh, and plump in the lowland, but not so sweet as some. Crossed the river there, carrying over my clothes. The Great Meadows present a very busy scene now. There are at least thirty men in sight getting the hay, revealed by their white shirts in the distance, the farthest mere specks, and here and there great loads of hay, almost concealing the two dor-bugs that draw them — and horse racks [sic] pacing regularly back and forth. It is refreshing to behold and scent even this wreck of the meadow-plants. Here is a man sedulously cocking up great heaps composed almost alone of flowering fern, yet perfectly green. Here are many owners side by side, each taking his slice of the great meadow. The mower fixes bits of newspaper to stakes in straight lines across the meadow to guide him, lest he cut over his bounds. The completion of haying might be celebrated by a farmers’ festival. The wormwood, perhaps; has hardly opened yet. Peter appears to have cut all the liatris before its time. [No.] The Solidago stricta begins to yellow the Great Fields in front of his house, but the nemoralis is hardly out there yet. The crotalaria has some fully formed pods, together with flowers, a little further east than before. It must be three weeks old at least. The sight of the small rough sunflower about a dry ditch bank and Hedge advances me at once further toward autumn. At the same time I hear a dry, ripe, autumnal chirp of a cricket. It is the next stop to the first goldenrod. It grows where it escapes the mower, but no doubt, in our localities of plants, we do not know where they would prefer to grow if unmolested by man, but rather where they best escape iris vandalism. How large a proportion of flowers, for instance, are referred to and found by hedges, walls, and fences. I see three m, four (apparently) young marsh hawks, but full grown, circling and tumbling about not much above the ground and playing with one another. They tire quite a reddish brown. They utter a squeak (not a shrill scream), much like a small bird or animal. I noticed that my hen-hawks screamed and circled round their old nest yesterday, though their young must be fully grown. Butterflies of various colors are now more abundant than I have seen them before, especially the small reddish or coppery ones. I counted ’ten yesterday on a single Sericocarpus conyzoides. They were in singular harmony with the plant, as if they made a part of it. The insect that comes after the honey or pollen of a plant is necessary to it and in one sense makes a part of it. Being constantly in motion and, as they moved, opening and closing their wings to preserve their balance, they presented a very lifesome scene. To-day I see them on the early goldenrod (Solidago stricta). I broke through Heywood’s thick wood, north of Moore’s land, going toward Beck Stow’s in the Great Fields, and unexpectedly came into a long, narrow, winding, and very retired blueberry swamp which I did not know existed there. A spot seemingly untrodden, — a deep withdrawn meadow, sunk low amid the forest and filled with green waving sedge, three feet high, and low andromeda and hardhack, for the most part dry to the feet and with no print of man or beast, interspersed with islands of blueberry bushes and surrounded by a dense hedge of high blueberry bushes, panicled andromeda, high choke-berry, wild holly, with its beautiful crimson berries, etc., etc., this being the front rank to a higher wood. Thus hedged about these places are, so that it is only at some late year that you stumble upon them. Crouching you thread your way amid some dense shrub oak wood some day, descending next through the almost impenetrable hedge, and stand to your surprise on the edge of this fair open meadow with a bottom of unfathomed mud, as retired and novel as if it were a thousand miles removed from your ordinary walks. Not penetrable except in midsummer. It is as far off as Persia from Concord. I entered from this swamp to that next south, through a narrow passage hardly a foot wide, stooping close to the ground, worn by some cows once, brushing off blueberries in my passage, and then burst out into another yet larger swamp, or meadow, of a similar character. And in the first I found great blueberries as big as old- fashioned bullets or cranberries, — the ambrosial fruit. These grew side by side in singular harmony in the dense hedge with crimson holly berries and black choke-berries. Over these meadows the marsh hawk circles undisturbed. What means this profusion of berries at this season only? Beck Stow’s is much frequented by cows, which burst through the thickest bushes. Crossed over to Tuttle’s. Aaron’s-rod not yet. The high blackberries began to be ripe about a week ago. The small flowers of the Helianthemum Canadense (eistus). Its leaves are like the Lechea major, for which. I took it last (?) fall, when surrounded with frost at its base (hence called frost-weed). Started a pack of grouse two- thirds grown. Spiranthes gracilis in Hubbard’s Wood Path, coming toward his Close. May have been out some time. Hypopitys lanuginosa, American pine-sap, just pushing up, false beechdrops. Gray says from June to August. It is cream-colored or yellowish under the pines in Hubbard’s Wood Path. Some near the fence east of the Close. A plant related to the tobacco-pipe. Remarkable this doubleness in nature, — not only that nature should be composed of just these individuals, but that there should be so rarely or never an individual without its kindred, — its cousin. It is allied to something else. There is not only the tobacco-pipe, but pine-sap. Moist banks covered with the nearly grown, but green, partridge-berries now. Prenanthes, almost. Tobacco-pipe, how long? Coral-root well out, — Corallorhiza multiflora, — at Brister’s Hill. There are some beautiful glossy, firm ferns there, — Polystichum acrostichoides (?), — shield fern. Nature made ferns for pure leaves, to show what she could do in that line. I also see some small, umbrella-shaped (with sharp cones), shining and glossy yellow HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN fungi, like an election cake atop, also some dead yellow and orange. Clethra, a day or two in some places. In the Poorhouse Meadow, the white orchis spike almost entirely out, some days at least. This is the best place to find the Pycnanthemum muticum and lanceolatum that I know. Eupatorium purpureum. We are willing this coarse plant should be called Joe-Pye-weed. Rhus copallina behind Bent’s, out a day or two; earlier than at Cliffs. Acalypha Virginica probably out in some places; not the plant I saw. Some scarlet thorn leaves are yellow-spotted now. By railroad causeway a large smooth-stemmed goldenrod (not yet out), with smooth (both sides) linear-lanceolate sharply toothed leaves. Another in a meadow, smaller, downy, with broader leaves, already out, like (?) the first. That was probably the Scirpus lacustris, — the black rush of the Sudbury meadows, long since out; panicle just below the top. Perchance the moon shines sometimes merely to tempt men forth to view creation by night, but soon wanes to warn them that day is the season appointed for their labors. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1854

Late 1853 to Early 1854: The “F” version of Thoreau’s “WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS” manuscript. Thoreau’s mobilization of the absurd inverted-Walden tale came about in 1853-1854 while he was trying to explain the provenance of the rim of smooth “paving stones” around the shoreline of the pond:

stones have been shoved up into a ridge by the edge of the ice being driven against it, or as if the sand had washed down and collected against the ice, and there remained when the ice was melted. But the truth seems to be probably is that when there is a thaw or warm rain in midwinter which warms the water in the pond, that portion of the water which penetrates a little way under the frozen shore apparently takes out some of the frost there, and the shore, whether it is sand or pebbles, or stones or sticks, is puffed up in the form of a pent- roof six inches or more high, and under which this there is found to be no frost. Even pretty large rocks and trees, as I have said, are thus actually tripped up or pried over by a force applied beneath Some have been puzzled to tell how the shore became so regularly paved. but I observe that the surrounding hills are remarkably full of the same kind of stones, so that they have been obliged to pile them up in walls on both sides of the railroad cut nearest the pond; and, moreover, that there are most stones where the shore is most abrupt; so that, unfortunately, it is no longer a mystery to me. I detect the paver.

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THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN February/March to April/May: Henry Thoreau was working on his 8th draft of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, the G copy that was sent to the typesetter which evidently the printer threw away after the setting of the type. The paragraph about being able to live in the present always, about how this capability constitutes a “blessing,” the paragraph which now appears on page 314, underwent radical condensation and focusing so that there could no longer be any misreading that sometimes things can be very nice for us, and that when things are nice, such as on sunny days, we should hedonistically pay attention to this transitory niceness of nature:

We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty. We loiter in winter while it is already spring.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN WALDEN A ----> G Likewise the phrase I have emphasized in the material from WALDEN which follows, evidently added to the “Bean-Field” chapter of the manuscript by Thoreau at the last because it is not to be found in any existing draft despite the fact that the paragraph that precedes this material had been in the manuscript from the very beginning. This phrase is a paraphrase from Mrs. Felicia Hemans’s popular poem “The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in New England,” which Thoreau had already accessed for A WEEK: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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VIRGIL FELICIA DOROTHEA HEMANS WAR ON MEXICO HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The breaking waves dashed high On a stern and rock-bound coast; And the woods against a stormy sky, Their giant branches tossed; And the heavy night hung dark The hills and waters o’er When a band of exiles moored their bark On a wild New England shore. Not as the conqueror comes, They, the true-hearted, came; Not with the roll of stirring drums, And the trumpets that sing of fame; Not as the flying come, In silence and in fear; They shook the depths of the desert’s gloom With their hymns of lofty cheer. Amidst the storm they sang, And the stars heard, and the sea! And the sounding aisles of the dim woods rang To the anthem of the free; The ocean eagle soared From his nest by the white wave’s foam, And the rocking pines of the forest roared: This was their welcome home! There were men with hoary hair Amidst that pilgrim band; Why had they come to wither there, Away from their childhood’s land? There was woman’s fearless eye, Lit by her deep love’s truth; There was manhood’s brow serenely high, And the fiery heart of youth. What sought they thus afar? Bright jewels of the mine? The wealth of seas? the spoils of war? They sought a faith’s pure shrine! Aye, call it holy ground, The soil where first they trod! They left unstained what there they found Freedom to worship God! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself. I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks. I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did. They say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub of king Tching-thang to this effect: “Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again.” I can understand that. Morning brings back the heroic ages. I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its visible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was Homer’s requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world. The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes, which slumbers all the rest of the day and night. Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own newly-acquired force and aspirations from within, accompanied by the undulations of celestial music, instead of factory bells, and a fragrance filling the air –to a higher life than we fell asleep from; and thus the darkness bear its fruit, and prove itself to be good, no less than the light. That man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way. After a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul of man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his Genius tries again what noble life it can make. All memorable events, I should say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. The Vedas say, “All intelligences awake with the morning.” Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an hour. All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise. To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. ... HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Draft G of the third paragraph of the Hollowell Farm ruminations, destined for the 2d chapter of WALDEN:

The real attractions of the Hollowell farm, to me, were; ^1st its complete retirement, being about two miles from the village, half a mile from the nearest neighbor, and separated from the highway by a broad field; 2ndly its bounding on the river, ^which the owner said by its fogs protected it ^by its fogs from frosts in the spring, ^though that was nothing to me but his words suggested more than was meant^other values [?] than he suspected; 3rdly the gray color and pleasing ruin ^ruinous state of the house and barn, putting such an interval between me and the last occupant and the dilapidated & picturesque fences, ^which put such an interval between me and the last occupant; 4thly the hollow and lichen-covered apple trees, gnawed by rabbits, proving that there were rabbits there to gnaw them ^suggesting ^showing what kind of neighbors I should have; but 5thly & above all, the recollection I had of it from my earliest voyages up the river, when the house was concealed behind a dense grove of red maples which stood between it & the river ^water, through which I heard the house-dog bark. Though it afforded no western prospect I was in haste to buy it, before the proprietor finished getting out the ^some rocks, cutting down the hollow apple trees, and grubbing up some young birches which had sprung up in the pasture, or, in short, had made any more of his improvements.

February 3, Friday: Henry Thoreau mused about the attractions of the Hollowell Farm which he had once tried to purchase:

Feb. 3. A driving snow-storm again. The attractions of the Hollowell Farm were; its complete retirement, being at least two miles from the village, half a mile from any neighbor, and separated from the highway by a broad field; its bounding on the river; the pleasing ruin of the house and barn; the hollow and lichen-covered apple trees gnawed by rabbits; above all the recollection I had of it from my earliest voyages up the river, when the house was concealed behind a dense grove of red maples, which then stood between it and the river, through which I once heard the house-dog bark; and in general the slight improvements that had been made upon it. These were the motives that swayed, though I did not mention there to the proprietor. To enjoy these things I was ready to carry it on and do all those things which I now see had no other motive or excuse but that I might pay for it and be unmolested in my possession of it; though I knew all the while that it would yield the most abundant crop of the kind I wanted if I could only afford to let it alone. Though it afforded no western prospect, the dilapidated fences were picturesque. I was in some haste to buy, before the proprietor finished getting out some rocks, cutting down sonic hollow apple trees, and grubbing up some voting birches which had sprung up in the pasture, all which in my eyes very much enhanced its value. Varro speaks of two kinds of pigeons, one of which was wont to alight “on the (columinibus villae) columns of a villa (a quo appellatae columbae), from which they were called columbae, which on account of their natural HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN timidity (summa loca in tectis captant) delight in the highest places on the roofs (?) (or under cover?).” TIMELINE OF WALDEN

March 16, Thursday: Henry Thoreau signed an indenture for the publication of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS.

That the said Thoreau agrees to give, and by these presents give to said Ticknor & Co., the right to publish for the term of five years, a certain book, entitled “Walden, a Life in the Woods” of which, said Thoreau is the Author and Proprietor.

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Alexander Young died of pleurisy in Boston at the age of 53, leaving the widow Mrs. Caroline James Young with 8 surviving children (4 of their 12 had died but the oldest, Edward James Young, had arrived at 24 years of age and was a graduate of Harvard College). The Reverend Ezra Stiles Gannett would deliver the discourse at his funeral. Eventually he would be succeeded in the pulpit of the New South Church, located on “Church Green” at the corner of Summer Street and Bedford Street, by the Reverend Orville Dewey.93

On this night an earthquake was felt in San Francisco. CALIFORNIA

93. In the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, among the Benjamin Loring Young papers under call number Ms. N-504, has been found a “photomechanical” of a painting on the verso of which is the notation “Rev. Alexander Young, D.D. Born in Boston, Sept. 22, 1800. Pastor of Church on Church Green, 1825-1854. Died, March 16, 1854.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN This Daguerreotype of the edifice, which had been designed in 1814 by Charles Bulfinch and would be demolished in 1868, would be exposed as of 1858:

This deceased reverend’s CHRONICLES OF THE PILGRIM FATHERS OF THE COLONY OF PLYMOUTH, FROM 1602 TO 1625. NOW FIRST COLLECTED FROM ORIGINAL RECORDS AND CONTEMPORANEOUS PRINTED DOCUMENTS, AND ILLUSTRATED WITH NOTES would be appearing in Thoreau’s new book, albeit in somewhat submerged form: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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WALDEN: This further experience also I gained. I said to myself, PEOPLE OF I will not plant beans and corn with so much industry another WALDEN summer, but such seeds, if the seed is not lost, as sincerity, truth, simplicity, faith, innocence, and the like, and see if they will not grow in this soil, even with less toil and manurance, and sustain me, for surely it has not been exhausted for these crops. Alas! I said this to myself; but now another summer is gone, and another, and another, and I am obliged to say to you, Reader, that the seeds which I planted, if indeed they were the seeds of those virtues, were wormeaten or had lost their vitality, and so did not come up. Commonly men will only be brave as their fathers were brave, or timid. This generation is very sure to plant corn and beans each new year precisely as the Indians did centuries ago and taught the first settlers to do, as if there were a fate in it. I saw an old man the other day, to my astonishment, making the holes with a hoe for the seventieth time at least, and not for himself to lie down in! But why should not the New Englander try new adventures, and not lay so much stress on his grain, his potato and grass crop, and his orchards? –raise other crops than these? Why concern ourselves so much about our beans for seed, and not be concerned at all about a new generation of men? We should really be fed and cheered if when we met a man we were sure to see that some of the qualities which I have named, which we all prize more than those other productions, but which are for the most part broadcast and floating in the air, had taken root and grown in him. Here comes such a subtile and ineffable quality, for instance, as truth or justice, though the slightest amount or new variety of it, along the road. Our ambassadors should be instructed to send home such seeds as these, and Congress help to distribute them over all the land. We should never stand upon ceremony with sincerity.

ALEXANDER YOUNG THE BEANFIELD SQUANTO In transit from Veevay to Geneva, Professor Henri-Frédéric Amiel, who would be referred to as the “Swiss Thoreau,” wrote in his JOURNAL INTIME: “What message had this lake for me, with its sad serenity, its soft and even tranquility, in which was mirrored the cold monotonous pallor of mountains and clouds? That disenchanted disillusioned life may still be traversed by duty, lit by a memory of heaven. I was visited by a clear and profound intuition of the flight of things, of the fatality of all life, of the melancholy which is below the surface of all existence, but also of that deepest depth which subsists forever beneath the fleeting wave.”

March 16, A.M. — Another fine morning. Willows & alders along watercourses all alive these mornings & ringing with the trills & jingles & warbles of birds even as the waters have lately broken loose & tinkle below — song-sparrows blackbirds — not to mention robins &c &c The song sparrows are very abundant peopling each bush-willow or alder for ¼ of a mile & pursuing each other as if now selecting their mates– It is their song which especially fills the air — made an incessant & undistinguishable trill & jingle by their numbers– I see ducks afar saling on the meadow leaving a long furrow in the water behind them– Watch them at leisure without scaring them with my glass; observe their free & undisturbed motions– Some dark-brown partly on water alternately dipping with their tails up partly on land– These I think may be summer ducks. [Were they not females of the others?] Others with bright white breasts &c & black heads about same size or larger which may be Golden Eyes — i e Brass-eyed Whistlers They dive HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN & are gone some time & come up a rod off– At first I saw but one — then a minute after 3– The first phœbe near the water is heard. Saw & heard honey-bees about my boat in the yard — attracted probably by the beeswax in the grafting-wax which was put on it a year ago. It is warm weather. A thunder-storm in the evening.

Thaddeus William Harris of Cambridge, Massachusetts wrote in regard to the LARVÆ OF THE CRANE FLY to Simon Brown, Esq. via page 210 of the New England Farmer, as follows: Dear Sir — Yesterday, Mr. Flint brought to me the bottle of grubs, which you sent by him. He said that they were found in considerable numbers, on snow in Concord lately, and that they were alive when taken; but they were dead when received. They are of a livid or pale brownish color, about half an inch long, thickest at the hinder end of the body, and tapering towards the other end. Above the vent, there is a kind of coronet of short spines, four of which are longer than the others, and the latter are black at the points. These grubs are the larvæ or young of some kind of crane-fly or Tipula, and resemble the figures of the larvæ of the European Tipula corniciva and Tipula oleracea, two species vulgarly called daddy long-legs, in England, and well known for their injury, in the larvæ state, to the grass-roots of meadows. In the volume of “Insect Transformations” belonging to the “Library of Entertaining Knowledge,” will be found a short account of the European insects above named, pages 252 to 255 inclusive, to which I beg to refer you. The Concord grubs, like their European prototypes, probably lived in the ground upon the roots of grasses. How they came to be dislodged from their quarters I cannot tell.

March 27, Monday: Duke Carlo III of Parma died of the wounds he had received on the previous day and was succeeded by his son Roberto. Russia declared war on France.

Amidst a group of titles by Ticknor, Reed & Fields, the Boston Evening Transcript provided in column 2 on page 2 a “Literary Announcement” of Henry Thoreau’s Walden. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN March 27, Saw a hawk — probably marsh hawk — by meadow.

March 29, Wednesday: The Republic of the Orange Free State was created independent of Great Britain.

In New-York, in the Daily Tribune, 6 excerpts from Henry Thoreau’s WALDEN manuscript were published. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Thoreau went to Fair Haven:

March 29: Wednesday. P. M.--To Fair Haven. Coldest night. Pump froze so as to require thawing. Saw two marsh hawks (?), white on rump. A gull [Herring Gull Larus argentatus] of pure white,--a wave of foam in the air. How simple and wave-like its outline, the outline of the wings presenting two curves, between which the tail is merely the point of junction,--all wing like a birch scale; tail remarkably absorbed. Saw two

white-throated, black-beaked divers fly off swiftly low over the water, with black tips of wings curved short downward. Afterward saw one scoot along out from the shore upon the water and dive; and that was the last I

could see of him, though I watched four or five minutes. Fair Haven half open; channel wholly open. See thin cakes of ice at a distance now and then blown up on their edges and glistening in the sun. Had the experience of arctic voyagers amid the floe ice on a small scale. Think I saw a hen-hawk,--two circling over Cliffs. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN March 28, Tuesday: After the Requiem mass for the funeral of Michael Arneth, prior of St. Florian and friend of Anton Bruckner, Bruckner’s Vor Arneths Grab for chorus and three trombones and Libera me, Domine for chorus, three trombones, cello, double bass, and organ were heard for the initial time.

Russia declared war on Great Britain.

Great Britain and France declared war on Russia.

Hector Berlioz conducted in Hanover again, less successfully than in the previous year (but, he was a hit with the King and Queen).

In the afternoon Henry Thoreau walked to White Pond. And, when he picked up the mail, there was the nicest surprise: “Got first proof of ‘Walden’.”94 TIMELINE OF WALDEN

In the chapter “Visitors” the author had deployed the phrase “a ridiculous mouse.”95 Although this can be found elsewhere in classical literature, for instance in the writings of Athenaeus, those with that sort of education would have recognized it most readily as a reference to Horace’s ARS POETICA, 139, “Mountains will labor, to bring forth a ridiculous mouse.”

WALDEN: I think that I love society as much as most, and am ready PEOPLE OF enough to fasten myself like a blood-sucker for the time to any WALDEN full-blooded man that comes in my way. I am naturally no hermit, but might possibly sit out the sturdiest frequenter of the bar- room, if my business called me thither. I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. When visitors came in larger and unexpected numbers there was but the third chair for them all, but they generally economized the room by standing up. It is surprising how many great men and women a small house will contain. I have had twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof, and yet we often parted without being aware that we had come very near to one another. Many of our houses, both public and private, with their almost innumerable apartments, their huge halls and their cellars for the storage of wines and other munitions of peace, appear to me extravagantly large for their inhabitants. They are so vast and magnificent that the latter seem to be only vermin which infest them. I am surprised when the herald blows his summons before some Tremont or Astor or Middlesex House, to see come creeping out over the piazza for all inhabitants a ridiculous mouse, which soon again slinks into some hole in the pavement.

HERMIT HORACE

We need not take this to be a reference to the labor of producing this magnificent book since by coincidence on this very day the Allies (Great Britain, France, Turkey, and Sardinia) were in the process of declaring war upon Russia, with their objective being the destruction of the Russian naval base at Sevastopol — and with the benefit of our historical hindsight we now know how very well that effort was going to proceed! 94. Thoreau would not finish with his editing of this first proof until May. 95. Those with the benefit of the classical education would have received this as a reference to Horace. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN March 28. P. M. — To White Pond. Coldest day for a month or more, — severe as almost any in the winter. Saw this afternoon either a snipe or a woodcock; it appeared rather small for the last. Pond opening on the northeast. A flock of hyemalis drifting from a wood over a field incessantly for four or five minutes, — thousands of them, notwithstanding the cold. The fox-colored sparrow sings sweetly also. Saw a small slate- colored hawk, with wings transversely mottled beneath, — probably the sharp-shinned hawk. Got first proof of “Walden.”

June 10, Saturday: The new Crystal Palace opened in Sydenham, London, having not only been moved from its 1851 Hyde Park location, but also enlarged. It had come to comprise 150,000 square meters of rough sheet-rolled glass. The gardens had come to cover more than 80 hectares. The ceremonies were overseen by Queen Victoria.

In San Francisco there was a mass meeting to prevent squatting on anyone else’s property, but Judge Freelon of the Court of Sessions issued an order preventing action being taken against these squatters. CALIFORNIA

Henry Thoreau walked to Conantum. He was being written to by William Davis Ticknor of Ticknor & Co. in Boston, to advise that Mr. James Thomas Fields would be carrying proof sheets of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN 96 THE WOODS to England in order to secure the English copyright. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Boston June 10/54 Dear Sir Our Mr. Fields who left by the Steamer of the 7th for England took the proof sheets of Walden, — In order to secure a Copt in England the book must be published there as soon as here, and at least 12 Copies published and offered for Sale. If Mr. F. succeeds in making a sale of the Early sheets, it will doubtless be printed in London so as to cause very little delay here but if it be necessary to print and send out the Copies it will delay us 3 or 4 weeks. Probably not more than three weeks. You will probably prefer to delay the publication that you may be sure of your Cop’t in England. Truly Yours W.D. Ticknor & Co. Henry D. Thoreau Esq

96. Actually, this wouldn’t happen because Fields would be so seasick as to turn back. WALDEN would not see publication in England until 1886. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN July 3, Monday: Leos Janácek was born in Hukvaldy, northern Moravia, the 10th of 14 children born to Jirí Janácek, a teacher and musician, and Amálie Grulichová, daughter of a weaver (5 of the 14 would not survive into adulthood). This child was christened Leo Eugen.

In the afternoon Henry Thoreau went by boat to Hubbard’s Bridge.

In Boston, the sheets of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS were passing through the printing press! HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN The firm of Baker & Andrew, Engravers of Boston had rendered Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau’s drawing of the shanty on the pond as an engraving for the title page. WILLIAM JAY BAKER JOHN ANDREW TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Judge Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, considering the death of one of the members of the Marshall’s posse, a deputized truckman named James Batchelder, during the attempt to rescue Anthony Burns from the slavecatchers, issued the following pronouncement: A man whose private conscience leads him to disobey a law recognized by the community [the federal Fugitive Slave Law] must take the consequences of that disobedience. It is a matter solely between him and his Maker. He should take good care that he is not mistaken, that his private opinion does not result from passion or prejudice, but, if he believes it to be his duty to disobey, he must be prepared to abide by the result; and the laws as they are enacted and settled by the constituted authorities to be constitutional and valid, must be enforced, although it may be to his grevious harm. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN July 9, Sunday: The Reverend Thomas Starr King of the Universalist Church in Charlestown, Massachusetts thanked 97 James Thomas Fields for a “luscious copy” of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN The Reverend would review the gift for the Christian Register: A young man, eight years out of college, of fine scholarship and original genius, revives, in the midst of our bustling times, the life of an anchorite. By the side of a secluded pond in Concord, he builds with his own hands a hut which cost him twenty-eight dollars and twelve and a half cents; and there he lived two and a half years, “cultivating poverty,” because he “wanted to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and suck out all its marrow.” Here he found that the labor of six weeks would support him through the year; and so he had long quiet days for reading, observation, and reflection, learning to free himself from all the hollow customs and false shows of the world, and to pity those who by slavery to inherited property seemed to be doing incredible and astonishing penance. 97. James T. Fields. BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES AND PERSONAL SKETCHES. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 188, page 89. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN In the account he gives us of his clothes, house, food, and furniture, we find mingled many acute and wise criticisms upon modern life; while in his descriptions of all living things around him, birds, fishes, squirrels, mice, insects, trees, flowers, weeds, it is evident that he had the sharpest eye and the quickest sympathy. One remarkable chapter is given to the sounds that came to his ear, with suggestions, full of poetry and beauty, of the feelings which these sounds awakened. But nothing interested him so much as the Pond, whose name gives the title to his book. He describes it as a clear sheet of water, about a mile in circumference; he bathed in it every morning; its cool crystal depths were his well, ready dug; he sailed upon its bosom in summer, he noted many curious facts pertaining to its ice in winter; in short, it became to him a living thing, and he almost worshiped it. But we must not describe the contents of this book any farther. Its opening pages may seem a little caustic and cynical; but it mellows apace, and playful humor and sparkling thought appear on almost every page.... Rarely have we enjoyed a book more, or been more grateful for many and rich suggestions... As we shut the book up, we ask ourselves, will the great lesson it teaches of the freedom and beauty of a simple life be heeded? Shall this struggle for wealth, and this bondage to the impedimenta of life, continue forever? Will the time ever come when it will be fashionable to be poor, that is, when men will be so smitten with a purpose to seek the true ends of life that they will not care about laying up riches on the earth? Such times we know there have been, and thousands listened reverently to the reply, given in the last of these two lines, to the inquiry contained in the first; “O where is peace, for thou its path hast trod?” “In poverty, retirement, and with God.” Who can say that it is impossible that such a time may come round, although the fashion of this world now runs with such a resistless current in the opposite direction.

In the afternoon Henry Thoreau went to Hubbard’s Bathing-Place (and from there to Fair Haven). HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN This day saw the first meeting of Concord’s “Vigilance Committee,” organized in the wake of Anthony Burns’s return to slavery earlier that year (Thoreau doesn’t mention such a meeting in his journal entry for the day). Attendees were: Mary Merrick Brooks, Waldo and Lidian Emerson, Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau and John Thoreau, Mary Rice, Charles Bowers, Joshua R. Brown, Nathan B. Stowe, Nathan Henry Warren, James Weir, Stearns Wheeler, and William Whiting. Since, at this informal meeting, the attenders signed a pledge that they would do whatever was in their power to aid fleeing slaves, some incautious commentators have presumed that this meeting, and this new committee, had something to do with the Underground Railroad! What the attenders did, however, was merely to agree to sponsor a weekly series of public meetings on the topic of slavery. Emerson for instance agreed to invite the Reverend Theodore Parker to deliver an opening lecture. Of course they would honor their pledge, but of course, the Emersons couldn’t be expected to invite persons of color to enter their home, so it wouldn’t be within their power to interpret this pledge as including the aiding of any actual fleeing slave individuals. Surely such a pledge should be categorized as pious attitudinizing, or as righteous posturing, or as good public relations proselytizing, rather than as some incautious historians have supposed, the sort of Underground Railroad activism in which Cynthia and John and Henry Thoreau, were involved, for which they were putting their own persons and the assets of their family on the line. (I cannot presently cite any occasion on which any person of color ever was allowed to enter the Emerson home in Concord at any point during the 19th Century, before or after the Civil War, even as a servant. If a person is to be categorized as “vomit” on the basis of the color of his or her skin, would they then proceed to allow such a “vomit” person through the door — just because they were in need?)

My guess would be that we can take a clue from the fact that Thoreau hadn’t bothered to attend this meeting, and recognize from that, that actually this meeting didn’t have one doggone thing to do with the Underground Railroad. (If it did have something to do with such covert agendas — then this would be the very first instance of which we have any record of anyone ever putting anything having to do with that clandestine operation into incriminating ink on an incriminating piece of paper other than Bronson Alcott scribbling in a voluminous personal journal that he could be quite confident nobody but himself would trouble themselves to glance at.)

We need constantly to bear in mind that there were two very distinct types of white abolitionist, the non-racist abolitionist and the racist abolitionist. The non-racist abolitionists wanted to help improve the lives of black Americans and were opposed to race slavery because it harmed the lives of black Americans. The racist abolitionists didn’t think there even ought to be such a thing as a black American, and were opposed to race slavery because it created a place for black people in America, where they ought not to have any place at all. Likewise, there were two reasons for being in favor of the Underground Railroad, because it helped black people who needed help, and because it helped remove black people from the local area by shuffling them off toward the north where there might or might not be a place for them and that didn’t matter. (The genius of the abolition movement was to make strange bedfellows of these two very different sorts of personality, the non- racist Thoreau personality and the racist Emerson personality, enabling them to work together at a common task.) The point is that people like Thoreau, who wanted to help improve people’s lives, would sometimes be willing to place their own homes at risk of confiscation, but people like Emerson who just wanted weeds to grow somewhere else than in their own vicinity would never place their fine homes at risk of confiscation. That, to mix a metaphor, would be to risk throwing the clean white baby out with the dirty black bathwater! HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN July 21, Friday: A prepublication notice for WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS was on the first page of the Boston Transcript: “Ticknow and Fields have allowed us to read the proof sheets of one of the most remarkable books for originality of thought and beauty of style yet written in our day. Walden, or Life in the Woods, by Henry D. Thoreau, will attract as much attention and be as widely read as if it were a new book by Hawthorne or Emerson.” TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Henry Thoreau’s “SLAVERY IN MASSACHUSETTS” appeared in Garrison’s The Liberator (Volume 24, Number 29).It was so hot in Concord that it was almost impossible to work outdoors, and there were few people to be TIMELINE OF ESSAYS Ross/Adams commentary seen.

That night was the hottest yet that year. It was beginning to be too hot for Henry to disappear upstairs into his attic room as he would have liked, and so for a number of evenings he would be forced to endure the boardinghouse society.

August Bondi became a naturalized American citizen. For one year he would be in the clothing business at St. Louis, Missouri.

July 24, Monday: A pre-publication review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, titled “Thoreau’s Life in the Woods,” appeared on the first page of the New York Evening Post.

Reprinted in CRITICAL ESSAYS ON HENRY DAVID THOREAU'S WALDEN, ed. Joel Myerson (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1988), pages 17-18.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN July 25, Tuesday: Henry Thoreau walked on the Fitchburg Railroad tracks to Bare or Pine Hill in Lincoln (Gleason J9).

A pre-publication announcement of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS titled “The Hounds in Walden Woods” appeared on the 1st page of the Boston Commonwealth, in columns 6 and 7.

Messrs. Ticknor & Fields will publish in a few days a new volume by Henry D. Thoreau, author of “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.” It will be entitled, “Walden, or Life in the Woods.” Mr. Thoreau once built him a house, at a cost of something less than thirty dollars, near Walden Pond, in Concord, and lived there many months upon what he could raise, beans or muskrats, in the neighborhood. In this book he gives an account of his life during the summer in the woods. The following is an extract in advance of publication: [Reprints “Winter Animals,” pages 276.31-280.9.]

TIMELINE OF WALDEN

July 27, Thursday: A pre-publication announcement of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS titled “Walden Ice” appeared on the 1st page of the Boston Commonwealth, in column 7.

Reprints “The Pond in Winter,” pages 296.31-298.23, followed by the words: H.D. Thoreau’s forthcoming book.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN July 28, Friday: Charles Henry Branscomb, a lawyer from Holyoke, Massachusetts serving as a general agent for the Emigrant Aid Society in the Kansas Territory, traveled up the Kansas River as far as Fort Riley with a pioneer party of 30 persons to select a location for an antislavery town. He and Dr. Charles Robinson of Fitchburg would agree on the site of Lawrence. THE 2D GREAT AMERICAN DISUNION

William B. Sheppard, who had hoped to get married with his boss Henry C. Day’s daughter, had, when his employer had refused to consent, stabbed him to death. On this day Sheriff William Gorham officiated over the hanging of the murderer on “Government Reserve property” near the Presidio in San Francisco, before a crowd of 10,000 citizens. The body of the executed man would hang for an hour before Sheriff Gorham would permit it to be cut down.

FINAL EXECUTIONS

last Harvard College professor to be hanged by the August 30, 1850 John White Webster neck in Boston

last public open-air hanging in San Francisco, at July 28, 1854 William B. Sheppard the Presidio before a crowd of not less than 10,000

hanged outside the municipal prison of Cardiff July 25, 1857 John Lewis before a crowd of 12,000, the final public hanging in Wales

Also, in San Francisco on this day, California Freemasons adopted a constitution and installed officers.

A pre-publication announcement of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS titled “Life in the Woods. Former Inhabitants” appeared on the 4th page of the Boston Daily Evening Traveller, in columns 1 and 2.

EXTRACT FROM MR. THOREAU’s “WALDEN.” (In press, by Ticknor & Fields.) [Reprints “Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors,” pages 256.1-264.3.]

TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN July 29, Saturday: In the afternoon Henry Thoreau went a-berrying to Brooks Clark’s (Gleason D6) on the Old Carlisle Road.

The Bunker-Hill Aurora and Boston Mirror, on its 1st page in columns 5 and 6, under the heading “Hounds in Walden Woods,” provided its readers with an 1,100-word excerpt from the “Winter Animals” chapter of WALDEN (this had been presumably supplied by William W. Wheildon).

Review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, presumably by Horace Greeley, titled “A Massachusetts Hermit,” on the 3d page of the New-York Daily Tribune, columns 2-6:

Ticknor & Fields have in press a work by HENRY D. THOREAU entitled “Life in the Woods,” describing the experience of the author during a solitary residence of two years in a hut on the shore of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. The volume promises to be one of curious interest, and by the courtesy of the publishers we are permitted to take some extracts in advance of the regular issue. THE HERMIT BUILDS HIS HUT. [Reprints “Economy,” pages 40.30-45.28.] THE HERMIT PLANTS BEANS. [Reprints “Economy,” pages 54.16-56.13.] THE HERMIT COMMENCES HOUSEKEEPING. [Reprints “Economy,” pages 65.14-67.24.] THE HERMIT’s FIRST SUMMER. [Reprints “Sounds,” pages 111.18-114.21.] THE HERMIT FINDS A FRIEND. [Reprints “Visitors,” pages 144.13-150.27.] THE HERMIT HAS VISITORS, MANY OF THEM BORES. [Reprints “Visitors,” pages 150.28-154.17.]

TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN August 1, Tuesday: At 6 AM Henry Thoreau went on the river. In the afternoon he went to Peter’s (Peter’s Path, Gleason E7-E9?).

Charles Henry Branscomb guided the initial group of eastern emigrants who would settle an antislavery town that they would name “Lawrence” in the Kansas Territory: “… a party of about 30 settlers, chiefly from New England … Mr. C.H. Branscomb, of Boston, on a tour in the territory a few weeks earlier in the summer, had selected this spot as one of peculiar loveliness for a town site.” THE 2D GREAT AMERICAN DISUNION

In a letter to his friend the Reverend William Rounseville Alger, a Unitarian clergyman, T. Starr King commented on WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS: “The latter half is wonderful ... I envy you your approaching rapture.”98 The Reverend Alger had been awaiting Thoreau’s 2nd book ever since, in 1849, he had read A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS (he had condemned it for failing to be a simple story of a vacation sailboat adventure by two brothers, saying “[f]ew books need expurgation more than this one”) and thus it was that, in Boston on this day when the very 1st copy of WALDEN was sold for one dollar at the Old Corner Bookstore, the Boston retail outlet of Ticknor & Fields, it was sold to the Reverend Alger.

98. Charles W. Wendte. THOMAS STARR KING: PATRIOT AND PREACHER (Boston: Beacon Press, 1921, pages 45-46). Walter Roy Harding, “The First Year’s Sales of Thoreau’s Walden,” Thoreau Society Bulletin, number 117 (Fall 1971): 1; Gary Scharnhorst, “’He Is Able to Write a Work That Will Not Die’: W. R. Alger and T. Starr King on Thoreau,” Thoreau Journal Quarterly, 13, numbers 1-2 (January-April 1981): 5-17. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN A review of WALDEN titled “A Massachusetts Philosopher” in the organ of the Oneida, New York utopian community, the Circular, on pages 410-11. On this day Henry James, Sr. had a Daguerreotype made of him

A very curious book is in press, entitled ‘Life in the Woods,’ by H. D. Thoreau; from which the [New-York] Tribune prints a few extracts in advance. It is a narrative of the author’s experience and mode of life during a two years’ solitary hermitage in the woods, by the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Mass. The writer, being of a philosophical turn, and much given to Homer, and similar antique models, seems to have proposed to himself to reduce his mode of life to the standard nearest to primitive nature. So he took an axe, and went into the woods, to a pleasant hill-side overlooking the pond, and built himself a cabin. Of his furniture, and his views on the subject of furniture in general, he gives the following account: [Reprints “Economy,” pages 65.14-67.10.] There is evident spice of truth in this. We like Communism particularly for its effect in relieving folks from the great mass of furniture—useless exuviæ as Thoreau says,—that accumulates about them and seems necessary, in isolation. The Communist moves freely without being tied to any such trap. He goes from one home to another, without care for what he leaves or carrying anything with him and finds all needed furnishing in the Commune where he sits down. This is better we think than our hermit’s method of getting rid of incumbrance. Here follows his agricultural experience: [Reprints “Economy,” pages 54.16-56.13.] Bating the solitude, we think Thoreau’s plan of agriculture is worth consideration. There is a simplicity and independence about it, that is rather fascinating, and if practicable in single solitude it would be certainly no less so in Association. In fact our method at Oneida and the other agricultural Associations in confining ourselves mostly to thorough garden-tillage, is substantially carrying things out to a similar result.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN and his son Henry James, Jr. This is now at the Houghton Library of Harvard University:

The material about WALDEN from the July 29th edition of the New-York Daily Tribune was repeated on pages 6 and 7 of this day’s issue of the Semi-Weekly Tribune.

August 2, Wednesday: Henry Thoreau surveyed in the east part of Lincoln.

View Thoreau’s personal working drafts of his surveys courtesy of AT&T and the Concord Free Public Library: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/Thoreau_Surveys.htm

99 On this day our author received a specimen copy of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Thoreau’s holograph title page draft for WALDEN, as preserved in the photograph on page 140 of Van Doren’s 1970 ANNOTATED WALDEN, contains an epigraph from Mosleh Od-Din Sa’di’s GULESTAN that differs considerably from what is found in the Francis Gladwin translation: “The clouds, wind, moon, sun and sky act in cooperation that thou mayest get thy daily bread, and not eat it with indifference; all revolve for thy sake, and are obedient to command; it must be an equitable condition, that thou shalt be obedient also.” Whereas the Gladwin translation has it on page 94 as “Clouds and wind, the moon, the sun, and the sky are all busied, that thou, O man, mayest obtain thy bread, and eat it not in neglect. For thy sake, all these revolve and are obedient: it is not therefore consistent with the rules of justice that thou only shouldest not obey.” This is also something of a mystery for another reason, for either the epigraph had been omitted by the point at which the manuscript reached the typesetter, or the typesetter for some reason left it out and then Henry neglected to register a correction in his personal print copy: ﺍﺑﺮ ﻭ ﺑﺎﺩ ﻭ ﻣﻪ ﻭ ﺧﻮﺭﺷﻴﺪ ﻭ ﻓﻠﮏ ﺩﺭ ﮐﺎﺭﻧﺪ ﺗﺎ ﺗﻮ ﻧﺎﻧﯽ ﺑﻪ ﮐﻒ ﺁﺭی ﻭ ﺑﻪ ﻏﻔﻠﺖ ﻧﺨﻮﺭی ﻫﻤﻪ ﺍﺯ ﺑﻬﺮ ﺗﻮ ﺳﺮﮔﺸﺘﻪ ﻭ ﻓﺮﻣﺎﻧﺒﺮﺩﺍﺭ ﺷﺮﻁ ﺍﻧﺼﺎﻑ ﻧﺒﺎﺷﺪ ﮐﻪ ﺗﻮ ﻓﺮﻣﺎﻥ ﻧﺒﺮی

99. On this day, also, a copy was purchased for $1.00 by F.W. Kellog. This Member of Congress representing a district in Michigan may have purchased a copy of a new book of such a title merely due to a known genealogical connection with a Kellogg family of the 16th Century in the town of Saffron Walden in England. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN At 5 PM Thoreau walked to Conantum (“J6” on the Gleason map of the Concord vicinity) along Hubbard’s Path. Here is a painting “Thoreau’s Path” by Cindy Kassab:

The full text of Thoreau’s “SLAVERY IN MASSACHUSETTS” having been published in The Liberator, at this point Horace Greeley used that as the basis for a republication in the New-York Daily Tribune, without paragraphing and with an editorial entitled “A Higher- Law Speech”: The lower-law journals so often make ado about the speeches in Congress of those whom they designate champions of the Higher Law, that we shall enlighten and edify them, undoubtedly, by the report we publish this morning of a genuine Higher Law Speech — that of Henry D. Thoreau at the late celebration of our National Anniversary in Framingham, Mass., when Wm. Lloyd Garrison burned a copy of the Federal Constitution. No one can read this speech without realizing that the claims of Messrs. [Charles Sumner, William Henry Seward and Salmon Portland Chase] to be recognized as Higher-Law champions are of a very questionable validity. Mr. Thoreau is the Simon-Pure article, and his remarks have a racy piquancy and telling point which none but a man thoroughly in earnest and regardless of self in his fidelity to a deep conviction ever fully attains. The humor here so signally evinced is born of pathos — it is the lightning which reveals to hearers and readers the speaker’s profound abhorrence of the sacrifice or subordination of one human being to the pleasure or convenience of another. A great many will read this speech with unction who will pretend to blame us for printing it; but our back is broad and can bear censure. Let each and all be HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN fairly heard.

August 3, Thursday: One H. Woodman, presumably the Boston lawyer Horatio Woodman who was a friend of Waldo 00 Emerson’s, purchased a copy of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS for $1. . TIMELINE OF WALDEN

There isn’t conclusive evidence but it does seem likely that perusing this copy of WALDEN would fail to enable this Boston lawyer in learning to live a life of simplicity and straightforwardness — for in a later timeframe it appears that while under considerable stress due to self-induced financial and legal difficulties, he would commit suicide by dropping from a steamboat into the Long Island Sound:

Kathryn Schulz, who writes for The New Yorker, has glanced into the cold eyes of a “Pond Scum” Henry Thoreau, and has engaged in a deep reading of WALDEN, coming to the considered conclusion that this writing amounts to mere “cabin porn.” –Could that help explain why one of the first readers of the book then killed himself? Like many canonized works, [WALDEN] is more revered than read, so it exists for most people only as a dim impression retained from adolescence or as the source of a few famous lines: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.” “If you HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” Extracted from their contexts, such declarations read like the text on inspirational posters or quote-a-day calendars — purposes to which they are routinely put. Together with the bare facts of the retreat at Walden, those lines have become the ones by which we adumbrate Thoreau, so that our image of the man has also become simplified and inspirational. In that image, Thoreau is our national conscience: the voice in the American wilderness, urging us to be true to ourselves and to live in harmony with nature. This vision cannot survive any serious reading of “Walden.” The real Thoreau was, in the fullest sense of the word, self- obsessed: narcissistic, fanatical about self-control, adamant that he required nothing beyond himself to understand and thrive in the world. From that inward fixation flowed a social and political vision that is deeply unsettling. It is true that Thoreau was an excellent naturalist and an eloquent and prescient voice for the preservation of wild places. But “Walden” is less a cornerstone work of environmental literature than the original cabin porn: a fantasy about rustic life divorced from the reality of living in the woods, and, especially, a fantasy about escaping the entanglements and responsibilities of living among other people.

August 4, Friday: In the afternoon Henry Thoreau walked down the Cambridge Turnpike to Smith’s Hill (Gleason G10).

WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS was reviewed under the heading “A New Book by Henry Thoreau” on the 2d page of the Dedham, Massachusetts gazette, Norfolk Democrat. Ticknor & Fields will issue in a few days a book by the eccentric Thoreau, of Concord, entitled, “Walden, of Life in the Woods.” It is a record of Mr. Thoreau’s life and experience during a residence of two or three years in a house of his own building, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord. From several extracts which we have seen in the Commonwealth, Tribune, N. Y. Evening Post, and other papers, we conclude that it will be one of the most attractive books of the year. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN August 5, Saturday: Russian forces devastated the main Turkish army of the Caucasus at Kurudere, forcing them to retreat to Kars. The battle left 11,000 total casualties.

At 8:30 AM Henry Thoreau went by boat to Coreopsis Bend. A subscription library in New York City, the 39 “Mercantile Library,” purchased two copies of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS for $1. .

WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS was reviewed under the heading “Life in the Woods” on the 1st page of the Bunker-Hill Aurora and Boston Mirror, columns 6-7:

[Thoreau] says that he lived alone two years, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which he built himself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, where he earned his living by the labor of his own hands. How he lived, a few extracts from his own story will best delineate: BUILDING THE HOUSE. [Reprints “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” page 90.32-34; and “Economy,” pages 40.30-42.5, 42.34-45.28, 48.28-49.22.] HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Reprint of the July 29th review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS [by Horace Greeley?] titled “A Massachusetts Hermit” in the New-York Weekly Tribune, 6:6-7:1-3.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN

August 7, Monday: The Barony of Knyphausen was annexed by Oldenburg.

On this day and the following one there would be anti-Catholic rioting by the nativists of St. Louis, Missouri (10 would be killed and 30 injured). ANTI-CATHOLICISM

In the afternoon Henry Thoreau walked on Peter’s Path (Gleason E7-E9) to Beck Stow’s Swamp (Gleason E9), and thence to Walden Pond.

A remark was made about WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS by “Algoma” (Charles Creighton Hazewell) in his column titled “Our Boston Correspondence” in the New-York Herald, page 6, column 2.

Mr. Thoreau’s new work, “Walden, or Life in the Woods,” is advertised to be out on the 9th.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN August 8, Tuesday: Zenaide Laetitia Julie Bonaparte died.

In Vienna, Austria, France, and Great Britain presented their Four Points for peace with Russia. Russia would need to abandon its claim of protection over Christians in Ottoman lands, would need to agree to a revision of the Straits Settlement, would need to agree to free passage of the mouth of the Danube, and would need to guarantee the integrity of Moldavia, Wallachia, and Serbia.

Henry Thoreau went by boat up the Assabet River to Annursnack Hill (Gleason D3). The official date of publication of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS was remarked on the 2d page of the Boston Daily Bee, in column 3:Thoreau wrote to H.G.O. Blake.

LIFE IN THE WOODS comes out tomorrow.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Concord Aug 8th ’54

Mr Blake,

Methinks I have spent a rather unprofitable summer thus far. I have been too much with the world, as the poet might say. The completest performance of the highest duties it imposes would yield me but little satisfaction. Better the neglect of all such because your life passed on a level where it was impossible to recognize them. Latterly I have heard the very flies buzz too distinctly, and have accused myself because I did not still this superficial din. We must not be too easily distracted by the crying of children—or of dynasties. The Irishman erects his stye, and gets drunk, and jabbers more and more under my eaves, and I am responsible for all that filth and folly. I find it, as ever, very unprofitable to have much to do with men. It is sowing the wind, but not reaping even the whirlwind,— only reaping an unprofitable calm and stagnation. Our conversation is a smooth and civil and never-ending speculation merely. I take up the thread of it again in the moring [sic] with very much such courage as the invalid takes his prescribed Seidlitz powders. Shall I help you

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you to some of the mackerel? It would be HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN more respectable if men, as has been said before, instead of being such pygmy des- perates, were Giant Despairs. Emerson says that life is so unprofitable and shabby for the most part, that he is driven to all sorts of [resources], and among the rest to men. I tell him that we differ only in our resources. Mine is to get away from men. They very rarely affect me as grand or beautiful; but I know that there is a sunrise & a sunset every day. In the summer this world is a mere watering-place—a Saratoga—drinking so [many] tumblers of Congress water; and in the winter, is it any better, with its oratorios? I have seen more men than usual lately, and well as I was acquainted with one, I am surprised I am surprised to find what vulgar fellows they are. They do a little business commonly each day, in order to pay their board, and then they congregate in sitting rooms and feebly fabulate and paddle in the social slush, and when I think that they have sufficiently relaxed, and am prepared to see them steal away to their shrines (They) go unashamed to their beds, and take on a new layer of sloth. They

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may be single or have families in their faineancy. I do not meet men who can have nothing to do with me because they have so much to do with themselves. However, I trust that a very few cherish purposes which they never declare. Only think, for a moment, of a man about his affairs! How we should respect him! How glorious he would appear! Not working for any Cor- poration—its agent or President, but fulfilling the end of his being! A man about his business would be the cynosure of all eyes.

The other evening I was de termined that I would silence this shallow din—that I would walk in various directions & see if there was not to be found any depth of silence around. As Buonaparte sent out his mounted horsemen in the HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Red Sea on all sides to find shallow water—so I sent forth my mounted thoughts to find deep water. I left the village & paddled up the river to Fair Haven Pond. As the sun went down, I saw a solitary boatman disporting on the smooth lake. The falling dews seemed to strain & purify the y air, and I was soothed with an infinite stillness. I got the world, as it were, by the

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nape of the neck, and held it under in the tide of its own events till it was drowned, and then I let it go down stream like a dead dog. Vast hollow chambers of silence stretched away on every side, & my being expanded in proportion and filled them. Then first could I appreciate the din which the world sound and find it musical.

But now for your news. Tell us of the year. Have you fought the good fight? What is the state of your crops? Is your harvest agoing to answer well to the seed-time, and are you cheered by the prospect of stretching cornfields. Is there any blight on your fields, any murrain in your herds? Have you tried the size and quality of your potatoes? It does one good to see their balls dangling in the low lands. Have you got your meadow hay before the fall rains shall set in? Is there enough in your barns to keep your cattle over? Are you killing weeds now-a-days? Or have you earned leisure to go a fishing? Did you plant any Giant Regrets last spring—such as I saw advertised. It is not a new species but the result of cultivation,

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and a fertile soil. They are excellent for sauce. How is it with HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN your marrow squashes for winter use? Is there likely to be a sufficiency of fall feed in your neighborhood? What is the state of your springs? I read that in your county there is more water [in] the hills than in the valleys. Do you find it easy to get all the help you require? Work early and late, and let your men & teams rest at noon. Be careful not to drink too much sweetened water while at your hoeing this hot weather. You can bear the heat much better for it

H. D. T.

“I have been too much with the world.”

Also appearing in the Daily Bee in this day’s issue was a report on Joe Polis:

THE PENOBSCOT INDIANS — SOMETHING INTERESTING IN RELATION TO THEM. — The following interesting information on the Penobscot Indians, is taken from a recent letter in the Puritan Recorder of this city. It was written at Oldtown, Me. My special object in writing this communication is to give some facts respecting the Penobscot Tribe of Indians, from whom this town derived its name. Their residence is upon the islands in the Penobscot, extending some fifty miles and containing some thousand of acres. Most of the tribe dwell upon the south part of the islands, nearest to this town. The tribe like others all over the land has been gradually wasting away. It numbers less than five hundred, of whom many are constantly absent to secure the means of living. The tribe still clings to its ancient custom of retaining HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN at its head, a Chief, or King, or Governor, whose office is hereditary. Some are anxious to have the office elective. Hence two parties were formed who became mutually hostile, and for a time were in open and bitter conflict. At length the parties agreed upon terms of peace, and pledged to each other to bury the Tomahawk at the foot of the Liberty Pole which they had erected at the place of mutual concord for the future. Here was their common rallying point, until the Catholic Bishop and Priests came with the design to cut down that Pole and erect in its stead the cross, the emblem of Romanism. The day came for this transaction. The Indians assembled. The Bishop and Priests appeared in their gorgeous robes and imposing movements to the spot. — There, the preparatory measures having been taken, the Bishop was just giving his orders to apply the axe; when, directly before him, stepped up one of the Indians, a noble, athletic and fearless man, and taking his stand between him and the Liberty Pole — he said to the Bishop: — “You go too far, Bishop. This Pole my property. He part my property. No white man any right to touch ‘em. Suppose Governor of State himself come here; he no right to touch ‘em, — Indian property. Who are you? Foreigner, — you come from Massachusetts, — and you go to destroy Indian property. You no touch ‘em.” The Bishop replied, “You Indians can’t understand, — I am your Bishop. — I know what is best for you. You are ignorant, — you don’t know.” To which the Indian replied: “You say true, Bishop, — the Indian be ignorant, — but who make him ignorant? — You Bishop, and you Priests. You been here on Indian island 125 years. You never teach Indian to read one word. You bury Indian one foot deeper in darkness every year. Now you get him 125 feet deep, and then you tell him, ‘He no see.’ The Priests tell him, ‘Learning is not suitable for Indian, learning was not made for Indian. That which is good for white man is not good for them.’ Now, Bishop, you show me one place in Bible where it says learning is good for white man, — he no good for Indian, — and let me carry ‘em to Oldtown and show to my friend (meaning Rev. Mr. Merrill,) and see if you read ‘em right.” With such reasoning the Indian stood his ground; the Bishop and Priests were compelled to retire; and the Liberty Pole is still standing. After a little time, the same Indian said to the Priest who had been residing there for years — and only to depress the people: “I guess the best way you live somewhere else. Suppose you live here; may be you get hurt.” The Priest took the hint, left the island, and has not resided there since. This young man, who took such a decided stand for the tribe, is now one of the Counsel of the Nation, and was their representative two years since to the Legislature of Maine. His deep feeling and earnest efforts for the improvement of his brethren, are traceable to a striking event. Some ten years since, among those who visited the Island, was a pious lady from Boston. She sought those who could read, and finding a young Indian near the church, who answered her inquiry in the affirmative, she HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN presented him with a bible. He was a boy in whom the Priest had expressed great interest, had taken him to his house and had learned [sic] him thus to read the English language. That boy was then residing with the Priest. He received the Bible gratefully and read it with deep interest. He soon found its teachings to be unlike those of the priest. This increased his interest in it, and caused him to conceal the Book in his bosom when not reading it. At length, by accident, he was called suddenly from his room, where he left the bible upon his table; the Priest on coming in saw it, and asked him how he obtained it. The boy frankly told him. The priest then said, “It is a bad book,” and threw it into the fire. This, however, did not settle the questions with the youth; he secured another copy and read and reflected, and was hopefully led to Christ as the only hope of his soul. Not long after he was called to his dying scene; when he entreated his elder brother to labor for the improvement of the tribe, and for its relief from the degradation to which Romanism had so long reduced it. That elder brother is the same person who has been described above. He and others are now active in efforts to elevate the character of the tribe; and, to furnish means of education for the children and youth, they have had, at times, a school upon the island. The pupils have learned rapidly, and as they improve, have an increasing desire to improve. Two years since the legislature paid an extra grant of $200 to furnish means of improvement. Last year they increased the amount to $300; and, under the direction of their real and valued friend, Rev. Mr. Merrill, the tribe are receiving advantages for continued improvement. They are feeling more and more the need of it. Obstacles exist which they are laboring to remove. They are compelled to leave the Islands and traverse the country to obtain support; thus taking the children away from a settled home and means of instruction. It is hoped relief on this point will be obtained, by establishing a deposit for the articles manufactured by them, and in return supplying them with the means of living. In respect to religion they are in a transition state. Many of them are totally dissatisfied with Romanism, and disgusted with the priests; and could a judicious course be taken, by those in whom they confide, the light of the Gospel might reach them, and its precious hopes be theirs. They are a very interesting people. No one can visit them and converse with them, without deep sympathy. As a people they are honest and upright in all their dealings, and are treated with respect and kindness by the surrounding communities. They cherish and practice principles of peace. They were never known, in our revolutionary struggles, to act against the Colonies, nor since, against the nation. Nor have they been in conflict with other tribes, except in cases of self-defence and protection. It is hoped that amid the benevolent activities of this age, they will not be overlooked by Christians who know them and can fully appreciate their HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN condition. Yours truly, D.S.

WALDEN: Consider first how slight a shelter is absolutely PEOPLE OF necessary. I have seen Penobscot Indians, in this town, living in WALDEN tents of thin cotton cloth, while the snow was nearly a foot deep around them, and I thought that they would be glad to have it deeper to keep out the wind. Formerly, when how to get my living honestly, with freedom left for my proper pursuits, was a question which vexed me even more than it does now, for unfortunately I am become somewhat callous, I used to see a large box by the railroad, six feet long by three wide, in which the laborers locked up their tools at night, and it suggested to me that every man who was hard pushed might get such a one for a dollar, and, having bored a few auger holes in it, to admit the air at least, get into it when it rained and at night, and hook down the lid, and so have freedom in his love, and in his soul be free. This did not appear the worst, nor by any means a despicable alternative. You could sit up as late as you pleased, and, whenever you got up, go abroad without any landlord or house-lord dogging you for rent. Many a man is harassed to death to pay the rent of a larger and more luxurious box who would not have frozen to death in such a box as this. I am far from jesting. Economy is a subject which admits of being treated with levity, but it cannot so be disposed of.

RICHARD LOVELACE HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN August 9, Wednesday: King Friedrich August II of Saxony died in the Tirol and was succeeded by his brother Johann.

“‘WALDEN’ published” (JOURNAL); Ticknor and Fields had printed 2,000 copies.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN The drawing provided by Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau for the title page of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS has been criticized in a number of particulars. The evergreens shown are firs rather than the pines which surrounded the actual shanty, the deciduous trees are far too large and omnipresent, the slope against which the shanty was positioned is not clearly depicted, and, as Henry Thoreau himself pointed out, the door and the roof projection above it were not accurately portrayed.

Thoreau went in to the publisher’s offices to pick up copies of his book. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Presumably it was one of these copies, that he presented to Waldo Emerson:

Did Waldo ever read it? Did Waldo ever comment on it? HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN A two-inch announcement of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS appeared in the New-York Daily Tribune.

Of this first edition of 2,000 copies of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, as many as 500 may have been lacking the map of Walden Pond that should have faced page 307. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS under “New Publications” in the Boston Daily Bee, 2:6.

An original book, this, and from an original man—from a very eccentric man. It is a record of the author’s life and thoughts while he lived in the woods—two years and two months. It is a volume of interest and value— of interest because it concerns a very rare individual, and of value because it contains considerable wisdom, after a fashion. It is a volume to read once, twice, thrice—and then think over.—There is a charm in its style, a philosophy in its thought. Mr. Moreau [sic] tells us of common things we know, but in an uncommon manner. There is much to be learned from this volume. Stearn [sic] and good lessons in economy; contentment with a simple but noble life, and all that, and much more. The author “lived like a king” on “hoe cakes,” and drank water; at the same time outworking the lustiest farmers who were pitted against him. Get the book. You will like it. It is original and refreshing; and from the brain of a LIVE man.

Review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS on the front page of the Boston Daily Evening Traveller: That evening Thoreau dined with Bronson Alcott and presented him also with a copy of his new book.

By the day of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS’s publication, Ticknor & Fields had received advance orders for only 402 copies. Another 164 would be ordered during the first week of publication. As the number of reviews dwindled, so would sales. Over the following month, the firm would receive orders for merely 123 copies, which would bring total sales during the first five weeks after publication to a very disappointing 689. Only about 65 more copies would be sold between mid-September 1854 and early-August 1855.100 Not until 1859 would the printed stocks of the book be depleted — and then it would remain out of print until after Thoreau’s demise.

100. The information about the sale of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS is per Walter Roy Harding’s “The First Year’s Sales of Thoreau’s Walden,” 1-2. Harding noted that we have no sales records for April 1st to June 29th, 1855, but that average monthly sales figures suggest that at most 20 copies would have sold during the period. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN August 10, Thursday: Friend Daniel Ricketson purchased a copy of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS:

Bought a book this morning named Walden, or Life in the Woods, by Henry D. Thoreau, who spent several years upon the shore of Walden Pond near Concord, Mass., living in a rough board house of his own building. Much of his experience in his out-of-door and secluded life I fully understand and appreciate.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow also purchased a copy.

Bronson Alcott completed a reading of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

At 4:30 AM Henry Thoreau went to the Cliffs of Fair Haven Hill (Gleason 26/J7). In the afternoon Thoreau went to Conantum (Gleason J6) and thence to Clematis Brook (Gleason K7). He had a conversation with Eben J. Loomis.

The tinkling notes of goldfinches [American Goldfinch Carduleis tristis] and bobolinks which we hear nowadays are of one character and peculiar to the season. They are not voluminous flowers, but rather nuts of sound, –ripened seed of sound. It is the tinkling of ripened grain in Nature’s basket. It is like the sparkle on water, a sound produced by friction on the crisped air. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS on the 2d page of the Boston Atlas:

Reprinted in CRITICAL ESSAYS ON HENRY DAVID THOREAU'S WALDEN, ed. Joel Myerson (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1988), page 18.

WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS was reviewed under the heading “New Publications” on the front page of the Boston Daily Journal, column 6: HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

This is a remarkable book. The thread of the work is a narrative of the personal experience of the eccentric author as a hermit on the shores of Walden Pond. The body consists of his reflections on life and its pursuits. Mr. Thoreau carried out his ideas of “communism” by building with his own hands an humble hut, cultivating his own garden patch, earning with the sweat of his brow enough of coarse food to sustain life, and living independent of the world and of its circumstances. He continued this selfish existence for two years, and then returned to society, but why, he does not inform his readers. Whether satisfied that he had mistaken the “pleasures of solitude,” or whether the self-improvement which the world has charitably supposed was the object of his retirement had been accomplished, it is certain that he was relieved of none of his selfish opinions —that he left behind in the woods of Concord none of his misanthropy, and that he brought back habits of thought which, though profound, are erratic, and often border on the transcendental. The narrative of the two years hermit life of such a man can hardly fail to be attractive, and the study of the workings of a mind so constituted must possess a peculiar interest. But the attraction is without sympathy—the interest is devoid of admiration. The outre opinions of a mind like that of Mr. Thoreau, while they will attract attention as the eccentric outbursts of real genius, so far from finding a response in the bosom of the reader, will excite a smile, from their very extravagance, and we can easily imagine that if Mr. Thoreau would banish from his mind the idea that man is an oyster, he might become a passable philosopher. Mr. Thoreau has made an attractive book—more attractive than his “Week on the Concord and Merrimac[k].” But while many will be fascinated by its contents, few will be improved. As the pantheistic doctrines of the author marred the beauty of his former work, so does his selfish philosophy darkly tinge the pages of “Walden,” and the best that can be said of the work in its probable effects is, that while many will be charmed by the descriptive powers of the author, and will smile at his extravagant ideas, few will be influenced by his opinions. This is a negative virtue in a book which is likely to be widely circulated, and which might do much mischief if the author could establish a bond of sympathy with the reader. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS under the heading “New Publications” in the Salem Register, page 2 column 3.

This is a remarkable book, the production of one of the eccentric geniuses who seem to swarm in old Concord, either because they are to the manor born, as was the case with Thoreau, or because there is something sympathetic in the atmosphere which induces an immigration of oddities thither. The author affects to be a philosopher, and is a sort of compound of Diogenes and Timon, flavored with the simplicity of a hermit and a pure child of nature. There is nothing in literature, that we know of, exactly like his book. Mr. Thoreau is a graduate of Harvard College, in the class of 1837, where he was a diligent student. Subsequently, in one of his whimsical freaks, he built himself a hut in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, where he lived alone, and earned his living by the labor of his hands only, for the space of two years and two months, at the end of which time he became a sojourner in civilized life again. The book was written principally during this seclusion, and is, in some sort, a digested record of his life there, with sage reflections on the social condition and the ordinary aims of human ambition. It is a strikingly original, singular, and most interesting work. Several passages from the narrative portion have appeared in journals which were favored with sheets in advance. We avail ourselves of the following brief extract near the conclusion, which gives a little insight into his philosophy:— [Reprints “Conclusion,” pages 328.5-329.16.]

Review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS in the Lowell Journal and Courier, page 2 column 3.

Ticknor & Fields, of Boston, have just sent us this handsome volume, by Henry D. Thoreau, author of “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.” Mr Thoreau, who lived nearly three years in the woods, has been called ‘the Concord Diogenes,’ as Ralph Waldo Emerson has been called the Concord Platonist or American Plato. This is one of the most singular, as well as one of the best of works. It is no romance, though most of it is of a narrative character. The press all over the country have given the most flattering notices of it; and without doubt it will command a very extensive sale. It surely deserves it.

August 11, Friday: Henry Thoreau sent a book, presumably WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, to Senator Charles Sumner, and also wrote (presumably) to James Thomas Fields. Concord Aug 11th ’54 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Mr Fields, Dear Sir[,] I shall feel still more under obligations to you if you will send the accompanying volume to Mr. Sumner in one of your parcels. I find that I omitted to count the volume sent to Greeley — & so have one more than my due. Will you please charge me with it. Yrs truly Henry D. Thoreau

In the afternoon he went to Assabet Bath (Gleason 4/E5). There was a review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS under the heading “New Publications” in the Salem, Massachusetts Gazette, page 2, column 6.

This is a very noticeable work, the production of an educated, eccentric man, who thinks much, and often justly, and expresses his thoughts in a clear and agreeable style. The author lived more than two years alone in the woods of Concord, Mass., a mile from any neighbors, earning his living by the labor of his hands, and his life-like sketches of solitary and rural life will be read with interest and pleasure. At present he is a sojourner in civilized life again. He says: [Reprints “Conclusion,” pages 323.29-324.6.]

Review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS on the front page of the Providence, Rhode Island Daily Journal:

Reprinted in CRITICAL ESSAYS ON HENRY DAVID THOREAU'S WALDEN, ed. Joel Myerson (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1988), page 19. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN August 12, Saturday: In his journal, Henry Thoreau noted the first watermelon of the season. He went by boat to Conantum (Gleason J6). He walked the Fitchburg Railroad tracks to Bare or Pine Hill in Lincoln (Gleason J9).

Bronson Alcott completed a re-reading of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, and also of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

The Concord librarian, Albert Stacy, purchased a copy of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS for the town library at a cost of $0.75, and the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson purchased two copies for $2.00. A favorable review under the heading “Editorial Correspondence” presumably by the Reverend John Sullivan Dwight appeared in Dwight’s Journal of Music, A Paper of Art and Literature (5:149-50):

... Thoreau is one of those men who has put such a determined trust in the simple dictates of common sense, as to earn the vulgar title of “transcendentalist” from his sophisticated neighbors. ... Of course, they find him strange, fantastical, a humorist, a theorist, a dreamer. It may be or it may not.... Walden’s literary style is admirably clear and terse and elegant; the pictures wonderfully graphic; for the writer is a poet and a scholar as well as a tough wrestler with the first economical problems of nature, and a winner of good cheer and of free glorious leisure out of what men call the “hard realities” of life. Walden Pond, a half mile in diameter, in Concord town, becomes henceforth as classical as any lake of Windermere. And we doubt not men are beginning to look to transcendentalists for the soberest reports of good hard common-sense, as well as for the models of the clearest writing.

Review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS under the heading “New Publications” in the Boston Commonwealth, 2:4.

The Bunker-Hill Aurora and Boston Mirror provided a WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS review entitled “H.D. Thoreau’s Life at Walden Pond,” presumably by William W. Wheildon, on its page 2 in columns 3-5: “Thoreau’s book we earnestly commend to the perusal of our friends. It is refreshing to week day mortals during these blistering summer days. It is a ‘psalm of life,’ of consolation and healing, to those whom the wolf of want has driven into a corner. It shows at least what can be done by man, if he reaches, by any untoward circumstances, an extremity. It opens the heart of a man deeply enamored of Nature. It is a book with which men cannot quarrel. It can have no counterpart. No man ever lived as Thoreau lived, before, for a similar purpose. No man will imitate his example. Yet his forest life has lessons of the deepest wisdom.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

We mean, before long, to say how delightful a book this is [no subsequent notice located]; but it is now Saturday, the very day when people buy books, and we can only say that it is just the pleasantest and most readable, the most thought-provoking book of the present season. It is a better work than the author[’]s previous one, “A [W]eek on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” though we reckon that as a book which will live in American literature a good while. “Walden” is a record of two years’ sojourning in a house built by the author with his own hands, near Walden Pond. He was a squatter upon the land, and his sovereignty was over all he surveyed. Most lively accounts he gives of his life there, mingled with pages of philosophical (sensible or other) reflections upon all sorts of topics. No more attractive book has been printed for a long time. It ought, to be sure, considering the author’s theories of food and raiment, to be printed upon birch-bark, but it is, on the contrary, issued in Ticknor & Fields’ best style.

Review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS under the heading “New Publications” in the Boston Olive Branch, 3:3-4.

This is indeed a quaint book, as any person, who is in the least familiar with the character of the author, might expect. It gives a full account of his experience during his sojourn on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Mass. Having imbibed the idea that the daily life of his neighbors, with its cares, its trials and its conformity to fashion and custom was little better than a penance, he made himself a home in that secluded spot. He built a house, which cost him about thirty dollars; furnished it scantily and began to keep “bachelor’s hall.” There in his solitary abode he read the great book of Nature; watched the stars, the birds and the waters, and mused and philosophized after his own fashion. Besides, he had a small piece of land near this cottage, which he cultivated, and which yielded him a small harvest. His expenditures for food and clothing were very trifling, and it will no doubt, astonish many to know that so moderate a sum supported a person two years. He gives the details of his life and we presume they will entertain the reader as they have us. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN “SLAVERY IN MASSACHUSETTS” appeared in The National Anti-Slavery Standard.

Review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS under the heading “New Publications” on the second page of the New Bedford, Massachusetts Mercury, column 3:

This is a remarkable history of remarkable experiences. Mr. Thoreau is an eccentric genius, and affects the philosopher, despising all the ordinary aims and petty ambitions of the world, looking in a half cynical, half amused mood upon men and things, and meanwhile retiring into a semi barbarous state builds with his own hands a hut on Walden Pond in Connecticut [sic], where for twenty-six months he lives like a hermit on the labor of his hands, looking to nature, ‘kindest mother still,’ for the supply of his physical wants, and as a perpetual fountain of delight to his eye and soul. This volume is in some measure a record of his external and internal being during his retiracy, and is perfectly unique in experience and expression. A simple, pure heart, high cultivation and a luxuriant fancy, give to Mr. Thoreau a vigorous intellectual life, and impart a freshness and charm to his style which leads one on quite enchanted. For its fine descriptions of nature, it will bear more than one reading, while its stern and true lessons on the value of existence, its manly simplicity, its sage reflections, will drop many a good seed for content and true living, to spring up and flourish and beautify new homes, albeit in civilized life, for we do not think any will be so enamored of Mr. Thoreau’s experience, as to seek it in his way.

Review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS on the second page of the Roxbury Norfolk County Journal, HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN column 6:

Mr. Thoreau is an eccentric genius as well as an original thinker and good writer. His eccentricity led him to build a hut upon the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, in which he lived alone for two years, laboring in his garden patch to raise food for the support of life, and all that he might experience the pleasures of solitude and a perfectly independent life. But Mr. Thoreau is a man of education, of intellect, of taste, — though he did not show much of the latter in his odd sort of life, according to the general estimation of the world, — and he did not live alone in the woods like a savage. He mused and studied — mused somewhat on the works of nature, somewhat more on mankind, and not in the most loving and gentle spirit, and he studied his own erratic mind. The latter occupation might have been more profitable, perhaps, had he observed it from a different point of view. The book which he now gives to the world after coming out from his self imposed exile, is a sort of history of his hermitage, an account of his solitary mode of living, a description of the external things which occupied his attention, colored throughout with a sort of philosophy which is little else than the peculiarities of Mr. Thoreau’s mind. The narrative and descriptions are certainly very interesting and attractive, full of life and nature, and the book is in this respect quite a charming one. In other respects it may find fewer admirers, but altogether, from its origin and character, it may be set down as a remarkable book, which will command the attention of the tasteful reader and of the thoughtful student. It is hardly necessary to say that it is published in the neat style which characterizes all the volumes issued by these publishers.

In New Bedford, Friend Daniel Ricketson completed a reading of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS and began HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN to cultivate the author:

Finished this morning reading Walden, or Life in the Woods, by H. D. Thoreau. I have been highly interested in this book, the most truly original one I ever read, unless the life of John Buncle, an old book written by an eccentric English Gentleman. The experience of Thoreau and his reflections are like those of every true lover of Nature. His views of the artificial customs of civilized life are very correct. Mankind labor and suffer to supply themselves with the unnecessaries of life, — leisure for enjoyment is rarely obtained. I long for mankind to be emancipated from this thralldom which has spread its nets and snares over so large a portion of the human family. A love for a more simple life increases with me, and I hope that the time will ere long come when I may realize the peace to be derived therefrom. Simplicity in all things, house, living, dress, address, &c. &c. My fortune, though not large, is ample, and were my style of living less expensive I might have considerable for charitable purposes. One of my greatest luxuries has been in books, — good books I value beyond most all else in the world of earthly treasure, after my family, — handsome editions of my favorite authors. Such I want in the best of paper, type, and binding and English, for my reading is confined pretty much to my native language. England, Scotland, or rather Great Britain and America, have furnished nearly all the authors I am acquainted with. Genuine English literature is my line of reading.

On this day or the following one, Thoreau was written to by Friend Daniel Ricketson in New Bedford.

Mailed a letter to Henry D. Thoreau expressive of my satisfaction in reading his book, “Walden, or Life in the Woods.” His volume has been a source of great comfort to me in reading and will I think continue to be so, giving me cheerful views of life and feeling of confidence that misfortune cannot so far as property is concerned deprive me or mine of the necessities of life, and even that we may be better in every respect for the changes.

Friend Daniel included on this day the interesting information that William Cowper’s “The Task” was his “greatest favorite.” (I think it no exaggeration to say that you could count on the fingers of one foot the people for whom Cowper’s “The Task” would their “greatest favorite,” or even readable — Thoreau is one of the few HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN people I have heard of, who had their own personal copy of this poem.)

Brooklawn, near New Bedford

Mass. Aug. 12th. 1854–

Dear Sir,

I have just finished reading “Walden” and hasten to thank you for the great degree of satisfaction it has afforded me. Having always been a lover of Nature, in man, as well as in the material universe, I hail with pleasure every original production in literature which bears the stamp of a genuine and earnest love for the true philosophy of human life.— Such I assure you I esteem your book to be. To many, and to most, it will appear to be the wild musings of an eccentric and strange mind, though all must recognize your affectionate regard for the gentle denizens of the woods and pond as well as the great love you have shewn for what are familiarly called the beauties of Nature. But to me the book appears to evince a mind most thoroughly self possessed, highly cultivated with a strong vein of common sense. The whole book is a prose poem (pardon the sole- cism) and at the same time as simple as a running brook.

I have always loved ponds of pure translucent water, and some of my happiest and most memorable days have been passed on and around the beautiful Middleboro’ Ponds, particularly the largest, As- sawampset–here king Philip frequently came, and a beautiful round hill near by, is still known as “King Philip’s look-out.” I have often felt an inclination when tired of the noise and strife of society, to retire to the shores of this noble old pond, or rather lake, for it is some 5 or 6 miles in length and 2 broad. But I have a wife and four children, & besides have got a little too far along, being in my fortysec- ond year, to undertake a new mode of life. I strive however, and have striven during the whole of my life, to live as free from the restraint of mere forms & cermonies as I possibly can. I love a quiet, peaceful rural retirement; but it was not my fate to realize this until a little past thirty years of age–since then I have been a sort of rustic, genteel perhaps, rustic. Not so very genteel you might reply, if you saw HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN the place where I am writing. It is a rough board Shanty 12 x 14 three miles from New Bedford in a quiet & secluded spot–here for the present I eat & sleep, read, write, receive visitors &c. My house is now undergoing repairs &c and my family are in town.

A short time since a whip-poor-will serenaded me, and later at night I hear the cuckoos near my windows. It has long been my delight to observe the feathered tribes, and earlier in life I was quite an orni- thologist. The coming of the first Blue bird in early Spring is to me still a delightful circumstance. But more particularly soothing to me is the insect hum so multitudinous at this season.— Now as I write the crickets & other little companions are sweetly & soothingly singing around my dwelling, & occasionally in my room. I am quite at home with partridges, Quails, rabbits skunks & woodchucks. But Winter is my best time, then I am a great tramper through the woods. O how I love the woods. I have walked thousands of miles in the woods hereabouts. I recognize many of my own experiences in your “Walden”. Still I am not altogether given up to these matters–they are my pastimes. I have a farm to at tend to, fruit trees & a garden & a little business occasionally in town to look after, but much leisure nevertheless. In fact I am the only man of leisure I know of, every body here as well as elsewhere is upon the stir. I love quiet, this you know friend Thoreau dont necessarily imply that the body should be still all the time. I am often quietest, ar’nt you, when walking among the still haunts of Nature or hoeing perhaps beans as I have oftentimes done as well as corn & potatoes &c &c.

Poetry has been to me a great consolation amid the jarring elements of this life. The English poets some of them at least, and one Latin, our good old Virgil, have been like household gods to me.— Cowper’s Task, my greatest favorite now lies before me in which I had been reading & alternately looking at the western sky just after sunset before I commenced this letter. Cowper was a true lover of the country. How often have I felt the force of these lines upon the country in my own experience

“I never framed a wish, or formed a plan, That flattered me with hopes of earthly bliss But there I laid the scene.”

All through my boyhood, the country haunted my thoughts. Though blessed with a good home, books & teachers, the latter however with one exception were not blessings, I would have exchanged all for the life of a rustic. I envied as I then thought the freedom of the farmer boy. But I have long thought that the life of the farmer, that is most farmers, possessed but little of the poetry of labour. How we accu- mulate cares around us. The very repairs I am now making upon my house will t o some considerable extent increase my cares. A rough board shanty, rye & indian bread, water from the spring, or as in HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN your case, from the pond, and other things in keeping, do not burden the body & mind. It is fine houses, fine furniture, sumptuous fare, fine clothes, and many in number, horses & carriages, servants &c &c &c, these are the harpies, that so disturb our real happiness.

My next move in life I hope will be into a much more simple mode of living. I should like to live in a small house, with my family, uncar- peted white washed walls, simple old fashioned furniture & plain wholesome old fashioned fare. Though I have always been inclined to be a vegetarian in diet & once lived in capital health two years on the Graham system.

Well this will do for myself. Now for you friend Thoreau. Why return to “the world” again? a life such as you spent at Walden was too true & beautiful to be abandoned for any slight reason.

The ponds I allude to are much more secluded than Walden, and really delightful places Should you ever incline again to try your “philosophy of living” I would introduce you into haunts, that your very soul would leap to behold. Well, I thought I would just write you a few lines to thank you for the pleasure I have received from the reading of your “Walden”, but I have found myself running on till now. I feel that you are a kindred spirit and so fear not. I was pleased to find a kind word or two in your book for the poor down trodden slave. Wilberforce, Clarkson and John Woolman & Anthony Benezet were household words in my father’s house.— I early became acquainted with the subject of slavery for my parents were Quakers, & Quakers were then all Abolitionists. My love of Nature, absolute, un- defiled nature makes me an abolitionist. How could I listen to the woodland songs–or gaze upon the outstretched lanscape, or look at the great clouds & the starry heavens and be aught but a friend of the poor and oppressed coloured race of our land. But why do I write–it is in vain to portray these things–they can only be felt and lived, and to you of all others I would refrain from being prolix.

I have outlived, or nearly so, all ambition for notoriety. I wish only to be a simple, good man & so live that when I come to surrender up my spirit to the Great Father, I may depart in peace.

I wrote the above last evening. It is now Sunday afternoon, and alone in my Shanty I sit down to my desk to add a little more. A great white cloud which I have been watching for the past half hour is now ma- jestically moving off to the north east before the fine s. w. breeze which sets in here nearly every summer afternoon from the ocean. We have here the best climate in New England–shelter ed on the north & east by dense pine woods from the cold winds which so cut up the healths of eastern folk, or rather are supposed to–but I think if the habits of our people were right the north easters would do but little harm. I never heard that the Indians w ere troubled by them– HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN but they were nature’s philosophers and lived in the woods. I love to go by my instincts, inspiration rather. O how much we lose by civilization! In the eyes of the world you & I are demi savages— But I rather think we could stand our hand at the dinner table or in the drawing room with most of folks. I would risk you any where, and as for myself I have about done with the follies of “society.” I never was trump’d yet.

I have lived out all the experiences of idle youth–some gentle, & some savage experiences but my heart was not made of the stuff for a sportsman or angler–early in life I ranged the woods, fields & shores with my gun, or rod, but I found that all I sought could be obtained much better without the death dealing implements. So now my rustic staff is all the companion I usually take, unless my old dog joins me–taking new track as he often does, and bounding upon me in some distant thicket. My favorite books are–Cowper’s task, Thomson’s Seasons Milton, Shakespeare, &c &c–Goldsmith Gray’s Elegy–Beattie’s Minstrel (parts) Howitt, Gil. White, (Selbourne) Be- wick (wood engraver) moderns–Wordsworth Ch. Lamb–De Quincy, Macauly, Kit. North, &c &c

These and others are more my companions than men. I like talented women & swear lustily by Mary Wolstoncroft, Mde– Roland, Joan d’arc & somewhat by dear Margaret Fuller.

The smaller fry, I let go by–

Again permit me to thank you for the pleasure & strength I have found in reading “Walden.”

Dear Mr Walden good bye for the present.

Yours most respectfully

Daniel Ricketson

Henry D. Thoreau Esq HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN August 13, Sunday: Henry Thoreau was being written to by the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson in Newburyport.101

NEWBURYPORT, Aug 13, 1854.

Dear Sir: Let me thank you heartily for your paper on the present condition of Massachusetts, read at Framingham and printed in The Liberator. As a literary statement of the truth, which every day is making more manifest, it surpasses everything else (so I think), which the terrible week in Boston has called out. I need hardly add my thanks for “Walden,” which I have been awaiting for so many years. Through Mr. Field's kindness, I have read a great deal of it in sheets:— I have just secured two copies, one for myself, and one for a young girl here, who seems to me to have the most remarkable literary talent since Margaret Fuller, —and to whom your first book has been among the scriptures, ever since I gave her that.

FRAMINGHAM MA TIMELINE OF WALDEN

101. No MS — printed copy from Franklin Benjamin Sanborn’s RECOLLECTIONS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN August 15, Tuesday: At 5:15AM Henry Thoreau went by boat to Nawshawtuct or Lee’s Hill (Gleason F6). Beginning at 9AM, he and Ellery Channing walked all day, northwest into Acton and Carlisle. In the evening, at Miss MacKay’s, Thoreau looked through Mr. Russell’s microscope at a section of pontederia leaf.

There appeared a review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, by “W,” under the heading “New Publications” in the Albany, New York Argus, 2:7:

The book purports to have been written chiefly while the author resided in the woods, and earned his living by the labor of his hands. It contains a record of a strange experience, in connection with the many bright thoughts on various subjects that were suggested by it. It is an intensely entertaining production.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN A review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS appeared under the heading “New Publications, &c” in the Massachusetts Life Boat: Devoted to Temperance, Morals, Education, Business and General Information, 2:6:

The author is certainly a great genius, and though something of a hermit, is making his mark in the world.... While we admire many passages in the book, and not a few of the author’s thoughts, we cannot subscribe to all his sentiments. [Long Quotation from the final chapter of the book]

Meanwhile Elizabeth Rogers Mason Cabot,102 a Boston debutante who ordinarily lived at 63 Mount Vernon Street in Boston but who was vacationing at the Cabots’ summer home in New Hampshire, was writing

102. Any relation to the Nathaniel Peabody Rogers of Concord, New Hampshire who put out the Herald of Freedom prior to his death in 1846, and about whom Thoreau wrote in the last issue of THE DIAL? To Thoreau’s friend James Elliot Cabot who had written on the philosophy of the Hindoos? HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN in her diary:

I have finished this morning Thoreau’s CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS; it has given me a little tidbit of reading every day for a long time, and is far from exhausted yet, for I am eager to go back and examine some of the truths more thoroughly. It is a life-giving book and gives a picture of life from a point of view entirely unaffected by the artificial world created by man. He is a man without money, not poor, because able to get his daily bread with small toil, and desiring nothing more, untrammeled entirely (as no man with very warm affections I think could be) by the opinions or feelings of others, afraid of nothing, intimate with nature as a bosom friend, learned in all the wisdom of the world handed down in books, ignoring ambition, position, aimless as far as concerns this world, and as unbiased as I can imagine possible. Added to these advantages are a pure large nature, vigorous intellect, and healthy life moral and physical. He is all-convincing at the time, and ought to be, for he is merely putting in practice, the principles which all daily preach, but none entirely make facts. Yet when we would follow him, our old habits of feeling rush back on us, making his purer practice a sort of dream, from which we awake, sorry that it is gone, and almost doubting still which is the unreality, the world we have left, or the world we awake to. I believe solemnly and sincerely that the spiritual life should be first, material last, and needs a very small corner, and yet we place it practically first, because other people do. I know no better reason. –FROM MORE THAN COMMON POWERS OF PERCEPTION: THE DIARY OF ELIZABETH ROGERS MASON CABOT edited by P.A.M. Taylor (Boston MA: Beacon Press, 1991). HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN August 16, Wednesday: French forces took the Russian garrison at Bomarsund (Sund) in the Åland (Ahvenanmaa) Islands. Aboard the French fleet was young volontaire aspirant Louis Berlioz, son of the composer.

William Cooper Nell visited with Charlotte L. Forten, who was staying with the Charles Lenox Remond family.

In Henry Thoreau’s journal: “R. showed me the ginseng in my collection.”

At 8 AM Thoreau and John Russell went to climbing fern, and in the afternoon they went by boat to Fair Haven Bay (Gleason J7). “Extracts from WALDEN” were printed on the first page of the Worcester, Massachusetts Palladium, column 4:

From Thoreau’s new work, just published by Ticknor & Fields, we take the following extracts: WALDEN ICE. [Reprints “The Pond in Winter,” pages 296.31-298.23.] EMERSON & ALCOTT AS VISITORS TO THOREAU’s HUT. [Reprints “Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors,” pages 267.35-270.11.]

And the review itself, on page 3 of the Palladium:

INSERT REVIEW HERE, AS OCR-SCANNED FROM PS1638 EMERSON AND THOREAU: THE CONTEMPORARY REVIEWS, EDITED BY JOEL MYERSON, NEW YORK: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1992, PAGE 376.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN August 17, Thursday: Haute-volée-Polka op.155 by Johann Baptist Strauss II was performed for the initial time, in the Volksgarten, Vienna.

Sale at public auction by Selover & Sinton of water lot property in the city of San Francisco. CALIFORNIA

A review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS appeared on page 2, column 3 of Worcester’s Daily Transcript:

This is the result of the Authors’ [sic] experience while living alone in the woods, and during a Sojourn of two years and two months on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Mass. His object in going there was, in his own words, “not to live cheaply nor dearly; but to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles; to be at once Pilot, captain and owner; to be hindered from accomplishing which for want of a little energy and business talent, appeared not so sad as foolish.” Though we cannot readily yield to many of the Author’s opinions, yet we will not with[h]old from him our share of the praise which the work merits. It is neatly issued by Ticknor & Co.

Another review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS has been turned up, in the Burlington, Vermont Sentinel, page 3, column 1, quite recently, by Richard E. Winslow III (and the total number of known reviews during Henry Thoreau’s lifetime is now up to 69):

This is altogether a very remarkable book, and will attract much attention. It is devoted to a detailed account of the most interesting features of the life of a hermit, “in the woods,” and is at once scholarly, philosophical, agricultural, statistical, satirical and poetical. The writers themes are as various and unique as could be desired — such as “Economy,” “Where I lived and what I lived for,” “Reading,” “Sounds,” “Solitude,” “Visitors,” “The Bean-field,” “Higher Laws,” “Brute Neighbors,” “House-Warming,” “Winter Animals,” &c., &c. It is something to say of “Walden” in these days of abject and drivelling imitations, that the work is thoroughly original both in its faults and excellencies, and will be found a very readable and spicy volume. It is neatly printed, –contains 356 pages, and is sold by SAML. B. NICHOLS.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN William M. White’s version of this journal entry is:

I have just been through the process of killing The cistudo For the sake of science; But I cannot excuse myself for this murder, And see that such actions are inconsistent With the poetic perception, However they may serve science, And will affect the quality of my observations.

I pray that I may walk more innocently And serenely through nature. No reasoning whatever reconciles me to this act. It affects my day injuriously. I have lost some self-respect. I have a murderer’s experience in a degree.

August 19, Saturday: On this day in the wild and wooly west, Lieutenant John Lawrence Grattan having been dispatched from Fort Laramie to take High Forehead under arrest for having shot an arrow into the flank of a Mormon ox, when High Forehead refused to surrender himself the soldiers were ordered to fire indiscriminately into the native American village and headman Conquering Bear was fatally wounded. The Brulé Dakota warriors, assisted by Oglala Dakota warriors, overwhelmed this troop detachment. Soon a detachment under General William Selby Harney would be sent out to “punish” the Brulé group. Escalation, sound at all familiar?

In Concord during the afternoon Henry Thoreau and Eben J. Loomis walked the Fitchburg Railroad tracks to Flint’s, or Sandy, Pond (Gleason J10). HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

There was a review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS under the heading “New Publications” on the 1st page of the Cincinnati, Ohio (Daily?) Gazette, column 8:

Mr. Thoreau is an eccentric young man, who chose to build himself a house in the woods, with his own hands, and dwell there two years and two months, during which period the greater portion of the contents of this volume were written. He is an utterly fearless thinker and writer, of which his book will give sufficient evidence. To those who are not familiar with his writings, the following title of some of the chapters of his book will be an acceptable hint of what they may expect to find in it: Sounds, Solitude, The Bean Field, The Village, The Ponds, Higher Laws, Brute Neighbors, Winter Animals, The Pond in Winter, and Spring.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN

There was also a review of WALDEN; OR,LIFE IN THE WOODS in the Boston Saturday Evening Gazette, 2:6.

A quaintly-philosophic work, evidently the production of an acute, as well as a peculiar intellect. It is a work which, we judge, would be to some extent “caviar to the general,” yet when in a meditative mood, one cannot find a cheerier closet companion. Philosophy, politics, economy, mathematics, mechanics, with a dash of romance, thrown together very neatly by a polished verbalist, go to make up this very agreeable book.

There was also a review of WALDEN; OR,LIFE IN THE WOODS under the heading “Recent Publications” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN in Philadelphia’s Cummings’ Evening Bulletin, 2:2.

In the multiplied and confused recollection of the hundreds of books that have passed under our notice within a year or two, there is a distinct and pleasant impression of a volume called “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” as a quaint, but original record of rural experiences. “Walden” is by the same hand, and we recognize in it the same refined appreciation of nature and her beauties, and the same benevolent and human way of treating external and moral topics. It is, in fact, the history of a sort of hermit life passed by the author, in a house built by his own hands on the shore of Walden Pond, in the town of Concord, Massachusetts. It was written, indeed, in that house, and the narrative has all the vividness of true portraiture. If the author is eccentric, there is a great deal of good sense in his eccentricity, and he has certainly made a book which will be read with pleasure by all.

There was also a review of WALDEN; OR,LIFE IN THE WOODS in the Portsmouth Journal of Literature and Politics, 2:3.

The quaint writer of this volume resided for more than two years alone in the woods, in a house of his own building, a mile from any neighbor, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Mass. It has been said that it takes all sorts of people to make up a world. The writer of this book, full of quaint notions, quaint sayings, and withal a philosopher and a wit, is one of the rare ones which, like the sea-serpent, is only now and then visible—never two of them seen at the same time. The style is attractive, and although there may be some ideas which we do not readily adopt, there is not a page you wish to omit in the perusal.

There was also a review of WALDEN; OR,LIFE IN THE WOODS in the Portland, Maine Transcript, page 151.

Reprinted in CRITICAL ESSAYS ON HENRY DAVID THOREAU'S WALDEN, ed. Joel Myerson (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1988), page 21.

There was also a review of WALDEN; OR,LIFE IN THE WOODS under the heading “New Books” in the Daily Ohio State Journal, page 3, column 2.

Those who have read “A Week on the Concord and Merrimac[k] Rivers,” by the same author, will thank him for the opportunity of enjoying a second call from the same author. We shall recur to the volume again. [No subsequent notice located.] HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Another review of WALDEN; OR,LIFE IN THE WOODS has been turned up in Boston’s New England Farmer, page 2, column 3, quite recently, by Richard E. Winslow III, and the total number of known reviews during Thoreau’s lifetime is now up to 69:

WALDEN. Messrs. Ticknor & Fields, of this city, have recently issued a highly attractive and original volume, entitled, “Walden; or Life in the Woods,” by Henry D. Thoreau, author of “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.” Mr. Thoreau, who is a philosopher of the Emerson school, give in this volume some items of experience and lessons of wisdom which he gathered during a residence of over two years alone in the woods, in a cabin built with his own hands, on the borders of Walden Pond, in Concord, Mass. He thus explains his object, in choosing this solitary abode: — Quotes WALDEN 90:32-91:11 An idea may be formed of the scope of the book, from the title of the chapters, which are as follows: — Lists all 18 chapters of the book Mr. Thoreau handles his subjects in his own erratic way, weaving into his pages many charming descriptions of nature, and shrewd and caustic criticisms of men; mingling some brave truths and noble thoughts with much that is extravagant and outre; and throwing around the whole the cold mists of a selfish philosophy, which mystifies the head and repels the sympathies of the reader. Still, the book is a fresh and entertaining one, and will be widely read and admired, as the production of a mind of gifted powers and curious mould.

In addition, on this day an extract from the “Sounds” chapter of WALDEN; OR,LIFE IN THE WOODS was presented under the heading “Wood Sounds” in Dwight’s Journal of Music, A Paper of Art and Literature, as shown on the following screens: HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

WALDEN: Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, PEOPLE OF Acton, Bedford, or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, WALDEN a faint, sweet, and, as it were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness. At a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it. There came to me in this case a melody which the air had strained, and which had conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of the sound which the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed from vale to vale. The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood; the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph. At evening, the distant lowing of some cow in the horizon beyond the woods sounded sweet and melodious, and at first I would mistake it for the voices of certain minstrels by whom I was sometimes serenaded, who might be straying over hill and dale; but soon I was not unpleasantly disappointed when it was prolonged into the cheap and natural music of the cow. I do not mean to be satirical, but to express my appreciation of those youths’ singing, when I state that I perceived clearly that it was akin to the music of the cow, and they were at length one articulation of Nature. Regularly at half past seven, in one part of the summer, after the evening train had gone by, the whippoorwills chanted their vespers for half an hour, sitting on a stump by my door, or upon the ridge pole of the house. They would begin to sing almost with as much precision as a clock, within five minutes of a particular time, referred to the setting of the sun, every evening. I had a rare opportunity to become acquainted with their habits. Sometimes I heard four or five at once in different parts of the wood, by accident one a bar behind another, and so near me that I distinguished not only the cluck after each note, but often that singular buzzing sound like a fly in a spider’s web, only proportionally louder. Sometimes one would circle round and round me in the woods a few feet distant as if tethered by a string, when probably it was near its eggs. They sang at intervals throughout the night, and were again as musical as ever just before and about dawn.

BEN JONSON EURIPIDES AEOLIAN HARP WHIPPOORWILL HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

When other birds are still the screech owls take up the strain, PEOPLE OF like mourning women their ancient u-lu-lu. Their dismal scream is WALDEN truly Ben Jonsonian. Wise midnight hags! It is no honest and blunt tu-whit tu-who of the poets, but, without jesting, a most solemn graveyard ditty, the mutual consolations of suicide lovers remembering the pangs and the delights of supernal love in the infernal groves. Yet I love to hear their wailing, their doleful responses, trilled along the wood-side, reminding me sometimes of music and singing birds; as if it were the dark and tearful side of music, the regrets and sighs that would fain be sung. They are the spirits, the low spirits and melancholy forebodings, of fallen souls that once in human shape night- walked the earth and did the deeds of darkness, no expiating their sins with their wailing hymns or threnodies in their scenery of their transgressions. They give me a new sense of variety and capacity of that nature which is our common dwelling. Oh-o-o-o-o that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n! sighs one on this side of the pond, and circles with the restlessness of despair to some new perch on the gray oaks. Then –that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n! echoes another on the farther side with tremulous sincerity, and –bor-r-r-r-n! comes faintly from far in the Lincoln woods. I was also serenaded by a hooting owl. Near at hand you could fancy it the most melancholy sound in Nature, as if she meant by this to stereotype and make permanent in her choir the dying moans of a human being, –some poor weak relic of mortality who has left hope behind, and howls like an animal, yet with human sobs, on entering the dark valley, made more awful by a certain gurgling melodiousness,– I find myself beginning with the letters gl and I try to imitate it, –expressive of a mind which has reached the gelatinous mildewy stage in the mortification of all healthy and courageous thought. It reminded me of ghouls and idiots and insane howlings. But now one answers from far woods in a strain made really melodious by distance, –Hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo; and indeed for the most part it suggested only pleasing associations, whether heard by day or night, summer or winter.

EURIPIDES SHAKESPEARE BEN JONSON COLERIDGE HDT WHAT? INDEX

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I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and PEOPLE OF maniacal hooting for men. It is a sound admirably suited to swamps WALDEN and twilight woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and undeveloped nature which men have not recognized. They represent the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have. All day the sun has shone on the surface of some savage swamp, where the double spruce stands hung with usnea lichens, and small hawks circulate above, and the chicadee lisps amid the evergreens, and the partridge and rabbit skulk beneath; but now a more dismal and fitting day dawns, and a different race of creatures awakes to express the meaning of Nature there. Late in the evening I heard the distant rumbling of wagons over bridges,-a sound heard farther than almost any other at night, – the baying of dogs, and sometimes again the lowing of some disconsolate cow in a distant barn-yard. In the mean while all the shore rang with the trump of bullfrogs, the sturdy spirits of ancient wine-bibbers and wassailers, still unrepentant, trying to sing a catch in their Stygian lake, –if the Walden nymphs will pardon the comparison, for though there are almost no weeds, there are frogs there,– who would fain keep up the hilarious rules of their old festal tables, though their voices have waxed hoarse and solemnly grave, mocking at mirth, and the wine has lost its flavor, and become only liquor to distend their paunches, and sweet intoxication never comes to drown the memory of the past, but mere saturation and waterloggedness and distention. The most aldermanic, with his chin upon a heart-leaf, which serves for a napkin to his drooling chaps, under this northern shore quaffs a deep draught of the once scorned water, and passes round the cup with the ejaculation tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r-oonk! and straightway comes over the water from some distant cove the same password repeated, where the next in seniority and girth has gulped down to his mark; and when this observance has made the circuit of the shores, then ejaculates the master of ceremonies, with satisfaction, tr-r-r-oonk! and each in his turn repeats the same down to the least distended, leakiest, and flabbiest paunched, that there be no mistake; and then the bowl goes round again and again, until the sun disperses the morning mist, and only the patriarch is not under the pond, but vainly bellowing troonk from time to time, and pausing for a reply.

We may well ask ourselves what Thoreau had intended, by describing the nighttime hooting of the male Eastern screech owl as “Ben Jonsonian.” Since Emerson had a 6-volume set of THE WORKS OF BEN JONSON in his library, we can presume that our Henry would have made himself pretty familiar with these materials. About all I have been able to come up with to date as an explanation for this ascription (since I have never myself read or seen performed any of Jonson’s plays) is that some of these plays have down through the years been critiqued as suffering from “an inner poverty in the humanities of the heart.” I note that Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for instance, has commented that “there is no goodness of heart in any of the prominent characters.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN August 23, Wednesday: Due to Ariana Smith Walker’s consumption, the waiting period was cut a bit shorter than the traditional year and she and Franklin Benjamin Sanborn had their wedding celebration.

British ships destroyed Kola on the Russian Arctic coast. Review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS under the heading “New Publications” in the Springfield Daily Republican, 2:3.

This is a journal and account of an ascetic life, passed in the woods near Concord, Mass. It opens with a dissertation on the economy of life and wants of human nature, which is radical and austere.

Review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS under the heading “Literary Record” in the Philadelphia Dollar Magazine, 3:3.

There is a good deal of wholesome food for thought in this volume; it is both instructive and entertaining. The author has evidently read much and observed acutely. Indeed most of the articles which compose “Walden,” display a knowledge of men and things, which few would expect from the title of the book. They are imbued with good practical sense and sound philosophy, and are written in a terse, animated and attractive style—everywhere exhibiting a cheering freshness and originality. The paper on “Reading” is excellently suggestive, and will be read with profit and pleasure. We would commend it to the reader as a fair specimen of the good things which are so abundant throughout the volume. “Walden” is neatly and substantially got up, on good type and paper, and is well bound in one handsome, library volume.

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THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN August 24, Thursday: In the afternoon Henry Thoreau went by boat to Assabet Bath (Gleason 4/E5).

There was a review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS under the heading “Literature” in the New-York Morning Express, 2:4.

Mr. Thoreau is a young but promising writer.—He is a manly thinker; his opinions betray a clear judgment, careful intellectual cultivation, and a great deal of talent. But the tendencies of his mind are at times too speculative. He is too impractical, and although many of the social habits against which he declaims, are susceptible of improvement; yet, he takes the privilege of most men with a “mission,” as the strong- minded philosophers and philosopheresses say, and condemns what cannot well be remedied, or what is so trivial as hardly to be worth the trouble of a chapter of Carlylean rhapsody, or epigrammatic abuse. Yet he is indubitably sound in much of what he says, and right in the main. His style is crude but forcible. Its harshness appears to be in a measure the result either of carelessness or of affectation; for some of the more elaborate passages a reader meets with in turning over the work, display a great mastery of language, much facility in expression that is at once easy and strong, and a happy fancy. When Mr. Thoreau wrote the book, he lived, he says, a mile from any neighbor and alone in the woods in a house which he had built himself on the shore of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. There he lived for two years and two months and supported himself by the labor of his hands, only. During the whole of this time he appears to have been a sort of anchorite; the eccentricity of his mode of life, as he relates it, is laughable. Yet it has a moral. Here are the statistics of the first year’s outlay. [Reprints “Economy,” page 60.10-15, 17-29.] —The philosophy of such a Pythagoras could not be else than odd, of course, and will repay perusal.

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There was a review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS under the heading “Notices of New Publications” in HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN the Boston Puritan Recorder, 133:6.

The author of this work represents himself as having played hermit during nearly the whole time that he was writing, having selected for his dwelling place a spot on the shore of Walden Pond in Concord. The author has shown not a little talent, and a world of good humor, in giving us his experiences and observations, though he occasionally lets drop a sentiment, as for instance at the top of the 118th page,1 which seems to us inconsistent with just views of Christianity.

1.See “Reading,” page 108.11, beginning “peculiar religious experience.”

There was a review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS under the heading “New Books” in the New Orleans Daily Picayune, 2:1.

Mr. B. M. Norman, 14 Camp street, sends us “Walden, a Life in the Woods,” by Henry D. Thoreau, a very handsomely got up volume, from the press of Ticknor & Fields, Boston. We had a specimen of Mr. Thoreau’s quality, in the 4th [of] July oration he delivered at the Abolitionists’ traitor-celebration, where Garrison signalized the occasion by burning a copy of the [C]onstitution.

August 26, Saturday: President Franklin Pierce appointed a proslavery Democrat, John Calhoun (1806-1859), as Surveyor General of the Kansas Territory so that land surveys might begin (during the frequent absences of the territorial governor, the surveyor general would hold the gubernatorial power). THE 2D GREAT AMERICAN DISUNION

The chair that had emptied at the Institute was granted to Antoine Clapisson, rather than Hector Berlioz.

A few days after a minor railway accident, Phoebe Elizabeth Hough Fowler Watts Carlyle gave birth. The infant was stillborn and the mother did not survive.

In San Francisco, under Commercial Street between Montgomery Street and Kearny Street, workmen discovered the coffin of city pioneer W.C. Rae. Thomas O. Larkin not only identified the body but related that Rae had committed suicide during January 1845 after having constructed the 1st 2-story house in the municipality. CALIFORNIA HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

The new USS Constellation was launched at the Gosport Navy Yard in Virginia.

Henry Thoreau reported that he “Opened one of my snapping turtle’s eggs. The egg was not warm to the touch. The young is now larger and darker-colored, shell and all, more than a hemisphere, and the yolk which maintains it is much reduced.... These eggs, not warm to the touch, buried in the ground, so slow to hatch, are like the seeds of vegetable life.” Tortoise Eggs William M. White’s version of a portion of the journal entry in HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN regard to the eggs is:

We unconsciously step over the eggs of snapping turtles Slowly hatching the summer through. Not only was the surface perfectly dry and trackless there, But blackberry vines had run over the spot Where these eggs were buried And weeds had sprung up above.

If Iliads are not composed in our day, Snapping turtles are hatched and arrive at maturity.

It already thrusts forth its tremendous head, — For the first time in this sphere,— And slowly moves from side to side, — Opening its small glistening eyes For the first time to the light,— Expressive of dull rage, As if it had endured the trials of this world For a century.

A review titled “The Battle of the Ants” appeared in the Portland Transcript, 157:1.

From Thoreau’s “Life in the Woods,” we extract the following interesting account of a curious scene in insect life. [Reprints “Brute Neighbors,” pages 228.25-231.26.] HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Also, a review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, by the Reverend Thomas Starr King of the Universalist Church in Charlestown, Massachusetts, under the heading “New Publications” in the Christian Register, 135:5-6.

A young man, eight years out of college, of fine scholarship and original genius, revives, in the midst of our bustling times, the life of an anchorite. By the side of a secluded pond in Concord, he builds with his own hands a hut which cost him twenty-eight dollars and twelve and a half cents; and there he lived two and a half years, “cultivating poverty,” because he “wanted to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and suck out all its marrow.” Here he found that the labor of six weeks would support him through the year; and so he had long quiet days for reading, observation, and reflection, learning to free himself from all the hollow customs and false shows of the world, and to pity those who by slavery to inherited property seemed to be doing incredible and astonishing penance. In the account he gives us of his clothes, house, food, and furniture, we find mingled many acute and wise criticisms upon modern life; while in his descriptions of all living things around him, birds, fishes, squirrels, mice, insects, trees, flowers, weeds, it is evident that he had the sharpest eye and the quickest sympathy. One remarkable chapter is given to the sounds that came to his ear, with suggestions, full of poetry and beauty, of the feelings which these sounds awakened. But nothing interested him so much as the Pond, whose name gives the title to his book. He describes it as a clear sheet of water, about a mile in circumference; he bathed in it every morning; its cool crystal depths were his well, ready dug; he sailed upon its bosom in summer, he noted many curious facts pertaining to its ice in winter; in short, it became to him a living thing, and he almost worshipped it. But we must not describe the contents of this book any farther. Its opening pages may seem a little caustic and cynical; but it mellows apace, and playful humor and sparkling thought appear on almost every page. We suppose its author does not reverence many things which we reverence; but this fact has not prevented our seeing that he has a reverential, tender, and devout spirit at bottom. Rarely have we enjoyed a book more, or been more grateful for many and rich suggestions. Who would have looked to Walden Pond for a Robinson Crusoe, or for an observer like the author of the Natural History of Selbo[u]rne, or for a moralist like the writer of Religio Medici? Yet paragraphs in this book have reminded us of each of these. And as we shut the book up, we ask ourselves,

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will the great lesson it teaches of the freedom and beauty of a simple life be heeded? Shall this struggle for wealth, and this bondage to the impedimenta of life, continue forever? Will the time ever come when it will be fashionable to be poor, that is, when men will be so smitten with a purpose to seek the true ends of life that they will not care about laying up riches on the earth? Such times we know there have been, and thousands listened reverently to the reply, given in the last of these two lines, to the inquiry contained in the first; “O where is peace, for thou its path hast trod?” “In poverty, retirement, and with God.” Who can say that it is impossible that such a time may come round, although the fashion of this world now runs with such a resistless current in the opposite direction. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Also, on this date, a review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS under the heading “New Publications” on the 2d page of the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post, column 3:

We have, now and then, in this jostling, civilized world, an unmistakable human oddity, and the author of this strange, but interesting book, is one of that class. He is evidently a gentleman of educated and refined tastes; but, before he had attained to middle age, he appears—after having summed up and weighed the matter—to have come to the conclusion that Modern Civilization is a delusion and a sham. He, therefore, hied to the woods—a mile from any neighbor —on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Mass., where he had previously built himself a house—which house cost him not quite thirty dollars—and earned his living by the labor of his hands. Here he dwelt—(subsisting on rye and Indian meal without yeast, potatoes, rice, green corn, peas, a little salt pork, and less molasses and salt)—for two years and two months, and then returned to civilized life again, where he is at present a sojourner—probably a wiser, if not a better, man. While thus “alone in his glory,” our eccentric author worked a little, visited now and then, roamed about in the woods, (watching the ways of the birds, squirrels, and coons) by day, and in the evening gazed upon the moon and stars, until he chose to retire to his lonely rest. He does not like the restraints of social life, saying that “it is hard to have a Southern overseer— worse to have a Northern one—and worst of all, when you are the slave- driver of yourself.” In his humble dwelling, he had three pieces of limestone on his table—for ornament, we suppose— but finding, to his horror, that they wanted dusting every morning, he threw them out of the window. He is no believer in either expensive houses, furniture, clothes, food, or anything else—neither does he like to be crowded, and he is a little selfish, withal; for he remarks, “I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.” He grieves for the good old days of Adam and Eve — yea, he sighs, not for the good time coming, but for the good time long since past and gone. He appears to envy the lot of the birds, beasts, and wild Indians, and to entertain strong doubts whether our boasted Civilization is a real advance in the condition of man. He would much prefer the tub of Diogenes to the palace of a monarch—the costume of a South Sea Islander to the robes of a Prince— the simplest and plainest repast to the most delicious and sumptuous banquet. Pity it is, that he was not born a turtle, that his shell might be his shelter, as he styles a house—or a bear, and then his furry hide would serve him both for shelter and raiment. Nevertheless, his ‘Life in the Woods’ is a most fascinating book.

Aug. 26. For a week we have had warmer weather than for a long tune before, yet not so warm nearly as in July. I hear of a great many fires around us, far and near, both meadows and woods; in Maine and New York also. There may be some smoke in this haze, but I doubt it.

P.M. — To Dugan Desert. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN I hear part of a phœbe’s strain, as I go over the railroad bridge. It is the voice of dying summer. The pads now left on the river are chiefly those of the white lily. I noticed yesterday where a large piece of meadow had melted and sunk on a sandy bottom in the Assabet, — and the weeds now rose above the surface where it was five feet deep around. It is so dry that I take the left of the railroad bridge and go through the meadows along the river. In the hollows where the surface of the meadows has been taken out within a year or two, spring up pontederias and lilies, proserpinaca, polygonums, Ludwigia palustris, etc., etc. Nasturtium hispidum still in bloom, and will be for some time. I think I hear a red-eye. Rudbeckia,—the small one,—still fresh. The Poa hirsuta is left on the upper edge of meadows (as at J. Hosmer’s), as too thin and poor a grass, beneath the attention of the farmers. How fortunate that it grows in such places and not in the midst of the rank grasses which are cut! With its beautiful fine purple color, its beautiful purple blush, it reminds me and supplies the place of the rhexia now about done. [Leaving off, though I see some pretty handsome Sept. 4th.] Close by, or held in your hand, its fine color is not obvious,—it is but dull,—but [at] a distance, with a suitable light, it is exceedingly beautiful. It is at the same time in bloom. This is one of the most interesting phenomena of August. [The name of the grass appears in Excursions as Eragrostis pectinacea.] I hear these afternoons the faint, cricket-like note of the Rana palustris squatting by the side of the river, easily confounded with that of the interrupted cricket, only the last is more ringing and metallic. How long has it been heard? The choke-cherry leaves the are, some of them, from scarlet inclining to crimson. Radical leaves of the yellow thistle spot the meadow. Opened one of my snapping turtle’s eggs. The egg was not warm to the touch. The young is now larger and darker-colored, shell and all, more than a hemisphere, and the yolk which maintains it is much re and are quite sweet, but have a large seed. Interesting for the various colors on the same bush and in the same cluster. Also the choke-berries are very abundant there, but mostly dried black. There is a large field of rhexia there now almost completely out of bloom, but its scarlet leaves, reddening the ground at a distance, supply the place of flowers. We still continue to have strong wind in the middle of the day. The sun is shorn of his beams by the haze before 5 o'clock P.M., round and red, and is soon completely concealed, apparently by the haze alone. This blue haze is not dissipated much by the night, but is seen still with the earliest light.

CONTINGENCY ALTHOUGH VERY MANY OUTCOMES ARE OVERDETERMINED, WE TRUST THAT SOMETIMES WE ACTUALLY MAKE REAL CHOICES. “THIS IS THE ONLY WAY, WE SAY, BUT THERE ARE AS MANY WAYS AS THERE CAN BE DRAWN RADII FROM ONE CENTRE.”

August 28, Monday: Secretary of War Jefferson Davis would be traveling with President Franklin Pierce until September 4/5, and would speak in Virginia.

The Revolution of the Left against Espartero was defeated.

Nachtfalter op.157, a waltz by Johann Baptist Strauss II, was performed for the initial time, in Ungers Casino, Vienna.

The Ticknor & Fields firm’s junior partner, James Thomas Fields had, more than a month prior to official publication, distributed advance copies of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, to prospective reviewers such as the Reverend John Sullivan Dwight, the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and T. Starr King. About three weeks prior to publication, Ticknor & Fields began sending advance sheets to the editors of major New- York and Boston papers. By this point the work had been praised in over 30 newspapers and magazines from

Walden “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Maine to Ohio. A few days prior to publication, Ticknor & Fields had placed advertisements for WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS in several Boston and New-York dailies. Under the banner headline “LIFE IN THE WOODS,” the ads had begun appearing on August 4th and had run for three, four, or even five days. A second series of ads had appeared in selected papers in late August, usually every other day for three days. Waldo Emerson was able to note that “All American kind are delighted with ‘Walden’ as far as they have dared say.” TIMELINE OF WALDEN

In the afternoon Henry Thoreau walked through Great Meadows (Gleason D8) and Bedford meadows on the south side of the Concord River to Carlisle Bridge (Gleason A9), and there crossed the river and came back on its north side, the Carlisle and Concord side, across the lots to the schoolhouse.

Before August 29th a review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS appeared in the Philadelphia Register:

This book was written because the author had something to say. “Walden” may be pronounced a live book—a sincere, hearty production.

[Quoted from advertisement in Boston Advertiser, August 29, 2:7.] HDT WHAT? INDEX

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On this day, or one of the two following days (August 28-30), Emerson wrote George Partridge Bradford in London:

I do not know if the book has come to you yet; — but it is cheerful, sparkling, readable, with all kinds of merits, & rising sometimes to very great heights. We account Henry the undoubted King of all American lions. He is walking up & down Concord, firm-looking, but in a tremble of great expectation.

On the basis of this letter would you say that it can be established that Emerson did read WALDEN? HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN September 2, Saturday: “Opened one of my snapping turtle’s eggs [sic??]. The young alive, but not very lively, with shell dark grayish black; yolk as big as a hazelnut; tail curled round and is considerably longer than the shell, and slender; three ridges on the back, one at edges of plates on each side of dorsal, which is very prominent. There is only the trace of a dorsal ridge in the old. Eye open.” Tortoise Eggs

In the afternoon Henry Thoreau went to the Purple Utricularia Shore on Fair Haven Bay (Gleason 102/ K7).

Review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS under the heading “Literature” in the New-York Churchman, 4:1- 4. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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ZOROASTER

[Walden; or, Life in the Woods is] The book of a humourist —a man of humours rather than of humour— and a lover of nature. Mr. THOREAU, living at Concord, is known among literary circles by his association with the good company of EMERSON and HAWTHORNE, and by his production of a book a few years since, “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” which, with some unpleasant peculiarities of its school, savouring greatly of a species of irreverent egotism, contained many close and faithful observations of nature, and many shrewd reflections on life. Every man has his humour, though from the present pressure and overlaying of society it is not always easy to discover it. Mr. THOREAU brings his out into prominent relief. It is the stoic affectation of a lover of personal freedom, with a grudge against civilization for its restrictions. He looks upon all the trappings of society, of Church and State, of conventional usages, cities and towns, even clothes and houses, as so many impediments to the free growth of the unfettered man. The only concession he seems disposed to make to the social state is to work for it a sufficiently long time,—in his case it is a very short time,—to secure honestly a portion of the spoils adequate to keep body and soul in company, that the former, strengthened by toil, may enjoy a vigourous sense of existence, and the latter be free to watch its own motions and imbibe the simple thoughts of primitive poetry and philosophy. In all our modern reading, unlike as the situation and circumstances are, and different as Mr. THOREAU is from DIOGENES in many respects, we have not met with so complete a suggestion of what used to be considered, by the vulgar at least, a philosopher. He realizes the popular notion of an impracticable, a man who rails at society and is disposed to submit to as few of its trammels as possible, and who has the credit of resources within himself which the majority of people do not possess, and, in fact, do not much care for. The world is very ready to give the title, for it is of very little mercantile value, and the world can afford to part with it. On his part, the philosopher can return the compliment. He says to the hard workers about him, my friends, you are all wrong, shortening your lives in toil and vanities, working for that which does not profit, and reaping an endless harvest of failure and dismay. Ninety-seven out of every hundred merchants, he continues, according to an old calculation, fail in business, and it is pretty safe to put down the other three as rogues. As in merchandize, [sic] so in farming. People are toiling with real pain after imaginary pleasure. The true secret of life is to ask for little; to live on the minimum. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Mr. THOREAU has made the experiment. Entering manhood with a good education and a vigourous frame, he has, after various attempts, come to the conclusion, recorded in his book, that, after all, “the occupation of a day labourer was the most independent of any, especially as it required only thirty or forty days in a year to support one.” School-keeping he had tried; but that, as a trade, was a failure. There was no love in it, and it did not gratify the mind; beside, it was expensive:—he was “obliged to dress and train, not to say think and believe accordingly, and time was lost in the bargain.” Trade was still worse. It was tried, but the experimentalist for freedom found “it would take ten years to get underway in that, and that then he should probably be on his way to the devil.” He was “actually afraid that he might by that time be doing what is called a good business.” At one time, when he was looking about to see what he could do for a living, some sad experience in conforming to the wishes of friends being fresh in his mind to tax his ingenuity, “he thought often and seriously of picking huckleberries”; which indeed would not be a very self- sacrificing occupation, and certainly has its agreeable features. The difficulty is, the season of huckleberries is short, the demand limited, and it requires so little capital of head or pocket that,—if it would pay,—it would soon be overstocked. We fear it would not be adequate to the support of a family in respectability, and that if it could be generally adopted, much of what is valuable in the present system of society, school-houses, churches, lyceums, architecture, opera, and generally all costly things, would go by the board. However this may be, for more than five years Mr. THOREAU supported himself by about six weeks’ labor of his hands per annum; and the conclusion to which he came was “a conviction both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship, but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely, as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial,” which is a point in illustration exceedingly well made, and is really a poetical defence of the author’s theory. He adds, “It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do.” Mr. THOREAU is thus at war with the political economy of the age. It is his doctrine that the fewer wants man has the better; while in reality civilization is the spur of many wants. To give a man a new want is to give him a new pleasure and conquer his habitual rust and idleness. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The greater his needs and acquisitions, the greater his safety; since he may fall back from one advance post to another, as he is pressed by misfortune, and still keep the main citadel untouched. He may give up his couch and still keep his gig; resign his Madeira and retain at least his small beer; if he fails as an orator he may be eloquent in the parlor or the school-room; a condemned poet may cut down into a profitable prose-writer; the bankrupt citizen may become a proud villager. He has, by his devotion to luxury, the fostering of his spiritual appetites, his deference to the standards set up about him, interposed a long series of steps, which he may gradually descend, before he touches the bottom one, of starvation. As a general thing in the world, the people who aim at most get most. The philosophical negation keeps no account in the bank and starves. Nay, it keeps robbing itself till from him that hath not is taken away even that which he hath. In the woods, on the edge of a fine pond, aloof from markets and amusements, our author begins to doubt even of his favourite and ultimate resource of fishing. Life and reality seem oozing out of his feeble grasp, and he holds to the world only by the slender filament of a metaphysical whim. Says he in his chapter on the “higher laws”: [Reprints “Higher Laws,” pages 213.33-214.35.] With the preparation in his experiences which we have alluded to, Mr. THOREAU, in the spring of 1845, borrowed an axe, and set forth to level a few trees, for the site of a house, on the edge of Walden pond, in a wood near Concord. He did not own the land, but was permitted to enjoy it. He dropped a few pines and hewed timbers, and for boards bought out the shanty of JAMES COLLINS, an Irishman who worked on the Fitchburg railroad, for the sum of four dollars, twenty-five cents. From his allusion, he was assisted, we presume, in the raising, by EMERSON and other friendly literary celebrities of the region. Starting early in the spring, long before winter he had secured, with the labour of his hands, “a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide by fifteen long, and eight feet posts, with a garret and a closet, a large window on each side, two trap doors, one door at the end and a brick fire-place opposite.” The exact cost of the house is given: [Reprints “Economy,” page 49.3-26.] HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The rest of the account is curious, and will show “upon what meats CAESAR fed,” that he has interested the world so greatly in his housekeeping: [Reprints “Economy,” pages 58.33-60.32.] He had nothing further to do after his “family baking,” which, the family consisting of a unit, could not have been large or have come round very often, than to read, think and observe. HOMER was his favourite book; the thinking was unlimited, and the observation that of a man with an instinctive tact for the wonders of natural history. On this last point we cannot give the author too high praise. He has a rare felicity of sight and description, which IZAAK WALTON would have approved of and ALEXANDER WILSON envied. To many of his moral speculations we could take exceptions. He carries his opposition to society too far. A self-pleasing man should have a more liberal indulgence for the necessities of others, and something more cheerful to tell the world than of its miseries. We should be sorry to think this a true picture of the “industrial classes”: [Reprints “Economy,” pages 6.25-7.35.] And again: [Reprints “Economy,” pages 37.17-38.11 and 38.27-32.] We are all wrong, it seems, and had better go back to savage life. The “lendings” of society and civilization are all impediments. The railroad is a humbug, the post- office an absurdity, for there are really no letters worth reading, it is “a penny for your thoughts”: all “mud and slush of opinion and prejudice and tradition and delusion and appearance,—alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through Church and State, through poetry, philosophy, and religion.” Rising to transcendental emotion, our author exclaims, [Reprints “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” page 98.19-30.] HDT WHAT? INDEX

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This excessive love of individuality and these constant Fourth-of-July declarations of independence, look very well on paper, but they will not bear the test of a practical examination. We say excessive, for there is no doubt there is such a thing as a neglect of a proper cultivation of a man’s isolated, individual self. In many things “the world is too much with us”; the soul needs retirement, sequestration, repose. We are slaves to idle expenses, and “walk in a vain show.” “Poor Richard” might come among us with profit and tell us how dearly we are paying for the whistle, and show us how much richer we might become, not by acquiring more but by wanting less. But let us look at Mr. THOREAU’s contempt for the labouring of the harassed farmer. We may admit that the yoke is on his shoulder, as well as on the neck of his patient ox; but where is the condition of life which has not its yoke of some fashion or other? We cannot all be philosophers, or affect the pleasures of a hermit life in the wilderness. Even “the mean and sneaking fellows,” whom THOREAU, in the kindness of his sublimated philanthropy, so tenderly describes, have their little compensations of pleasure and satisfaction, and no doubt frequently pitied the recluse of Walden at his lone habitation in the wood. His pleasure, stretched out on a piece of damp turf, displacing with his frame huge shoals of insect life, and gazing intently on space in an arduous endeavour to think that he is thinking; this sort of enjoyment would be simple misery to the “swinkt hedger,” the poor unthinking clown, who like a lackey, from the rise to set, Sweats in the eye of Phoebus, and all night Sleeps in Elysium; next day, after dawn, Doth rise and help Hyperion to his horse; And follows so the ever-running year, With profitable labour, to his grave. The man of toil, with all his woes, has probably the common permanent consolation of humanity, he does not toil always, and with the sterile harvest of his fields he reaps, too, some bounties of friendly countenances in his little sphere of society, the treasures, perhaps, of wife and children; and though he is sublimely unconscious of Eddas and Zendavestas, he can read his Bible—the best book which any sage has in his library—and learn from it that there is a felicity in labouring patiently and cheerfully in one’s vocation, and doing one’s duty in that state of life in which it has pleased GOD to call us. Retiring from civilized life, in a vain attempt to escape its ills, must be the casual chance experiment of the few, and those few will hardly prosecute the work with any great degree of consistency. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Even Mr. THOREAU, who loves the society of lizards and mosquitos, and can eat an acorn with as much zest as any man, cuts the pleasing connection after awhile, and hastens back to civilization, to secure the admiration of the very vicious public whose unprofitable heart-aches and barren pursuits he had, for the moment, abandoned. Why was not Mr. THOREAU satisfied with carving his elegies on the bark of trees, mingling his philosophic ejaculations with the wild laugh of the loon, or swelling the brimming flood of Walden Pond with his sympathetic tears? We hold that in publishing he has given up the whole argument. Seriously, he cannot expect many people to follow his example; comically, his experience is published as a curiosity, a piece of quaintness, an affectation for the simple amusement of a wicked world. Look where the author’s principles would carry him were we to listen to his suggestions, and follow this instinct of our nature for idleness and the wilderness. This day, if any, would be a favourable one for putting this experiment in operation. It is sleepy, heavily laden mid August, with a sultry temperature, and we are writing, surrounded by bricks and mortar, in a city which strangers are just now avoiding on suspicion of the lugubrious pestilence lurking in its atmosphere. We should certainly, on his showing, neither stay here to earn money to buy his book, or earn money by reviewing it: yet these are duties which he challenges us to perform, and one or other of which some considerable number of people must execute; or there will be no sale of “Walden,” and the philosophic soul of THOREAU will be shaken at Concord, and the face of FIELDS, most beneficent of publishers, will lengthen, and when the author presents himself in Washington street to receive his six months’ profits, the results will be small, and, instead of cash, he will be entertained with that most bitter of all receptions for an author, when his publishers take to analyzing his book—a critical proceeding which they never think of attempting unless the book is a failure; when one partner will say it was the too much Zoroaster, and infidelity in it which killed it; another will doubt whether the public cares very much about the infinitesimals of insect life, or is disposed to be imaginative on mosquitos, and a third, taking up the “Barclays of Boston,” will venture the suggestion that Mr. THOREAU had better, after all, emigrate to Beacon street and write a book that will sell like that. From this fearful fate, we say, may this author be preserved! Yet he will owe it to the tender mercies and degraded toil of the civilization he despises, if he is. We are not disposed to throw any unnecessary obstacles in the way of this author, but The Churchman would be reckless of its duty if it were not to ask the question why Mr. THOREAU so frequently throws doubt over and suggests a spirit of disaffection to the sacred Scriptures. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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There is not so much of this as in his previous book, The Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, but a little of this nonsense is quite too much: for example, “Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints. Our hymn-books resound with a melodious cursing of GOD and enduring Him forever. One would say that even the prophets and redeemers had rather consoled the fears than confirmed the hopes of man. There is nowhere recorded a simple and irrepressible satisfaction with the gift of life, any memorable praise of GOD.” If we may credit the quotations of the writer of this unhappy passage, he enjoys a privileged literary intimacy with CONFUCIUS; if it would not be taken as an impertinence, we should like to ask if he has ever perused the Psalms of DAVID. The fact is, that the great discoveries and revelations of Mr. THOREAU’s solitude turn out to be very familiar affairs after all. Wriggle as he may among his scraps of SHEIK SADI and the VISHNU PURANA, he will find it difficult to bring forward anything of a sacred character, or illustrating human life, which is not included with tenfold more effect in the Bible. His aphorisms from these old oriental sources are frequently very happy; but it is the most pitiful affectation to use them as he occasionally does. Humour is not the author’s highest faculty, but we may suspect the exercise at least of an ingenious pleasantry, when he treats us to this significant quotation. “Says the poet Mîr Camar Uddîn Mast, ‘Being seated to run through the region of the spiritual world, I have had this advantage in books. To be intoxicated by a single glass of wine; I have experienced this pleasure when I have drunk the liquor of the esoteric doctrines.’” We may, after all, be looking at this matter too seriously. The author, in spite of his sarcasm and denunciations, is only playing the part of an individual humourist. He knows as much as any one how much he is indebted to civilization; and is only taking a view of life dramatically, as an on- looker for the moment. In this view he carries out the humour admirably. A book was published some years since, entitled “The Hermit in London,” which, though it was quite successful, had not half the humour or philosophical amusement of this volume. Who but a man who had projected himself as it were into another state of being could see so clearly the humours of the village life. THE VILLAGE. [Reprints “The Village,” pages 167.22-168.33.] HDT WHAT? INDEX

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There is some geniality in this, as there is in the sketch of the Homeric or Paphlagonian man who came along from Canada, who is thus introduced. A CHARACTER. [Reprints “Visitors,” pages 144.13-145.36.] We could add to these pleasant extracts many of the natural history observations, which, as we have said, are the writer’s forte. The agriculture, the woods, the life of the pond, are all eminently well described. He was fortunate one day to witness that remarkable sight, a battle between two forces of red and black ants, of which a rather poetical account, rivalling the combats of Turks and Russians, was once given by a M. HANHART, an improvement upon HUBER which LEIGH HUNT has pleasantly commented upon and the original of which may be found in the Edinburgh Journal of Science for 1828. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS in the New-York Home Journal, 2:1.

Walden is the history of a year passed on the shores of a quiet New England lake. It abounds in pleasant pictures of forest life, enlivened by such incidents and adventures as befal[l] a contemplative dweller in the woods. Incidents which, unimportant in themselves, go to make up the life of almost hermit-like retiracy which our author labours to depict. The seasons have each their novelty and charm, and the ever-varying aspect of the lake furnishes an endless theme for reflection and comment. No utterance of nature is void and trivial when listened to and sympathized with in the spirit that inspires the recluse of Walden Pond. The water-fowl come with the glowing leaves of autumn, and sport on the waters of the lake, and wing their way southward, to return in the spring; the wild pigeons wheel along the mountains, and the jay screams among the shrubs in the clearing; the red squirrel scampers and chatters over the roof, and the large-eyed hare burrows under the floor of the hut where the author, regardless of seasons, (or rather kindly regarding each,) lives a sort of half dreamy, half active life— part philosopher, part hunter, and husbandsman. There is a wealth of pure sentiment, and a graphic minuteness of narrative and description in this work, that renders it, beyond doubt, among the most delightful of books. As a companion for a country ramble, or a book for city reading, where rural longings make up for realities, we have seldom met a better.

Review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS in Concord, New Hampshire State Capital Reporter, page 2, column 5. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS.” This work, written by HENRY D. THOREAU, and published by MESSRS. TICKNOR & FIELDS, of Boston, a few weeks since, is one of sterling literary merit. It has the merit of originality. The author does his own thinking, and uses his own style of expression, which is appropriate, vigorous and beautiful. “Walden” has in it the essential elements of a grand Poem of life spent in the solitude of forests and beside beautiful waters. It is a poem in all except the rythmical [sic] arrangement of its words. The author writes in the fullness of the inspiration of genius, and has stored every page of his work with thoughts, as well as words. A pond of water, a bean-field, and a fight between two species of ants in a door-yard, would not be reckoned by the heedless world as matters of much importance, but the thinking, observing and poetic mind of the author of “Walden,” seems much in them, and has found in them themes for pages of most fascinating description. We have wondered at the acuteness of observation manifested by the writer, who seemed to see and hear everything in the world of nature around him, and which faculty seems equalled by his powers of expressing, with intelligibility, his ideas thus obtained by observation. The scene of this work is in the woods of Concord, Mass., upon the shores of Walden Pond, where, for two years and upwards, the author dwelt in a house built by his own hands, supporting himself by his own labor, and who chose this retiracy that he might the better commune with Nature in her own solitary retreats. This work will bear reading — indeed, we doubt, if many will be able by a single perusal to gain a full conception of its beauties. It can be found at any of the bookstores here, we presume.

We may presume that this very perceptive but anonymous review must have been composed by the editor of the paper, Cyrus Barton. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN September 9, Saturday: Senator Charles Sumner’s speech of Thursday on the slavery question, at the state political convention in Worcester, was being reported in the newspapers:

(Review of Henry Thoreau’s WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS): TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN “Notices of New Books,” Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer, p. 2, col. 4.

Half mad, but never silly; and the half that is not mad, full of truths which if they are not entirely new, have at least lain hidden under the crust of fashion, folly, and listlessness so long as to seem new on being dug out and placed boldly before us. Mr. THOREAU built himself with his own hands a hut, shanty, or cottage on the shores of Walden pond, near Concord, Mass., and lived there two years and two months doing all his own working and thinking. In this volume we have such of the results of his work and thought as can be put on paper; and to a reflecting, well trained mind it is a book full of matter for careful consideration. It is at times repulsively selfish in its tone, and might easily help a bad man to be worse; but to readers of an opposite character who peruse it, not with the intent of imitating the author in his mental or physical habits, but for its suggestiveness, it cannot prove other than an occasion for healthy mental exercise. In style it partakes of the characteristics of THOMAS CARLYLE and Sir THOMAS BROWNE: indeed had not the Clothes-Philosophy and the Pseudo-doxia Epidemica and the Urn Burial been written, Walden would probably never have seen the light. The author has CARLYLE’S hatred of shams and CARLYLE’S way of showing it: he has Sir THOMAS BROWNE’S love of pregnant paradox and stupendous joke, and utters his paradoxes and his jokes with a mysterious phlegm quite akin to that of the Medical Knight who “existed only at the periphery of his being.” Walden is a book which should have many readers, if readers were always sound thinkers.

SIR THOMAS BROWNE

A column entitled “The Canadian Wood-cutter” in the English Albion, n.s. 13:424, reprinted part of “Visitors,” pages 144.13-150.28, followed by the words:

From “Walden; or Life in the Woods,” by H. D. Thoreau.

Five pages farther along in Albion, n.s. 13:429: One of those rare books that stand apart from the herd of new publications under which the press absolutely groans; moderate in compass but eminently suggestive, being a compound of thought, feeling, and observation. Its author, it seems, during 1845, 6, and 7, played the philosophic hermit in a wood that overlooks Walden Pond, in the neighbourhood of Concord, Massachusetts. Here he tested at how cheap a rate physical existence may healthfully be maintained, and how, apart from the factitious excitement of society and the communion of mind with mind, he could cultivate a tranquil and contemplative spirit, yet resolute withal. This experiment was undeniably successful; and he has here set forth the record of his sylvan life and the musings of his happy solitude. He probably errs in believing, that life in an isolated shanty, and the strict vegetarian system, could be made profitable or pleasant to the men and women HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN of this age. But we shall not discuss the question with this voluntary and most practical hermit. We can admire, without wishing to imitate him; and we can thank him cordially for hints on many topics that interest humanity at large, as well as for page upon page of research and anecdote, showing how lovingly he studied the instincts and the habits of the dumb associates by whom he was surrounded. The choicest and most popular works on natural history contain no descriptions more charming than those that abound in this volume. A little humour and a little satire are the pepper and salt to this part of the entertainment that Mr. Thoreau serves up. Into it we advise the reader — of unvitiated taste and unpalled appetite — to dip deeply. We at least do not come across a Walden, every day. Possibly our strong commendation may be borne out by the two lengthened and characteristic extracts that we quote. The first may well be called the “The Battle of the Ants.” [“Brute Neighbors,” 228.25-232.11] We might have found something writ in gentler strain; but there is a point and a quaintness in the above warlike episode, that catches our fancy. Our second borrowing from this clever book — a sketch of character and a striking one — may be found on another page.

A favorable review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS appeared in The National Anti-Slavery Standard. “This morning I find a little hole, three quarters of an inch or an inch over, above my small tortoise eggs, and find a young tortoise coming out (apparently in the rainy night) just beneath. It is the Sternothaerus odoratus –already has the strong scent– and now has drawn in its head and legs. I see no traces of the yoke, or what-not, attached. It may have been out of the egg some days. Only one as yet. I buried them in the garden June 15th.” Tortoise Eggs HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN September 22, Friday: In the afternoon Henry Thoreau went over Nawshawtuct or Lee’s Hill (Gleason F6).

WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS was scathingly condemned in the pages of the New-York Times. Its author, Mr. Henry D. Thoreau or “Thorrau” is erratic, impracticable, and apt to confuse rather than arrange the order of things mental and physical. He imagines himself a philosopher but presents us with no philosophy. He is not a Christian but, perhaps, is a Communist. His new manifesto is of interest only as a contribution to the comic literature of America: TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The author of this book—Mr. HENRY D. THOREAU—is undoubtedly a man of genius. It is not possible to open twenty pages without finding plentiful indications of that fact. Unfortunately, however, he is an erratic genius, thoroughly impracticable, and apt to confuse rather than arrange the order of things, mental and physical. Mr. THOREAU, it will be remembered, was one of the earliest contributors to EMERSON’s remarkable transcendental publication, the Dial. His eccentricities constituted one of the features of that very eccentric journal, and were well suited to it. Subsequently he published a volume called Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. A great deal of observation and quaintness were incorporated in the latter work, and obtained for it some popularity here and in Europe. Influenced by a peculiar philosophy of his own, Mr. THOREAU abandoned literature in 1845. He was probably disgusted with social life, and thought an experience of its savage phase might be agreeable. With this idea he “borrowed an axe” and went down to Walden Pond, in the vicinity of Concord, with the intention of building a house and living in it. The Cabin was constructed, and Mr. THOREAU occupied it for two years. Why he returned to society after that period he does not inform us. The present book was written in solitude, and occupied those spare moments when the author was not more profitably engaged in the labors of the field. As a contribution to the Comic Literature of America, Walden is worthy of some attention, but in no other respect. The author evidently imagines himself to be a Philosopher, but he is not. He talks constantly of “vast cosmogonal themes,” but narrows them all down to the nearest line of self. The mere fact of existence seems to satisfy Mr. THOREAU. He wonders why men aspire to anything higher than the cultivation of a patch of beans, when by that they may live— perhaps grow fat. Mr. THOREAU has been accused of communistic principles. This is his idea of communism: “I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion. I would rather ride on earth, in an ox cart, with a free circulation, than go to Heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train, and breathe a malaria all the way.” This is one of Mr. THOREAU’s “vast cosmogonal themes”: “While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings. And if the civilized man’s pursuits are no worthier than the savage’s—if he [has] employed the greater part of his life in obtaining gross necessaries and comforts merely—why should he have a better dwelling than the former?” In other words, why should he not live like a savage, to save the trouble of living like a Christian? HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Mr. THOREAU denounces everything that indicates progress. Railroads, telegraphs, steam engines, newspapers, and everything else which the world values, offend him. There is nothing estimable in his eyes but a log hut and a patch of beans. On the latter he dwells with infinite delight. It is one of the few things that does not disgust his philosophical mind. Ascetics who have a taste for beans will find comfort in this volume. Mr. THOREAU is a good writer, possessed of great comic powers, and able to describe accurately many peculiar phases of nature. But the present work will fail to satisfy any class of readers. The literary man may be pleased with the style, but he will surely lament the selfish animus of the book.

September 23, Saturday: In the afternoon Henry Thoreau went to Gowing’s Swamp (Gleason F9) and then Great Meadows (Gleason D8).

Frederick Billings officiated at the dedication of a choolhouse in the Fifth District of San Francisco. CALIFORNIA

WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS was reviewed in the Daily Alta California, 5:264.

Walden; or Life in the Wood. By Henry D. Thoreau. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. This is a very strange book, the history of a philosopher living in the woods, a sort of Robinson Crusoe life. It shows the simplicity with which life can be conducted, stripped of some of its conventionalities, and the whole narrative is imbued with a deep philosophic spirit. All together besides being beautifully written, it has an air of originality which is quite taking. We commend it to our reader.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN Father Isaac Hecker, CSSR, wrote to Orestes Augustus Brownson.

Arthur Martineau Alger was born at Roxbury. (He would study for the law at Boston University, and then in the office of the Honorable N.B. Bryant.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN October: Review of Henry Thoreau’s WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, in “Review of New Books,” Peterson’s Magazine 26: 254.

The author of this volume would be called by some a modern Diogenes; but all will admit that he is a close, though somewhat eccentric observer of Nature. Disgusted with the ordinary conventional life, he retired to the shores of Walden Pond in Massachusetts, where building himself a log hut, he lived a sort of half hermit life for two years. The present book is a narrative of his experience during that period. The style is graceful, the reflections often profound, the thought always robust and healthy. On the excessive luxury of the homes the author makes war a la outrance, as a man who has lived on fifty dollars a year, we think, has a right. The book is so out of the beaten track that it cannot fail to set people to thinking; while no one, who once picks it up, will lay it down till he has finished it. The author, in his love of Nature, reminds us of old Isaa[k] Walton, as in other particulars he often recalls Sir Thomas Browne. Naturalists will learn many curious facts from the volume, while the poetical admirer of Nature will linger over its pages with delight. The publishers have issued it in their usual neat style.

SIR THOMAS BROWNE “Literary Notices,” in Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book, Issue #49, page 370:

This ought to be a very profound and excellent book, a character which we think it will pretty fairly sustain among quiet and thoughtful readers. When he wrote it, the author says he lived a mile from any neighbor, in a house which he had built with his own hands, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned his living by the labor of his hands only. He lived there for the space of two years and two months, and, since his return to society, has prepared this volume of practical philosophy for the benefit of the world at large. It records his manner of life in his seclusion, and obstacles he met with, and the interesting reflections to which they gave birth in a mind disposed to make the most of every object brought under its observation. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN An anonymous review probably by the Reverend Andrew Preston Peabody, D.D. on page 536 of this month’s issue of his North American Review:

The economical details and calculations in this book are more curious than useful; for the author’s life in the woods was on too narrow a scale to find imitators. But in describing his hermitage and his forest life, he says so many pithy and brilliant things, and offers so many piquant, and, we may add, so many just, comments on society as it is, that his book is well worth the reading, both for its actual contents and its suggestive capacity.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN An anonymous review “A Yankee Diogenes” by Charles Frederick Briggs, on pages 443-48 of this month’s issue of Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science and Art. READ THE FULL TEXT

October 8, Sunday: The Reverend Albert Williams resigned as pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of San Francisco, and delivered a farewell sermon. CALIFORNIA

A review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, titled “Letter from a Lady Correspondent” and presumably by Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard, appeared in the Daily Alta California, 5:279. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

In Plymouth, Massachusetts, Thoreau for the 1st time delivered his lecture “MOONLIGHT”. Well, actually, the full title of the lecture Thoreau delivered at Leyden Hall on this occasion was: “Moonlight (Introductory to an Intended Course of Lectures)” According to Pliny, there is a stone in Arabia called Selenites, “wherein is a white, which decreases and increases with the PLINY moon.” My journal for the last year or two has been selenitic in this sense. In his “Moonlight” lecture, Henry Thoreau made a reference to Augustine: As S Augustine says, “Deus regit inferiora corpora per HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN superioria”

Although he would continue to work on this essay for a few days, Thoreau would begin to pay more attention to “Walking, or the Wild.” The two new lectures he planned to generate from this earlier lecture presumably were to become the 2d and 3d lectures in his “Intended Course of Lectures” (refer to William L. Howarth’s “Successor to WALDEN? Thoreau’s ‘Moonlight–An Intended Course of Lectures’,” page 101).

October 21, Friday: The severest earthquake since 1851 struck San Francisco at 7:30 PM. CALIFORNIA

The Lawrence, Kansas Territory Herald of Freedom appeared (it would be generally antigovernment and antislavery).

Review of Henry Thoreau’s WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, by “D’A” on the 1st page of the Boston Atlas:

It is a sorrowful surprise that a constant communion with so much beauty and beneficence was not able to kindle one spark of genial warmth in this would-be savage. Pithy sarcasm, stern judgement, cold condemnation — all abound in the pages of this volume.... There is not a page, a paragraph giving one sign of liberality, charitableness, kind feeling, generosity, in a word — heart.

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THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN November 13, Monday: George Whitefield Chadwick was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, the youngest of 2 children born to Alonzo Calvin Chadwick, a carpenter in the Massachusetts Mills, with Hannah Godrey Fitts who came from a family of musicians (the mother would die within a week, of puerperal fever).

Edward Dickinson was defeated in his bid to retain his seat representing Hampshire County in the US House of Representatives.

In England, Nathaniel Hawthorne was confiding to Monckton Milnes, asking that he not be quoted, that although WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS and A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS were by “a very remarkable man,” he hardly hoped that Milnes would read the books, “unless for the observation of nature in them which is wonderfully accurate.” Hawthorne’s evaluation was that these, like other American books, did not carry the reader away, requiring some effort –and not by a man of weak resolution– to read through to the end. TIMELINE OF WALDEN TIMELINE OF A WEEK This is frequently controverted — but some allege that Mr. Henry D. Thoreau was a guest on a mid-19th- Century television talk show. Here is the surviving transcript evidence: [AB=Ainsworth Brown; HT=Henry Thoreau] AB: Good afternoon. This is “The Ainsworth Brown Show” and I am Ainsworth Brown. We are privileged to have as our guest this afternoon Henry David Thoreau who has written a book, WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. Henry, come on out .... [Applause from studio audience as Thoreau enters] Welcome, welcome. Glad you could come.... Have a seat.... HT: Thank you. AB: Henry, I have not had a chance to read your book yet but I do know that it is, in the popular parlance, “hot, hot, hot.” Graham’s Magazine has called it “always racy and stimulating,” the product of a “powerful and accomplished mind”.... So what’s this WALDEN about? HT: It’s the story of the two years, two months, and two days I spent living alone in a cabin by Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts. AB: What happened? HT: I built the cabin. That first summer I grew some beans as a cash crop. In the book I talk about the food I ate, the plants and animals I saw, and the changing of the seasons. AB: So what did you eat? HT: I ate wild berries and grapes. I occasionally caught some fish or a wild animal –I once trapped and butchered a woodchuck who was bothering my bean plants– but mostly I ate rice, bread made from rye and cornmeal with molasses as sweetening, potatoes, and peas. AB: Frankly, Henry, except for the woodchuck, it sounds pretty boring. HT: I can see why you might think so, Mr. Brown. But, as I contend in the book, the external circumstances in which one finds one’s self are far less important than one’s inner life. I wanted to simplify my material needs to a point where I could spend just a few hours each day satisfying them and have all the HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN rest of my time free for contemplation and self-improvement. Most men are slaves to their possessions and to the jobs they are forced to perform in order to pay for them. AB: I get it — a Marxist/capitalist kind of thing.... HT: I’m not sure I know what you mean.... AB: What were the results of your contemplations? HT: I have recorded many of my thoughts in the book, but I don’t really think of contemplation as a means for book-creation, or as a means to anything at all, but rather as an end in itself. AB: I see ... so it’s like meditation, TM, that kind of thing.... HT: Yes, it is meditation. AB: But you would meditate for like —what —ten hours a day? HT: Yes, it might frequently have been that long. AB: Wow! ... Did you spend all your time at the pond or did you go other places too? HT: I have always walked wherever I’ve wanted to. Individual men may think they own particular pieces of property but, in a truer sense, trees, mountains and animals can not be owned; they belong to Nature and to the men who would love and protect them. AB: [Turning to the camera] So, there you have it. Henry David Thoreau, Marxist eco-warrior. He has regularly spent ten hours a day in meditation and once killed, butchered with his own hands, and ate a woodchuck who was devouring his bean plants. His book [holding a copy up to the camera] is WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE W OODS. Thank you, Henry. Please tune in tomorrow when my guest will be...

December 16, Saturday: In a letter to Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner came up with the idea behind the opera Tristan und Isolde. LISTEN TO IT NOW

At what would come to be known as the initial meeting of the Saturday Club, Richard Henry Dana, Jr. recorded in his journal, he dined at the Albion Hotel “in a select company,” which is to say Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, Amos Bronson Alcott, a visiting lecturer Charles H. Goddard from Cincinnati, Thomas Cholmondeley, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, and the Boston attorney Horatio Woodman.103 “Emerson is an excellent dinner table man, always a gentleman, never bores or preaches, or dictates, but drops & takes up topics very agreeably, & has even skill & tact in managing his conversation. So, indeed, has Alcott, & it is quite surprising to see these transcendentalists appearing well as men of the world.”

The National Anti-Slavery Standard suggested that neither Henry Thoreau’s A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS nor WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS had “received ... adequate notice in our Literary Journals.” TIMELINE OF WALDEN TIMELINE OF A WEEK

103. Woodman would be one of the small number purchasing Thoreau’s WALDEN. Whether he would read it, we wish we knew. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1855

January: Review of Henry Thoreau’s WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS by the Reverend William Rounseville Alger, titled “The Transmigration of Souls,” in the North American Review, 80:71.

[Thoreau is] a remarkable writer of our own day. [Reprints “Sounds,” page 126.7-36.]

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THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN January: Review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS by Edwin Morton titled “Thoreau and His Books” in the Harvard Magazine, 1:92, 98-99.

The sounds ... of Nature,—from the chirping sparrow to the screeching owl; from the lowing cow to the tr-r-o-o-nking frog,—who has ever heard them as [Thoreau] has? That chapter in Walden on Sounds! I have read and re-read it, always with delight. It deserves binding by itself, and gilt binding at that. * * * The critic will remember that Mr. Thoreau, where he speaks of “browsing Olive-Branches,” has some excellent remarks upon newspapers; that reformers, alas! may sometimes begin with themselves; and that society, God knows, is bad enough. The question is, whether Mr. Thoreau takes the right way, or any way, to mend it. On the whole, we think he has no business with it. He has as distinct an office— mission, if you will—as any which Mr. Pierce can dispense, and many times more honorable. As the critic says, he is the “priest and poet of Nature,” but, as the Night-song runs,—

“Zu was anderm taugt er nicht.”

Further alluding to Walden, as a “book, though less artistic than its predecessor, yet in other respects superior, and in every way worthy the attention (he might have added, the admiration) of all honest readers,” the critic disappears in the sunset cloud of this farewell apostrophe. Speaking of the discontent of some of his friends with society, and what prompted them to organize (?) the “Brook Farm Community,” as “a true and noble aspiration for a better life,” and of this joined with a certain “natural wildness” BROOK FARM as shaping the destiny of Mr. Thoreau, he says: “This is the dæmon, seemingly satyrical, with a head for the stars, and hoofs to dig in the earth, which harries you now, as it ever will. This it is which causes you to shift from ‘pencil- making,’ ‘huckleberrying,’ or thy more praiseworthy and excellent surveying, ‘from fear of doing a good business’;— a Brahministic antipathy to what is, in a worldly sense, practical. This, which sent you dreaming down the Concord River, and up the Merrimack. Spiritually, poetically Quixotic pilgrimage! Rozinantean bark! Quaint navigators! Dreams infinitely beautiful, and sometimes, as the best dreams are, infinitely unintelligible!—Ah, Pliniogenes, if, in that divine pilgrimage, that Ulyssean wandering, (for the fates are not idle with thee,) thou hadst met with some Calypso’s island, what dreams should we not have had!—And this, at last, which drove thee restless from a peaceful home, to live like a Gaboon savage, materially, at Walden Pond; spiritually, a true—the truest— prophet of Nature.

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THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN George Eliot also reviewed Henry Thoreau’s literary production: In other critical comments, Marian [Mary Anne Evans (Lewes) = “George Eliot”] criticized Kingsley’s WESTWARD HO! for being too “parsonic,” an amusing remark given her own penchant for sermonistic writing.... Marian was not duped by Tennyson’s war cries [in MAUD], the male song of blood and sacrifice [in regard to the Crimean War]. Her taste is revealed in her approval of Henry David Thoreau’s WALDEN, which she reviewed in the January 1855 issue of the Westminster [Review] and found quite sympathetic. How could she not have found a receptive voice in Thoreau’s paean to solitude and to natural splendor! She found particularly gratifying his joining of a clear eye with a poetic strain which allowed him to turn realism into imaginative prose. But she also found Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “HIAWATHA” sympathetic, and recommended it; that she failed to object to its childish moralism cannot be explained.... In all, she covered over 150 books in her seven contributions to this segment of the [Westminster] Review, including favorable comments on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s DRED, in October 1856. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Into the Valley of Death rode the 500, tra-la, tra-la....

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THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Early in the year: Franklin Benjamin Sanborn encountered Bronson Alcott at Bartlett’s bookshop in Cambridge, Massachusetts and, according to Sanborn, Alcott indicated that he was entirely pleased with Edwin Morton’s reviews of Henry Thoreau’s A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS and WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS in The Harvard Magazine. When Sanborn returned to Harvard and told Morton of this, Morton insisted that they go together to visit Alcott, and according to Sanborn, Alcott met them “with his serene smile at his study door.” The trio then went to Bartlett’s bookshop and he and Morton looked at a magazine together, but then Alcott then took that magazine with him when they left. “He explained his special arrangement with the store, laughing about the look on my face when I’d seemed to have caught him, in his old age, stealing.” TIMELINE OF A WEEK TIMELINE OF WALDEN

March: Dr. Levi D. Boone, the candidate of the American or “Know-Nothing” Party, was elected mayor of Chicago. He would organize the city’s 1st police department (you know, don’t you, who needed to be kept under control?).

WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS was reviewed in the Knickerbocker Magazine, 45:235-41. TIMELINE OF WALDEN TOWN AND RURAL HUMBUGS. WHEN Philip, King of Macedon, had made preparations to march against the Corinthians, the latter, though utterly incapable of coping with that sagacious and powerful monarch, affected to make great efforts at defence with a view to resist him. Diogenes, who took great delight in ridiculing such follies as he was too proud to indulge in himself, or did not happen to have a taste for, began to roll about his tub in a bustling and excited manner, thus deriding the idle hurry and silly show of opposition by which the feeble Corinthians were trying to deceive themselves or Philip into a belief that he had something to fear from them. It is a wonder to a certain Yankee Diogenes, that there are not more tubs rolled about now-a-days; for the world, in his estimation, never contained more bustling, shadow-pursuing Corinthians, than at the present time. A Concord philosopher, or modern Diogenes, who has an eye of acute penetration in looking out upon the world, discovered so much aimless and foolish bustle, such a disproportion of shams to realities, that his inclination or self-respect would not permit him to participate in them; so he built himself in the woods, on the banks of a pond of pure water –deep enough for drowning purposes if the bean-crop failed– a tub of unambitious proportions, into which he crawled. In this retreat, where he supported animal and intellectual life for more than two years, at a cost of about thirteen (!) dollars per annum, he wrote a book full of interest, containing the most pithy, sharp, and original remarks. It is a fortunate circumstance for Mr. Thoreau, the name of this eccentric person, that his low estimate of the value of the objects, compared with their cost, for which the world is so assiduously and painfully laboring should have received, so soon after the publication of his book, such an important, substantial, and practical confirmation in the auto-biography of Barnum. If any thing is calculated to induce a man to see how few beans will support animal life, we think it is a contemplation of the HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN life and career of the great show-man. If there is any thing calculated to reconcile us, not to the career of Barnum, but to whatever laborious drudgery may be necessary to procure good beef-steaks and oysters. with their necessary accompaniments, it is the thought of those inevitable beans, that constituted so large a part of the crop of Mr. Thoreau, and that extraordinary compound of corn-meal and water, which he facetiously called bread. Beyond all question, the two most remarkable books that have been published the last year are the “Autobiography of Barnum,” and “Life in the Woods,” by Thoreau. The authors of the two books, in tastes, habits, disposition, and culture are perfect antipodes to each other; and the lessons they inculcate are consequently diametrically opposite. If ever a book required an antidote, it is the auto-biography of Barnum, and we know of no other so well calculated to furnish this antidote as the book of Thoreau’s. If any of the readers of the “Knickerbocker” have so long denied themselves the pleasure of reading “Walden, or Life in the Woods,” we will give them a slight account of the book and its author; but we presume the information will be necessary to only very few. Mr. Thoreau is a graduate of Harvard University. He is a bold and original thinker; he reads much, is a great observer, and looks quite through the deeds of men.” “Beware,” says Emerson, “when the great GOD lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk.” Are thinkers so rare that all the moral, social, and political elements of society may be disturbed by the advent of one? The sale Barnum’s book has already met with is not, to be sure, suggestive of an overwhelming number of thinkers in the country. Thinkers always have been considered dangerous. Even Caesar, if he could have feared any thing, would have been afraid of that lean Cassius, because

“He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.”

And why are thinkers dangerous? Because the world is full of “time-honored and venerable” shams, which the words of thinkers are apt to endanger. After leaving college, Mr. Thoreau doffed the harness which society enjoins that all its members shall wear, in order for them “to get along well,” but it galled and chafed in so many places that he threw it off, and took to the woods in Concord. He built a hut there, a mile from any neighbors, that cost him twenty-eight dollars, twelve and a-half cents, and lived there more than two years — eight months of the time at an expense of nearly nine shillings a-month. Before adopting this mode of life, he first tried schoolkeeping, reporting for a newspaper, and then trading for a livelihood; but after a short trial at each, became persuaded that it was impossible for his genius to lie in either of those channels. After hesitating for some time as to the advisability of seeking a living by picking huckle-berries, he at last concluded that the occupation of a day-laborer was the most independent of any, as it required only thirty or forty days in a year to support one. The laborer’s day ends with the going down of the sun, and he is then free to devote himself to his chosen pursuit, independent of his labor; but· his employer, who speculates from HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN month to month, has no respite from one end of the year to the other. In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on this earth, is not a hardship, but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely, as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial. It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do.”

It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do.

The establishment in the woods, kept up by the extravagant expenditures we have mentioned before, was the result of these Reflections. If there is any reader of the “Knickerbocker” —native-born and a Know-Nothing– who needs to be told who P.T. BARNUM is, such a person might, without doubt, “hear something to his advantage,” by inquiring out and presenting himself before that illustrious individual; for the great show-man has made a good deal of money by exhibiting less extraordinary animals than such a man would be. lt was pretty well understood by physiologists, before the recent experiment of Mr. Thoreau, how little farinaceous food would suffice for the human stomach; and Chatham-street clothiers have a tolerably accurate knowledge of how little poor and cheap raiment will suffice to cover the back, so that his “life in the woods” adds but little to the stock of information scientific men already possessed. But it was not clearly known to what extent the public was gullible until the auto-biography of Barnum fully demonstrated the fact. This renowned individual has shown to a dignified and appreciative public the vulgar machinery used to humbug them, and they (the public) are convulsed with laughter and delight at the exposition. ’Cuteness is held in such great esteem that the fact of being egregiously cajoled and fooled out of our money is lost sight of in admiration for the shrewdness of the man who can do it. And then HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN there is such an idolatrous worship of the almighty dollar, that the man who accumulates “a pile” is pretty sure to have the laugh on his side. “Let him laugh who wins,” says Barnum, and the whole country says amen. It is very evident that shams sometimes” pay better” pecuniarily than realities, but we doubt if they do in all respects. Although Thoreau “realized” from his bean-crop one season –a summer’s labor– but eight dollars seventy-one and a- half cents, yet it is painful to think what Barnum must have “realized” from “Joice Heth” and the “Woolly Horse.” If we were obliged to choose between being shut up in “conventionalism’s air-tight stove,” (even if the said stove had all the surroundings of elegance and comforts that wealth could buy,) and a twenty-eight dollar tub in the woods, with a boundless range of freedom in the daily walks of life, we should not hesitate a moment in taking the tub, if it were not for a recollection of those horrid beans, and that melancholy mixture of meal and water. Aye, there’s the rub; for from that vegetable diet what dreams might come, when we had shuffled off the wherewith to purchase other food, must give us pause. There’s the consideration that makes the sorry conventionalisms of society of so long life. We rather bear those ills we have, than fly to others that we know not of very reasonable dread of something unpleasant resulting to us from eating beans in great quantities, would be likely to be a consequence of our experience alone, if we happened to be deficient in physiological knowledge. Whatever effects, however, different kinds of diet may have upon different persons, mental1y or physical1y, nothing is more clear than the fact that the diet of Mr. Thoreau did not make him mental1y windy. We think, however, between Iranistan, with Joice Heth and the Mermaid for associates, and the tub at Walden, with only Shakespeare for a companion, few probably would be long puzzled in making a choice, though we are constrained to say that the great majority would undoubtedly be on the side of the natural phenomena — we mean on the side of Barnum and the other mentioned curiosities. Stil1, in contemplating a good many of the situations in which Barnum was placed, it is impossible to conceive that any person of a comparatively sensitive nature would not gladly have exchanged places with the man of the woods. (We refer of course to the author of “Walden,” and not to the animal known as “the man of the woods.” Some perhaps would not have taken pains to make this explanation.) There is a good deal more virtue in beans than we supposed there was, if they are sufficient to sustain a man in such cheerful spirits as Thoreau appears to have been in when he wrote that book. The spirit oftentimes may be strong when the flesh is weak; but there does not appear to be any evidence of weakness of the flesh in the author of “Walden.” We cannot help feeling admiration for the man

“THAT fortune’s buffets and rewards. Hast ta’en with equal thanks:”

and since Sylla so coolly massacred so many Roman citizens, there has not been a man who apparently has contemplated his fellow-men with a more cheerful, lofty, and philosophical scorn than the occupant of this Walden tub. If a man can do this upon beans, or in spite of them, we shall endeavor to cultivate a HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN respect for that vegetable, which we never could endure. It was a philosopher, as ancient as Aristotle, we believe, who affirmed that” they most resemble the gods whose wants were fewest.” Whether the sentiment is a true one or not, we have no hesitation in saying that the gods we worship will bear a good deal more resemblance to H.D. Thoreau than to P.T. Barnum. We believe it requires a much higher order of intellect to live alone in the woods, than to dance attendance in the museum of a great metropolis upon dead hyenas and boa constrictors, living monkeys and rattle-snakes, giants and dwarfs, artificial mermaids, and natural zanies. There is, however, a good deal of society worse than this. Of the many good things said by Colton, one of the best, we think, is the following: “Expense of thought is the rarest prodigality, and to dare to live alone the rarest courage; since there are many who had rather meet their bitterest enemy in the field, than their own hearts in their closet. He that has no resources of mind is more to be pitied than he who is in want of necessaries for the body; and to be obliged to beg our daily happiness from others, bespeaks a more lamentable poverty than that of him who begs his daily bread.” We do not believe there is any danger of proselytes to Mr. Thoreau’s mode of life becoming too numerous. We wish we could say the same in regard to Barnum’s. We ask the reader to look around among his acquaintances, and see if the number of those whose resources of mind are sufficient to enable them to dispense with much intercourse with others, is not exceedingly small. We know of some such, though they are very few; but their fondness for solitude unfortunately is not associated with any particular admiration for a vegetable diet. It is a melancholy circumstance, and one that has been very bitterly deplored, ever since that indefinite period when “the memory of man runneth not to the contrary,” that the accompaniments of poverty should go hand-in-hand with a taste for a solitary life. A hearty appreciation of and love for humble fare, plain clothes, and poor surroundings generally, are what men of genius need to cultivate. “Walden” tends to encourage this cultivation. The part of Mr. Barnum’s life, during which he has become a millionaire, has been spent almost wholly in a crowd. It would be no paradox to say that if the time he has spent as a show- man had been spent in the woods, neither the brilliancy of his imagination nor the vigor and originality of his thoughts would have enabled him to have produced a book that would have created any very great excitement, notwithstanding the extraordinary attributes of that intellect which could conceive the idea of combining nature and art to produce “natural curiosities, “and which was shrewd enough to contrive ways and means for drawing quarters and shillings, and for the smallest value received, indiscriminately from residents in the Fifth Avenue and the Five-Points, from the statesman and “the Bowery-boy,” from savans, theologians, lawyers, doctors, merchants, and “the rest of mankind,” to say nothing about Queen Victoria, the Duke of Wellington, and a large portion of the Eastern continent beside. Unlike as Barnum and Thoreau are in most every other respect, in one point there is a striking resemblance. Both of them had no idea of laboring very hard with their hands for a living; HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN they were determined to support themselves principally by their wits. The genius of Barnum led him to obtain the meat he fed upon by a skillful combination of nature with art — by eking out the short-comings in the animal creation with ingenious and elaborate manufactures, and then adroitly bringing the singular compounds thus formed to bear upon the credulity of the public. And thus, while he taxed the animal, vegetable. and mineral kingdoms, either separately or combined, to gratify the curiosity of the public, the most valued products of the last- mentioned kingdom flowed in a large and perpetual stream into his pocket. But his expenditures of “brass” in these labors were enormous. Thoreau had no talent for “great combinations.” The meat he fed upon evidently would not be that of extraordinary calves or over-grown buffaloes, baked in the paragon cooking- stove of public curiosity; or rather, as he ate no meat, the vegetables he lived upon would not come from the exhibition of India-rubber mermaids, gutta-percha fish, or mammoth squashes. His genius did not lie at all in that direction. On the contrary, he preferred to diminish his wants, instead of resorting to extraordinary schemes to gratify them. Mr. Thoreau gives a description of a battle fought upon his wood- pile between two armies of ants, that is exceedingly graphic and spirited. We think it surpasses in interest the description of battles fought about Sebastopol, written by the famous correspondent of the London “Times.” Perhaps, however, we are somewhat prejudiced in the matter. The truth is, we have read so much about the war in Europe, that the whole subject has become somewhat tiresome; and this account of the battle of the ants in Concord had so much freshness about it — so much novelty, dignity, and importance, which the battles in Europe cease to possess for us that we have read it over three or four times with increased interest each time. We regret that the whole account is too long to copy here, but we will give the closing part: “They fought with more pertinacity than bull-dogs. Neither manifested the least disposition to retreat. It was evident that their battle-cry was, Conquer or die! ... I was myself excited somewhat, even as if they had been men. The more you think of it, the less the difference. And certainly there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment’s comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroism displayed. For numbers and for carnage it was an Austerlitz or Dresden. Concord fight! Two killed on the patriot’s side, and Luther Blanchard wounded! Why, here every ant was a Buttrick. ‘Fire! — for God’s sake, fire!’ and thousands shared the fate of Davis and Hosmer. There was not one hireling there. I have no doubt it was a principle they fought for, as much as our ancestors, and not to avoid a three-penny tax on their tea; and the results of this battle will be as important and memo~ able to those whom it concerns as those of the battle of Bunker-Hill, at least.” The more you think of it the less the difference between this fight and those battles about Sebastopo1. There appears, however, to have been this advantage in favor of the battle of the ants, there was no “mistake” made in the orders, (that the chronicler could discover), by which many valuable lives were lost, as in the charge of cavalry at Sebastopol. All the operations of the ants appeared to be systematic and welltimed. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN This rather goes to show that the commanders of ants are more cautious than the commanders of men, for the reason probably that they hold the lives of their combatants in greater estimation. The machinery that is used to bring about battles between different nations by “the powers that be,” is very much like that Barnum used to divert the public — to divert money from their pockets into his. By adding to the age of his remarkable “nurse” –the vivacious and interesting Joice– in about the same proportion that he increased the age of his juvenile phenomenon, General Thumb, he was guilty of a departure from truth not a whit more extraordinary than the discrepancy between the conversation of the Emperor of all the Russias with the English ambassadors in regard to the health of Turkey, and his actions at the same time. Barnum unquestionably possesses superior diplomatic talents. Talleyrand would have approved them. We said some little way back that there was one point of resemblance between Barnum and Thoreau. There are half-a-dozen. Both are good-natured, genial, pleasant men. One sneers at and ridicules the pursuits of his contemporaries with the same cheerfulness and good-will that the other cajoles and fleeces them. The rural philosopher measured the length, breadth, and depth of Walden Pond, with the same jovial contentedness that the metropolitan show-man measured the length, breadth, and depth of the public gullibility. Both too are compassionate men. Flashes of pity are occasionally met with in the book of Barnum’s, at the extent of the credulity of that public he seemingly so remorselessly wheedled; and Thoreau evinced a good deal of compassion for some of his well-to-do townsmen. His sympathy was a good deal moved in behalf of the farmer that owned “a handsome property,” who was driving his oxen in the night to Brighton, through the mud and darkness. Both were artists. He of the wood constructed himself the unpretending edifice he occupied — a representation of which graces the title-page of his book. Barnum’s artistic ski1l was more evinced in constructing such “curiosities” as we have before alluded to. And final1y, both were humbugs — one a town and the other a rural humbug. But both of them have nevertheless made large contributions to the science of human nature. Malherbe, once upon hearing a prose work of great merit extol1ed, dryly asked if it would reduce the price of bread! If “Walden” should be extensively read, we think it would have the effect to reduce somewhat the price of meat, if it did not of bread. At all events it encourages the belief, which in this utilitarian age enough needs encouragement, that there is some other object to live for except “to make money.” In the New-England philosophy of life, which so extensively prevails where the moral or intel1edual character of a man is more or less determined by his habits of thrift, such a book as “Walden” was needed. Extravagant as it is in the notions it promulgates, we think it is nevertheless calculated to do a good deal of good, and we hope it wi1l be widely read. Where it exerts a bad influence upon one person, Barnum’s autobiography will upon a hundred. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN March 2, Friday: A report appeared in the New-York Times of the contents of a magazine, Knickerbocker. A section of that magazine, “Town and Rural Humbugs,” had commented that Henry Thoreau lived on thirteen dollars a year and had lately written a curious book, WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, “which we waded more than half through”:

TIMELINE OF WALDEN Nikolai I, Tsar of all the Russias, Grand Duke of Finland, King of Poland died in St. Petersburg and was succeeded by his son, Alyeksandr II.

Thoreau went to Great Meadows (Gleason D8) to see the ice.

Heard two hawks scream. There was something truly March-like in it, like a prolonged blast or whistling of the wind through a crevice in the sky, which, like a cracked blue saucer, overlaps the woods. Such are the first rude notes which prelude the summer’s quire, learned of the whistling March wind.

March 2. Another still, warm, beautiful day like yesterday. 9 A. M. — To Great Meadows to see the ice. Saw yesterday one of those small slender-winged insects on the ice. A. Wright says that about forty years ago an acre of meadow was carried off at one time by the ice on the Colburn place. D. Clark tells me he saw a piece of meadow, on his part of the Great Meadows, five or six rods square, which had been taken up in one piece and set down again a little distance off. I observe that where there is plowed ground much of it has been washed over the neighboring grass ground to a great distance, discoloring it. The Great Meadows, as all the rest, are one great field of ice a foot thick to their utmost verge, far up the hillsides and into the swamps, sloping upward there, without water under it, resting almost everywhere on the ground; a great undulating field of ice, rolling prairie-like, — the earth wearing this dry, icy shield or armor, which shines in the sun. Over brooks and ditches, perhaps, and in many other places, the ice, a foot thick in some places, is shoved (?) or puffed up in the form of a pent-roof, in some places three feet high and stretching twenty or thirty rods. There is certainly more ice than can lie flat there, as if the adjacent ices had been moved toward each other. Yet this general motion is not likely, and it is more probably the result of the expansion of the ice under the sun and of the warmth of the water (?) there. In many places the ice is dark and transparent, and you see plainly the bottom on which it lies. The various figures in the partially rotted ice are very interesting, white bubbles which look like coins of various sizes overlapping each other; [550302a.jpg (3512 bytes)] parallel waving lines, with sometimes very slight intervals, on the under side of sloping white ice, marking the successive levels at which the water has stood; [550302b.jpg (9351 bytes)] also countless white cleavages, perpendicular or inclined, straight and zigzag, meeting and crossing each other at all possible angles, and making all kinds of geometrical figures, checkering the whole surface, like white frills or ruffles in the ice. (At length the ice melts on the edge of these cleavages into little gutters which catch the snow.) There is the greatest noise from the ice cracking about 10 A. M., yesterday and to-day. Where the last year's shoots or tops of the young white maples, at the Salix Purshiana shore, are brought together, as I walk, into a mass, a quarter of a mile off, with the sun on them, they present a fine dull scarlet streak. Young twigs are thus more florid than the old wood, as if from their nearness to the flower, or like the complexion of children. You see thus a fine dash of red or scarlet against the distant hills, which near at hand or in their midst is wholly unobservable. I go listening, but in vain, for the warble of a bluebird from the old orchard across the river. I love to look now at the fine- grained russet hillsides in the sun, ready to relieve and contrast with the azure of the bluebirds. I made a burning- glass of ice, which produced a slight sensation of warmth on the back of my hand, but was so untrue that it did not concentrate the rays to a [550302c.jpg (11983 bytes)] sufficiently small focus. Returning over Great Fields, found half a dozen arrowheads, one with three scallops in the base. If we have a considerable freshet before the HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN ice melts much, apparently much meadow crust will be moved on the South Branch. There is about six inches of frost in the swamps. Heard two hawks scream. There was something truly March-like in it, like a prolonged blast or whistling of the wind through a crevice in the sky, which, like a cracked blue saucer, overlaps the woods. Such are the first rude notes which prelude the summer's quire, learned of the whistling March wind.

March 17, Saturday: In the New-York Times:

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THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN March 17. Saturday. H. Hosmer says he has seen black ducks. Edmund Hosmer's meadow, i. e. the Hunt house meadow, is covered with great pieces of meadow, the largest thick and dense cranberry meadow. It is piled three or four feet high for several rods. Higher up on the North Branch I see where the trees, especially the swamp white oaks, have been chafed smooth and white by the ice (at that time), from the ground to three or four feet (six in some cases), as if scraped with a hoe, and the bushes all along the shore — willows, alders, etc., etc. (blueberry swamps in some places) — have been more or less broken down. I hear the lesser redpolls yet [The last.]. See now along the edge of the river, the ice being gone, many fresh heaps of clamshells, which were opened by the musquash when the water was higher, about some tree where the ground rises. And very many places you see where they formed new burrows into the bank, the sand being pushed out into the stream about the entrance, which is still below water, and you feel the ground undermined as you walk. White maple blossom- buds look as if bursting; show a rusty, fusty space, perhaps a sixteenth of an inch in width, over and above the regular six scales [There is an interrogation-point in the margin against this paragraph.]. I see scraps of the evergreen ranunculus along the riverside. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN March 21, Wednesday: In the New-York Times:

TIMELINE OF WALDEN

March 21. 6.30 A. M. — To Swamp Bridge Brook. Clear, but a very cold westerly wind this morning. Ground frozen very hard. Yet the song sparrows are heard from the willow and alder rows. Hear a lark far off in the meadow. P. M. — To Bare Hill by railroad. Early willow and aspen catkins are very conspicuous now. The silvery down of the former has in some places crept forth from beneath its scales a third of an inch at least. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN This increased silveriness was obvious, I think, about the first of March, perhaps earlier. It appears to be a very gradual expansion, which begins in the warm days of winter. It would be well to observe them once a fortnight through the winter. It is the first decided growth I have noticed, and is probably a month old. The song sparrow is now seen dodging behind the wall, with a quirk of its tail, or flitting along the alders or other bushes by the side of the road, especially in low ground, and its pleasant strain is heard at intervals in spite of the cold and blustering wind. It is the most steady and resolute singer as yet, its strain being heard at intervals throughout the day, more than any as yet peopling the hedgerows. There is no opening in Flint's Pond except a very little around the boat-house. The tree sparrow, flitting song-sparrow-like through the alders, utters a sharp metallic tcheep. In the hollow behind Britton's Camp, I see seven mouse-holes — probably Mus leucopus — around an old oak stump, all within a foot of it, and many of their droppings at each hole and where they have gnawed off the grass, and indistinct galleries in the grass, extending three or four feet on every side. I see red maple sap oozing out and wetting the young trees where there is no obvious wound. Crossed Goose Pond on ice.

August 7, Tuesday: On Ellen Fuller Channing’s birthday, her brother Eugene Fuller gave her a copy of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. She commented:

I really enjoy Thoreau’s book -- it is so thoroughly characteristic, and fresh.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN Surely she knew that her estranged husband Ellery figured in this book, with snippets of his poetry quoted and with several passages in which he was semi-disguised as “poet” (but knowing that, she made no comment):

ELLERY CHANNING

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

Aug.7. To Tarbell Hill again with the Emersons, a-berrying. Very few berries this year. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1856

May 1, Thursday: Review of Henry Thoreau’s WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, titled “America,” in the London Critic, 223-4. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Originality is the chief virtue of a book. It includes veracity, for the truly original man is the truly veracious; he is not a mere soundpipe or echo, but alive in the world, and tells us how he finds it. Thousands of books are published every year, most of them the pouring of one vessel into another, books about books, old notions, old phrases turned once again. Professional critics, too, living in the thick of this noisy manufacture, are usually the last, among men who read, to distinguish a real from a pseudo excellence, or to greet the truly original book which has nature’s pure juices in its veins. Their great poet is never the true dawning star, their supreme philosopher is likely to prove an ignis-fatuus; but the heavens move on, and at last they too acknowledge the genuine ray, they loudest of all, when it is lifted high from the horizon. So much for a general remark. Mr. Thoreau, author of “Walden” and “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” is not a literary artist or professional teacher; but he has given us two volumes of homegrown experiences—mark! homegrown experiences—things he has seen and known—thoughts and feelings actually born in the mind of an honest intelligent man among the trees and streams of Massachusetts. Books he has studied, new and old, and the society of cultivated persons, but still better the language of birds, fishes, herbs, clouds, fogs, snow, sunbeams, nor failed in sympathy and collaboration with the farmer, squatter, hunter, woodman, and villager. In short, he has lived heartily where he was put, has tried, observed, and reflected on all that came near him, and out of his store given us some pages of record very delightful to read, and comprising a suggestion for the amelioration of human life not the least practical in the crowd of such suggestions. His Walden text is this, simplify your wants, and, in accordance with it, he himself went out to the banks of a clear pool, about a mile and a half from the village of Concord, in Massachusetts, and there built and lived for two years in a hut of wood, growing most of his own victuals with easy labour. The example could seldom be followed in its particulars, and, perhaps, should not if it could; but the principle is well worth the consideration of thoughtful men—Nature versus Fashion, Substance versus Appearance, Real Education versus Luxury, Life versus Cash. Henry Thoreau has written down some things from his life at Walden Pond; and the volume is worth reading and re-reading. We do not get such a book every day, or often in a century. [Reprints “Economy,” pages 3.21-4.7.]

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THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

We shall present some extracts, requiring little or no comment to explain or recommend them. Here are pregnant sentences. [Reprints “Economy,” pages 31.9-16, 38.11-13, 38.27-30; “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” pages 90.18-28, 92.4-18, 95.30-96.9; “Sounds,” page 112.30-35; “Solitude,” page 134.6-8; “Baker Farm,” page 208.1-3; and “Higher Laws,” page 218.28-30.] His sketches of natural history and the landscape are most fresh and charming. Here is a glimpse of WALDEN POND ITSELF [Reprints “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” page 86.3-32; and “The Ponds,” page 199.21-32.] IN THE WOODLAND [Reprints “Baker’s Farm,” pages 201.1-202.15.] WILD GOOSE AND CAT-OWL [Reprints “Winter Animals,” pages 272.9-32.] How graphic and interesting is this BATTLE OF THE ANTS [Reprints “Brute Neighbors,” pages 228.25-231.26.] In conclusion, Mr. Thoreau tells us merely that he “left the woods for as good a reason as he went there,” adding— [Reprints “Conclusion,” pages 323.29-324.8.] This volume has its faults, no doubt, and the realising and rhetorical jar together sometimes on our ear. The letter is not for general application, but the spirit is—Walden being a brave book, one in a million, an honour to America, a gift to men. A grateful reader of it wrote these lines on the fly-leaf of his copy: Walden’s a placid woodland pool Across the wild waves hoary, In whose fountain clear and cool I intend to swim. British lakes, Italian, Swiss, Prouder, lovelier than this, Echo song and story; Wide are the Indian waters; but By Walden one man built a hut— I often think of him. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN August 9, Saturday: In England, Thomas Hardy attended the execution of Elizabeth “Martha” Brown at Dorchester.

After she had discovered her husband in bed with another woman he had struck her with a whip, whereupon she had bludgeoned him with the kitchen wood-axe. This was an interesting escalation of domestic hostilities that Hardy could use as material for TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES!

“Summer Stories,” a condescending Brit notice of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, appeared on page 760 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN of London’s The Leader.

Here we have a very agreeable series of natural and social studies, fresh in manner and style, with many entertaining anecdotes, and sketches of forest life in America. It is excellent, as a picture of young- settlement manners.

(Isn’t this the sort of review of WALDEN that one might expect, from the sort of people who need to attend a hanging in order to acquire fresh ideas? Phew!) TIMELINE OF WALDEN

August 9. Saturday. Notwithstanding the very copious rain, with lightning, on the night of August 5th and the deluge which fell yesterday, raising the river still higher, it rained again and again with very vivid lightning, more copiously than ever, last night, and without long intervals all this day. Few, if any, can remember such a succession of thunder-storms merged into one long thunderstorm, lasting almost continuously (the storm does) two nights and two days. We are surprised to see that it can lighten just as vividly, thunder just as loud, rain just as copiously at last as at first. P.M. — Up Assabet. The river is raised about two feet! My boat is nearly even full, though under the willows. The water stands nearly a foot over the highest part of the large flat rock by Island. There is more current. The pads are drowned; hardly one to be seen afloat; the utmost length of their tethers does not permit them to come within a foot or ten inches of the surface. They lay smoothly on the top before, with considerable spare coil beneath; now they strain in vain toward the surface. All the Bidens Beckii is drowned too, and will be delayed, if not exterminated for this year. The water is cool to the bather after so much rain. The notes of the wood pewee and warbling vireo are more prominent of late, and of the goldfinch twittering over. Does the last always titter his twitter when ascending? These are already feeding on the thistle seeds. Again I am surprised to see the Apocynum cannabinum close to the rock at the Island, several plants, apparently not more than ten days out; say July 25th, including the ones I saw before. The flowers of this are white, with divisions of the corolla erect or nearly so, corolla not one eighth of tin inch wide, calyx-segments lanceolate, pointed, as long as the tube of the corolla. I now notice that all the branches are about equally upright, and hence the upper ones are much more upright than the upper ones of the A. androsœmifolium. The plant is inclined to be taller and narrower than that, perhaps because it grows by water. The leaves are more oblong or lanceolate and pointed, the downiness and petioles about the same with that of the common; in this case, none heart-shaped. The one found the 5th was between this and the common, a rose-streaked one, in fact colored like the common; this, a white one with still longer calyx-segments and no heart-shaped leaves. This is rather smooth. Say, then, for that of the 5th and this, they are varieties of the A. cannabinum.104 I scare up a couple of wood ducks separately, undoubtedly birds bred and dispersed about here. The rise of the river attracts them. What I have called Aster corymbosus out a day, above Hemlocks. It has eight to twelve white rays, smaller than those of the macrophyllus, and a dull-red stem commonly. It differs from Gray’s corymbosus in the achenia being apparently not slender, not opening in July, and there being no need of distinguishing it from A. macrophyllus; from his cordifolius in the rays not being numerous, nor the panicled heads very numerous (sometimes pretty numerous), and the rays not pale-blue. Perhaps I must call it A. cordifolius, yet the lower and principal petioles are naked (Gray makes them so commonly!), not at all winged, though the upper are. Found one individual at Miles Swamp whose lower petioles were winged. Its petioles (the lower) are only sometimes winged here. The flowers of A. macrophyllus are white with a very slight bluish tinge, in a coarse flat-topped corymb. Flowers nine to ten eighths of an inch in diameter. A. cordifolius flowers six eighths of an inch [in] diameter.

104. At Astor Library, New York, Nov. 8th, 1856, in Richardson’s Flora Boreali, etc., the leaves of Apocynum cannabinum in the plate are an inch or more beyond the flowers, and not hearted! Of the A. hypericifolium, the lower leaves are decidedly hearted, and the flowers are about terminal. FLORA BOREALI AMERICANA HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1857

Review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS by Horace Greeley titled “The Bases of Character” in THE ROSE OF SHARON: A RELIGIOUS SOUVENIR, FOR MDCCCCLVII, ed. Mrs. Caroline M. Sawyer (Boston: Abel Tompkins and Sanborn, Carter, and Bazin, 1857), 65-73. THE BASES OF CHARACTER TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1858

November 5, Friday: Bronson Alcott commented that Henry Thoreau was

better poised and more nearly self-sufficient than other men.

Thoreau was being written to by John Otos Wattles from Moneka in the Kansas Territory, asking for a fresh copy of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS.

Moneka Kansas—Nov. 5/58 Friend Thoreau— When I was east I obtained your book relating to your residence at Walden Pond[.] Friend Greeley & I s[a]t up nearly all one night to read it but did n’t finish it, he gave it to me to finish on my way in the cars — I had it reading it, & some one, perhaps perceiv[ing] the book was interesting took good care to change it from my possession to his, I hope he has enjoyed as much as I did in reading it— But I want another — I want you to send me a copy, & I will remit the price in the “needful stamps” &c— Do it up carefully & send by mail— Direct to me as follows, Moneka, [Linn] Co, Kansas— As Ever For God & Humanity John O. Wattles

Page 2 I shall direct to you & to friend Emerson— Not having heard of your whereabout since I left your house two or three years ago, I do not know that this will reach you—

Page 3 Address: Henry D. Thoreau or Ralph Waldo Emerson Concord Mass Return address: Moneka Ks. Nov 10 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN November 5: Humphrey Buttrick says that he finds old and young of both kinds of small rails, and that they breed here, though he never saw their nests. P.M. – Up Assabet. The river has risen somewhat, on account of rain yesterday and the ~0th. So it was lowest the 30th. That great fleet of leaves of the 21st October is now sunk to the bottom, near the shore, and are [~w] flatted out there, paving it thickly, and but few recently fallen are to be seen on the water; and in the woods the leaves do not lie up so crisp since the rain. Saw Stewart shoot a Carolina rail, which was standing on the side of a musquash-cabin off Prichard’s, within two rods of him. This has no black throat and is probably the female. The large shallow cups of the red oak acorns look like some buttons I have seen which had lost their core. The Cornuorida on the Island is still full-leafed, and is now completely scarlet, though it was partly green on the 28th. It is apparently in the height of its color there now, or, if more exposed, perhaps it would have been on the 1st of November. This makes it the latest tree to change. The leaves are drooping, like the C. sericea, while those of some sprouts at its base are horizontal. Some incline to crimson. A few white maples are not yet bare, but thinly clothed with dull-yellow leaves which still have life in them. Judging from the two aspens, this tree, and the willows, one would say that the earliest trees to leaf were, perhaps, the last to lose their leaves. Little dippers were seen yesterday. The few remaining topmost leaves of the Salicericea, which were the last to change, are now yellow like those of the birch. Water milkweed [Asclepias incarnata, the swamp milkweed] has been discounting some days, with its small upright pods. I hear one cricket this louring day. Since but one is heard, it is the more distinct and therefore seems louder and more musical. It is a clearer note, less creaking than before. A few Populus grandidentata leaves are still left on. The common smooth rose leaves are pretty conspicuously yellow yet along the river, and some dull-reddish high blackberry is seen by the roads. Also meadowsweet is observed yet with the rose. It is quite still; no wind, no insect hum, and no note of birds, but one hairy woodpecker. That lake grass, Glyceria fluitans, is, methinks, more noticeable now than in summer on the surface of the fuller stream, green and purple. Meadowsweet is a prominent yellow yet. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1859

Harper’s Magazine had occasion to mention the irksome nature of American life: “Fast,” is the word: and it irks us terribly. Society is tumbling “ahead” neck and heels. Be that as it may, in his travel narrative THE WHITE HILLS the writer T. Starr King found the leisure to cite WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS not once but twice.

According to Harding’s DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU, page 339, one of Thoreau’s townsmen, obviously unaware that a book named WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS had ever been created, “innocently told him after riding through Walden woods in his sleigh that he had never seen anything so beautiful in his life and that if there had been men there who knew how to write about it, it would have been a great occasion for them....”

Ticknor & Fields managed to sell the last copy of their 2,000-copy printing of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. After the first year’s sales of 1,700 copies, it had required five years to sell the remaining 300 copies. They therefore decided regretfully that this was a publication which it would not pay them to reprint. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

This WALDEN by Henry Thoreau was, after all, such a gloom and doom book — whyever would anyone want to invest in a copy? Contemporaries marshaled their own facts and figures of hard times. Harshest of all was an assessment popularized in Thoreau’s WALDEN: that among all merchants, “a very large majority, even ninety-seven in a hundred, are sure to fail.” He added that “probably not even the other three succeed in saving their souls, but are perchance bankrupt in a worse sense than they who fail honestly.” Thoreau relished “the sweetest fact that statistics have yet revealed,” but his scolding had less force than the number itself. Ninety-seven in a hundred! having first seen print in an 1834 novel about the Manhattan business district, THE PERILS OF PEARL STREET, INCLUDING A TASTE OF THE DANGERS OF WALL STREET, BY A LATE MERCHANT [Asa Greene], it endured as the most cited failure ration of the century. [On February 28, 1849,] General Henry Dearborn (a hero of the War of 1812) affirmed it in a much published speech. Judging from his years as collector of the Port of Boston, Dearborn thundered, “among one hundred merchants and traders, not more thaN THREE, in this city, ever acquire independence.” As in a child’s whispering game, the number made the rounds in private diaries and congressional reports as representing the truth not merely about Boston but about the wider culture. Everyone from abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson to proslavery apologist George Fitzhugh cited the statistic to support one cause or another. From 1870 to 1925, Russell HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Conwell taught it to more than six thousand audiences in his famous motivational talk, “Acres of Diamonds.” Letters to editors sent confirmation from city directories, probate records, and the memories of “antiquarian” merchants. In 1905, Bradstreet’s credit agency finally debunked it for Success magazine; but System: The Magazine of Business reinstated it in a special issue on failure in 1908. The figure reverberated for seventy-five years because it conveyed not the economic but the emotional magnitude of ubiquitous failure. —Scott A. Sandage, BORN LOSERS, page 7

WALDEN: What has been said of the merchants, that a very large majority, even ninety-seven in a hundred, are sure to fail, is equally true of the farmers. With regard to the merchants, however, one of them says pertinently that a great part of their failures are not genuine pecuniary failures, but merely failures to fulfil their engagements, because it is inconvenient; that is, it is the moral character that breaks down. But this puts an infinitely worse face on the matter, and suggests, beside, that probably not even the other three succeed in saving their souls, but are perchance bankrupt in a worse sense than they who fail honestly.

January: The “Reading” chapter of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS was reprinted in its entirety in the Massachusetts Teacher. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN July 30, Saturday: Jean-François Gravelot, “The Great Blondin,” performing before a crowd of 25,000, was again crossing above the Niagara Falls on his tightrope. This time, to keep the repeat of the stunt interesting, he made the crossing pushing his wheelbarrow, on stilts, blindfolded, carrying his manager Harry Colcord on his back.

Henry Thoreau sent off to William A. Wilson a copy of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS at his request, with a bill for $1.25, and let him know that he had no copies of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS to spare and had been informed it was out of print.105 TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Concord Mass. July 30th 1859 Mr Wm A. Wilson, Dear Sir, I send you by the same mail with this a copy of ‘A Week on the Concord & Merri- mack Rivers’. The price is $1.25 The change can be sent in postage stamps. I have 105.Copies of WALDEN would still, however, have been available from the publisher. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN no copies of “Walden” to spare; and I learn that it is out of print. Yrs respectfully Henry D. Thoreau

July 30. A. M.–On river to ascertain the rate of the current. This dog-day weather I can see the bottom where five and a half feet deep. At five feet it is strewn clear across with sium, heart-leaf, Ranunculus Purshii, etc. It is quite green and verdurous, especially with the first. I see the fishes moving leisurely about amid the weeds, their affairs revealed, especially perch,–some large ones prowling there; and pickerel, large and small, lie imperturbable. I see more moss(?)-covered rocks on the bottom and some rising quite near the surface,–three or four between my boat’s place and thirty rods above,–and a good many three feet over on the bottom, revealed in the sunny water, and little suspected before. Indeed, the bottom may be considered rocky from above Dodd’s to my boat’s place, though you would suspect it only when looking through this clear water. They are so completely covered with moss-like weeds or tresses that you do not see them,–like the heads of mermaids. A rock there is a nucleus or hard core to a waving mass of weeds, and you must probe it hard with a paddle to detect the hard core. No doubt many a reach is thus rock-strewn which is supposed to have an uninterruptedly muddy bottom. They sleep there concealed under these long tresses on the bottom, suggesting a new kind of antiquity. There is nothing to wear on and polish them there. They do not bear the paint rubbed off from any boat. Though unsuspected by the oldest fisher, they have eyed Concord for centuries through their watery veil without ever parting their tresses to look at her. Perchance the increased stagnancy of the river at this season makes the water more transparent, it being easier to look into stagnant water than when the particles are in rapid motion. The outside heart-leaves above Dodd’s grow in six feet of water, and also the kalmiana lily. Trying the current there, there being a very faint, chiefly side, wind, commonly not enough to be felt on the cheek or to ripple the water,–what would be called by most a calm,–my bottle floats about seventy-five feet in forty minutes, and then, a very faint breeze beginning to drive it back, I cannot wait to see when it will go a hundred. It is, in short, an exceedingly feeble current, almost a complete standstill. My boat is altogether blown up-stream, even by this imperceptible breath. Indeed, you can in such a case feel the pulse of our river only in the shallowest places, where it preserves some slight passage between the weeds. It faints and gives up the ghost in deeper places on the least adverse wind, and you would presume it dead a thousand times, if you did not apply the nicest tests, such as a feather to the nostrils of a drowned man. It is a mere string of lakes which have not made up their minds to be rivers. As near as possible to a standstill. Yet by sinking a strawberry box beneath the surface I found that there was a slight positive current there, that when a chip went pretty fast up-stream in this air, the same with the box sunk one foot and tied to it went slowly down, at three feet deep or more went faster than when the box was sunk only one foot. The water flowed faster down at three feet depth than at one, there where it was about seven feet deep, and though the surface for several inches deep may be flowing up in the wind, the weeds at bottom will all be slanted down. Indeed, I suspect that at four or five feet depth the weeds will be slanted downward in the strongest wind that blows up, in that the current is always creeping along downward underneath. After my first experiments I was surprised to find that the weeds at bottom slanted down-stream. I have also been surprised to find that in the clear channel between the potamogetons, though it looked almost stagnant, it was hard to swim against it; as at Rice’s Bend. See many cowbirds about cows. P. M.–Left boat at Rice’s Bend. I spoke to him of the clapper rail. He remembered that his father once killed a bird, a sort of mud-hen, which they called the tinker, since he made [A] noise just like a tinker on brass, and they used to set it agoing in the meadows by striking two coppers together. His father stuffed it and did not know what it was. It had a long body. Yet the river in the middle of Concord is swifter than above or below, and if Concord people are slow in consequence of their river’s influence, the people of Sudbury and Carlisle should be slower still. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1862

March 4, Tuesday: Urbano Rattazzi replaced Bettino Ricasoli, Count Brolio as prime minister of Italy.

Confederate forces occupied Santa Fe in the New Mexico Territory. US CIVIL WAR

Letter to Ticknor & Fields from H.D. Thoreau by the hand of his sister Sophia, changing the title of “The Higher Law” to “Life without Principle,” and changing the title of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS: “I wish to make one alteration in the new edition viz, to leave out from the title the words ‘Or Life in the Woods’.” TIMELINE OF WALDEN Concord March 4th ’62 Messrs Ticknor & Fields, I hereby acknowledge the receipt of your check for one hundred dollars on account of manuscript sent to you— As for another title for the Heigher Law article, I can think of nothing better than, Life without Principle. The paper on Walking will be ready ere long. I shall be happy to have you print 250. copies of Walden on the terms mentioned & will consider this answer as settling the business. I wish to make one alteration in the new edition viz, to leave out from the title the words “or Life in the Woods.” Yours truly H.D. Thoreau by S.E. Thoreau HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Thoreau acknowledged receipt from Ticknor & Fields of a draft, for $100.00, which may well have been their payment for “AUTUMNAL TINTS”. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN (Thoreau’s book had been primarily the publication of a collection of lyceum lectures he had offered, made up of one lyceum lecture per chapter. One of his earliest of these lyceum lectures had been titled “Life in the Woods,” and the “hook” that had rounded up an audience for this particular lecture had been that he was going to explain to his fellow townspeople, why as a younger man he had made the strange experiment of going off and living by himself outside of town. In the year in which he had first published this collection of his lyceum lectures, the names “Walden Pond” and “Walden Woods” were quite unknown outside of the immediate environs of Concord, Massachusetts and therefore a book title such as simply WALDEN wouldn’t have meant much to anybody, any more than if he had titled it IPSUM, or PERMOS, or LADDET. The situation was very different, however, at this 2d publication. By the year of republication, this word “Walden” had come to be a word known to everyone and everyone’s aunt Matilda. The word stood for one thing and one thing only — that famous book, a book that everybody had come to know about even if they hadn’t themselves bothered to peruse it. –Meanwhile, however, the fact that Thoreau had once offered a lyceum lecture that he had titled “Life in the Woods” had been quite forgotten. The title needed to be simplified because simple titles are better titles, and because the “Life in the Woods” part of the title had turned out to be ill-advised — there had turned out to be a certain sort of reader who would presume, on the basis of this title, that what Thoreau was doing was sponsoring an agenda, that folks ought to go off and live in the woods the way he had gone off and lived in the woods. That was an unfortunate interpretation and one that was getting in the way of his communicating his message. He hadn’t ever been proposing that anyone ought to go live on the shore of Walden Pond, or that anyone ought to go out and live in the piney Walden Woods, that had been no part of his agenda. So it was better to be rid of this part of the title.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Thoreau acknowledged receipt from Ticknor & Fields of a draft, for $100.00, which may well have been their payment for “AUTUMNAL TINTS”. HDT WHAT? INDEX

March 21, Friday: James Bruce, Earl of Elgin replaced Charles John Canning, Earl Canning as Viceroy of India.

Confederate President Jefferson Davis visited the rebel army on the Potomac. US CIVIL WAR

Ticknor & Fields issued a 2d edition of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, at Henry Thoreau’s request deleting from the title page ‘Or Life in the Woods’.” TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Thoreau wrote with Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau’s help to Myron B. Benton.

{No MS — printed copy LVP, 1865} Concord, 21 March 1862 Dear Sir,— I thank you for your very kind letter, which, ever since I received it, I have intended to answer before I died, however briefly. I am encouraged to know, that, so far as you are concerned, I have not written my books in vain. I was particularly gratified, some years ago, when one of my friends and neighbors said, “I wish you would write another book,—write it for me.” He is actually more familiar with what I have written than I am myself. The verses you refer to in Conway’s “Dial,” were written by F.B. Sanborn of this town. I never wrote for that journal. I am pleased when you say that in “The Week” you like especially “those little snatches of poetry interspersed through the book,” for these, I suppose, are the least attractive to most readers. I have not been engaged in any particular work on Botany, or the like, though, if I were to live, I should have much to report on Natural History generally. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN You ask particularly after my health. I suppose that I have not many months to live; but, of course, I know nothing about it. I may add that I am enjoying existence as much as ever, and regret nothing. Yours truly, Henry D. Thoreau, by S.E. Thoreau.

May 16, Saturday: Father Isaac Hecker wrote to Orestes Augustus Brownson.

The Lowell Weekly Journal printed an extended obituary on its page 3: “Thoreau could have made of himself a scientific naturalist, a physicist, strictly speaking, of the first order. He had the keen senses and instincts of an Indian.... Stoic and dreamer as he was, with scarcely any interest in the ordinary pursuits of life, Thoreau was a true patriot, and was anxious for the progress and well being of his country.” Though the writer of this, one “B.W.B.,” supposed that Thoreau’s writings were “of course not likely to be popular,” he observed in regard to WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS that “In some respects we prefer it to any book which has been produced on this side of the Atlantic.” TIMELINE OF WALDEN

General Benjamin Butler, the Union military commander of New Orleans, decreed that any woman acting disrespectfully towards the United States or its representatives “shall be regarded as a woman of the town plying her avocation.” US CIVIL WAR

June 7, Saturday: The United States of America entered into a “Treaty for the suppression of the African slave trade” with Great Britain. This treaty would be ratified unanimously by the US Senate. Ratifications would be exchanged at London on May 20, 1862 and the treaty would be proclaimed to the public on June 11, 1862. (U.S. TREATIES AND CONVENTIONS (1889), pages 454-66. See also SENATE EXECUTIVE JOURNAL, XII. pages 230, 231, 240, 254, 391, 400, 403). INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE

A review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS appeared on page 53 of Concord’s Monitor. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1863

December 18, Friday: The Chambersburg, Pennsylvania barber Henry Watson, at the age of 50, was mustered into the 29th Regiment of the Connecticut Colored Infantry.

Three works of vocal chamber music by Johannes Brahms were performed for the initial time, in Vienna: Wechsellied zum Tanz op.31/1 for vocal quartet to words of Goethe, Die Nonne und der Ritter op.28/1 for alto, baritone and piano to words of Eichendorff, and Vor der Tür op.28/2 for alto, baritone and piano to words of an old German poet translated by Wenzig.

The New York Evening Post, under “New Books,” in reviewing Ticknor & Fields’s fancy $3 leatherbound edition HOUSEHOLD FRIENDS A BOOK FOR ALL SEASONS. ILLUSTRATED WITH ENGRAVINGS ON STEEL, mentioned material from the “Winter Animals” chapter of WALDEN by Henry D. Thoreau.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN

(This included, among its fine steel engravings, the initial portrait of Thoreau ever to be published.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1864

July 16, Saturday: The Boston True Flag presented “Homes of New England Authors”:

Only a few miles upon the same road [as the Old Manse] still stands the rough shelter that Thoreau had celebrated in the weird talk of “Walden.”

TIMELINE OF WALDEN EMERSON’S SHANTY HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1866

The Reverend Horatio Alger, Jr. came to be suspected of being engaged in “questionable relations” with a choirboy or two, “deeds too revolting to relate,” and was ousted from the Unitarian church of Brewster on Cape Cod, at which he had been the pastor. He agreed never again to accept a position as a minister, and returned to the home of his father and mother elsewhere. He then relocated to the New-York metropolis, where, over the following three decades, he would “adopt,” live with, and nurture a series of teen-age boys. HOMOSEXUALITY

His cousin, the Reverend William Rounseville Alger, who on August 1, 1854 had been the first to purchase a copy of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS –hot off the press 8 days before its official publication date– during this year prepared a treatise THE SOLITUDES OF NATURE AND OF MAN; OR, THE LONELINESS OF HUMAN LIFE which immediately went through a number of printings, a treatise in which in no uncertain terms he denounced Henry Thoreau. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

On page vii of the Introduction we learn that the objective of this treatise was to learn “how at the same time to win the benefits and shun the evils of being alone.” ... “The subject –the conditions and influences of solitude in its various forms– is so largely concerned with disturbed feelings that it is difficult, in treating it, to keep free from everything unhealthy, excessive, or eccentric.” On page viii we learn that: “The warm effusion of Christianity is better adapted to human nature than the dry chill of Stoicism.”

It was obviously a very low blow, hitting below the belt, to describe Thoreau as he did in terms that suggested that this author had been not only a solitary but also had been “feeling himself,” had been “fondling himself,” (see below) which is to suggest, going one better on the previously published derogations of James Russell Lowell, that Henry had been a masturbator. Nowadays, however, it requires some special explanation of the context for us to grasp just what an utterly low blow it was, because nowadays we have a more accurate theory, an infection theory, of the origins of the tuberculosis from which Thoreau died. This was, however, the period before, during which the contagious nature of the ailment was not yet generally understood. One of the pervasive theories of “phthisis” of that era was that it was a debility brought about through excessive and unrestrained masturbation. The reverend was therefore in effect suggesting to his appreciative audience that the Concord author had, through his lack of self-restraint as persistently exhibited in the text of his manual for life, been responsible for his own early death!

The second half of the volume bears this title page: SKETCHES OF LONELY CHARACTERS: or, PERSONAL ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE GOOD AND EVIL OF SOLITUDE. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN In this second half the reverend author deals serially, in sub-chapters, with Gautama Buddha, Confucius, Demosthenes, Tacitus, Lucretius, Cicero, Boethius, Dante, Petrarch, Tasso, Bruno, Vico, Descartes, Hobbes, Leibnitz, Milton, Pascal, Rousseau, Zimmermann, Beethoven, Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Blanco White, Leopardi, Foster, Channing, Robertson, Chopin, Thoreau (pages 329-338), Maurice de Guérin, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Eugenie de Guérin, Comte, and then with Jesus.

Pages 329-338: If any American deserves to stand as a representative of the experience of reclusiveness, Thoreau is the man. His fellow-feelings and alliances with men were few and feeble; his disgusts and aversions many, as well as strongly pronounced. All his life he was distinguished for his aloofness, austere self-communion, long and lonely walks. He was separated from ordinary persons in grain and habits, by the poetic sincerity of his passion for natural objects and phenomena. As a student and lover of the material world he is a genuine apostle of solitude, despite the taints of affectation, inconsistency, and morbidity which his writings betray. At twenty-eight, on the shore of a lonely pond, he built a hut in which he lived entirely by himself for over two years. And, after he returned to his father’s house in the village, he was for the chief part of the time nearly as much alone as he had been in his hermitage by Walden water. The closeness of his cleaving to the landscape cannot be questioned: “I dream of looking abroad, summer and winter, with free gaze, from some mountain side, nature looking into nature, with such easy sympathy as the blue-eyed grass in the meadow looks in the face of the sky.” When he describes natural scenes, his heart lends a sweet charm to the pages he pens: “Paddling up the river to Fair-Haven Pond, as the sun went down, I saw a solitary boatman disporting on the smooth lake. The falling dews seemed to strain and purify the air, and I was soothed with an infinite stillness. I got the world, as it were, by the name of the neck, and held it under, in the tide of its own events, till it was drowned; and then I let it go down stream like a dead dog. Vast, hollow chambers of silence stretched away on every side; and my being expanded in proportion, and filled them.” In his little forest-house, Thoreau had three chairs, “one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.” “My nearest neighbor is a mile distant. It is as solitary where I live as on the prairies. It is as much Asia or Africa as New England. I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars; and a little world all to myself.” “At night, there was never a traveler passed my door, more than if I were the first or last man.” “We are wont to imagine rare and delectable places in some remote and more celestial corner of the system, — behind the constellation of Cassiopea’s Chair, far from noise and disturbance. I discovered that my house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new and unprofaned, part of the universe.” “I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so compatible as solitude.” In this last sentence we catch a tone from the diseased or disproportioned side of the writer. He was unhealthy and unjust in all his thoughts on society; underrating the value, overrating the dangers, of intercourse with men. But his thoughts on retirement, the still study and love of nature, though frequently exaggerated, are uniformly sound. He has a most catholic toleration, a wholesome and HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN triumphant enjoyment, of every natural object, from star to skunk-cabbage. He says, with tonic eloquence, “Nothing can rightly compel a simple and brave man to a vulgar sadness: while I enjoy the friendship of the seasons, I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me.” But the moment he turns to contemplate his fellow-men, all his geniality leaves him, — he grows bigoted, contemptuous, almost inhuman: “The names of men are of course as cheap and meaningless as Bose and Tray, the names of dogs. I will not allow mere names to make distinctions for me, but still see men in herds.” The cynicism and the sophistry are equal. His scorn constantly exhales: “The Irishman erects his sty, and gets drunk, and jabbers more and more under my eaves; and I am responsible for all that filth and folly. I find it very unprofitable to have much to do with men. Emerson says that his life is so unprofitable and shabby for the most part, that he is driven to all sorts of resources, and, among the rest, to men. I have seen more men than usual, lately; and, well as I was acquainted with one, I am surprised to find what vulgar fellows they are. They do a little business each day, to pay their board; then they congregate in sitting-rooms, and feebly fabulate and paddle in the social slush; and, when I think they have sufficiently relaxed, and am prepared to see them steal away to their shrines, they go unashamed to their beds, and take on a new layer of sloth.” Once in a while he gives a saner voice out of a fonder mood: “It is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, the company grows thinner and thinner, till there is none at all.” But the conceited and misanthropic fit quickly comes back: “Would I not rather be a cedar post, which lasts twenty-five years, than the farmer that set it; or he that preaches to that farmer?” “The whole enterprise of this nation is totally devoid of interest to me. There is nothing in it which one should lay down his life for, — nor even his gloves. What aims more lofty have they than the prairie-dogs?” This poisonous sleet of scorn, blowing manward, is partly an exaggerated rhetoric; partly, the revenge he takes on men for not being what he wants them to be; partly, an expression of his unappreciated soul reacting in defensive contempt, to keep him from sinking below his own estimation of his deserts. It is curious to note the contradictions his inner uneasiness begets. Now he says, “In what concerns you much, do not think you have companions; know that you are alone in the world.” Then he writes to one of his correspondents, “I wish I could have the benefit of your criticism; it would be a rare help to me.” The following sentence has a cheerful surface, but a sad bottom: “I have lately got back to that glorious society, called solitude, where we meet our friends continually, and can imagine the outside world also to be peopled.” At one moment, he says, “I have never felt lonesome, or the least oppressed by a sense of solitude, but once; and then I was conscious of a slight insanity in my mood.” At another moment he says, “Ah! what foreign countries there are, stretching away on every side from every human being with whom you have no sympathy! Their humanity affects one as simply monstrous. When I sit in the parlors and kitchens of some with whom my business brings me — I was going to say — in contact, I feel a sort of awe, and am as forlorn as if I were cast away on a desolate shore. I think of Riley’s narrative, and his sufferings.” That his alienation from society was more bitter than sweet, less the result of constitutional superiority than HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN of dissatisfied experience, is significantly indicated, when we find him saying, at twenty-five, “I seem to have dodged all my days with one or two persons, and lived upon expectation”; at thirty-five, “I thank you again and again for attending to me”; and at forty-five, “I was particularly gratified when one of my friends said, ‘I wish you would write another book, — write it for me.’ He is actually more familiar with what I have written than I am myself.” The truth is, his self-estimate and ambition were inordinate; his willingness to pay the price of their outward gratification, a negative quantity. Their exorbitant demands absorbed him; but he had not those powerful charms and signs which would draw from others a correspondent valuation of him and attention to him. Accordingly, he shut his real self in a cell of secrecy, and retreated from men whose discordant returns repelled, to natural objects whose accordant repose seemed acceptingly to confirm and return, the required estimate imposed on them. The key of his life is the fact that it was devoted to the art of an interior aggrandizement of himself. The three chief tricks in this art are, first, a direct self-enhancement, by a boundless pampering of egotism; secondly, an indirect self-enhancement, by a scornful deprecation of others; thirdly, an imaginative magnifying of every trifle related to self, by associating with it a colossal idea of the self. It is difficult to open many pages in the written record of Thoreau without being confronted with examples of these three tricks. He is constantly, with all his boastful stoicism, feeling himself, reflecting himself, fondling himself, reverberating himself, exalting himself, incapable of escaping or forgetting himself. He is never contented with things until they are wound through, and made to echo himself; and this is the very mark of spiritual disturbance. “When I detect,” he says, “a beauty in any of the recesses of nature, I am reminded, by the serene and retired spirit in which it requires to be contemplated, of the inexpressible privacy of a life.” In the holiest and silentest nook his fancy conjures the spectre of himself, and an ideal din from society for contrast. He says of his own pursuits, “The unchallenged bravery which these studies imply is far more impressive than the trumpeted valor of the warrior.” When he sees a mountain he sings: — Wachuset, who, like me, Standest alone without society, Upholding heaven, holding down earth, — Thy pastime from thy birth, — Not steadied by the one, nor leaning on the other, May I approve myself thy worthy brother!

This self-exaggeration peers out even through the disguise of humor and of satire: “I am not afraid of praise, for I have practised it on myself. The stars and I belong to a mutual-admiration society.” “I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost.”

I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” But he, — he is victorious, sufficing, royal. At all events he will be unlike other people. “I am a mere arena for thoughts and feelings, a slight film, or dash of vapor, so faint an entity, and make so slight an impression, that nobody can find the traces of me.” “I am something to him that made me, undoubtedly, but not much to any other that he has made.” “Many are concerned to know who built the monuments of the East and West. For my part, I should like to know who, in those days, did not build them, — who were above such trifling.” “For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper.” This refrain of opposition between the general thoughts and feelings of mankind and his own, recurs until it becomes comical, and we look for it. He refused invitations to dine out, saying, “They make their pride in making their dinner cost much; I make my pride in making my dinner cost little.” One is irresistibly reminded of Plato’s retort, when Diogenes said, “See how I tread on the pride of Plato.” — “Yes, with greater pride.” But he more than asserts his difference; he explicitly proclaims his superiority: “Sometimes when I compare myself with other men, it seems as if I were more favored by the gods than they.” “When I realize the greatness of the part I am unconsciously acting, it seems as if there were none in history to match it.” Speaking of the scarlet oaks, he adds with Italics, “These are my china-asters, my late garden-flowers; it costs me nothing for a gardener.” The unlikeness of genius to mediocrity is a fact, but not a fact of that relative momentousness entitling it to monopolize attention. He makes a great ado about his absorbing occupation; his sacred engagements with himself; his consequent inability to do anything for others, or to meet those who wished HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN to see him. In the light of this obtrusive trait the egotistic character of many passages like the following become emphatic: “Only think, for a moment, of a man about his affairs! How we should respect him! How glorious he would appear! A man about his business would be the cynosure of all eyes.” He evidently had the jaundice of desiring men to think as well of him as he thought of himself; and, when they would not, he ran into the woods. But he could not escape thus, since he carried them still in his mind. His quotations are not often beautiful or valuable, but appear to be made as bids for curiosity or admiration, or to produce some other sharp effect; as they are almost invariably strange, bizarre, or absurd: culled from obscure corners, Damodara, Iamblichus, the Vishnu Purana, or some such out-of-the-way source. He seems to take oddity for originality, extravagant singularity for depth and force. His pages are profusely peppered with pungent paradoxes and exaggerations, — a straining for sensation, not in keeping with his pretence of sufficing repose and greatness: “Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way?” “All that men have said or are, is a very faint rumor; and it is not worth their while to remember or refer to that.” He exemplifies, to an extent truly astonishing, the great vice of the spiritual hermit; the belittling, because he dislikes them, of things ordinarily considered important; and the aggrandizing, because he likes them, of things usually regarded as insignificant. His eccentricities are uncorrected by collision with the eccentricities of others, and his petted idiosyncrasies spurn at the average standards of sanity and usage. Grandeur, dissociated from him, dwindles into pettiness; pettiness, linked with his immense ego, dilates into grandeur. In his conceited separation he mistakes a crochet for a consecration. If a worm crosses his path, and he stops to watch its crawl, it is greater than an interview with the Duke of Wellington. It is the wise observation of Lavater, that whoever makes too much or to little of himself has a false measure for everything. Few persons have cherished a more preposterous idea of self than Thoreau, or been more persistently ridden by the enormity. This false standard of valuation vitiates every moral measurement he makes. He describes a battle of red and black ants before his wood-pile at Walden, as if it were more important than Marathon or Gettysburg. His faculties were vast, and his time inexpressibly precious: this struggle of the pismires occupied his faculties and time; therefore this struggle of the pismires must be an inexpressibly great matter. A trifle, plus his ego, was immense; an immensity, minus his ego, was a trifle. Is it a haughty conceit or a noble loftiness that makes him say, “When you knock at the Celestial City, ask to see God, — none of the servants”? He says, “Mine is a sugar to sweeten sugar with: if you will listen to me, I will sweeten your whole life.” Again, “I would put forth sublime thoughts daily, as the plant puts forth leaves.” And yet again, “I shall be a benefactor if I conquer some realms from the night, — if I add to the domains of poetry.” After such manifestos, we expect much. We do not find so much as we naturally expect. He was rather an independent and obstinate thinker than a powerful or rich one. His works, taken in their whole range, instead of being fertile in ideas, are marked by speculative HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN sterility. “He was one of those men,” a friendly but honest critic says, “who, from conceit or disappointment, inflict upon themselves a seclusion which reduces them at last, after nibbling everything within reach of their tether, to simple rumination and incessant returns of the same cud to the tongue.” This unsympathetic temper is betrayed in a multitude of such sentences as this: “O ye that would have the cocoanut wrong side outwards! when next I weep I will let you know.” Thoreau is not the true type of a great man, a genuine master of life, because he does not reflect greatness and joy over men and life, but upholds his idea of his own greatness and mastership by making the characters and lives of others mean and little. Those who, like Wordsworth and Channing, reverse this process, are the true masters and models. A feeling of superiority to others, with love and honor for them, is the ground of complacency and a condition of chronic happiness. A feeling of superiority to others, with alienation from them and hate for them, is the sure condition of perturbations and unhappiness. Many a humble and loving author who has nestled amongst his fellow-men and not boasted, has contributed far more to brace and enrich the characters and sweeten the lives of his readers than the ill-balanced and unsatisfied hermit of Concord, part cynic, part stoic, who strove to compensate himself with nature and solitude for what he could not wring from men and society. The extravagant estimate he put on solitude may serve as a corrective of the extravagant estimate put on society by our hives of citizens. His monstrous preference of savagedom to civilization may usefully influence us to appreciate natural unsophisticatedness more highly, and conventionality more lowly. As a teacher, this is nearly the extent of his narrow mission. Lowell [James Russell Lowell], in a careful article, written after reading all the published works of Thoreau, says of him: “He seems to us to have been a man with so high a conceit of himself, that he accepted without questioning, and insisted on our accepting, his defects and weaknesses of character, as virtues and powers peculiar to himself. Was he indolent, — he finds none of the activities which attract or employ the rest of mankind worthy of him. Was he wanting in the qualities that make success, — it is success that is contemptible, and not himself that lacks persistency and purpose. Was he poor, — money was an unmixed evil. Did his life seem a selfish one, — he condemns doing good, as one of the weakest of superstitions.” In relation to the intellectual and moral influence of solitude, the example of Thoreau, with all the alleviating wisdom, courage, and tenderness confessedly in it, is chiefly valuable as an illustration of the evils of a want of sympathy with the community. Yet there is often a deep justice, a grandly tonic breath of self-reliance, in his exhortations. How sound and admirable the following passage: “If you seek the warmth of affection from a similar motive to that from which cats and dogs and slothful persons hug the fire, because your temperature is low through sloth, you are on the downward road. Better the cold affection of the sun, reflected from fields of ice and snow, or his warmth in some still wintry dell. Warm your body by healthful exercise, not by cowering over a stove. Warm your spirit by performing independently noble deeds, not by ignobly seeking the sympathy of your fellows who are no better than yourself.” Though convinced of the justice of this sketch, the writer feels HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN rebuked, as if it were not kind enough, when he remembers the pleasure he has had in many of the pages of Thoreau, and the affecting scene of his funeral on that beautiful summer day in the dreamy town of Concord. There was uncommon love in him, but it felt itself repulsed, and too proud to beg or moan, it put on stoicism and wore it until the mask became the face. His opinionative stiffness and contempt were his hurt self-respect protecting itself against the conventionalities and scorns of those who despised what he revered and revered what he despised. His interior life, with the relations of thoughts and things, was intensely tender and true, however sorely ajar he may have been with persons and with the ideas of persons. If he was sour, it was on a store of sweetness; if sad, on a fund of gladness. While we walked in procession up to the church, though the bell tolled the forty-four years he had numbered, we could not deem that he was dead whose ideas and sentiments were so vivid in our souls. As the fading image of pathetic clay lay before us, strewn with wild flowers and forest sprigs, thoughts of its former occupant seemed blent with all the local landscapes. We still recall with emotion the tributary words so fitly spoken by friendly and illustrious lips. The hands of friends reverently lowered the body of the lonely poet into the bosom of the earth, on the pleasant hillside of his native village, whose prospects will long wait to unfurl themselves to another observer so competent to discriminate their features and so attuned to their moods. And now that it is too late for any further boon amidst his darling haunts below, There will yet his mother yield A pillow in her greenest field, Nor the June flowers scorn to cover The clay of their departed lover. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1872

Spring: John Muir was presented with a copy of the 2d edition of WALDEN as it had been republished by Ticknor and Fields of Boston on March 21, 1862. This copy, now in the Muir library in California, provides us with the following marginalia: • “I have said that Walden has no visible inlet nor outlet....”: “Walden is a Moraine pond wh dates back to the close of the last glacial period when the general New England ice sheet was reeding & is fed by currents wh ooze thro beds of drift.” • “Some have been puzzled to tell how the shore became so regularly paved.”: “By the expansion of the ice in the winter.” • “The pond rises and falls....”: “Caused by differences in general rain-fall & evaporation.” • Baker Farm chapter, “red-alder berry”: “elder-berry”106 • “I felt as if I could spit a Mexican with a good relish, —for why should we always stand for trifles? — and looked round for a woodchuck or a skunk to exercise my chivalry upon.”: “Rather silly.” • “In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.”: Muir underlined this. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

106. Ilex verticillata, the common winterberry, has red berries and grows in wet places. Sambucus canadensis, the common elder, has purple-black berries and grows in wet places. Sambucus pubens, the red-berried elder, lives only on higher ground such as on Mount Monadnock. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1873

Friend John Greenleaf Whittier wrote to Waldo Emerson and spoke of “that wise, wonderful Thoreau.”107 One may very well wonder whether at this point he would have desired to recall his earlier reaction upon reading WALDEN, that it was:

capital reading, but very wicked and heathenish. The practical moral of it seems to be that if a man is willing to sink himself into a woodchuck he can live as cheaply as that quadruped; but after all, for me I prefer walking on two legs.

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107. Why would two members of the Saturday Club have needed to write letters to one another? –Could they not simply have had table talk at their weekly meal with their club? The answer is that Friend John, having no gift for small talk, seldom showed up for these meetings, so seldom that apparently Waldo was even unaware he was a member. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1879

January 12, Sunday: José Martí was appointed as Secretary of the Literary Section of the Guanabacoa Lyceum in Havana.

An early purchaser of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, the Boston lawyer Horatio Woodman, seems to have been unsuccessful in learning from this advice book how to live a life of simplicity and straightforwardness. At this point it would appear that, in considerable stress due to self-induced financial and legal difficulties, he committed suicide, dropping from a steamboat into the Long Island Sound:

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THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN A January night: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

Fine trips across the wide Delaware to-night. Tide pretty high, and a strong ebb. River, a little after 8, full of ice, mostly broken, but some large cakes making our strong-timber’d steamboat hum and quiver as she strikes them. In the clear moonlight they spread, strange, unearthly, silvery, faintly glistening, as far as I can see. Bumping, trembling, sometimes hissing like a thousand snakes, the tide- procession, as we wend with or through it, affording a grand undertone, in keeping with the scene. Overhead, the splendor indescribable; yet something haughty, almost supercilious, in the night. Never did I realize more latent sentiment, almost passion, in those silent interminable stars up there. One can understand, such a night, why, from the days of the Pharaohs or Job, the dome of heaven, sprinkled with planets, has supplied the subtlest, deepest criticism on human pride, glory, ambition.

Another Winter night: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

I don’t know anything more filling than to be on the wide firm deck of a powerful boat, a clear, cool, extra-moonlight night, crushing proudly and resistlessly through this thick, marbly, glistening ice. The whole river is now spread with it — some immense cakes. There is such weirdness about the scene — partly the quality of the light, with its tinge of blue, the lunar twilight — only the large stars holding their own in the radiance of the moon. Temperature sharp, comfortable for motion, dry, full of oxygen. But the sense of power — the steady, scornful, imperious urge of our strong new engine, as she ploughs her way through the big and little cakes.

Another Winter night: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days” For two hours I cross’d and recross’d, merely for pleasure — for a still excitement. Both sky and river went through several changes. The first for awhile held two vast fan-shaped echelons of light clouds, through which the moon waded, now radiating, carrying with her an aureole of tawny transparent brown, and now flooding the whole vast with clear vapory light-green, through which, as through an illuminated veil, she moved with measur’d womanly motion. Then, another trip, the heavens would be absolutely clear, and Luna in all her effulgence. The big Dipper in the north, with the double star in the handle much plainer than common. Then the sheeny track of light in the water, dancing and rippling. Such transformations; such pictures and poems, inimitable. [Page 836] HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Another Winter night: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

I am studying the stars, under advantages, as I cross to-night. (It is late in February, and again extra clear.) High toward the west, the Pleiades, tremulous with delicate sparkle, in the soft heavens. Aldebaran, leading the V-shaped Hyades — and overhead Capella and her kids. Most majestic of all, in full display in the high south, Orion, vast-spread, roomy, chief histrion of the stage, with his shiny yellow rosette on his shoulder, and his three Kings — and a little to the east, Sirius, calmly arrogant, most wondrous single star. Going late ashore, (I couldn’t give up the beauty and soothingness of the night,) as I staid around, or slowly wander’d, I heard the echoing calls of the railroad men in the West Jersey depot yard, shifting and switching trains, engines, &c.; amid the general silence otherways, and something in the acoustic quality of the air, musical, emotional effects, never thought of before. I linger’d long and long, listening to them. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1880

James R. Osgood formed a new J.R. Osgood and Co. as Houghton, Osgood and Co., with the participation of George Mifflin, became Houghton, Mifflin, & Co.

This business entity maintaining copyright to the literary productions of, among others in their full barn of cash cows, Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry Thoreau — and nevertheless an editor of the firm, Horace Scudder, in an introduction to AMERICAN PROSE, alerted the discerning reader to Thoreau’s “protesting attitude” and counseled that because this particular author had been “against the common order of things,” his writings “could not be relied upon as sound and wholesome.” TIMELINE OF THE MAINE WOODS TIMELINE OF WALDEN TIMELINE OF ESSAYS TIMELINE OF CANADA TIMELINE OF CAPE COD TIMELINE OF JOURNAL HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1886

During this year WALDEN came into the public domain, and was immediately printed up by various publishers in various hardbound and paperback editions. It was for instance belatedly published in England, with an introduction by a Will H. Dircks in which he supposes Cambridge, Massachusetts to be to the north of Concord, and in which he gets Thoreau’s age at death wrong.108 1ST ENGLISH EDITION TIMELINE OF WALDEN

This 1st English edition’s blunders were not confined to the introduction it provided, for it also took unwarranted liberties with the text itself — for instance, we find the word “reclines” in the text of the conclusion chapter has been altered into “inclines,” to make the sentence begin “This generation inclines a little to congratulate itself on being the last of an illustrious line....” Copies are even rarer than copies of the 1st American edition, but one copy in good condition is presently available to the less than discriminating reader with more money than sense, from Hirschfeld Galleries of Saint Louis, Missouri, at an asking price of $1,125.00 USD, and also a “bumped” copy with a chip to the head of the spine and minor soiling to the boards is available there at an asking price of $650.00 USD. Step right up, folks!

108. The English poet W.H. Auden would in 1962 bring forward a reworked snippet based upon WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS’s “I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes,” as:

THE VIKING BOOK OF APHORISMS, A PERSONAL SELECTION BY W.H. AUDEN…

Pg Topic Aphorism Selected by Auden out of Thoreau

252 Action Beware all enterprises that require new clothes. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

WALDEN: How long shall we sit in our porticoes practising idle and musty virtues, which any work would make impertinent? As if one were to begin the day with long-suffering, and hire a man to hoe his potatoes; and in the afternoon go forth to practise Christian meekness and charity with goodness aforethought! Consider the China pride and stagnant self-complacency of mankind. This generation reclines a little to congratulate itself on being the last of an illustrious line; and in Boston and London and Paris and Rome, thinking of its long descent, it speaks of its progress in art and science and literature with satisfaction. There are the Records of the Philosophical Societies, and the public Eulogies of Great Men! It is the good Adam contemplating his own virtue. “Yes, we have done great deeds, and sung divine songs, which shall never die.” –that is, as long as we can remember them. The learned societies and great men of Assyria, – where are they? What youthful philosophers and experimentalists we are! There is not one of my readers who has yet lived a whole human life. These may be but the spring months in the life of the race. If we have had the seven-years’ itch, we have not seen the seventeenth-year locust yet in Concord. We are acquainted with a mere pellicle of the globe on which we live. Most have not delved six feet beneath the surface, nor leaped as many above it. We know not where we are. Beside, we are sound asleep nearly half our time. Yet we esteem ourselves wise, and have an established order on the surface. Truly, we are deep thinkers, we are ambitious spirits! As I stand over the insect crawling amid the pine needles on the forest floor, and endeavoring to conceal itself from my sight, and ask myself why it will cherish those humble thoughts, and hide its head from me who might perhaps be its benefactor, and impart to its race some cheering information, I am reminded of the greater Benefactor and Intelligence that stand over me the human insect. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1897

An illustrated 2-volume set of WALDEN by Henry D. Thoreau was dated on its title page M DCCC XCVII.

This year’s English edition was being touted by Houghton Mifflin and Company, Boston and New York/The Cambridge Press, Cambridge as “a book for the individual soul against the world,” no less. Also, this year marked the 1st publication of WALDEN in a language other than English — a partial translation by Emma Emmerich into German, which appeared in München. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Here is Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau’s famous drawing: HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Here is Charles H, Overly’s version of Sister Sophia’s drawing:

Rose Hawthorne Lathrop had walked out on husband George Parsons Lathrop, moved to New-York, and trained as a nurse specializing in terminal care of cancer victims.

At this point Rose wrote MEMORIES OF HAWTHORNE, and she would use the net proceeds of this publication effort to open her refuge for cancer victims on New-York’s Lower East Side (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, pages 420-1): Another peculiar spirit now and then haunted us, usually sad as a pine-tree — Thoreau. His enormous eyes, tame with religious intellect and wild with the loose rein, making a steady flash in this strange unit son of forces, frightened me dreadfully at first. The unanswerable argument which he unwittingly made to soften my heart towards him was to fall desperately ill. During his long illness my mother lent him our sweet old music-box, to which she had danced as it warbled at the Old Manse, in the first year of her marriage, and which now softly dreamed forth its tunes in a time-mellowed tone. When he died, it seemed as if an anemone, more lovely than any other, had been carried from the borders of a wood into its silent depths, and dropped, in solitude and shadow, among the recluse ferns and mosses which are so seldom disturbed by passing feet. Son of freedom and opportunity that he was, he touched the heart by going to nature’s peacefulness like the saints, and girding upon his HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN American sovereignty the hair-shirt of service to self-denial. He was happy in his intense discipline of the flesh, as all men are when they have once tasted power — if it is the power which awakens perception of the highest concerns. His countenance had an April pensiveness about it; you would never have guessed that he could write of owls so jocosely. His manner was such as to suggest that he could mope and weep with them. I never crossed an airy hill or broad field in Concord, without thinking of him who had been the companion of space as well as of delicacy; the lover of the wood-thrush, as well as of the Indian. Walden woods rustled the name of Thoreau whenever we walked in them. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Here is Professor Lawrence Buell on pages 321-2 of THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMAGINATION: THOREAU, NATURE WRITING, AND THE FORMATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE: During Henry Thoreau’s life and for some time thereafter, Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne were the great literary figures one came to see or track. They and the lure of Concord’s Revolutionary fame kept the tourist’s or pilgrim’s interests focused more on the village than on the woods. Even as late as the turn of the century, some tourist guidebooks made no mention, or scant mention, of Walden Pond (“too far from the center of town for the average tourist to visit,” judged one in 1895), though they inevitably cited Thoreau as a local author. A typical promotion piece, issued on the occasion of the Emerson Centenary (1903), placed Emerson first (as probably “the best known of anyone who has ever lived here”) followed by Hawthorne. In 1904, the decade’s most famous literary pilgrim, Henry James, Jr., strayed as far from the village center as the Concord River but, while paying Thoreau tribute in a hasty parenthetical phrase, insisted on associating even the sylvan places of Concord with Emerson’s genius: “not a russet leaf fell for me, while I was there, but fell with an Emersonian drop.” But Thoreau’s disciples had already begun to predict in the 1890s that “Thoreau will continue to grow, while Emerson will become more and more of a back number.” Franklin Benjamin Sanborn –the last surviving member of the antebellum Concord transcendentalist group, and its most officious memorializer– had begun prudently to tip the scales of his praise so as to give Thoreau more play, Emerson less. In 1897, a villager in the literary souvenir business told a visitor that Thoreau items were selling better than Emerson and Hawthorne memorabilia. [Emphasis added] In 1898, Thomas Wentworth Higginson observed that Thoreau’s manuscript letters were fetching the same as Hawthorne’s ($17.50) and nearly four times Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s. In 1904, an enterprising Concordian advertised in a Boston paper that he owned some of the remaining timbers of Thoreau’s cabin, presumably displayable at a price. In 1906 Good Housekeeping noted that Thoreau hatpins, made from the nuts of a tree he supposedly once sowed, were being sold in Concord. More important, that same year Thoreau became the first American man of letters to have his private journal published in full — with a few judicious deletions, of course. Reappraising Concord culture in 1919, forty years after having been a student in the Concord School of Philosophy, Henry Beers of Yale University confessed that Thoreau was interesting him more and more, Emerson less, and registered little surprise at Franklin Benjamin Sanborn’s recently quoted statement that Thoreau was the Concordian most likely to endure. These signs of the times coincided with the more conventional mark of literary canonization: Thoreau’s promotion, by 1900, to major figure status in the majority of surveys of American literature.

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THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1899

Professor Bliss Perry began to edit The Atlantic Monthly. His forgettable novel THE POWERS AT PLAY. (NOT WORTH YOUR WHILE)

In Holland, Frederik van Eeden started a cooperative colony named “Walden.” However, he would protest later that:

I did not believe in non-resistance, nor did I reject the aid of machinery in the struggle for existence. And the name “Walden,” given to my settlement, only proved that I admired Thoreau as an author, not that I shared all his views.

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THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1900

An abridged translation of WALDEN appeared in Moscow. It was entitled OPYT UPROSHCHENYA ZHIZNI UVALDENSKOVO OZERA V AMERIKE, that is, AN EXPERIMENT IN SIMPLIFIED LIFE: AT WALDEN POND IN AMERICA. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1902

The partial Emmerich translation of Henry Thoreau’s WALDEN into German was republished in München.

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Frederik van Eeden provided the foreword for the 1st Dutch edition of Henry Thoreau’s WALDEN, a translation by Johgh van Damwoude published in Bussum. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Zdeněk Franta’s translation of Henry Thoreau’s WALDEN into Czech was published by Jan Laichter in Prague. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN In Bohemia, Henry Thoreau’s WALDEN and Epictetus’s ENCHIRIDION were translated by Zdenek Franta.

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THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1905

The partial 1897 Emma Emmerich translation of WALDEN into German was added to by Wilhelm Nobbe and republished in Jena and Leipzig. TIMELINE OF WALDEN Wenn ich versuchen wollte zu schildern, wie ich in früheren Tagen mein Leben zu verbringen wünschte, würden wahrscheinlich diejenigen meiner Leser, die meinen wirklichen Lebenslauf kennen, überrascht sein. Diejenigen, die gar nichts davon wissen, würden einfach staunen. Ich will nur einige Unternehmungen, an denen ich meine Freude hatte, andeuten. Bei jedem Wetter, zu jeder Tages- oder Nachtstunde versuchte ich den gegebenen Augenblick zu benutzen. Immer war ich bedacht dort festen Fuß zu fassen, wo zwei Ewigkeiten – Vergangenheit und Zukunft – zusammentreffen, d.h. gerade im jeweiligen Augenblick. Gerade dort wich ich keinen Zoll. Mit einigen Unklarheiten muß der Leser schon Nachsicht haben, denn in meinem Handwerk gibt es mehr Geheimnisse als in den meisten anderen. Und doch werden diese nicht vorsätzlich gehütet, sondern die Natur der Sache bringt es mit sich. Ich würde mit Freuden alles, was ich darüber weiß, mitteilen und niemals an meine Tür schreiben: »Zutritt verboten«. Vor langer Zeit verlor ich einen Jagdhund, ein rotbraunes Pferd und eine Turteltaube. Noch immer suche ich sie. Zahlreich sind die Wanderer, mit denen ich über die Verlorenen sprach, denen ich die Spuren beschrieben habe und die Rufe, auf die meine Tiere hörten. Ein paar Leute hatten das Bellen des Hundes, den Hufschlag des Pferdes vernommen, ja sie hatten auch die Taube gesehen, wie sie gerade hinter einer Wolke verschwand. Und sie waren so erpicht darauf sie wieder einzufangen, als ob sie selbst sie verloren hätten. Es gilt, nicht nur dem Sonnenaufgang und der Morgendämmerung, nein, womöglich der Natur selbst zuvorzukommen! Wie oft bin ich in der Frühe, im Sommer wie im Winter, bevor noch irgend ein Nachbar zur Arbeit sich anschickte, bei meiner Arbeit gewesen. Sicherlich haben mich manche meiner Mitbürger gesehen, wenn ich von meiner Beschäftigung zurückkehrte: Farmer, die im Zwielicht nach Boston wanderten oder Holzhacker, die zur Arbeit gingen. Allerdings, ich half der Sonne nicht wesentlich beim Aufgehen, aber zweifellos war allein schon meine Anwesenheit bei diesem Ereignis von allerhöchster Wichtigkeit. Wie viele Herbst- und Wintertage verlebte ich außerhalb der Stadt, um zu hören, was der Wind sagte, und dann das Gehörte als Eilgut weiterzutragen: Fast mein ganzes Vermögen steckte ich hinein und verlor obendrein meinen Atem bei dem Handel, wenn ich ihm entgegenstürmte. Hätte er von politischen Parteien erzählt, Ihr könnt Euch drauf verlassen, es hätte unter »Neueste Nachrichten« alsbald in der Zeitung gestanden. An anderen Tagen hielt ich von dem Observatorium eines Felsens oder eines Baumes aus Wache, um irgend eine ungewohnte Ankunft weiter zu telegraphieren, oder ich wartete abends auf den Gipfeln der Hügel darauf, daß der Himmel sich herniedersenke, damit ich ein Stückchen davon erwischen könne. Doch ich erwischte niemals viel, und selbst das zerschmolz wie Manna in der Sonne. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1906

Newell Convers Wyeth and Carolyn Brenneman Bockius were wed in the Wilmington Unitarian church. They would make their home in nearby Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. The Wyeths were members of the 1st Unitarian Society of Wilmington. All their children –the inventor “Nathaniel,” the composer Ann Wyeth McCoy, and the artists Henriette Wyeth Hurd, Carolyn and Andrew– would grow up in that church (none would remain Unitarian Universalists). Carolyn Brenneman Bockius Wyeth would persuade her husband to re-evaluate Henry Thoreau, whom he had been dismissing as merely another “amateur naturalist,” and WALDEN would come to serve in that family virtually in place of the BIBLE (the artist would also come to own the 1906 collected edition of Thoreau’s writings, with his JOURNAL). TIMELINE OF WALDEN

In Houghton, Mifflin’s Riverside Press series AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS, Professor Bliss Perry’s potboiler WALT WHITMAN. (NOT WORTH YOUR WHILE)

Employees of The Riverside Press belonged to the International Typographical Union, which, with 642 locals, led a drive for an 8-hour day and a union shop. When the Boston locals went out on strike, the Cambridge Typographical Union (which included employees from The Riverside Press, the University Press and the Atheneum Press) held a mass meeting. Capitulating to the threat of a strike, the three employers consented to an 8-hour day, but not to a union shop. Houghton, Mifflin, after trimming many of the 520 leaves the corporation had obtained from Thoreau’s trunk (cutting many in half) and after mounting the full and half leaves on larger sheets, bound Henry Thoreau’s original manuscripts into the first volume of each of its 620 THE MANUSCRIPT EDITION OF THOREAU’S WRITINGS sets and into the first volume of an undisclosed number of its 200 specially bound WALDEN EDITION sets.

On the following screen is WALDEN in the Riverside edition that would be sold through the 1920s. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Raymond R. Borst has noted in HENRY DAVID THOREAU: A DESCRIPTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY (Pittsburgh PA: U of Pittsburgh P, 1982, page 168) that of the 200 specially bound sets of the Walden Edition with a manuscript tipped into the first volume, only 6 still contained their manuscripts by the time recovery was attempted. Of the 180 or so Manuscript and Walden Edition leaves recovered to date, 23 full and 9 half leaves are “LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE” manuscripts. Assuming that the 180 or so manuscripts that have been recovered are a HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN representative sampling of the 520 manuscripts that were dispersed in 1906, then the ratio of “Life without Principle” manuscripts recovered –a total of 27 1/2 leaves– to the total number of manuscripts recovered suggests that just over 15% or about 80 of the 520 manuscripts dispersed were “Life without Principle” leaves. This means that approximately 52 full-leaf “Life without Principle” leaves yet remain to be accounted for. If you can find out anything about any manuscript that is or was bound into the Manuscript or the Walden Edition, you should contact the Thoreau Textual Center at the U of California – Santa Barbara. BRAD DEAN’S COMMENTARY

At some early point HENRY THOREAU’S FRIENDSHIP AND OTHER ESSAYS began to be published by the Little Leather Library Corporation, and later by Robert K. Haas Publishers, in a red-leather series labeled “Little Leather Luxart.” The packet of 92 pages would be reprinted down through the years without publication date:

TIMELINE OF ESSAYS HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

THE WORKS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906Journal I, 1837-1847: TIMELINE OF THE MAINE WOODS TIMELINE OF WALDEN TIMELINE OF ESSAYS TIMELINE OF CANADA TIMELINE OF CAPE COD TIMELINE OF JOURNAL

1837 (æt. 20) 1838 (æt. 20-21) 1839 (æt. 21-22) 1840 (æt. 22-23) 1841 (æt. 23-24) 1842(æt. 24-25) 1845-1846 (æt. 27-29) 1845-1847 (æt. 27-30) 1837-1847 (æt. 20-30) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Journal II, 1850-September 15, 1851: 1850 (æt. 32-33) December 1850 (æt. 33) January-April 1851 (æt. 33) May 1851 (æt. 33) June 1851 (æt. 33) July 1851 (æt. 33-34) August 1851 (æt. 34) September 1851 (æt. 34) Journal III, September 16, 1851-April 30, 1852: September-October 1851 (æt. 34) November 1851 (æt. 34) December 1851 (æt. 34) January 1852 (æt. 34) February 1852 (æt. 34) March 1852 (æt. 34) April 1852 (æt. 34) Journal IV, March 1, 1852-February 27, 1853: May 1852 (æt. 34) June 1852 (æt. 34) July 1852 (æt. 34-35) August 1852 (æt. 35) September 1852 (æt. 35) October 1852 (æt. 35) November 1852 (æt. 35) December 1852 (æt. 35) January 1853 (æt. 35) February 1853 (æt. 35) Journal V, March 5-November 30, 1853: March 1853 (æt. 35) April 1853 (æt. 35) May 1853 (æt. 35) June 1853 (æt. 35) July 1853 (æt. 35-36) August 1853 (æt. 36) September 1853 (æt. 36) October 1853 (æt. 36) November 1853 (æt. 36) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Journal VI, December 1, 1853-August 31, 1854: December 1853 (æt. 36) January 1854 (æt. 36) February 1854 (æt. 36) March 1854 (æt. 36) April 1854 (æt. 36) May 1854 (æt. 36) June 1854 (æt. 36) July 1854 (æt. 36-37) August 1854 (æt. 37) Journal VII, September 1, 1854-October 30, 1855: September 1854 (æt. 37) October 1854 (æt. 37) November 1854 (æt. 37) December 1854 (æt. 37) January 1855 (æt. 37) February 1855 (æt. 37) March 1855 (æt. 37) April 1855 (æt. 37) May 1855 (æt. 37) June 1855 (æt. 37) July 1855 (æt. 37-38) August 1855 (æt. 38) September 1855 (æt. 38) October 1855 (æt. 38) Journal VIII, November 1, 1855-August 15, 1856: November 1855 (æt. 38) December 1855 (æt. 38) January 1856 (æt. 38) February 1856 (æt. 38) March 1856 (æt. 38) April 1856 (æt. 38) May 1856 (æt. 38) June 1856 (æt. 38) July 1856 (æt. 38-39) August 1-15, 1856 (æt. 39) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Journal IX, August 16, 1856-August 7, 1857: August 16-30, 1856 (æt. 39) September 1856 (æt. 39) October 1856 (æt. 39) November 1856 (æt. 39) December 1856 (æt. 39) January 1857 (æt. 39) February 1857 (æt. 39) March 1857 (æt. 39) April 1857 (æt. 39) May 1857 (æt. 39) June 1857 (æt. 39) July 1857 (æt. 39-40) August 1-7, 1857 (æt. 40) Journal X, August 8, 1857-June 29, 1858: August 7-30, 1857 (æt. 40) September 1857 (æt. 40) October 1857 (æt. 40) November 1857 (æt. 40) December 1857 (æt. 40) January 1858 (æt. 40) February 1858 (æt. 40 March 1858 (æt. 40) April 1858 (æt. 40) May 1858 (æt. 40) June 1858 (æt. 40) Journal XI, July 2, 1858-February 28, 1859: July 1858 (æt. 40-41) August 1858 (æt. 41) September 1858 (æt. 41) October 1858 (æt. 41) November 1858 (æt. 41) December 1858 (æt. 41) January 1859 (æt. 41) February 1859 (æt. 41) Journal XII, March 2, 1859-November 30, 1859: March 1859 (æt. 41) April 1859 (æt. 41) May 1859 (æt. 41) June 1859 (æt. 41) July 1859 (æt. 41-42) August 1859 (æt. 42) September 1859 (æt. 42) October 1859 (æt. 42) November 1859 (æt. 42) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Journal XIII, December 1, 1859-July 31, 1860: December 1859 (æt. 35) January 1860 (æt. 35) February 1860 (æt. 35) March 1860 (æt. 35) April 1860 (æt. 35-36) May 1860 (æt. 36) June 1860 (æt. 36) July 1860 (æt. 36) Journal XIV, August 1, 1860-November 3, 1861: August 1860 (æt. 43) September 1860 (æt. 43) October 1860 (æt. 43) November 1860 (æt. 43) December 1860 (æt. 43) 1861 (æt. 43-44) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1909

During this year and the following one, publication of Waldo Emerson’s “Journals 1820-1876,” edited into 10 volumes by son Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson and grandson Waldo Emerson Forbes. EMERSON’S JOURNAL, I EMERSON’S JOURNAL, II EMERSON’S JOURNAL, III EMERSON’S JOURNAL, IV EMERSON’S JOURNAL, V EMERSON’S JOURNAL, VI EMERSON’S JOURNAL, VII EMERSON’S JOURNAL, VIII EMERSON’S JOURNAL, IX EMERSON’S JOURNAL, X HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN In Boston, publication of a “Bibliophile” edition of Henry Thoreau’s WALDEN in two volumes “printed for members only”: TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1910

WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, by P. Boulanger, appeared in Moscow, Russia: VALDEN, ILI ZHIZN’ VLESAKH. The book was a full translation of the text; however, in the material which accompanied Henry Thoreau’s words the author was presented to the Russian reader entirely by way of the attitudes of Waldo Emerson.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN In Concord, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn was conceding that the area leading toward Walden Pond had been considered by Concordians, rather than as a favored spot for picnics and recreations or for vacation cabins and fishing shanties, to have been “of dark repute, the home of pariahs and lawless characters.”

A modestly annotated edition of WALDEN with introduction and thumbnail biography of author was produced by Raymond Macdonald Alden, PhD, of Leland Stanford Junior University in California: TIMELINE OF WALDEN

VIEW THE PAGE IMAGES

It was this Associate Professor of English’s considered opinion that the strictly literary value of the work was very uneven. Thoreau had written freely and unsystematically, as he thought and lived, not seeking to order his material carefully, or to build up the structure of his thought in the manner of one who really tries to prove something. Sometimes Thoreau’s pencil seemed to linger and amble when a critic might have preferred for it to have proceeded more directly to some point. In his considered opinion this writing was certainly longer than it needed to be and it would be perfectly all right for a busy undergrad to flip past chapters six, seven, nine, ten, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and seventeen — although “by no means omitting” the final, eighteenth chapter.

(This volume contains what perhaps was the first attempt at annotations and notes to the text. One of Associate Professor Raymond Macdonald Alden’s suggestions was that implicit in the pages of Thoreau’s WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN might have been a reference to the American woman poet, Mrs. Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney — but alas, it seems the good professor was mistaken here as well!)

May 25, Wednesday: V. Bulgakov recorded a conversation with Lev Nikolævich Tolstòy:

In the evening he said that he had read a book, WALDEN, and as he did not like it before, so he does not like it now. “Purposely original, boastful, restless,” said Lev Nikolævich about Thoreau.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN

September: Clifton Johnson provided an unremarkable introduction and an unremarkable set of photographs for an edition of WALDEN by Thomas Y. Crowell & Company of New York. CLIFTON JOHNSON TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1911

July 12: SHINRINSEIKATSU, by “Toroh,” an annotated but incomplete translation of WALDEN, appeared in Japan. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Beginning of August: In Japan, a 2d printing of SHINRINSEIKATSU by “Toroh,” an annotated but incomplete translation of WALDEN, became necessary. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

August 30, Wednesday: Kimmochi Saionji replaced Prince Taro Katsura as prime minister of Japan.

A 3d printing of SHINRINSEIKATSU by “Toroh,” an annotated but incomplete translation of WALDEN, became necessary. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1913

The 1st US crossword puzzle appeared, in a New York newspaper.

According to THE LIVING AGE (Boston: The Living Age Company, 8th Series, Volume XXVI for April, May, and June 1922): It is said that in 1913, M. Louis Fabulet, the translator of Kipling, went to M. André Gice of the Nouvelle Revue Française to tell him of an American writer whom he thought the French public ought to know. Before his visitor had pronounced the name, M. Gide drew a copy of WALDEN from his pocket and set it on the table. M. Gide had had the same idea as M. Fabulet, and in fact had already translated a few pages. Later, when M. Fabulet was about to publish his translation [WALDEN, LA VIE DANS LE BOIS], he learned to his surprise that M. Léon Bazalgette, the translator of Walt Whitman, had undertaken the same task and was already well advanced with an entirely independent translation of WALDEN. Upon learning, however, that M. Fabulet had completed his work, M. Bazalgette gracefully retired in his favor. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1921

Professor Bliss Perry’s THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE, A CHRONICLE OF GREAT INTERPRETERS. (NOT WORTH YOUR WHILE)

By this year Houghton Mifflin Company had become the 4th-largest educational publisher in the United States. It still owned copyright to the literary productions of Henry David Thoreau (many things do change about the United States of America — but not property rights) and was continuing to flog this cash cow for all it was worth.

Meanwhile, in Tokyo, another translation of WALDEN into the Japanese language, by Kazuo Iwai, was published by Shincho-sha, and was being widely publicized. The book was to become a favorite in the camping movement (which makes one rather dubious of the sophistication of this translation) and there would be a number of reprintings. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

March 1, Tuesday: Here is Louis Fabulet (1862-1933), describing for us in the pages of Le Revue de Paris the seven years of his life during which he had devoted himself (at the urging of André Gide) to providing for the French public a most careful translation of “Henry-David” Thoreau’s WALDEN, OU LA VIE DANS LES BOIS: “Or, incident qui me paraît valoir d’être ici mentionné, André Gide, avant que j’eusse prononcé nom d’auteur ni titre d’ouvrage, mais sur la nature du bien que je lui disais des deux, sourit, porta la main à sa poche, en tira un livre, qu’il me tendit. C’était Walden, et il en avait, me dit-il, entrepris la traduction quelques jours auparavant. Nous nous rencontrions à un carrefour. Mon instinct devenait certitude. En l’aimable fraternité que nous lui connaissons, et sachant que je m’étais fait métier de donner à notre pays la version de ce que je sentais lui être profitable, il m’abandonna généreusement le privilège de traduire Walden. Je l’en remercie publiquement ici. Je viens de vivre sept années en communion parfaite avec la pensée de Henry-David Thoreau, sept années, parfois peut-être non sans effort ni lutte intérieure, dans le silence de la solitude, au cours desquelles toujours en moi a triomphé le sentiment que mon devoir, puisque je ne me trouvais pas appelé sur la première ligne du front de bataille, était de traduire ce livre pour la France, destinée peut-être, en sa mission dans le monde, à faire de cette source pure encore un fleuve, un fleuve, celui-ci, débordant de sagesse et d’amour de la vie. Années où aidé des leçons de la guerre j’ai mis, en ce qui me concerne, l’esprit du livre en pratique, et, ce faisant, ai conquis le bonheur.” TIMELINE OF WALDEN “En octobre 1913 j’allai parler à André Gide d’un livre, écrit en langue anglaise, paru en Amérique vers 1854, alors récemment venu ma connaissance, livre qu’il me semblait expédient de faire lire à nos compatriotes. C’est plus tard, et même tout récemment, que j’ai appris qu’il s’agit du livre classique des Américains, du livre de classe de la jeunesse américaine, et qu’à lui comme aux autres ouvrages du même auteur nous devons aujourd’hui le goût de la vie au grand air, de la culture physique, du camping et de tout ce qui nous rapproche de la nature, de la vie naturelle. Il est grave de prendre seul la responsabilité qui consiste à affirmer le premier à son pays la valeur d’une oeuvre étrangère. J’ai connu l’hésitation autour de moi, et parmi les esprits les plus avertis au regard de la littérature, à admirer les Livres de la Jungle aussi bien que l’oeuvre subséquent de Rudyard Kipling. J’ai, durant des années, emporté dans mon bagage au cours de mes déplacements une large photographie de la Création HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN de l’Homme, de la Sixtine, pour la clouer partout à mon chevet dans le temps que je traduisais les Feuilles d’Herbe, et par là m’assurer que je ne m’abusais pas, que les deux hommes, Walt Whitman et Michel-Ange, étaient deux sommets d’égale altitude, ignorant alors que je serais devancé par Léon Bazalgette. Il s’agissait maintenant d’un second Américain, contemporain de Walt Whitman, animé comme lui du souffle de vérité qui semble avoir passé sur les États-Unis au moment où allait être résolue à jamais la question de l’esclavage nègre. Tous deux issus de Ralph Waldo Emerson, leur aîné d’une quinzaine d’années. Ce nouvel écrivain, dont je croyais devoir interpréter l’œuvre, était Henry-David Thoreau, et l’oeuvre avait pour titre: Walden, ou la Vie dans les Bois. Or, incident qui me paraît valoir d’être ici mentionné, André Gide, avant que j’eusse prononcé nom d’auteur ni titre d’ouvrage, mais sur la nature du bien que je lui disais des deux, sourit, porta la main à sa poche, en tira un livre, qu’il me tendit. C’était Walden, et il en avait, me dit-il, entrepris la traduction quelques jours auparavant. Nous nous rencontrions à un carrefour. Mon instinct devenait certitude. En l’aimable fraternité que nous lui connaissons, et sachant que je m’étais fait métier de donner à notre pays la version de ce que je sentais lui être profitable, il m’abandonna généreusement le privilège de traduire Walden. Je l’en remercie publiquement ici. Je viens de vivre sept années en communion parfaite avec la pensée de Henry-David Thoreau, sept années, parfois peut-être non sans effort ni lutte intérieure, dans le silence de la solitude, au cours desquelles toujours en moi a triomphé le sentiment que mon devoir, puisque je ne me trouvais pas appelé sur la première ligne du front de bataille, était de traduire ce livre pour la France, destinée peut-être, en sa mission dans le monde, à faire de cette source pure encore un fleuve, un fleuve, celui-ci, débordant de sagesse et d’amour de la vie. Années où aidé des leçons de la guerre j’ai mis, en ce qui me concerne, l’esprit du livre en pratique, et, ce faisant, ai conquis le bonheur. Si l’on me demande qui est Henry-David Thoreau, habitué que l’on est, en un fâcheux pharisaïsme, baucoup plus à se montrer curieux de la personnalité ou des faits et gestes du sage, voire l’adorer, sinon adorer ses vieux ustensiles, qu’à mettre en pratique ses enseignements ou l’imiter d’exemple, je répondrai que, arrière petit-fils du Français Philippe Thoreau, qui avait émigré de l’île de Jersey à Boston, mais pourvu du côté des femmes de bonne part de sang écossais, il naquit à Concord, Massachusetts, le 12 juillet 1817. De taille moyenne, paraît- il, il avait le visage vermeil de ceux qui aiment sentir sur la joue le baiser du grand air, des yeux bleu gris sous des cheveux bruns, et le puissant nez émersonien. Il fit ses premières études à l’école de Concord, et plus tard, en 1837, grâce à l’affection de sa soeeur Hele, elle-même maîtresse d’école, et à qui il dut en grande partie son éducation, put prendre son degré à l’Université de Harvard, avec d’excellentes notes. Durant comme immédiatement après ces dernières années d’étude, il s’adonna, lui aussi, à l’enseignement, et de bonne heure fit des conférences au Concord Lyceum. Puis il prit part à l’industrie de son père, lequel fabriquait des crayons, à l’amélioration desquels tout de suite il contribua, les amenant à un degré de perfection tel qu’à cet égard la fortune lui était HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN assurée d’ores et déjà, si aux félicitations de ses amis il n’eût répondu qu’il ne fabriquerait pas un crayon de plus. Lui-même dira qu’il entreprit bien des métiers, et toujours d’humbles métiers, surtout des métiers de plein air. Il réussit dans tous. Il faisait bien ce qu’il faisait, honnête en tout, et, au premier chef, vis-à-vis de soi. «Ne plantez pas un clou, dit-il, que, vous éveillant la nuit, vous ne ressentiez le contentement de votre oeuvre.» C’est en 1845 qu’il bâtit de ses mains sa fameuse cabane au bord de l’Étang de Walden, aujourd’hui reconstituée, je crois, et lieu de pèlerinage. Il contera dans Walden les jours qu’il y passa. Ils sont de telle qualité que la vie humaine de la sorte vécue peut enfin être prise pour un bienfait de la nature. Non pas la vie artificielle, décevante, que nous a faite la société. «Je ne voulais pas vivre ce qui n’était pas la vie, tant vivre est bon», dit-il. Et telle est la pensée: tant vivre est bon, qui, lorsqu’on referme le livre sur la dernière page, vous vient à l’esprit en communion avec l’auteur, et la pensée sur laquelle les nouvelles générations s’inspirant de Henry-David Thoreau, devront s’appuyer pour fonder la vie nouvelle à quoi rêve actuellement en sa subconscience l’entière humanité. «Je n’entends pas écrire une ode à la dépression, dit-il encore à propos de Walden, mais chanter victoire aussi vigoureusement que Chanteclerc au matin, debout sur son perchoir, quand ce ne serait que pour réveiller mes voisins.» Que restait-il encore d’artificiel en l’esprit de Robert-Louis Stevenson lorsqu’il osait traiter Henry-David Thoreau de «skulker», c’est-à-dire de poltron, d’homme qui se cache, qui évité, alors qu’en ces années où Thoreau subvint de ses seules mains aux besoins de son existence, il avait au contraire assumé toutes les responsabilités humaines et donné la mesure d’un courage dont peu d’hommes fournirent jamais la preuve? C’est ce même Robert-Louis Stevenson qui, parlant encore de Henry-David Thoreau, dit ironiquement, en Anglais qui veut, avec entêtement, ne pas ajouter foi à la valeur d’un Américain et en romantique attardé: «Il n’est pas donné à tous de témoigner si clairement de l’heur de leur destin... car ce monde-ci, en lui-même, n’est qu’un pénible et incommode lieu de résidence.» Sans doute, ce monde, tel justement que l’ont fait les hommes qui ne traitent pas avec la vérité comme a traité l’auteur de Walden, lequel eût-il été même malingre et invalide comme Robert-Louis Stevenson, aurait, lui, adressé quelque cantique à son frère le Mal, à sa soeur la Souffrance. Ainsi, d’un côté, celui qui trouve ce monde-ci «un pénible et incommode lieu de résidence», et ne veut admettre la pensée de l’améliorer; de l’autre celui qui dit: «tant vivre est bon!» et livre le secret d’être heureux. A. l’humanité de choisir. Je dois ajouter, toutefois, que plus tard Robert-Louis Stevenson retira l’épithète de «skulker». Mais qu’importe son opinion sur Henry-David Thoreau, en dépit de tout ce que, parfait écrivain, il a pu par ailleurs nous donner d’admirable. Demandez seulement à Rudyard Kipling combien de ses propres pages vivent du souffle de Walden. Sans oser le questionner, c’est chose que je sens bien. Walden suffit à affirmer sa propre maîtrise sur toutes autres productions du cerveau humain. Ici, non pas les méandres de philosophies qui veulent prouver l’improuvable, inventent de toutes pièces des paradis ou des enfers pour âmes faibles, calculent que deux et deux font quatre, quand deux et deux font cinq, prétendent à du HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN génie pour être de première force au jeu d’échecs. Non, le simple instinct doublé de la raison presque enfantine, et par là combien supérieure, parce que plus près de Dieu, de Christophe Colomb. L’instinct de ceux qui travaillent chaque jour à s’élever au point qu’ils arrivent à prendre contact avec la divinité, et connaître ce qui sera tout aussi bien que ce qui a été. Je ne sache pas de pensée qui s’identifie davantage au conseil que pourrait donner la divinité elle-même, que celle- ci, formulée par l’auteur de Walden: «Prête-t-on l’oreille aux plus intimes mais constantes inspirations de son génie, qui certainement sont sincères, qu’on ne voit à quels extrêmes, sinon à quelle démence il peut vous conduire; cependant, au fur et à mesure que vous devenez plus fidèle à vous-même, c’est cette direction que suit votre chemin.» J’imagine chaque homme mettant cette pensée en action: à quel degré de bonheur l’humanité ne tarderait pas à parvenir! Mais rétif, l’homme résiste, secoue la tête, secoue l’oreille, s’en tient avec un entêtement de mule aux traditions, à la lâche habitude, au piétinement sur place, ce qui le maintient en cet état constant de mécontentement de soi qu’il témoigne, et fait de la société ce «lieu de résidence pénible et incommode» opposé à l’affirmation de Henry-David Thoreau. J’ai essayé l’enseignement que fournit Walden sur un jeune garçon qui s’éveillait à la raison. Je dois dire dire qu’il est doué d’une intelligence très grande, l’une des plus pleines de promesses qu’il m’ait été donné de rencontrer. Devant ce, que je lui en dévoilais, ses yeux s’ouvraient, à mon regard émerveillé, sur des horizons qui se reflétaient en aurore sur sa face; et il prit la morale de Walden pour sienne, s’avisa, grâce à elle, au seuil de la vie, de ne se laisser prendre à aucun des rets dans lesquels l’homme social actuel s’enchevêtre sottement et comme à plaisir, et dont l’entière société arrive à ne se pouvoir déprendre sans tout briser. Ce garçon, aujourd’hui jeune homme de dix-neuf ans, ne concevrait plus de se voir servi par ses semblables, supporte à peine du sel dans ses aliments, c’est dire qu’il n’y tolère poivre, épices ni condiments, ne comprend que l’eau en fait de breuvage, s’abstient de sucre, «n’apporte pas de religion à la table plus qu’il n’y demande de bénédicité», comme il est dit dans Walden, ne fume pas, dois-je l’ajouter? et jouit de la vie comme jamais encore je n’avais vu un être humain en jouir avec tant d’amour, de confiance, d’abandon, de sûreté de soi. Car adopter les voies de Henry-David Thoreau, ce n’est pas, obligatoirement, prendre à son exemple une hache, et s’en aller se bâtir une cabane au bord d’un étang pour, dans la solitude, y subsister du produit d’un champ; c’est vivre, en tous nos états de vie, dans l’obéissance à la suggestion de nos plus élevés instincts, dans le mépris de la tradition, voire de l’expérience, je n’ajoute de l’habitude ni de l’opinion, et dans le sacrifice pour cela, s’il le faut, de nos affections mêmes. Pour cela il ne s’agit pas d’être un «skulker», mais il s’agit d’être ce que s’est montré Henry-David Thoreau, un homme doué du vrai courage viril. Le bonheur est à ce prix, mais il est sûr. N’en voudrons-nous pas? L’auteur de Walden énonçait, au milieu du XIXe siècle, une vérité qui doit aujourd’hui nous faire plus que jamais réfléchir, car jamais elle ne fut plus apparente: c’est qu’on a commis la faute de faire prévaloir les intérêts matériels sur HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN les spirituels -et je m’entends lorsque je dis intérêts spirituels,- que ce ne sont les automobiles, les aéroplanes, plus que la télégraphie sans fil ni toutes les inventions de cet ordre qui feront faire un pas à l’humanité vers le but auquel elle tend. Cette vérité s’est prouvée éclatante pour l’Allemagne la première. Et lisez ce que dit le prophète de Concord à propos des chemins de fer, nouvelle invention de son temps: «Les hommes croient essentiel que la Nation parcoure trente milles à l’heure, que ce soient eux-mêmes ou non qui le fassent; mais que nous vivions comme des babouins ou comme des hommes, voilà qui est quelque peu incertain. Si au lieu de fabriquer des traverses et de fabriquer des rails, et de consacrer nuits et jours au travail, nous employons notre temps à battre sur l’enclume nos existences pour les rendre meilleures, qui donc construira des chemins de fer? Et si l’on ne construit pas de chemins de fer, comment atteindrons-nous le Ciel en temps? Mais si nous restons chez nous à nous occuper de ce qui nous regarde, qui donc aura besoin de chemins de fer? Ce n’est pas nous qui roulons en chemin de fer; c’est lui qui roule sur nous. Avez-vous jamais pensé à ce que sont ces traverses, ces «dormants», qui supportent le chemin de fer? Chacun est un homme... Je suis bien aise de savoir qu’il faut une équipe d’hommes par cinq milles pour maintenir ces «dormants mants en place, car c’est signe qu’ils peuvent à quelque jour se relever.» Mais je ne peux pas ravir au lecteur de Walden, oeuvre dont malheureusement l’envergure ne permet de donner ici que quelques pages, la satisfaction de découvrir lui-même en chaque ligne de Henry-David Thoreau, que, s’il est de terribles maux, il est d’admirables remèdes, et qu’au fond des plus noires ténèbres humaines repoint, inlassablement, une lumière, qui grandit pour, espérons-le, un jour devenir enfin celle qui à jamais nous éclairera. Ce n’est pas aujourd’hui que je me sens au fond des ténèbres. C’était en 1913, à la veille de la Guerre. J’avais demandé à Rudyard Kipling d’infuser un sang nouveau dans les veines françaises. Je demandais à Walt Whitman de rappeler à la France le but pour lequel trop souvent en aveugle elle combattait, c’est-à-dire l’Amour, l’Amour Cosmique, l’Amour Omnipotent. J’étais allé à François d’Assise lui demander de me débarrasser de tout ce que je sentais m’encombrer, et qui n’était que les mille besoins artificiels multipliés par une civilisation ne reposant que sur la matière, pour l’étouffement de toute beauté humaine. Et j’arrivai comme naturellement à Henry-David Thoreau, que j’appris plus tard passer pour le François d’Assise de l’Amérique, le François d’Assise de nos jours. Dirai-je mon ravissement à trouver ici précisées, résumées, les pensées finales auxquelles tout le travail de ma pensée, depuis l’âge où l’homme commence à penser, m’avait amené? Et pour quelle fin! Pour un bonheur dont il n’était pas un mot de Walden qui ne fût la réalisation triomphante... Alors, la Guerre éclata, qui fut l’agent d’une des ultimes convulsions du monde. La vérité présentée à mon esprit par Henry-David Thoreau en fut-elle modifiée? Voici qu’au contraire les événements de ces dernières années, et les événements plus confirmatifs des temps présents, la montrent plus que jamais et à jamais vérité, et que si Walden n’est plus le livre prophétique qu’il me parut être avant la Guerre, il explique les temps nouvellement commencés, et prépare aux temps imminents. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Oui, je m’aperçois que dans cette présentation j’ai manqué à parler de l’auteur du livre et du livre lui-même en critique ou en rhétoricien, que je n’ai pas plus conté l’histoire du Transcendentalisme américain, dont Boston fut le centre au cours du XIXe siècle, et Emerson, le chef, et Henry-David Thoreau l’un des adeptes, que je n’ai nommé Alcott et Margaret Fuller. Je n’ai parlé ici ni du Dial, ce périodique autour duquel gravitèrent les Transcendentalistes, et qui publia tant de pages de l’auteur de Walden, ni de Brook Farm, ce phalanstère fondé par George Ripley, à l’instar du phalanstère français de Charles Fourier, et qui fort les occupa, à l’exception, je suppose, de Henry-David Thoreau, lequel avait trouvé mieux. Mais c’est que je crois vain, le scalpel d’une main et de l’autre une loupe, de disséquer, pour le seul profit de la curiosité et de l’érudition, un homme dont la pensée s’impose. Ce n’est pas nous qui avons à nous pencher sur Henry-David Thoreau. C’est lui qui se penche sur nous. Et notre rôle est de nous laisser pénétrer de son influence. Non plus ne m’inquiété-je de le voir mourir phtisique à quarante-cinq ans, en 1862, non plus de savoir qu’au bout de deux ans et demi de séjour au bord de l’étang de Walden il quitta sa cabane pour obéir à d’autres appels. Et quant à ceux qui lui opposent son célibat, je les renvoie au chapitre de La Case de l’Oncle Tom, intitulé: «Une Colonie de Quakers», où ils trouveront, accueillant l’esclave en fuite, toute une famille, père, mère, enfants, voisins, dont le tableau de bonheur parfait, tracé par une contemporaine et compatriote de Henry-David Thoreau, répond aux vues de ce dernier. Ce qui seul doit ici retenir mon attention, c’est la vérité déroulée du commencement à la fin de ce livre, et la mise à l’index de toutes les erreurs; c’est de voir, au fur et à mesure qu’on avance dans sa lecture, la possibilité de dissiper ce malaise et ce mécontentement de la vie, telle que nous la vivons, que je sens autour de moi, alors que s’y révèle le loisir de faire de cette vie la source d’enchantement qu’elle peut être, qu’elle est. Sans doute pour cela suffira-t-il d’avoir le bon sens de vivre chacun sa vie, non vouloir vivre celle de notre voisin, de notre parent, de notre aïeul, de notre trisaïeul ou du dernier prince régnant. Et ce qui me captive encore dans cette lecture, c’est de m’apercevoir, grâce à elle, avec une netteté singulière, que moi, homme, je m’élève aisément chaque jour davantage sur l’échelle des êtres, en suivant cette vie propre qui ne tire sa source que de l’inspiration, et peux me bercer d’espérance sur le bien-fondé de mon instinct, qui me fait entrevoir la délivrance de mes maux et mon rapprochement chaque jour plus intime de la divinité.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1922

A textbook edition of Henry Thoreau’s WALDEN in English with notes was prepared by Professor Kinsaku Shinoda of Tokyo University. In Paris, Louis Fabulet issued WALDEN, LA VIE DANS LE BOIS (to the task of translating WALDEN into a text legible and intelligible within the French culture he had devoted 7 years of his life). In Jena, Germany, the Eugen Diedrichs edition of the full text of Wilhelm Nobbe’s WALDEN ODER LEBEN IN DEN WÄLDERN of 1905 was republished. TIMELINE OF WALDEN Wenn ich versuchen wollte zu schildern, wie ich in früheren Tagen mein Leben zu verbringen wünschte, würden wahrscheinlich diejenigen meiner Leser, die meinen wirklichen Lebenslauf kennen, überrascht sein. Diejenigen, die gar nichts davon wissen, würden einfach staunen. Ich will nur einige Unternehmungen, an denen ich meine Freude hatte, andeuten. Bei jedem Wetter, zu jeder Tages- oder Nachtstunde versuchte ich den gegebenen Augenblick zu benutzen. Immer war ich bedacht dort festen Fuß zu fassen, wo zwei Ewigkeiten – Vergangenheit und Zukunft – zusammentreffen, d.h. gerade im jeweiligen Augenblick. Gerade dort wich ich keinen Zoll. Mit einigen Unklarheiten muß der Leser schon Nachsicht haben, denn in meinem Handwerk gibt es mehr Geheimnisse als in den meisten anderen. Und doch werden diese nicht vorsätzlich gehütet, sondern die Natur der Sache bringt es mit sich. Ich würde mit Freuden alles, was ich darüber weiß, mitteilen und niemals an meine Tür schreiben: »Zutritt verboten«. Vor langer Zeit verlor ich einen Jagdhund, ein rotbraunes Pferd und eine Turteltaube. Noch immer suche ich sie. Zahlreich sind die Wanderer, mit denen ich über die Verlorenen sprach, denen ich die Spuren beschrieben habe und die Rufe, auf die meine Tiere hörten. Ein paar Leute hatten das Bellen des Hundes, den Hufschlag des Pferdes vernommen, ja sie hatten auch die Taube gesehen, wie sie gerade hinter einer Wolke verschwand. Und sie waren so erpicht darauf sie wieder einzufangen, als ob sie selbst sie verloren hätten. Es gilt, nicht nur dem Sonnenaufgang und der Morgendämmerung, nein, womöglich der Natur selbst zuvorzukommen! Wie oft bin ich in der Frühe, im Sommer wie im Winter, bevor noch irgend ein Nachbar zur Arbeit sich anschickte, bei meiner Arbeit gewesen. Sicherlich haben mich manche meiner Mitbürger gesehen, wenn ich von meiner Beschäftigung zurückkehrte: Farmer, die im Zwielicht nach Boston wanderten oder Holzhacker, die zur Arbeit gingen. Allerdings, ich half der Sonne nicht wesentlich beim Aufgehen, aber zweifellos war allein schon meine Anwesenheit bei diesem Ereignis von allerhöchster Wichtigkeit. Wie viele Herbst- und Wintertage verlebte ich außerhalb der Stadt, um zu hören, was der Wind sagte, und dann das Gehörte als Eilgut weiterzutragen: Fast mein ganzes Vermögen steckte ich hinein und verlor obendrein meinen Atem bei dem Handel, wenn ich ihm entgegenstürmte. Hätte er von politischen Parteien erzählt, Ihr könnt Euch drauf verlassen, es hätte unter »Neueste Nachrichten« alsbald in der Zeitung gestanden. An anderen Tagen hielt ich von dem Observatorium eines Felsens oder eines Baumes aus Wache, um irgend eine ungewohnte Ankunft weiter zu telegraphieren, oder ich wartete abends auf den Gipfeln der HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Hügel darauf, daß der Himmel sich herniedersenke, damit ich ein Stückchen davon erwischen könne. Doch ich erwischte niemals viel, und selbst das zerschmolz wie Manna in der Sonne.

Martha E. Bonham described her experience of teaching Thoreau’s WALDEN at the high school level in Tulsa, Oklahoma: Some books, no matter what great masterpieces they are, should not be taught by everyone. If one is unsympathetic with the attitude of a writer, he [sic, this was written before feminism] is incapable of bringing out the best of his works. Thoreau’s WALDEN does not appeal to everyone. Many people would consider this very inappropriate for intensive study in the high school. They think Thoreau’s philosophy too deep, his views too fanatical, his life on the whole too narrow. A person with such views should never undertake to teach WALDEN. To be sure, the author is a unique character; but it is because he has something to give us that most writers have not that he should receive attention. “To meet one of the Thoreaus,” wrote Franklin Sanborn in his book on Henry Thoreau, “was not the same as to encounter any other person who might happen to cross your path. They lived their life according to their genius without the fear of man or of the world’s dread laugh.” In some high schools this book is used for outside reading. To many pupils it would, if read this way, soon become tiresome. They would be liable to misinterpret many of Thoreau’s motives, and thus become prejudiced against him. Before any reading is assigned, the pupils must get some conception of the life and character of the author. The teacher might ask that the biography be studied, or she might talk to the pupils during a class period. In all this work the imagination of the pupils should be appealed to as much as possible. Such a question as, “Describe Thoreau as you imagine he looked,” would make the pupils think. After several pupils have given their opinions, the teacher might read a description of him given by Sanborn, and see how it compares with their ideas. In studying this book there is a great scope for the development of the critical ability of pupils. Examples of well- chosen words and phrases should be asked for from time to time. In some places he rises to poetical prose. In describing his home in the woods he said, “The winds which passed over my dwelling were such as sweep over the ridges of mountains, bearing the broken strains, or celestial parts only, of terrestrial music. The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it. Olympus is but outside of the earth everywhere.” Again he puts phrases in such a homely way that one cannot forget them. Such sentences as, “I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all myself than to be crowded on a velvet cushion,” and “Instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail” — illustrate this point. The pupils should be asked to find a certain number of quotable passages in the portions assigned, some they would like to remember, others with which they do not agree. Thoreau had the ability to state old facts in a very unique manner. When speaking of clothing he said, “The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.” Then, too, examples of humor, sarcasm, egotism, and exaggeration might be asked for in some of the assignments. Facts which have been learned in previous HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN course can be applied here. Seniors, no doubt, will be well acquainted with the different figures of speech. To review these, and to discover Thoreau’s ability in this regard, the pupils should search out examples. The chapter on “Sounds” is rich with illustrations of alliteration and onomatopoeia; e.g., “All day the sun has shone on the surface of some savage swamp, where the spruce stands hung with Usnea lichens,” “rumbling of wagons,” “trump of bull-frogs.” The book abounds, too, in metaphor and simile. The field here for topical recitations, or oral compositions as they might be called, is especially fertile. Throughout the entire study, as often as possible, the questions should be put in such a way as to relate the feelings or experiences of Thoreau to those of the pupils. Such questions as, “Would you have liked to dine with Thoreau, and what would you have had to eat? Who were some of his visitors? If you could have called on him what you have liked to talk about?” — all make a direct appeal. To test whether the book has been carefully read one might ask, “How did build his house? Where did he entertain his company? Describe Walden Pond.” There will be many words with which the average Senior will not be acquainted. In preparing the lessons, the students might be asked to pick out five words which they wish to add to their vocabularies, They should put the words into such sentences as they would likely employ. Many of the experiences of the writer should suggest similar ones of the pupils. They might be asked to write a theme on the sounds they hear after listening carefully for ten minutes. The description of the action of some animal, modeled after the red squirrel in “Winter Animals,” would be an interesting subject. Longer papers could be written when the book is finished, thus necessitating a review. Some thought- provoking subjects are: “Books with which Thoreau was familiar”; “The animals that were his special friends”; and “Why would the poor people enjoy WALDEN?” The question as to whether Thoreau was justified in living as he did could be debated. Some portions of the book are well worth reading aloud in class. One of the best selections for this purpose is the description of the battle of the ants in the chapter on “Brute Neighbors.” For the most part, however, the time should be spent by having the pupils tell what they have read. At the present time the Boy Scout Movement is still attracting many boys. They are giving great attention to outdoor life, and take pride in being able to do many things for themselves. The question could be raised as to whether Thoreau would make a good Boy Scout leader. His ability to build a boat, to make a shelter in case of rain, to endure all kinds of weather, to swim, and his expert knowledge of fishing, his acquaintance with all the creatures of the woods, would argue in his favor. As far as his accomplishments go, he would qualify; but as to whether he would always be a congenial companion — there is room for doubt. There are many devices available for the stimulation of interest. When the greater portion of the book has been read, the teacher may announce that they are going to spend the day near Walden Pond. As an assignment such questions as the following would be appropriate: “Where will we get water to drink?” “What can we find to eat?” “What kind of fish will we catch?” “What birds are we apt to see along the pond?” “What flowers will we find in the woods?” Ability to answer these questions will require much fingering of the pages. By reading here and there, the pupils will bring HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN many points to light which before had been unnoticed. It would be a splendid thing to have a “Bird Guide” for a reference book. As different birds are mentioned, descriptions might be called for. Pupils eager to verify their opinions will turn to this book. They will be interested in looking at the pictures, and will be surprised to find that there are so many birds which they have never seen. The next time they hear a strange note, or see the flutter of wings, they will be more observant. Nature writers such as John Burroughs and Seton-Thompson should be mentioned in this connection. In conclusion, the aims in teaching WALDEN may be briefly stated as follows: to furnish a source for the study of a unique character; to develop the critical ability of the pupils; to stimulate thought for oral and written composition; lastly, and more important than all — to cause pupils to observe more closely, and thus come to have a greater appreciation of Nature. TIMELINE OF WALDEN Dwight Mackerron, a retired high school teacher, has recently reacted to the above as follows: Gulp; been there, done a lot of the stuff mentioned here ... with mixed success. Sometimes HDT has been described as a person who delivered his lecture then stood up front with a “take it or leave it” attitude, and there is no question that I had some of that attitude when I taught WALDEN. I would try to make it interesting, but also a challenge, 150 vocabulary words as a simple starter, but beyond some point I did not feel like “convincing” the students that HDT was a good guy, good writer etc. There was a period when I didn’t teach it very well at all, maybe because I wasn’t comfortable enough in my own late youth/early middle age skin. Later I got more comfortable and turned the process into a more enjoyable one because of a certain attitude I developed, better sense of humor, neat field trips and a generally adventurous approach, but I don’t know that the students like HDT any better. He is just too far removed from so many of their prime interests. There is the rare kid who will get something special from him, and most had a fairly strong reaction because I made them confront the content of the work one way or another, but the strong feelings were generally not positive. I think I could do somewhat better now, maybe not, but for the moment anyway, that is in the past. OK, that’s my personal confession; maybe I’ll have more thoughts later....

April: According to THE LIVING AGE, 8th Series, Volume XXVI for April, May, and June 1922 (Boston: The Living Age Company): It is said that in 1913, M. Louis Fabulet, the translator of Kipling, went to M. André Gice of the Nouvelle Revue Française to tell him of an American writer whom he thought the French public ought to know. Before his visitor had pronounced the name, M. Gide drew a copy of WALDEN from his pocket and set it on the table. M. Gide had had the same idea as M. Fabulet, and in fact had already translated a few pages. Later, when M. Fabulet was about to publish his translation [WALDEN, LA VIE DANS LE BOIS], he learned to his surprise that M. Léon Bazalgette, the HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN translator of Walt Whitman, had undertaken the same task and was already well advanced with an entirely independent translation of WALDEN. Upon learning, however, that M. Fabulet had completed his work, M. Bazalgette gracefully retired in his favor. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Franklin Benjamin Sanborn’s “An Unpublished Concord Journal” appeared posthumously in the Century CII. In his entry for May 18, 1855, he had been comparing Thoreau with Emerson: To-night Mr. Thoreau came in as I was reading Demosthenes, and we fell to talking about Greek, Latin, Milton, Wordsworth, Emerson, Ellery Channing, and other things. But first of all let me describe Thoreau.... He is a sort of pocket edition of Mr. Emerson, as far as outward appearance goes, in coarser binding and with wood-cuts instead of the fine steel-engravings of Mr. Emerson. He is a little under size, with a huge Emersonian nose, bluish gray eyes, brown hair, and a ruddy, weather-beaten face which reminds one of that of some shrewd and honest animal, some retired philosophic woodchuck or magnanimous fox. He dresses very plainly, wears his collar turned over like Mr. Emerson, and often an old dress-coat, broad in the skirts, and by no means a fit. He walks about with a brisk rustic air, and never seems tired. He talks like Mr. Emerson and so spoils the good things which he says; for what in Mr. Emerson is charming, becomes ludicrous in Thoreau, because an imitation. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1924

A new translation of Henry Thoreau’s WALDEN into Czech, by Miloš Seifert. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1930

Newell Convers Wyeth illustrated an edition of JINGLEBOB by Philip Ashton Rollins.

Vernon Parrington had written in MAIN CURRENTS IN AMERICAN THOUGHT (NY: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1927-1930) that “the single business of Henry Thoreau, during forty-odd years of eager activity, was to discover an economy calculated to provide a satisfying life. His one concern, that gave to his ramblings in Concord fields a value as of high adventure, was to explore the true meaning of wealth.... WALDEN is the handbook of an economy that endeavors to refute Adam Smith and transform the round of daily life into something nobler than a mean gospel of plus and minus.” TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1933

The following, which was penned in 1933, will give fresh meaning to the remark that is frequently made, that to read WALDEN truly, you must almost write it yourself:

I am going to China because I wish to live deliberately. New Guinea offers me, it is true, satisfaction for the tastes I have acquired which only leisure can satisfy. I am leaving economic security and I am leaving it deliberately. By going off to China with a paltry few pounds and no knowledge of what life has in store for me there, I believe that I am going to front the essentials of life to see if I can learn what it has to teach and above all not to discover, when I come to die, that I have not lived. We fritter our lives away in detail but I am not going to do this. I am going to live deeply, to acknowledge not one of the so-called social forces which hold our lives in thrall and reduce us to economic dependency. The best part of life is spent in earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.... To hell with money! Pursuit of it is not going to mould my life for me. I am going to live sturdily and Spartan like; to drive life into a corner and reduce it to its lowest terms, and if I find it mean, then I’ll know its meanness, and if I find it sublime I shall know it by experience, and not make wistful conjectures about it, conjured up by illustrated magazines. I refuse to accept the ideology of a business world which believes that man at hard labour is the noblest work of God. Leisure to use as I think fit!

The above is from Errol Flynn’s diary of the gold rush in New Guinea in 1933, after Flynn has been kicked out of school for theft at Shore School in Australia. Flynn wasn’t any more judicious in lifting material than was Emerson, or for that matter Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Charles Higham, this movie idol’s biographer,109 appears unaware that his youth is plagiarizing. Flynn wanted to title his autobiography IN LIKE FLYNN, and we may excuse such innocence among callow swashbucklers, and exclaim “Copy Like Flynn!” — but we may not excuse innocence among presidents, or among the biographers of swashbucklers such as Charles Higham. For even such propounders of fulsome platitudes and biographers of movie stars qualify as writers, and writers must know sin. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

109. Higham 1980, page 41. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

WALDEN: I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1936

D.B. Updike’s Marrymount Press put out an edition of WALDEN that included photographs by Edward Steichen. I wish I knew who created this arresting image for the printing’s cover, but (like the Readers’ Digest abbreviated edition of WALDEN, which for the longest time had been similarly unlocatable) I have been unable to locate a copy of this volume:

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1939

An edition of WALDEN was illustrated by Thomas W. Nason:

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Translation of Thoreau materials into Portuguese in Brazil: O PENSAMENTO VIVO DE THOREAU. Coleção Biblioteca do Pensamento Vivo, vol. 15. Seleção, organização e introdução de Theodore Dreiser. Tradução de Lauro Escorel. Contém excertos variados. São Paulo: Livraria Martins. 181 pages. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1940

February: Henry Thoreau’s personal copy of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS was purchased by Viola White, curator of the Julian Abernethy, Class of 1876 Collection of Middlebury College for $2,000 from the estate of an American literature collector. It is now featured in the Special Collections of the Middlebury College Library and Information Services. Bound in brown cloth, inside the front cover is inscribed “Henry D. Thoreau.” The many marginalia are in pencil. The majority of the annotations are corrections of typographical errors and factual information which have been silently incorporated into later editions, however, there are some annotations that are later thoughts Thoreau had on the text. (The collection also has obtained the inkwell Thoreau used while penning WALDEN and Thoreau’s personal copy of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS.) TIMELINE OF WALDEN

September: WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. A CONDENSATION FROM THE BOOK BY HENRY DAVID THOREAU. Pleasantville NY: Readers Digest Association, Inc., September 1940 (pages 129-136): TIMELINE OF WALDEN

WALDEN is the record of an experiment in serene living, a venture in simplicity and discipline as timely today as it was nearly 100 years ago. It is a book of which everyone has heard, but which few now read. Yet —written in sentences as rugged as the Massachusetts hills Thoreau loved— its importance and durability seem to increase with each year, as the pattern of our civilization becomes more and more complex. CONDENSED WALDEN

When I finally came across a copy of this, in December 2002, this is the way I reported on it: Lightning struck, this Christmas. I finally found something that I have been searching for, for more than a decade. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN I had known that once upon a time, the Readers Digest had put out a condensed edition of WALDEN, and yet for obvious reasons no such condensed edition was available even in university research libraries. They just don't store that sort of stuff. So I had been haunting Goodwill stores, in Minnesota, in California, and in Rhode Island, trying to find one of those READERS DIGEST CONDENSED BOOK editions, that typically have four or five book titles on the spine. Without any success at all. Finally, the Readers Digest condensed edition of WALDEN has turned up. I found it, would you believe, on *Ebay*! Turns out that I hadn’t been able to find this because I hadn’t been looking in the right place. Their condensed edition only ran to six and a half pages, and was printed at the end of one of their regular monthly magazines. It was the Readers Digest edition of September 1940, and at the end of the monthly magazine it had two condensed books: Osa Johnson’s I MARRIED ADVENTURE, and H.D. Thoreau’s WALDEN: OR LIFE IN THE WOODS. A CONDENSATION FROM THE BOOK BY HENRY DAVID THOREAU (Pleasantville NY: Readers Digest Association, Inc., September 1940, pages 129-136). As an illustration of the comparative merit which they attributed to the two books, I MARRIED ADVENTURE and WALDEN: OR LIFE IN THE WOODS, I should say that they put I MARRIED ADVENTURE first — and that they assigned it more than three times as much space as WALDEN. The condensed edition begins with the epigraph of the volume, “I propose to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, if only to wake my neighbors up....” and continues directly with page eight’s famous “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”: I propose to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, if only to wake my neighbors up.... The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Their incessant anxiety and strain is a well-nigh incurable form of disease. They have no time to be anything but machines. It is a fool’s life. And so on, as you see, skipping from page eight to page eleven, going back to page six to pick up a sentence, then proceeding with a sentence fragment from page five. I wonder, might there be any way now, to discover the name of the person whom they assigned to concoct this READERS DIGEST CONDENSED EDITION OF WALDEN? On the page facing this six-and-a-half-page condensation of WALDEN there is one of those bottom-of-the-page pagefiller paragraphs that are so typical of the Readers Digest, and it is about Samuel Goldwyn of Hollywood — the pagefiller paragraph instances that he “read part of a book all the way through.” Oh wow! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1943

Philip Van Doren Stern came to function as general manager of Armed Services Editions, a Pocket Books firm that made paperbacks available to the uniformed services under the rubrics “This is the Complete Book–Not a Digest” (of the 1,227 editions only 79 were shortened) and “Books are weapons in the war of ideas.” All books nominated were subject to the prior veto either of the Army library office under Trautman or the Navy library office under Miss DuBois. Seriously misinformed, Michigan Representative George Anthony Dondero, ranking Republican member of the House Committee on Education and an ally of Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy as well as a great admirer of Republican President Abraham Lincoln, would attack these books as “Communist propaganda.”

Volume #880 was Thoreau’s WALDEN and had not been abridged (by way of contrast, Melville’s MOBY-DICK was Volume G-209 and had been abridged). TIMELINE OF WALDEN WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1946

Roland Wells Robbins delivered his initial lecture before the Thoreau Society.

1,230 slides made by Herbert Wendell Gleason were discovered at the A.D. Handy film supply company and purchased by Roland Wells Robbins for $100.00 cash. These boxes of glass plates were so inordinately heavy that the Robbins family actually would store them under various beds in various parts of their home, in order to avoid putting too much load on the flooring in any one location.

Edwin Way Teale provided photographs for Henry Bugbee Kane’s edition entitled THOREAU’S WALDEN: A PHOTOGRAPHIC REGISTER (Introduction by Brooks Atkinson. NY: Alfred A. Knopf. 169 pages), and in this told of experiencing an intense summer evening storm while visiting the stately brick house by the Sudbury River that once had been owned by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn. He was interviewing the current owner, a descendant of the man who’d opinioned “Sanborn cared only for the sound of money jingling in his pocket.” TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Hubert H. Hoeltje’s “Thoreau as Lecturer” (New England Quarterly 19:485-94). TIMELINE OF A WEEK

The nasty truth came out: in this year Stanley Edgar Hymon discovered that Henry Thoreau’s activist credentials in civil disobedience had come not by virtue of the historical influence of Thoreau’s biographical act itself, but merely by virtue of his ability to write it up as an influential text! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1947

Additional slides by Herbert Wendell Gleason, to a total of 6,000 (not all on Thoreau topics) were discovered. A “Photographic Register” edition of WALDEN would be published:

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Aldo Leopold referred to Henry Thoreau as the American “father of phenology.”110

After WWII, during the Denazification period while studying about America-The-Winner was a high priority in the German consciousness, four-count-’em-four new translations of WALDEN into the German language would be created. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Frans G. Bengtsson’s 1924 translation of WALDEN into Swedish was republished, with the original 40-page foreword to the effect that Thoreau had been no Emerson clone but now also with woodcuts by Stig Åsberg.

110. What is phenology? The term derives from the Greek phaino meaning to show or to appear, and this is the science of periodic biological events in the animal and plant world as influenced by the environment, especially weather and climate. Sprouting and flowering of plants in the spring, color changes of plants in the fall, bird migration, insect hatches, and animal hibernation are all examples of phenological events. Plants are special, highly sensitive weather instruments that integrate the combined effect of weather factors such as temperature, rainfall, humidity, wind, and sunshine in their growth response. They can be observed year after year and dates recorded when certain growth stages, such as opening of leaf buds or appearance of first flowers occur. Recently, phenology has been identified as a crucial contributor to global change research. Understanding the interaction between the atmosphere (weather and climate) and the biosphere (living organisms) is a necessary part of efforts to improve models of Earth’s physical systems and monitor the impact of global climate change. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1948

Here is Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau’s famous drawing:

Here is Charles H. Overly’s version of sister Sophia’s drawing:

Professor Joseph Wood Krutch suggested in his HENRY DAVID THOREAU (NY: William Sloane Associates, 1948, page 103) that Emerson had exaggerated the favorable reception of Thoreau’s WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, when he had written that “All American kind are delighted with ‘Walden’ as far as they have dared say.” TIMELINE OF WALDEN Mr. Clifton Fadiman once remarked that Thoreau could, after all, get more out of ten minutes with a chickadee than most men could get out of a night with Cleopatra, and it is perhaps not HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN insignificant that a little more than two months after Ellen Sewall had rejected him he was writing one of those elaborate descriptions of a joyful encounter with a wild animal which became a recurrent feature of his JOURNAL and which deserve to be better known than they are as an aspect of both his literary and his personal character. [Continues with “Suddenly, looking down the river, I saw a fox... I returned to the village by the highway of the river.”] HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1949

A slightly revised new edition of the 1902 translation by Zdeněk Franta of Henry Thoreau’s WALDEN into Czech was published by Jan Laichter in Prague, with illustrations by the artist Rudolf Ruzicka, an American of Czech descent. This edition would, however, be placed in storage until the Czeck book industry was nationalized in 1951. (Upon its release the printing would sell out within a week.)

The first Danish edition of WALDEN was published by Kunst og Kultur in Copenhagen. The book had been translated by Ole Jacobsen and illustrated by Mads Stage and the title used, LIVET I SKOVENE, translates as LIFE IN THE WOODS. (The explanation “Walden” appeared in parentheses below this title.) Previous to this, I gather –during the period of the Danish resistance to Nazism– all that had been available had been “RESISTANCE TO CIVIL GOVERNMENT”.

Chenguang Press in Shanghai published Xu Chi’s translation of WALDEN into the Chinese language. In the preface, the translator indicated that to understand this Western author, Chinese readers would need to find a quiet place and calm themselves down. This was the first, and it would be republished by the Shanghai Yiwen Press in 1982 in an edition of 13,000 copies and would become the most popular translation of this book in China. It would be reprinted in 1993, 1997, and 2003, would be included in the Green Classics Library published by Jilin People’s Publishing House in 1997, and would be chosen as one of “the hundred books influencing the world” by Shenyang Press and republished again in 1999. In addition, there would come to be three other Chinese versions published in mainland China, a Chinese version published in many editions in Hong Kong, and a Chinese version published in Taiwan: • 1977: (8th edition) Wu Mingshi (translator), Hong Kong, Today’s World Press. • 1984: Kong Fanyun (translator), Taiwan, Zhiwen Press. • 1996: Chen Kai (translator), WALDEN OR LIFE IN THE WOODS; A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS; THE MAINE WOODS; CAPE COD. Beijing: Sanlian Bookstore. • 1996: Liu Fei (translator), WALDEN. Shijiazhuang: Huashan Wenyi Press. • 1997: The Green Classics Library of Jilin People’s Publishing House republished the 1949 Chinese translation of Thoreau’s WALDEN by Xu Chi. • 1998: Wang Guanglin (translator), WALDEN. Beijing: Zuojia Press. • 1999: Shenyang Press republished the 1949 Chinese translation of Thoreau’s WALDEN by Xu Chi. • 2000: An English-language edition of Thoreau’s WALDEN was published in Beijing by the Chinese Translation Publishing Company. • 2001: An English-language edition of Thoreau’s WALDEN was published in Haikou, China by the Hainan Press, while another English-language edition was published in Huhehaote by the Inner Mongolian People’s Publishing House. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1950

Joseph Chesley Mathews’s “Thoreau’s Reading in Dante,” Italica 27 (1950):77-81.

Translation of Thoreau materials into Portuguese in Brazil: ENSAÍSTAS AMERICANOS. Coleção Clássicos Jackson, vol. XXXIII. Tradução de Sarmento de Beires e José Duarte. Contém “Andar a pé.” São Paulo: W.M. Jackson. 360 pages. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1953

Translation of Thoreau materials into Portuguese in Brazil: WALDEN E OUTROS ESCRITOS. 2 volumes. Introdução de Brooks Atkinson. Tradução de E. C. Caldas. Contém Walden, “Os lagos Allegash,” “A arte de caminhar,” “Desobediência civil,” “Vida sem princípio.” Rio de Janeiro: Revista Branca. 184 pages. (aqui capa do vol. II). TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Winter: The few changes which had been entered by Henry Thoreau, in his “correction copy” of WALDEN as published, were set out in full in the Thoreau Society Bulletin by Reginald L. Cook. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1954

In The Yale Review, E.B. White offered a delightful, insightful essay about WALDEN, “A Slight Sound at Evening,” describing how it was that Henry Thoreau’s book was “the best youth’s companion yet written by an American.” “Walden” is an oddity in American letters. It may well be the oddest of our distinguished oddities. For many it is a great deal too odd, and for many it is a particular bore. I have not found it to be a well-liked book among my acquaintances, although usually spoken of with respect, and one literary critic for whom I have the highest regard can find no reason why anyone gives “Walden” a second thought. TO admire the book is, in fact, something of an embarrassment, for the mass of men have an indistinct notion that its author was a sort of Nature Boy. If Thoreau had merely left us an account of a man’s life in the woods, or if he had simply retreated to the woods and there recorded his complaints about society, or even if he had contrived to include both records in one essay, “Walden” would probably not have lived a hundred years. As things turned out, Thoreau, very likely without knowing quite what he was up to, took man’s relation to nature and man’s dilemma in society and man’s capacity for elevating his spirit and he beat all these matters together, in a wild free interval of self-justification and delight, and produced an original omelette from which people can draw nourishment in a hungry day.” “Hairshirt or no, he is a better companion than most, and I would not swap him for a soberer or more reasonable friend even if I could.... I find it agreeable to sit here this morning, in a house of correct proportions, and hear across a century of time his flute, his frogs, and his seductive summons to the wildest HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN revels of them all.” TIMELINE OF WALDEN

“Each morning I wake up and am torn between the desire to change the world, and the desire to enjoy it. This makes it difficult to plan my day.” — E.B. White, A SLIGHT SOUND AT EVENING The Yale Review, 1954

In my experience, the sort of reaction to Thoreau described by White, as “a particular bore,” is not at all unusual. For instance, I remember well a summer when I attended the annual birthday party for Henry in Concord, and the owner of the Fulcrum Publishing Company was part of an invited panel, in the basement of the church there in Concord, on the subject of Nature Writing (I have recounted this story elsewhere). This self-infatuated businessman said that he personally would never consider publishing a book manuscript offered to him now, if it in any respect resembled WALDEN.

He opinioned that as a nature writer Thoreau had been just hopelessly inept and diffuse. In today’s market the guy just wouldn’t stand a chance.

He said that what Thoreau had been attempting to do was found a religion — he proclaimed this utterly repulsive. If he received such a manuscript, he would not even bother to return it to its author. He would simply dump it in his trashcan. Etc.

The other two members of the panel did not disagree with him. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

The discussion of the panel went on and on, in regard to their topic of “How can we encourage good new nature writers today?” I noticed all the good little hopeful unpublished nature writers in the audience, taking careful notes. (I for one don’t know of anything every published by this gent’s Fulcrum Publishing Company of Golden, Colorado that is worth a second glance. Maybe there’s something and somehow I missed it! :-)

I vote for Henry. I don’t care whether he was a nature writer or not and if he was trying to found a religion, then as far as I am concerned,

“NIHIL OBSTAT.” † HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1956

WALDEN was translated into the Tamil language. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1957

A portion of WALDEN was translated into the Marathi language. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

J. Lyndon Shanley’s THE MAKING OF WALDEN WITH THE TEXT OF THE FIRST VERSION (Chicago: U of Chicago P).

Evidently a literary scholar named Roy R. Male was attempting to read the book in Marathi without a 111 grammar, for he commented in his HAWTHORNE’S TRAGIC VISION in this year on an idea of his that THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE amounted to “a kind of WALDEN in reverse.… The story begins in the spring and ends with the fall; the whole progression is condensed in the exhilaration of the brisk September day that makes Coverdale buoyant at first but later only emphasized his “sickness of the spirits.” Clearly, this rude Male not only had little grasp of Nathaniel Hawthorne but no grip whatever on Henry Thoreau, presumptuously simplistifying the messages of his work into one “rectify the inward” message and then equating this unary simplicitude with Hawthorne’s shallow pejorism after merely having purchased at Brook Farm a costly experience of the downside of communal life.

111. Austin: U of Texas P, chapter “The Pastoral Wasteland: THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE,” pages 139-56. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1958

WALDEN was translated into the Telugu language.

Publication in Venice of Thoreau’s OPERE SCELTE as edited by P. Sanavio. This included a new translation of WALDEN into Italian, and publication for the first time in Italian of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS, CAPE COD, NATURAL HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS, “RESISTANCE TO CIVIL GOVERNMENT”, and “A PLEA FOR CAPTAIN JOHN BROWN”.

The actor John Carradine (originally “Richmond Reed”) recorded the initial six chapters of WALDEN for the Audio Book Company of St. Joseph, Michigan as a “Talking Book.”

It would appear that the offering was not a commercial success and the remainder of the book continued unrecorded. (This company is still in existence and stands ready to record the material onto a fresh cassette and snailmail it to you. For instance, their offering “Complete essay titled ‘Economy’” has the stock number NU2-595 and is available for $12.95, presumably plus shipping.) TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1960

Doubleday Dolphin Books issued a paperback edition of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS that described itself as belonging in the “Philosophy and Religion” section of a bookstore.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN That wasn’t the only paperback edition issued during this year: HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1964

Professor Walter Roy Harding edited SOPHIA THOREAU’S SCRAPBOOK for publication by the Thoreau Society.

COLLECTED POEMS OF HENRY THOREAU, enlarged edition.

Translation of Thoreau materials into Portuguese in Brazil: ESCRITOS SELECIONADOS SOBRE NATUREZA E LIBERDADE. Série Clássicos da Democracia, vol. 25. Tradução de Aydano Arruda. Contém: “Desobediência Civil,” “Onde vivi e a razão por que vivi,” “Naufrágio,” “Domingo,” “Caminhada,” “Cartas familiares selecionadas.” São Paulo: IBRASA. 167 pages. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1966

During this year and the following one, Ronald Earl Clapper would be an acting instructor at UCLA.

A complete edition of WALDEN became available in the Marathi language. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Professor Walter Roy Harding’s THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU: A BIOGRAPHY (NY: Alfred A. Knopf; an enlarged and corrected edition would be put out by Dover in 1982 and another edition would be published by HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Princeton UP in 1992).

“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

This seems like an interesting biography, however I just skimmed through looking for details on Thoreau’s relationships with women. Thoreau’s mother, Cynthia, is described as a dynamic woman who was involved in charities and reform. She dominated not only her meek husband, but the whole household. And she had the reputation in the neighborhood of being an excellent wife and mother. Thoreau had two unsuccessful affairs with women. When he was twenty-two he fell in love with Ellen Devereux Sewall but, unfortunately, so did John Shepard Keyes and John Thoreau, Henry’s brother. John Thoreau proposed first, and Ellen accepted although she regretted doing so because she realized that she loved Henry. Then her mother encouraged her to break off the engagement because it would hurt her Unitarian father to have a Transcendental son-in-law. So when Henry proposed she unwillingly rejected him also. She married Joseph Osgood instead and evidently had a happy marriage. Thoreau remained friends with the Osgoods and visited them frequently. For motherly consolation after Ellen’s rejection, Thoreau turned to Mrs. Lucy Jackson Brown who was Emerson’s sister-in-law. She was twenty years Henry’s senior and boarded with the Thoreaus. However Thoreau was not discouraged yet; he fell in love again. This time it was with Mary Russell, a friend of Mrs. Emerson’s. She was three years younger than Thoreau. He wrote a poem to her “To the Maiden in the East” but she did not return his affection. This was his last romance. Thus Thoreau remained a confirmed bachelor who delighted in jibing at women and marriage. He replaced women with nature, and told the Reverend David Wasson that marriage as an institution is like a skunk cabbage. Harding then interjects, “It should be added that perhaps Wasson did not fully realize how much affection Thoreau had for skunk cabbages.” (Katherine A. O’Meara, May 26, 1989)

THE PORTABLE THOREAU / Henry David Thoreau; edited and with an introduction by Carl Bode (NY: Viking Press, originally issued in 1947, re-released in 1957 and 1963, reissued in 1964 and 1966 with the addition of HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN presumptuous psychobabble).

A new version of Kenneth Walter Cameron’s 1941 work on RALPH WALDO EMERSON’S READING: A GUIDE FOR SOURCE HUNTERS AND SCHOLARS TO THE ONE THOUSAND VOLUMES WHICH HE WITHDREW FROM LIBRARIES, TOGETHER WITH SOME UNPUBLISHED LETTERS AND A LIST OF EMERSON'S CONTEMPORARIES, 1827-1850 ...; ALSO OTHER EMERSON ... THE CHARGING RECORDS OF THE BOSTON ATHENAEUM (NY: Haskell House). Incomplete documentation of Emerson’s borrowings at three different libraries: The Boston Athenaeum, The Harvard College Library, and the Harvard Divinity School Library. Each book is listed twice; once by author and a second time in chronological order according to the date of Emerson’s borrowing. In the latter of these listings, the dated return of the book is included as well, in addition to any specific volume number. (Stephen R. Webb, February 20, 1986) Intended as a guide for source-hunters and scholars to the one thousand volumes which Emerson withdrew from libraries. This book also includes a list of Emerson’s contemporaries whose book borrowings are inscribed in the charging records of the Boston Athenaeum. Besides those from the Athenaeum, Emerson’s book charging records include those from the Harvard Divinity School’s and Harvard College Libraries. In general, Emerson’s reading as described in these lists focuses on classical and romantic philosophers but also particularly on biographies and memoirs. (David J. Pink, January 1992) A helpful listing of Emerson’s library charges from the Boston Athenaeum, Harvard College Library, and Harvard Divinity School; with titles, authors, dates of publication and of Emerson’s withdrawals, as well as notation of which library the materials were taken from. [Cecily F. Brown, March 1992] HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Also, his THOREAU’S FACT BOOK and his THOREAU’S HARVARD YEARS (Hartford CT: Transcendental Books).

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

Walden “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1967

May: When John Carradine read a dozen installments from WALDEN over KPFK-FM in North Hollywood, California, presumably what the radio station was doing was playing recordings by him that had previously been released commercially. In 1958 he had recorded the initial six chapters as a “Talking Book” for the Audio Book Company of St. Joseph, Michigan. (This company is still in existence and stands ready to record the material onto a fresh cassette and snailmail it to you. For instance, their offering “Complete essay titled ‘Economy’” has the stock number NU2-595 and is available for $12.95, presumably plus shipping.)

TIMELINE OF WALDEN Professor Melvin Ernest Lyon of the English Department of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln’s “Walden Pond as a Symbol” (PMLA Transactions and Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 82, #2:289- 300): READ THIS ARTICLE

The desire for redemption (or rebirth) and the achievement of it through identification with the pond seems to me the theme of WALDEN and the chief factor in determining its inner structure. ... Thoreau’s primary concern is to praise nature and solitude rather than to criticize civilization and society.... Walden [Pond] remains Thoreau’s ultimate image of God upon earth and the central symbol of the work to which it gives its name.... Walden [Pond] participates in the large natural rhythms of the day and the year which the sun (and the earth’s movement) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN creates. It is also a part of a living earth which is constantly creating new life.

To the above 1967 analysis by Professor Lyon, Professor of Geology Robert M. Thorson would add in December 2013 that: Thoreauvians of the twenty-first century might appreciate knowing that the cyclical frequency of rebirth can now be extended to the glacial-interglacial metronome. Just as surely as “frost coming out of the ground ... precedes the green and flowery spring,” so too does the physical withdrawal of an ice sheet precede the biological re-colonization of the land, a transition also driven by orbital planetary astronomy. Given Walden’s setting in an ancient bedrock valley, the lake we know today may be the third or fourth incarnation of nearly the same thing in nearly the same place. Just as surely as every spring thaw erases the evidence of earlier thaws, so too might the last ice sheet have erased evidence of previous Waldens. Thoreau’s JOURNAL, which links climate change to orbital variations, suggests he was on this seemingly modern train of thought by February 1854, only one month shy of submitting his WALDEN manuscript.... Finally, the creation narrative for Walden Pond remains blurry in popular culture, even though it’s straightforward and uncontroversial. Consider the official “geology” page of the Walden Pond State Reservation Web site, which reads as follows: “A large block of ice broke off into glacial Lake Sudbury,” was “surrounded by sediments ... flowing from the glacier,” and “left behind an indentation that eventually filled with water.” STATE RESERVATION WEBSITE

This “easy-speak” is fine for the 99 percent who want to skim the surface of understanding. But for more sophisticated readers, it’s misleading, especially for writers because their metaphors magnify misunderstandings. More accurately, the glacial lake expanded northward as debris-rich stagnant ice melted downward beneath a fixed shoreline elevation, leaving submerged residual masses. Little, if any, breakage was involved. Multiple blocks, rather than one, were present. All were buried, rather than merely “surrounded.” “Indentation” connotes a force that never was. Finally, the water didn’t “eventually” arrive. It had been there all along, actually dropping down to the present level after the ice-dam failed. GEOLOGY OUR MOST RECENT GLACIATION HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1968

Ronald Earl Clapper copyrighted his dissertation “The Development of WALDEN: A Genetic Text.” Since then it has been being printed from the microfilm “onesy-twosy fashion” for the use of individual scholars by University Microfilms, Inc. of Ann Arbor. (Dr. Clapper has now been located, and thanked — and we found out that he had kept up his good work well beyond his point of this publication.) TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Kenneth Walter Cameron’s “What Thoreau Taught in 1837” (Emerson Society Quarterly 52: 100). Cameron, undoubtedly the most industrious literary archeologist working in the American Renaissance, reprints yet another obscure document relating to Thoreau, a page from the report sent to Boston by the School Committeemen of the Concord Common Schools in 1838. The report lists all of the texts Thoreau would have used during his 2-week stint as teacher at the Center School. In addition, a statistical report includes enrollment, attendance, composition of the faculty by gender (7 male, 3 female in winter; 9 female, 1 male in summer). Interestingly, the average monthly salary for a male teacher was $32 ($10.80 for a female teacher); this means that Thoreau’s annual salary of $500 was much greater than average. [John Barz, March 1992] HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Norman Foerster’s “The Intellectual Heritage of Thoreau,” in TWENTIETH CENTURY INTERPRETATIONS OF WALDEN (Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall). “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Foerster reminds us at the beginning of his essay, that “Every man is a bundle of his ancestors” (34). The most significant ancestors that Thoreau possessed, according to Foerster, were his intellectual ones. Foerster goes on to write that Thoreau was deeply indebted to Emerson, who almost experienced orthodoxy and then doubts for him, who struggled with some issues so that Thoreau could avoid them. Thoreau inherited Transcendentalism, which had grown out of Unitarianism, which in turn had grown out of Calvinism. Foerster goes on to point out the indebtedness of New England Transcendentalism to Europe, to Rousseau, the French Revolution, Kant and the Romantic movement (both in Germany and England). It is also indebted to the Classics. Foerster sees Transcendentalism as a complex movement: it was defined by Emerson as Idealism, and contrasted with “the skeptical philosophy of Locke, which insisted that there was nothing in the intellect which was not previously in the experience of the senses” (35). The Transcendentalists expanded on Kant’s conception of Transcendental forms. Therefore, [T]he possibility of transcending the ordinary experience of the senses is constant — since the divine is immanent in the world, and the soul of the individual has access to the soul of the whole, or Oversoul, as Emerson called it. (36) Foerster points out that this Transcendentalism was Thoreau’s heritage, as was his classical education. Channing writes of Thoreau: He had no favorites among the French and Germans and I do not recall a modern writer except Carlyle and Ruskin whom he valued much. (38) Foerster points out that Thoreau was well read in the English literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Carlyle. Foerster conjectures that Thoreau’s interest in Goethe, however small, came from Emerson. (I wondered from other reading if it hadn’t come from Margaret Fuller). Foerster points out Thoreau’s evident provincialism and then counters with the Eastern influence in his life, and his “extensive reading in the lore of the North American Indian and other savage people.” Finally, Foerster looks more closely at works with which Thoreau would have been familiar: Shakespeare, Chaucer, etc. from the Elizabethan period, and his “insistent commitment to the Classics” (48). Foerster points out serious gaps in Thoreau’s reading, and closes by saying that much of what Thoreau read was judged through his Transcendental environment. {Mary Ellen Ashcroft 1989}

Translation of Thoreau materials into Portuguese in Brazil: A DESOBEDIÊNCIA CIVIL E OUTROS ENSAIOS. SELEÇÃO, INTRODUÇÃO, TRADUÇÃO E NOTAS DE JOSÉ PAULO PAES. Contém: “A desobediência civil,” “A vida sem princípio,” “Paraíso (a ser) recobrado,” “Um apelo em prol do Capitão John Brown.” São Paulo: Cultrix, 1968. 130 pages. Also, WALDEN. INTRODUÇÃO DE BROOKS ATKINSON. TRADUÇÃO DE E. C. CALDAS. Rio de Janeiro: Edições de Ouro. 350 pages. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Republication of Thoreau’s “RESISTANCE TO CIVIL GOVERNMENT” (Elizabeth Peabody’s ÆSTHETIC PAPERS, Volume I, 1849).

Professor Walter Roy Harding. WALDEN AND CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE: THE VARIORUM EDITIONS. NY: Washington Square P, 1968

Thomas Woodson’s “The Two Beginnings of WALDEN: A Distinction in Styles.” ELH 35 (1968):440-73. “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

The two beginnings which Woodson refers to are the early lecture, “The History of Myself,” delivered in February, 1847 and the journal entries for July 5-6, 1845 which grew into “Where I Lived and What I Lived For.” These two beginnings are seen to represent two distinct styles, the private (Where) and the public (Economy) which are distinguished by the following contrasts: personal/social, narrative/ expository, Walden-directed/Concord-directed, synthetic/analytic, mythopoeic/ rhetorical. Woodson finds that the musing and meditative private beginning is embodied in a loose, paratactic and highly metaphorical style which reaches out to “create the vital facts of a new mythology.” Revisions make the final version less personal and less mythical than earlier drafts. While the private style is described as “spontaneous” and “natural,” the public style is considered “artful” and “contrived.” There is a conscious intent to focus the audience’s attention on language; definition, precise diction, and the use of puns are characteristic of the public style. Personae are sometimes adopted to control the relationship between Thoreau and his audience. After discussing the public and private styles, Woodson attempts to place them in a broader literary perspective, examining their origins in ancient literature and then considering them in light of 19th century literature. (Patti S. Bleifus, March 14, 1986)

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FIGURING OUT WHAT AMOUNTS TO A “HISTORICAL CONTEXT” IS WHAT THE CRAFT OF HISTORICIZING AMOUNTS TO, AND THIS NECESSITATES DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN THE SET OF EVENTS THAT MUST HAVE TAKEN PLACE BEFORE EVENT E COULD BECOME POSSIBLE, AND MOST CAREFULLY DISTINGUISHING THEM FROM ANOTHER SET OF EVENTS THAT COULD NOT POSSIBLY OCCUR UNTIL SUBSEQUENT TO EVENT E.

Walden “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1970

Philip Van Doren Stern. THE ANNOTATED WALDEN, TOGETHER WITH “CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE” AND A DETAILED CHRONOLOGY AND VARIOUS PIECES ABOUT ITS AUTHOR, THE WRITING AND PUBLISHING OF THE BOOK. NY: Clarkson N. Potter, 1970112 TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Pages 4-13, “Walden: The Book And Its Meaning” There is one book in American literature that stands out from all the others because it is so very different from them. It is an intensely individual work, the expression of a man who believed fiercely in himself even though he was constantly tortured by what he considered to be his own shortcomings, weaknesses, and failures. His doubts, however, did not prevent him from criticizing the materialism and apathy that he saw dominating his country. What Henry David Thoreau said more than a century ago still holds true. But today more people—especially younger ones—are likely to heed his message than his contemporaries did. We had had a chance to see how empty the material rewards of an acquisitive society are. “Things are in the saddle and will ride mankind,” Thoreau’s friend and fellow townsman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, said. Things have been in the saddle ever since and dominate our thinking and our way of life. Thoreau, whose life bridged the careers of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, saw how his country was betraying the fine promises of its founders. He denounced the Establishment of his time for its gross disregard of human rights. He deplored the poverty-stricken misery of the penniless Irish immigrants who had fled from a potato famine in their own land only to encounter ruthless exploitation and hostility in their new refuge. He was indignant about the Indians, who had been driven ever farther west into territory that nobody wanted. And he reached new heights of eloquence in denouncing slavery and all that it meant. But Walden is far more than a book of social protest, although it is that too. It is an auto biography, a venture into philosophy, and a book about Nature. Most of all it is a work of literature—and a supremely good one, one of America’s best. *** It is as literature that Walden should be judged, for Thoreau thought of himself primarily as a writer. Even his philosophy was subordinate to that. He did not pretend to be a professional naturalist, although he was a perceptive observer and a first-rate note-taker, far better than most professionals in the field, then and now. His writings on natural history belong to art rather than science, even though he did pioneering work in limnology, dendrochronology, ecology, and phenology—all terms that did not even exist in Thoreau’s lifetime. And it must always be remembered that he was an active field-worker at a time when the 112. Distributed by Crown Publishers; new 1992 edition by Marlboro Books/Barnes and Noble. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN natural science were still being shaped. Nor had he had any formal training in them. His education at Harvard was confined to the study of languages, ancient and modern, early English poetry, rhetoric, grammar, philosophy, theology, and history. At college his only encounters with science were optics, electricity and magnetism, and mathematics (as far as calculus). He did have a year in natural history and occasionally listened to lectures on mineralogy and anatomy, but most of his meager scientific education came from books which he read without supervision. His Journal, which is our best key to his thinking and interests, has many more entries bout natural history for the years after 1854, when Walden was published, than it does for the period before that. From late 1845 to early 1854, while Thoreau was working on the manuscript, he was far more concerned with larger human issues than with the details of natural history. Style as well as content has made Walden a classic that is read throughout the world. Pithy, original, and memorable phrases make the book a delight. And beyond these are numerous poetic passages which have endeared Walden to generations of admirers. It is a book that people feel strongly about; even those who do not like it usually say so in forthright terms. Walden appeals to young people, but perhaps it is best appreciated by those who have read it in their youth and then go back to it in later years. True devotees keep returning to it all their lives. How did such a work come into being? One thing is certain; it did not just happen as a casual inspiration. Thoreau spent nearly nine years revising and restructuring his manuscript. He wrote eight versions, yet the never-satisfied author kept making further changes in the page proofs and even in the bound copies of the finished book. There is no doubt that Thoreau took his work seriously. Walden was to be his personal testament, the essence of all he had observed and put down in his Journal, the bringing together of everything he had felt and thought about. His world consisted of only a few square miles around the little town of Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau occasionally did go to other places in the Northeast. He also went to Canada, and he made one last long trip to Minnesota as a dying man in search of health. He never stayed away from Concord any longer than he had to. He came back to it as Antæus did to Mother Earth, for a renewal of strength by contact. Only at the end did that renewal fail, and it may be that by that time Thoreau wanted to die. Much as he loved Concord, he saw its failings and was unsparing in his criticisms of its citizens’ lack of interest in cultural affairs. Nevertheless, this village of 2,249 people held him entranced all his life. He had no desire to go to Europe or to see any of the far places of the earth. Yet he was enormously interested in them and read widely about them, as John Aldrich Christie’s Thoreau as World Traveler (1965) shows. Thoreau may have loved Concord, but he did not fully appreciate all that it had to offer. There was no small town in the Western Hemisphere in which he could have met so many distinguished people on intimate terms. Emerson was there, and for a while at least, so was Hawthorne. William Ellery Channing was Thoreau’s best friend; he knew the Alcotts, and later he met Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, who was to be his biographer. Among the constant stream of visitors were Margaret Fuller, Theodore HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Parker, Wendell Phillips, and—fatefully—John Brown of Osawatomie fame. There were others too, for Boston is only eighteen miles away. Concord, except for its mud and dust, was then at its most beautiful, with fine big houses set back from tree-lined streets, and broad green fields and woods all around. We who live in a strife-torn, heavily polluted, and disaster-threatened age look back at Concord in Thoreau’s time and are likely to think of it as an earthly paradise. It was not, of course, but to some of us it seems that way. Thoreau saw the railroad and the telegraph come into existence and intrude on Walden Pond. He said forthrightly that the huge cloth mills of New England were not operated for mankind to be “well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that the corporations may be enriched.” He realized that an old way of life was passing and that what was replacing it was not necessarily an improvement. He lived at a time when America was beginning to be transformed from a rural economy to an industrialized urban society. It may be that his protests came from his awareness of what the future would bring. We who live in this artificial present seldom think about Nature except to hope vaguely that some part of the natural world will be saved from the crunching jaws of our devastating machines that are equally ruthless with soil, rocks, and living things. We are so overwhelmed with the seemingly unsolvable problems of man that we tend to ignore what is going on beyond our narrow horizon’s rim. And our problems are real and horrifying, more so than any previous generation has had to face. Suddenly our world has become too crowded, and we have found out that creatures that live too closely together tend to become neurotic and destructive. Even worse is the shadow that looms over us for the first time in human history, the unbearable knowledge that mankind can annihilate itself and everything that lives. Sometimes we may be impatient with Thoreau for complaining about the defects of his much simpler world. But it is the very things he complained about that have become the monstrous evils which plague us now. Henry Miller, who once called American an air- conditioned nightmare, edited three of Thoreau’s essays and said of their author: “He appeared at a time when we had ... a choice as to the direction, we, the American people, would take. Like Emerson and Whitman, he pointed out the right road—the hard road.... As a people we chose differently. And we are now reaping the fruits of our choice.... It is too late now to change, we think. But it is not. As individuals, as men, it is never too late to change. That is what these sturdy forerunners of ours were emphasizing all their lives.” Many of our older people seem to believe that America’s destiny has already been determined and that our leaders can pursue no other course than the one they have been following, the one that has led us into an intolerable state of affairs. But young people, ever rebellious, refuse to believe this and demand a radical change. Thoreau has a special appeal to them. He wanted them for his audience. In the second paragraph of Walden he says: “Perhaps these pages are particularly addressed to poor students.” And then, a little later: “How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?” One is never too young or too old to read a book as universal as this one is. For Walden is not merely a printed text to be HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN read; it is an experience to savor. Each contact with it offers us more of its riches. The other nineteenth-century American classics, great as they are, do not convey the intensely personal message that Walden does. Examine them one by one, Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, all of Poe’s work, and Mark Twain’s too, and you will see that they are about people, but other people, never about you. Walden is as personal as a letter from a close friend, a friend who wishes you well. Emerson tries to do this, but the sage of Concord sometimes addresses his audience from too lofty a perch. Whitman comes nearest, for he speaks directly to his fellow men and is deeply concerned about them. But it must be remembered that he sings primarily of himself. Important as these authors are, none of their books has attracted the completely devoted following that Walden has. Even more than Emerson, Thoreau was concerned with the minds and morals of his readers. He was a mentor, a counselor, and an admonisher—a true teacher in every sense of the word. But if he had been only that he would have been forgotten along with countless other well-meaning and helpful advisers. He wrote superbly well, and they did not. It is as a poet and a stylist that Thoreau rises to front rank in American literature. His verse, however, is much inferior to his prose. He never mastered the technical skill that formal poetry requires. And, perhaps sensing his own weakness in that medium, he lost interests in it. Most of his verse was written while he was young. Even before Walden was published he noted that “the strains from my muse are as rare nowadays ... as the notes of birds in the winter.... It never melts into song.” The critic who has best grasped the essential nature of Thoreau’s great book is Charles R. Anderson, who writes about it with great perception in The Magic Circle of Walden (1968). The book has many facets, he says, but its style is even more important than its matter. Therefore, “why not try an entirely new approach and read Walden as a poem, the transformation of a vision into words?” Many Journal entries show that Thoreau thought of himself primarily as a poet. This does not mean that Walden’s best passages should be broken into lines of free verse, nor should one consider it a prose- poem. It can stand by itself, put together just as Thoreau wanted it to be. As Anderson says, “To read it as a poem is to assume that its meaning resides not in its logic but in its language, its structure of images, its symbolism.” “What Thoreau is striving for,” Anderson adds, is “rendered in an intricate series of image-clusters: animal, leaf, food and shelter, the imagery of time, the quest or journey, the cocoon, the circle, and so on.” On page 18 Professor Anderson explains Walden’s complex design: The overall structure of Walden may be likened to that of both a circle and a web. The Spider’s web is too geometric, but it will serve as a useful analogy to begin with. Walden Pond lies at the center as a symbol of the purity and harmony yearned for by man, though unattainable. Radial lines of wit run out from this, cutting across the attractions of the purely pragmatic or sensual life. And these radials are looped with circle after concentric circle of aspiration toward the ideal life of heaven—which is also mirrored in the HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN central pond. But Thoreau was too much a poet to be content with a mechanical design. These figures—the spider’s web and the formal Euclidean circle—are suggestive merely. Like the orientals he sought an asymmetrical pattern that would satisfy the esthetic sense of form and still remain true to the nature of experience, art without the appearance of artifice. The circle in Walden is less the obvious cycle of the seasons than a number of subtly suggested circular figures, overlapping as well as concentric. (This design is treated fully in a later chapter.) The web is but another name for the intricate lines of relationship that shape the total structure. But all are so woven together that the whole vibrates when any part is touched, and the ultimate motion is toward circumference. Few works of the creative imagination are more successfully unified. Few have their meaning more embedded in a complex pattern of words. Walden is a poem, though rendered in the guise of prose. Walden is a very great poem, one of America’s greatest, for it expresses the noblest ideals to which this country might have aspired. That it did not attain them is a tragedy that affects the entire human race. And Walden is a poem in the primeval mythic sense, as Reginald L. Cook (1965, page 98 f.) points out: “There are at least two Waldens. One is the homely, circumstantial, and actual record; the other is ancient, ritualistic, and hieratic.... The theme of the reactualization of the archetypal gestures of archaic man—the gestures of baptism and planting and harvesting, or curative ceremonials and re-birth—and their ritualistic evidences appear as naturally as the pickerel in the pond. The more searchingly Walden is read with Jane Harrison’s statement concerning ‘the darker and older shapes’ in mind the more various the shapes appear.... Interpreted in this light these passages complement and re-enforce an extra-Christian dimension in Walden. It can then be read on two levels most rewardingly to the imaginative reader. There is the level of the dramatic present and the level of the prehistoric past.” Walden is a difficult book. It cannot be skimmed through or read lightly. It is all meat, compact and solid. To get from it all that it can yield requires careful reading, rereading and concentrated study. It is worth the effort, for it has almost anything you can want—practical advice, facts about natural phenomena, anecdotes about people, philosophical speculation, and—for those who are attuned to such things—intimations of immortality, poetic insight, and the thrill that words can give when they have been chosen and arranged by a master who endows them with more than their apparent meaning. To have read Walden many years ago is not enough, no matter how well you may think you remember it. You are a different person now who will get different meanings from it if you read it again. Walden should never be put away; it is a book to keep close at hand so it can be referred to often. In it are depths below depths, vistas beyond vistas, an opening and closing of doors that lead to corridors and rooms stored with treasure beyond counting. But the treasure has to be searched for. Charles Anderson has described it, but even with the clues he gives, each reader has to go on his own quest. Like HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN all spiritual quests this one should be rewarding in itself. This much can be promised: that hidden in Walden —and buried deep within it— is another book that few readers even suspect is there. Only those who bring to Walden the necessary sensitivity and the ability to understand implied meanings will reach the central book that is artfully concealed beneath outer wrappings of nature writing, facts and figures about house building, and other seemingly irrelevant things. (They are not irrelevant.) Like poetry, Walden can be appreciated to its full extent only by those who respond to symbolism, suggestion, and association. A hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove are there to help readers on their way, but those readers must be able to recognize their guides when they see them, for they will not be labeled as such. (Nothing is.) The road is hard, the terrain perilous, the effort great, but the reward is beyond computing. (It would wreck anything so simple as a computer.) But seldom is so great a chance, so challenging a challenge given. Let the search begin, then stick to it manfully, always remembering that: At the heart of this inner secret book is Walden itself, but this Walden is no ordinary New England pond. It is a small bit of paradise that existed only in its creator’s mind, so you will have to re-create it in yours. It belongs with literature’s many lands of the heart’s desire, with the Forest of Broceliande where Merlin and Vivian still live, with the fairyland where Midsummer Night’s Dream forever casts its magic sell. These imaginary places may seem to be as insubstantial as moonbeams, yet they outlast time and transcend reality. The reader who is going to be won over by Walden will hear the musical hum of the wind blowing through the telegraph wire harp as he approaches a Concord that never was. In the countryside around Walden the trees are greener, the snow whiter, and the crystal-clear water of the pond bluer than anywhere else. In this enchanted forest the animals are friendly — as one would expect them to be. Here the flowers are forever in bloom, and the air is so exhilarating that just to breathe it is to make one want to renounce all previous life. Yet there is wildness here too, a psychic frenzy of the kind that the worshipers of Pan experienced when they ran unrestrained through the dark woods searching for the god of passion and rebellion. But Walden’s magic works only on those who are prepared to surrender themselves to it. To others it will be just another book full of words and phrases that have little significance. They literally will not be able to see the forest for the trees— and to them the trees will be just so much lumber to be calculated in board feet and sawed into planks for building fences. After reading Walden, men who have been leading lives of quiet desperation may become less desperate when they find out what is troubling them. And even those who feel that the odds are against them may realize that “there is more day to dawn” and that “the sun is but a morning star.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN June: Paul Benjamin Auster received a Master of Arts from Columbia University, where Literature of the Renaissance had become his primary field of study.

David Kaczynski graduated from Columbia University. At some point David would attempt to live the simple life in the Texas desert. As a Christmas or birthday present, a year later his brother Ted Kaczynski sent him his personal copy of WALDEN. David has written me about this: Thanks for your note and for checking in with me. If no Thoreau was found in Ted’s cabin (which I don’t know for a fact) it could be because he sent me his personal copy of Walden as a birthday or Christmas present one year after I had moved to the Texas desert. I remember that in his early years in the woods, Ted self-consciously compared himself to Thoreau in their common aim of living as simply and inexpensively as possible. Clearly, he admired Thoreau. It’s amazing that Thoreau could have had an influence on two such different people as my brother and Gandhi. Keep in mind, though, that Ted’s principles and values got mixed up with serious personal and emotional afflictions that rose to the level of a diagnosable mental illness. The lesson for me is that human beings are very very complex, and I think my brother is more complex than most. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1971

CLIFFS NOTES of Lincoln, Nebraska put out one of their black-and-yellow ponies, on WALDEN.

(The author of the above was Joseph R. McElrath, Jr.)

J. Lyndon Shanley opinioned –evidently making this up off the point of his gourd– that “The reviews and 113 notices on WALDEN’s first appearance were not such as to create any considerable demand for it.”

WALDEN-SAROVARA, translated by Banarasidasa Caturvedi (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi)

In this year Professor Walter Roy Harding’s THE VARIORUM WALDEN, published in 1962 by Twayne and in 1968 by Pocket Books, was reissued by Washington Square, his HENRY DAVID THOREAU, A PROFILE was published by Hill & Wang, and his A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOREAU SOCIETY BULLETIN BIBLIOGRAPHIES, 1941-1969 was issued by Whitston. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

113. J. Lyndon Shanley (ed.). “Historical Introduction” for WALDEN (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971, page 368) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1973

Professor Burrhus Frederic Skinner, author of a book WALDEN II that has no conceivable link with Thoreau’s WALDEN, lectured the Thoreau Society at Concord.

Princeton University Press put out a hardcover WALDEN edited and with a historical introduction by J. Lyndon Shanley. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

George FrisbieWhicher’s WALDEN REVISITED, A CENTENNIAL TRIBUTE TO HENRY DAV ID THOREAU (Chicago IL: Packard and Company, 1945) was reissued by Hendricks House of New York. Thoreau attained somewhat the same detached point of view in regard to human affairs, not by soaring above the earth, but by identifying himself with the earth and its various natural phenomena more closely than the average man is likely to do. The earth was his airplane swung in space. The planets were his neighbors. His mind was so occupied with moon and stars, clouds and winds, swamps and woods and their inhabitants that he had little time to bother about what his human neighbors were doing. Toward them and their affairs in fact he adopted a slightly quizzical attitude which can hardly have increased his popularity with the majority of Concord citizens. His opinion of their importance was obviously low, and he had an irritating forthrightness in saying so. They seemed to him to swarm like ants by his woodpile or tadpoles at the pond’s edge. As he put it in WALDEN:

WALDEN: In one direction from my house there was a colony of muskrats in the river meadows; under the grove of elms and buttonwoods in the other horizon was a village of busy men, as curious to me as if they had been prairie dogs, each sitting at the mouth of its burrow, or running over to a neighbor’s to gossip. I went there frequently to observe their habits. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1974

Robert M. Pirsig’s ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE: AN INQUIRY INTO VALUES (William Morrow and Company).

Remarking that a trip needs to be prepared for, Pirsig echoed Thoreau’s preparations for his travel in the Maine woods by enumerating the materials and provisions he had set aside for his long 1968 motorcycle journey. This included 3 pieces of reference material: the motorcycle manual, a general book on motorcycle maintenance, and WALDEN. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Pirsig’s son, above, had died at a much earlier age, and Pirsig himself has died at the age of 88, in 2017 while I was at age 79. Both he and I had been technical writers in Minneapolis and we had worked at the same firm (although when I arrived he was already gone).

When I read in his book how he had struggled unsuccessfully for years to get his dissertation on “quality” accepted so he could get an advanced degree in Philosophy and do something more interesting than contract technical writing for a living, I set out to get some clue about what he had been driving at. As near as I could figure there was “quantity” and there was “quality,” and this was a distinction that can be made, quantity being quantitative, being a gradient series either analog or digital between perhaps 0 and perhaps infinity, and quality being some other sort of difference, a sort of nonquantitative difference between this thingie and that thingie that was not in the same manner to be calculated as “less” in one direction or “more” in the other — possibly lower versus higher but not less versus more. For instance, given a basket of 9 red apples and another basket of 9 oranges, the philosophically inclined can say that the baskets contain the same number of pieces of fruit, 9, but that the pieces differ in that in one basket the pieces have the quality of the color red whereas in the other they have the quality of the color orange, or one can say that they are equivalent both quantity and in quality HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN in both possessing the quantity 9 plus a rather discretely different sort of thing, the quality of being pieces of fruit. Or one can offer a translation, that perhaps for Pirsig the word “quality” amounts to an easy synonym for “value” and he personally finds there to be greater value in oranges than in apples, or in apples than in oranges, being willing to pay $7 for one basket but $8 for the other. (Or one or another stupid distinction of that sort.)

Finally I was obliged to resign myself to consigning Pirsig to the same kettle of fish in which I many years before had placed another philosophaster of immense self-regard, Ayn Rand — because in neither case had I been able despite my very best efforts to discover anything of redeeming value in any of their pretentious and long-winded musings. In both cases I just gave up and figured that the matter was beyond me, that either they were fools or I was. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1979

Richard H. Dillman’s “The Psychological Rhetoric of WALDEN” (ESQ 25: 79-91). TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1980

Townsend Scudder III retired.

Robert M. Thorson became an Assistant Professor in Geology and Geophysics at the University of Alaska– Fairbanks.

Professor Walter Roy Harding and Thomas Blanding’s A THOREAU ICONOGRAPHY was put out by the Thoreau Society.

Professor Walter Roy Harding’s and Professor Michael Meyer’s THE NEW THOREAU HANDBOOK (NY: New York UP). TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1981

Professor Philip F. Gura’s “Farther Afield — Henry Thoreau’s Philological Explorations,” pages 109-44 in THE WISDOM OF WORDS (Middletown CT: Wesleyan UP).

In a determined effort to cut an author down to size, Avenel Books of New York published and Crown Publishers distributed a 731-page volume made up of various worthwhile portions, that Lily Owens114 had picked out here and there, of THE WORKS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

114. Lily Owens was a book editor who usually prepared collections of fairy tales. She was not the Lily Owens, fictional character, who famously opinioned that “The world will give you relief once in a while, a brief time out; the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, where somebody dabs mercy on your beat-up life.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1982

William L. Howarth’s THE BOOK OF CONCORD: THOREAU’S LIFE AS A WRITER (NY: Viking).

Wa-erh-teng hu / [Mei] Heng-li Tai-wei So-lo chu, translated by Hsu Ch’ih (1914- ). Shanghai: Shang-hai i wen ch’u pan she: Hsin hua shu tien Shang-hai fa hsing so. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1984

Ed Abbey revised the peroration of Waldo Emerson’s funeral argument on Henry Thoreau from “Wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home” by substituting for knowledge “deer and hawks,” for virtue “liberty and danger,” and for beauty “wilderness” and “a living river.” Oh. Well, allright. I suppose.

Translation of Thoreau materials into Portuguese in Brazil: DESOBEDECENDO. A DESOBEDIÊNCIA CIVIL & OUTROS ESCRITOS. APRESENTAÇÃO DE FERNANDO GABEIRA. SELEÇÃO, INTRODUÇÃO, TRADUÇÃO E NOTAS DE JOSÉ AUGUSTO DRUMMOND. CONTÉM: “A desobediência civil,” “A vida sem princípio,” “Caminhando,” “A escravidão em Massachusetts” e trechos escolhidos de Uma semana nos rios Concord e Merrimack. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco. 167 pages. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1985

WALDEN was issued in the boxed hard-cover Princeton University Press edition with photographs.

Jean Fleming’s BETWEEN WALDEN AND THE WHIRLWIND (Navpress). “For author Jean Fleming, life as a Christian seemed increasingly characterized by a whirlwind of disciplines and demands, which threatened to sweep away the quite center of intimacy with God so long for. Struggling to reconcile the desire to draw apart with God –to find a personal, spiritual ‘Walden’ – with the demands to spend energy n the whirlwind of ministry to others, Jean set a major, year-long goal: ‘to simplify my life … to tame my schedule and to unclutter my environment.’ But, instead of resolving the dilemma, Jean’s ‘search for simple’ raised deeper questions: Did living ‘simply’ mean on a change in lifestyle? Was it an escapist attempt to avoid stress and pressure? Or was it actually just a demand for control over circumstance? BETWEEN WALDEN AND THE WHIRLWIND sets forth the major discover of Jean’s search: focusing life, not simplifying it –or even balance it– is the key to truly Christ-centered living. Fleming’s thoughtful and perceptive insights are rich in practical value: learning from Jesus’ life by making God our Director and Audience; living decisively; discerning when ‘busy’ is too busy; the marrying of service and solitude and the importance of each; learning the secret of contentment from Paul’s life; developing Abraham’s pilgrim perspective. This book is for Christian struggling to live a Christ- like life in the midst of a whirlwind of activities, demands, and responsibilities; for those seeking to develop a deeper, secret, inner life while remaining intensely involved in our needy world. It is for those who long to make Christ their center, to be focused on the God who ministers to us as well as through us.”115 TIMELINE OF WALDEN

A WASHINGTON POST reporter interviewed residents of “Walden Breezes” near Walden Pond. Some resident in one or another trailer of that trailer park was heard to characterize Henry Thoreau as “that old drunk who used to live in a shack over on the cove.”

Sharon Cameron’s WRITING NATURE: HENRY THOREAU’S JOURNAL (NY: Oxford UP) discovered that Thoreau had utilized a writerly persona rather noticeably distant from himself (duh, yeah):

WALDEN’s philosophic position is difficult to get hold of precisely because it theatricalizes attitudes in which, from the vantage of the JOURNAL’s language, it appears Thoreau did not believe. In WALDEN we are conscious of postures of credence.

115. Fleming, Jean. BETWEEN WALDEN AND THE WHIRLWIND. Navpress, 1985 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Speaking of writers who create an authorial persona: Michael A. Lofaro in this year edited a study of the Brother Jonathan tradition of American humor as it exemplified itself in DAVY CROCKETT: THE MAN, THE LEGEND, THE LEGACY, 1786-1986 (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P). “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Contains eight essays on Crockett and his legacy, as well as a Crockett chronology, filmography, and bibliography (of the “Crockett Craze” in the 1950s), a checklist of printed twentieth-century versions of traditional “Davy Crockett” songs, and a checklist of commercial and noncommercial recordings of “Davy Crockett/Pompey Smash” songs. In the first essay, entitled “The Man in the Buckskin Hunting Shirt: Fact and Fiction in the Crockett Story,” Richard B. Hauck writes on the interrelationships between the biographical Crockett and the fictional Crockett. Hauck notes the virulent racism and jingoism in the Crockett almanacs and concludes: “Some scholars give the Crockett almanacs great credit for their role in building the Crockett legend; I have often wondered how the legend managed to survive the almanacs” (14). Hauck also points out that the frontier woodsman was already a stock character before Crockett came along: “The type had been solidified by the fame of Daniel Boone and widely popularized by ballads and theatrical skits celebrating the role of the ‘Kentuckians’ in the Battle of New Orleans” (14). Michael Lofaro analyzes Richard Dorson’s selections of tales from the Nashville almanacs for Dorson’s 1939 collection, Davy Crockett: American Comic Legend to show how Dorson presents only a partial view of the Crockett legend. Lofaro argues that “The Hidden ‘Hero’ of the Nashville Crockett Almanacs” is the shape-shifting, trickster-transformer Crockett. In “Davy Crockett and the Wild Man, Or, the Metaphysics of the Longue Duree,” Catherine L. Albanese borrows the historical methods of the French Annales school — and, in particular, Fernand Braudel’s notion of la longue duree (the study of long duration) — to locate the legendary Crockett within the global history of Wild Man mythology. Richard Hauck describes various manifestations of the Crockett figure on stage and screen in “Making It All Up: Davy Crockett in the Theater.” Hauck points out that the Crockett-like character, Nimrod Wildfire, in “The Lion of the West” (1830) was not an original creation but part of an established theatrical tradition of backwoods characters, the earliest variant being a Down- East character, the rude Yankee bumpkin, that can be traced back at least to 1787 and Royall Tyler’s play, “The Contrast.” (That character was named Brother Jonathan.) The sixth essay is a reproduction of an article from Motion Picture Magazine, dated September 1916, on a silent film about Davy Crockett. It is followed by Margaret J. King’s look at Walt Disney’s treatment of the Crockett legend (”The Recycled Hero: Walt Disney’s Davy Crockett”). The final essay, “Davy Crockett Songs: Minstrels to Disney” by Charles K. Wolfe, takes up the history of popular music in relation to the Crockett legend. John Seelye’s essay, “A Well-Wrought Crockett, Or, How the Fakelorists Passed Through the Credibility Gap and Discovered Kentucky” seems of particular importance to me and is cited separately within this bibliography.

John Seelye’s “A Well-Wrought Crockett; Or, How the Fakelorists Passed Through the Credibility Gap and Discovered Kentucky,” pages 21-45 in DAVY CROCKETT: THE MAN, THE LEGEND, THE LEGACY, 1786- 1986. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Seelye’s ingenious and careful literary detective work leads him to relegate the early folklore of David Crockett to “fakelore”: “No longer regarded as directly derived from folk tales, the Crockett almanacs are seen as an early version of popular literature: relying on oral conventions, the comic ‘legends’ were the invention of literary hacks who consciously introduced mythic (archetypal) elements” (24). Seelye identifies these hacks as anti-Jacksonian, anti-Democratic Eastern-based Whigs — “a moneyed elite”; and he claims that “the ‘legendary’ Davy Crockett like the literary ‘Jack Downing’ may, like the wit and wisdom of Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain, be traced to Whiggish origins” (25). Especially clever is Seelye’s analysis of various woodcut illustrations to determine that the probable publisher of the Nashville Crockett almanacs was Charles Ellms, an illustrator- editor residing in Boston in the 1830s and 1840s, who also published the American Comic Almanac and The People’s Almanac. This New England connection also helps to explain what a New England sailor named Ben Harding is doing out west in the company of Davy Crockett. (Harding is the ostensible editor of the Nashville almanacs.) (Lane Stiles, Winter 1992) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1986

Paul Benjamin Auster had taken on a position as lecturer at Princeton University — a post he would continue to hold until 1990. His short story GHOSTS reconfigured elements of a discarded Beckettish play BLACKOUTS. Auster described it to Joseph Mallia as “Walden Pond in the heart of the city.” It is ostensibly about a detective named Blue who is hired to spy on someone named Black by someone named White. All this detective is able to do, however, is wait and watch, as slowly he turns inward: One night, therefore, Blue finally turns to his copy of WALDEN. This time has come, he says to himself, and if he doesn’t make an effort now, he knows that he never will. But the book is not a simple business. As Blue begins to read, he feels as though he is entering an alien world. Trudging through swamps and brambles, hoisting himself up gloomy screes and treacherous cliffs, he feels like a prisoner on a forced march, and his only thought is to escape. He is bored by Thoreau’s words and finds it difficult to concentrate. Whole chapters go by, and when he comes to the end of them he realizes that he has not retained a thing. Why would anyone want to go off and live alone in the woods? What’s all this about planting beans and not drinking coffee or eating meat? Why all these interminable descriptions of birds? Blue thought that he was going to get a story, or at least something like a story, but this is no more than blather, an endless harangue about nothing at all. It would be unfair to blame him, however. Blue has never read much of anything except newspapers and magazines, and an occasional adventure novel when he was a boy. Even experienced and sophisticated readers have been known to have trouble with WALDEN, and no less a figure than Emerson once wrote in his journal that reading Thoreau made him feel nervous and wretched. To Blue’s credit, he does not give up. The next day he begins again, and this second go-through is somewhat less rocky than the first. In the third chapter he comes across a sentence that finally says something to him -Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written- and suddenly he understands that the trick is to go slowly, more slowly than he has ever gone with words before. This helps to some extent, and certain passages begin to grow clear: the business about clothes in the beginning, the battle between the red ants and the black ants, the argument against work.... What he does not know is that were he to find the patience to read the book in the spirit in which it asks to be read, his entire life would begin to change, and little by little he would come to a full understanding of his situation.... TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

A winged cat (just like in WALDEN) was reported in Anglesey, Wales. Shortly after being photographed it moulted its furry “wings.” CATS WITH WINGS

Translation of Thoreau materials into Portuguese in Brazil: WALDEN, OU A VIDA NOS BOSQUES. Coleção Armazém do Tempo. Introdução e tradução de Astrid Cabral. Contém em apêndice “A desobediência civil.” São Paulo: Global. 331 pages. Reed. Aquariana, 2001 (346 pages.); Novo Século, 2007 (288 pages.).

Richard O’Connor, the author of “The Irish Shanties at Walden Pond” in the Thoreau Society Bulletin for 1986 (182:7), informed Professor Walter Roy Harding that this dead horse of WALDEN had been disposed of, not in one of the natural sink holes in Walden Woods, but in the old cellar hole which Thoreau characterized as “some homestead of the Stratton family.” Refer to the JOURNAL for January 11, 1857:

WALDEN: There was a dead horse in the hollow by the path to my house, which compelled me sometimes to go out of my way, especially in the night when the air was heavy, but the assurance it gave me of the strong appetite and inviolable heath of Nature was my compensation for this.

WALDEN: Farther down the hill, on the left, on the old road in the PEOPLE OF woods, are marks of some homestead of the Stratton family; whose WALDEN orchard once covered all the slope of Brister’s Hill, but was long since killed out by pitch-pines, excepting a few stumps, whose old roots furnish still the wild stocks of many a thrifty village tree.

JOSEPH STRATON BRISTER FREEMAN

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1987

In about this year, translation of Thoreau materials into Portuguese in Brazil: DESOBEDIÊNCIA CIVIL (RESISTÊNCIA AO GOVERNO CIVIL) E WALDEN. Coleção Universidade de Bolso. Introdução de Brooks Atkinson. Traduções respectivas de David Jardim Jr. e E. C. Caldas. Rio de Janeiro: Ediouro. 217 pages. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

THE PORTABLE THOREAU / HENRY DAVID THOREAU; EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY CARL BODE. NY: Viking Press, originally issued in 1947, re-released in 1957 and 1963, reissued in 1964, 1966, 1977, 1980, 1982, and 1987 (Penguin), et cetera et cetera et cetera —more lay readers have now encountered Thoreau through the presumptious psychobabble in this one source, than all other works put together. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1988

David K. Stone painted this image of Henry Thoreau (the ArtworkOriginal is currently being offered on the internet by the artist, who is asking $1,250):

Stephen Adams and Donald Ross, Jr.. REVISING MYTHOLOGIES: THE COMPOSITION OF THOREAU’S MAJOR WORKS (Charlottesville VA: UP of Virginia). TIMELINE OF WALDEN TIMELINE OF A WEEK HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1989

The inexpensive Princeton paperback edition of Thoreau’s WALDEN made its appearance

(pagination in this paperback jibes exactly with the boxed hard-cover 1985 Princeton illustrated edition). TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1990

The complete text of Henry Thoreau’s WALDEN appeared for the first time in Polish. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1991

Josef Schwarz provided a new freer translation of Henry Thoreau’s WALDEN into Czech for the publishing house of Odeon. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1992

It was reported in a Thoreau Society publication that Henry Ross Perot, as part of his campaign for President of the United States of America, had claimed to have been influenced by the writings of Henry David Thoreau. In the July 1992 issue of Esquire magazine, in an article titled “Retro Man” by Mark Seal, we learn the truth of this claim:

Excited, he took his idea to his bosses at IBM, but, for the first time in his life, his sales pitch failed. So Ross Perot went out to get a haircut, and, waiting in the barbershop, he read a quote by Henry David Thoreau in a Reader’s Digest, a quote that was a clarion call to action, to arms, to glory.... “No, no, it’s not that deep,” he says today. “It’s just that I was sitting in the barbershop and read that one line ... ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.’ So I had to try.” He quit IBM and started Electronic Data Systems (EDS), where he built America’s mightiest data-processing army. Two years later, in a move Fortune called “the greatest personal coup in the history of American finance,” he took his computer army public and made $220 million overnight.

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Since it had become clear in the course of the interview that Mr. Perot hadn’t really been nearly as influenced by a careful study of Thoreau as some had chosen to report, the interviewer, Mark Seal, continued in an attempt to understand what sort of literature it might have been, that had been of significance to H. Ross “Retro Man” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Perot. The Esquire interviewer pressed his subject, and he hit pay dirt. After going “I read so many books,”

He rifles through the flotsam of his desk drawer, searching for a favorite book of philosophy. “Yep, here it is,” he says, retrieving the tiny, plastic-covered volume. From Perot I am expecting homespun Thoreau or Jefferson. But it is Mao Tse-tung’s Little Red Book, smothered in Post-It notes and paper clips. “In 1969, when the government asked me to work on the POW project, nobody knew what I should do,” he explains. “So I read all the communist literature I could find, and I ran into a couple of pearls.... Now, this is a beautiful statement. It says, ‘China’s 600 million people are poor and blank. This may seem like a bad thing. But in reality, it is a good thing. Poverty gives rise to the desire for revolution.’” He continues: “‘The army must become one with the people.’” A pause and a smile. “Can’t argue with that. Here’s one we oughtta carve on the wall up there in Washington: ‘We should be modest and prudent. Guard against arrogants and rationalists. And serve the people heart and soul.’ Sounds like something the framers of the Constitution would say.” Finished, he rises. He walks me all the way from his office through the long hallways to the exit.

I’ve more recently discovered what issue of the Readers Digest it was that H. Ross Perot had been perusing while waiting for his haircut on that day — he had been perusing the READERS DIGEST CONDENSED BOOK EDITION of WALDEN. At the very back of one of the Readers Digest monthly editions (Pleasantville NY: Readers Digest Association, Inc., front cover pictured above), which I was able to obtain on Ebay on the Internet, the Readers Digest Association had condensed two books: the 1st had been I MARRIED ADVENTURE. A CONDENSATION FROM THE BOOK BY OSA JOHNSON (MRS. MARTIN JOHNSON), written by someone who was in the 1930s and 1940s something of a famous name, and the 2nd was WALDEN: OR LIFE IN THE WOODS. A CONDENSATION FROM THE BOOK BY HENRY DAVID THOREAU. As an illustration of the comparative merit which they had attributed to these two works of literature, they had placed I MARRIED ADVENTURE first — and had allowed it more than three times as much space as they had allowed for WALDEN. The entirety of WALDEN they had condensed, would you believe, into six and a half pages, and they had begun this condensed edition with the epigraph “I propose to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, if only to wake my neighbors up” followed by a ligature (three dots) segueing directly into that most famous phrase that Mr. Perot had picked up on in the barbershop, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”: I propose to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, if only to wake my neighbors up.... The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Their incessant anxiety and strain is a well-nigh incurable form of disease. They have no time to be anything but machines. It is a fool’s life. CONDENSED WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN That this is not exactly the way Thoreau would have put the matter is beside the point. One can imagine how much of an impact such a short, sharply negative Readers Digest condemnation of the fools who surround us smart people would have had on a smartie such as Perot — so constantly determined as this libertarian “Retro Man” has been throughout his life to envision any person other than himself as a fool.

116 Here is a very rare image of the Chairman and the LITTLE RED BOOK that influenced Perot so very much:

In related news, there is, actually, a book which was accepted by a publisher because of an endorsement from H. Ross Perot! That book is neither Thoreau’s WALDEN nor Mao’s LITTLE RED BOOK but, get this, Wess Roberts’s 1994 Dell editions bestseller VICTORY SECRETS OF ATTILA THE HUN — ISBN 0440505917.

As H. Ross Perot gave this interview to Esquire magazine about the influence of Henry David Thoreau and Mao Tse-tung upon his thought, he was sitting at his desk in front of the painting which he had purchased to serve as his backdrop for his impersonation of a patriot, Archibald M. Willard’s famous 1891 contribution to

116. The reason why the image is so very rare is, the guy holding the book while smiling so widely has been, evidently, murdered, for records of his having existed have systematically been expunged. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN xenophobia “The Spirit of ’76”: HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1993

January: Everyman put out an edition of Henry Thoreau’s WALDEN with an introduction by Verlyn Klinkenborg. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1996

Chen Yinghong’s “Myth of Walden” and Wang Yuehua’s “Two Waldens” appeared in Reading. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Translation of Thoreau materials into Portuguese in Brazil: O PEQUENO LIVRO DA SABEDORIA. Tradução de Vera Maria Renoldi. São Paulo: BestSeller (C.L.C.); Rio de Janeiro: BestSeller (Record), 2005. 81 pages.

In this year a book titled THOREAU’S GARDEN: NATIVE PLANTS FOR THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE, by H. Peter Loewer, was put out by Stackpole Books, which among other egregious errors identified Brister’s Spring as “Blister’s Spring.” (However, poor Blister, a member of the Addams Family of cartoon fame, was not a black resident of early Concord and is not interred in Concord’s Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.)

October 24, Thursday: A local Illinois newspaper obituary: “J. Lyndon Shanley, 86, professor emeritus of English at Northwestern University and Henry David Thoreau scholar, died Tuesday at Wagner Health Center in Evanston. Mr. Shanley, a scholar of English Renaissance literature, taught at the Evanston school from 1936 to 1978. He was known for his research on Thoreau’s WALDEN, a book of philosophical observations.” TIMELINE OF WALDEN

October 26, Saturday: “Walden Pond,” a cycle for chorus, three cellos, and harp to words of Thoreau, was performed for the initial time, in Ted Mann Auditorium of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis on the eve of composer Dominic Argento’s 69th birthday. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1997

Kenneth Walter Cameron’s EVAL UAT ING EMERSON THEN AND NOW: HIS ROLE IN ANGLO-AMERICAN ROMANTICISM, HIS CENTENNIAL (1903) AND HIS BICENTENNIAL (2003) (Hartford, Connecticut; Box A, Station A, Hartford 06126: Transcendental Books).

Cameron’s EMERSON ON EDUCATION AND SCHOLARS; THE HAWTHORNE SECONDARY BIBLIOGRAPHY; THE VOICE FROM NIRVANA: BACKGROUNDS OF EMERSON’S “BRAHMA”; THOREAU’S DOCTRINES OF SIMPLICITY (Hartford, Connecticut; Box A, Station A, Hartford 06126: Transcendental Books).

Cameron’s THE THOREAU SECONDARY BIBLIOGRAPHY: SUPPLEMENT TWO (1836-1940): WITH AN APPENDIX OF COMMENTARY AND DOCUMENTS (Hartford, Connecticut; Box A, Station A, Hartford 06126: Transcendental Books).

Translation of Thoreau materials into Portuguese in Brazil: A DESOBEDIÊNCIA CIVIL. Coleção L&PM Pocket. Tradução de Sergio Karam. Porto Alegre: L&PM. 80 pages. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

In Professor Guy Davenport’s “Badger” in TWELVE STORIES (Washington DC: Counterpoint), Thoreau’s WALDEN parable of the hound, the bay horse, and the turtledove is repeated five times, on pages 20, 23-24, 27, 32, and 35: “I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtledove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travelers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who have heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.”

The The WALDEN other parable analyses

Also during this year, William Bronk opinioned in VECTORS AND SMOOTHABLE CURVES: COLLECTED ESSAYS that: Silence is an asylum not because it enabled him, in any sense, to stop living, but because it made it possible for him to continue to live and always come back for more in spite of disappointments and failures. He says in WALDEN in a cryptic but meaningful way, “I long ago lost ... lost them themselves.” It is of primary importance that Thoreau is still on their trail; and so at one time when he feels that a friendship has come to an end, he accepts the disappointment and loneliness, knowing that sooner or later there will be others to stand in the same relation to him as this friend once did. Friendship is “evanescent in every man’s experience,” one remembers from an earlier writing, “ancient and familiar as the sun and moon and as sure to come again.” ... There is the riddle that Thoreau makes in WALDEN about the lost hound and bay horse and turtle dover for which he spends his nights and days searching, which is as exact and suggestive as any other few sentences he ever write of himself. Thoreau pursued his life like game wherever he might find it or it might HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN come to him, and no other business was allowed to obstruct the meeting. It was a pursuit that led him in strange and unfrequented ways, —over the back road to Walden Pond, down to Nine Acre Corner, and all across the southern part of the town on the disused traces of the Canoe Birch, and Sudbury, and Old Marlboro Roads, which led away from towns and temptation, and conducted to the outside of earth, over its uppermost crust; where you could forget in what country you were traveling; where no farmer could complain that you were treading on his grass; no gentleman who had recently constructed a seat in the country, that you were tresspassing; on which you could go off at half- cock and wave adieu to the village; along which you might travel like a pilgrim, going no-whither; where travelers were not too often to be met; where your spirit was free; where the walks and fences were not cared for; where your head was more in heaven than your feet were on earth; not so luxuriant a soil as to attract men; where earth was cheap enough by being public; where you could walk and think with the least obstruction, there being nothing to measure progress by; where you could pace when your breast was full and cherish your moodiness; where you were not in false relations with men, nor dining nor conversing with them; by which you might go to the uttermost parts of the earth. “Sometimes,” Thoreau says, “it is some particular half-dozen rods which I wish to find myself pacing over, as where certain airs blow; then my life will come to me, methinks. Like a hunter I walk in wait for it. When I am against this bare promontory of a huckleberry hill, then forsooth my thoughts will expand. Is it some influence, as a vapor which exhales from the ground or something in the gales which blow there, or in all things there brought together agreeably to my spirit? The walls must not be too numerous, nor the hills too near, bounding the view, nor the soil too rich, attracting the attention to the earth. It must simply be the way and the life,— a way that was never known to be repaired nor to need repair, within the memory of the oldest inhabitant. I cannot walk habitually in those ways that are liable to be mended for sure it was the devil only that wore them. The road to the corner! the ninety and nine acres that you go through to get there! I would rather see it again though I saw it this morning than Gray’s Churchyard! There I can walk and stalk and pace and plod. Which nobody but Jonas Potter travels beside me; where no cow but his is tempted to linger for the herbage by its side; where the guideboard is fallen and now the hand points to heaven significantly, — to a Sudbury and Marlboro in the skies. That’s a road I can travel, that the particular Sudbury I am bound for, six miles an hour, or two, as you please; and few there be that enter thereon. There I can walk and recover the lost child that I am without any ringing of a bell; on the promenade deck of the world, an outside passenger. I must be fancy-free. I must feel that wet or dry, high or low, it is the genuine surface of the planet, and not a little chip dirt or a compost-heap or made land or redeemed.

The The WALDEN other parable analyses HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

August 29, Friday: The British government formally invited Sinn Fein to participate in multiparty peace talks for the province.

Unknown gunmen killed over 300 residents of Rais, a village south of Algiers. The government blamed Islamic militants.

Dr. Peter D. Kramer, a psychiatrist specializing in depression, opinioned, in an OP-ED piece for the New York Times, that “American literature’s one great self-help book is WALDEN, a paean to self-reliance and an homage to Henry David Thoreau’s favorite preacher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who declaimed: ‘Say to them, O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward, I am the truth’s. ... I must be myself. I cannot break my self any longer for you, or you.’” TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN

1998

In THOREAU, EMERSON AND EUROPE: FOUR TITLES (Hartford: Transcendental Books), Kenneth Walter Cameron provided an examination of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, William Jesse Jupp, John Page Hopps, and Francois de Salignac de La Mothe-Fenelon.

Also in this year, his TRANSCENDENTALISM OF EMERSON’S HOMILETICAL YEARS (1826-1836) (Hartford CT: Transcendental Books, 1998).

EMERSON, NIETZSCHE AND MAN’S STRIVING UPWARD THE “VIA EMINENTIAE” OF SUPERIOR PEOPLE: BACKGROUNDS AND A SPECIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY / [edited by] Kenneth Walter Cameron. (Hartford, Connecticut; Box A, Station A, Hartford 06126: Transcendental Books).

EMERSON, GLASGOW AND JOHN PAGE HOPPS: THE UNITARIAN STRUGGLE WITH SCOTTISH CALVINISM / [edited by] Kenneth Walter Cameron. (Hartford, Connecticut; Box A, Station A, Hartford 06126: Transcendental Books).

THE PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY OF EMERSON AND THOREAU IN ENGLAND—WILLIAM JESSE JUPP: SELECTIONS FROM HIS WORKS / edited with backgrounds by Kenneth Walter Cameron. (Hartford, Connecticut; Box A, Station A, Hartford 06126: Transcendental Books).

GEORGE P. BRADFORD, EMERSON AND THE PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY OF FÉNELON / [edited by] by Kenneth HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Walter Cameron. (Hartford, Connecticut; Box A, Station A, Hartford 06126: Transcendental Books).

Also in this year, his THE VARIORUM WALDEN: COMMENTARY AND INDEXES FOR THE THOREAU SCHOLAR (Box A, Station A, Hartford, Connecticut 06126: Transcendental Books, 1998).

WALDEN, ANNOTATED BY BILL MCKIBBEN (Beacon Press).

Professor of English Wang Guanglin of the Shanghai Institute of Foreign Trade prepared a translation of Thoreau’s WALDEN into the Chinese language, and it was published by Writer’s Press in Beijing (subsequently, there would be a revised edition published by the Changjiang Literature and Arts Press, in 2005 and 2006). TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Publication of the 300BCE Guodian Laozi inscribed on bamboo strips, that had been dug up in China in 1993.

February 26, Thursday: Valdas Adamkus replaced Algirdas Mykolas Brazauskas as President of Lithuania.

Sixth Symphony by William Bolcom was performed for the initial time.

A lengthy article on the OP-ED page of the New York Times, by Joyce Carol Oates, dealt in part with Henry Thoreau and WALDEN as seeming to be autobiography but being actually much more than autobiography. The headline of this article carried the word “fact” overlaid by the word “fiction,” and the subhead was “Believing What We Read, and Vice Versa.” Here is the section dealing with Thoreau: HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN Slave narratives tended to follow formal patterns of narration, often consisting of a “before” and “after” (the escape from slavery). So do tales of religious conversion or of a repudiation of a vice like alcoholism. Such American classics as Benjamin Franklin’s AUTOBIOGRAPHY, Henry David Thoreau’s WALDEN and Henry Adams’s EDUCATION seem highly calculated literary inventions in which ideas are principles of organization and much of “real” life is omitted. Thoreau’s prose in particular was painstakingly rewritten, a mosaic of meticulously observed nature vignettes conjoined with an impassioned polemic. Both were imposed on a single year at Walden Pond — although Thoreau lived in his cabin there for two years, and lived a historic life very different from the idealized, rather bodiless and monastic life he presents in his book. Thoreau, who disapproved of fiction, preferring “one world at a time,” was as masterly a creator of his own mythic image as Mark Twain, Jack London, Ernest Hemingway would be of theirs in subsequent generations. Yet who would wish WALDEN and other classics altered in the interest of factual “truth”? TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1999

On a TV cartoon of the “South Park” series, a student won an environmental-essay contest by submitting a copy of WALDEN with Thoreau’s name crossed out on the title page and his name written in. At the awards ceremony, when another contestant exposed this plagiarism, nobody reacted. The whistle-blower then commented to another contestant “They don’t even know what WALDEN is” and yelled at the audience: I’ll bet if WALDEN was a sit-com, you’d all know what it was!

With this as preamble: for some time now, I have been wondering what might be done about a situation I am observing in academe. Learned scholars seem at present to feel perfectly free to issue various gratuitous derogatory asides about Henry Thoreau. There seems, in contemporary academic culture, at least in regard to this one topic, to be no penalties whatever for a display of ignorance amounting to buffoonery. I am therefore here going to create a little essay on this situation, instancing Robert Blair St. George, and I am going to entitle my little essay with a “quote unquote” from the scholarly ruminations of this academic117 — whom I will here instance as having made himself out to be one of these buffoons:

“JEFFERSON SEEMS THE ANCESTOR OF THOREAU”

I take my text from page 245 in the 1995 volume edited by Dan Ben-Amos and Liliane Weissberg,118 CULTURAL MEMORY AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITY (Detroit: Wayne State UP). It is the one- count’em-one reference to Thoreau to be found in this collection of essays. It occurs in an essay contributed by Associate Professor St. George, entitled “Placing Race at Jefferson’s Monticello.” It occurs in a context in which, after providing floor plans and descriptions of various shanties occupied by Thomas Jefferson’s various “servants” at the Monticello plantation, and photographs of similar surviving structures from other plantations, the author faults former President Jefferson for having failed to live up to his earlier “lofty visions” about the ennobling capabilities of proper architecture. Jefferson, we learn, “actually housed his slaves in hovels.” Living conditions for the “servant” class at Monticello actually were rather more similar than not to those provided by “many other Virginia landowners” — who it would appear did no particular pontification of record about the ennobling capabilities of proper architecture. This may make Jefferson out to have been something of a hypocrite.

It is at this point that this volume registers its nonce aside about Henry Thoreau, that “Jefferson seems the ancestor of Thoreau.” The aside could be classified as gratuitous in that it really has very little or nothing to do with the subject of the article, “Placing Race at Jefferson’s Monticello.” The author makes no effort to place race at Thoreau’s Walden Pond, although of course, as we know, he might very well have done so. The connection between the slave cabins described and illustrated, and Thoreau, a connection which actually is left pretty much to the reader’s imagination, seems to be either 117. Associate Professor St. George was serving as Graduate Chair in the Department of Folklore and Folklife of the University of Pennsylvania. 118. Professor Ben-Amos is a Professor of Folklore and Folklife and Professor Weissberg is a Professor of German and Comparative Literature, at the University of Pennsylvania. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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a.) that Jefferson’s slaves lived in cabins and then Thoreau also lived in a cabin, or

b.) that Jefferson the hypocrite who claimed to disdain industrial production but was guilty of “extensive record-keeping and monitoring of domestic productivity,” “keenly aware of profit, investment, and loss,” resembled Thoreau the hypocrite of Walden Pond who wrote an entire long chapter on “Economy,”

or perhaps a combination of both a.) and b.):

THOREAU’S WALDEN PLANTATION AND ITS SLAVE CABIN For deep background, Thoreau is derogatorily thumbnailed only as a critic of “materialism’s moral wickedness,” but he is a rather stupid critic who immediately betrays to the reader of WALDEN; OR LIFE IN THE WOODS the hypocrisy of his own critique, by expressing great concern in regard to “building costs” and in regard to “domestic economy.” It is at this point that the summation remark occurs, that this problematic person Jefferson seems the ancestor of Thoreau.

Having told us about this, the author St. George moves on with his topic of race, to give a detailed account of Jefferson’s hypocritical and offensive attitudes in regard to racial contamination, attitudes which included his observation that just as orangutan males (“the Oranootan”) allegedly preferred black women rather than other orangutans because of their “superior beauty,” black men indicated that they preferred lighter human women rather than darker women because of their “superior beauty.” –Attitudes which presumably applied “in spades” to some of Jefferson’s own slave offspring! This Jefferson who owned a total of some 220 slaves and during his lifetime freed exactly two of them (presumably two of his lighter-skinned offspring) seems the ancestor, the article indicates in passing, of any number of Americans of various shades of the rainbow. These mulatto HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN descendants are, we know, only barely tolerated when, as tourists, they visit the “Mulberry Row” of slave cabins on the Monticello mountaintop.

As I indicated before, to say in such a highly charged context that this hypocritical miscegenator Jefferson seems the ancestor of Thoreau is malignance amounting to buffoonery.

What I am wondering is how such a situation as this is tolerable in academe. “They don’t even know what WALDEN is.” I know of no major figure of our culture, other than Thoreau, in regard to whom academics tolerate such. Why, I ask, is this tolerated in regard to Thoreau? Why is it that academics who obviously lack the slightest grounding in this area, and who seem normally so utterly timid and fearful of giving any offense even by the splitting of an infinitive, in regard to Thoreau feel so free to make such clowns of themselves? TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2000

December 6, Wednesday: An article in the Albuquerque, New Mexico Journal by Rudi Keller, Staff Writer: Library Finds Real Friend In Thoreau While living a simple life for a year beside a Massachusetts pond, Henry David Thoreau spent $28.12 on necessities. This weekend, someone with the means to live a little more luxuriously can add a first edition of “WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS” to their home library. The cost: $10,000, or more than 350 times what Thoreau spent during his year alone. Friends for the Public Library is offering the book, published in 1854 by Ticknor and Fields of Boston, during the monthly book sale at the Albuquerque Public Library.

“It really belongs in the hands of a serious collector,” said Jeff Bantly, coordinator of volunteer services at the library. The rare book may have been sitting unnoticed in the library for years. Bantly said he discovered the volume when he gathered some donated books from the office of former director Alan Clark, who retired last year. “It was among the 15 or so books that I put in a carton that were sitting in a windowsill,” Bantly said. Intrigued, Bantly found a bookdealer via the Internet and confirmed it was one of 2,000 printed in the first edition of Walden. “Sight unseen, he said he would give us $4,000 for it,” Bantly said. Bantly said the dealer’s offer indicated to him that the book had a retail value of at least $8,000. Copies in good to excellent condition can fetch as much as $13,000. And while the library Friends aren’t sure whether they will find a buyer, a book like Walden might be quite a draw. “We really don’t think we are going to get $10,000 for it,” he said. The price HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN is negotiable, he added. Other treasures are to be found in the book sale. A signed copy of a first edition of Tony Hillerman’s novel, “The Blessing Way,” will be priced at $1,000. Most of the books on sale Saturday will cost from 25 cents to a couple of dollars. The sale begins at 9 a.m. and ends at 5 p.m. in the main library at Fifth Street and Copper NW. The library switched to monthly sales for used and donated books when the annual sale at the Pit proved unwieldy, Bantly said. Money raised by the monthly sales supports library programs. And while keeping a volume like a first edition Walden would be nice, said Bob Daniel, president of the Friends, it isn’t practical. “The city library is really not in the business of collecting books in that classic sense,” Daniel said. “We are more interested in books that people will use and think about.” Friends for the Public Library will hold its monthly sale Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the main library at Fifth Street and Copper NW. Most of the books will cost from 25 cents to a couple of dollars. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2001

February 28, Wednesday evening: Dr. Brad Dean was sitting around with his laptop working on his database of Thoreau’s reading on this evening while watching the network television show “Ed” — when four of the characters, high-school kids, sitting in a small circle, somehow began talking about WALDEN, with their teacher at her desk in the background. One of the kids, in an effort to come on to a girl, had memorized the “desperation” passage, which seemed to have prompted him to read the book — or at least its 1st three chapters. He actually evinced, in the TV sitcom, some enthusiasm for the book, and concluded that it was “one big wake-up call.” Later in the program he read the “deliberation” passage to two of his teachers and asked them, “Wow, was this guy cool or what?” –His English teacher responded that “Yes, Henry David Thoreau is a cool guy.” TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2003

Winter/Spring: H2SO4 journal featured an article by Heidi Pollock, “Reviews of Books I Shouldn’t Have Read,” in which this person emoted for almost a page about her attempted reading of WALDEN on the beach at Martha’s Vineyard. She found Henry Thoreau “just too pedantic”: “I mean, darling, nobody actually reads Thoreau ... I remember almost nothing about the book.” TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2004

Randall Conrad prepared an index for WALDEN: READ ALL ABOUT IT TIMELINE OF WALDEN

August: Jeffrey S. Cramer edited WALDEN: A FULLY ANNOTATED EDITION (Yale University Press). • p. xii: “Thomas Knowles” should read “Thomas Knoles” • p. xiv: insert “the —> Walden Woods Project” should read the “Walden Woods Project” • p. 24, note 134: “1741?” should read “1781” • p. 74, note 410: “Rev. Andrew T. Foss (1803-1875)” should read “Rev. H.C. Wright (1797-1870)” • p. 74 note 411: “Isaiah 57:18: ‘As he has bowels to pity’” should read “Colossians 3:12: ‘bowels of mercy, kindness’ and I John 3:17: ‘bowels of compassion.’” • p. 81, note 12: “Henry Thoreau Remembered by a Young Man” should read “Henry Thoreau as Remembered by a Young Friend” • p. 81, note 15: “2d” should read “2nd” • p. 104, note 45: insert “or —> wooden clay” should read “wood or clay” • p. 106, note 51: “19 lectures” should read “21 lectures” • p. 158: remove decimal, add space “—> 8.7½” should read “8 7½” • p. 205, l. 25: add note “Allusion to Exodus 14:13: And Moses said unto the people ... for the Egyptians whom ye have seen today, ye shall see them again no more for ever.” • p. 221, note 34: “David Hosmer” should read “Abner Hosmer” • p. 267, note 21: complete note should be replaced with “Quoted from John James Audubon and John Bachman’s The Quadrupeds of North America (1849-1854) Vol. 1, p. 47.” • p. 311, note 21: “Hamlet” should read “Romeo and Juliet” • p. 320, note 76: replace “’A Winter Walk’ he ‘shut out the gadding town’ [W 5:168] and in” with “In” • Index, p. 354: remove entry: “Foss, Rev. Andrew T., 74” • Index, p. 356, under Hosmer family: remove “David, 221” and insert “Abner, 221” • Index, p. 370: insert entry: “Wright, Rev. H.C., 74” TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2006

Wai-chee Dimock, William Lampson Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University, explored Henry David Thoreau’s and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s readings of the BHAGAVAD-GITA, and elaborated on the process by which each separately had adapted its war story in accordance with their predilection for nonviolent action, in Princeton UP’s THROUGH OTHER CONTINENTS: AMERICAN LITERATURE ACROSS DEEP TIME.

Translation of Thoreau materials into Portuguese in Brazil: CAMINHANDO. Coleção Sabor Literário. Introdução e tradução de Roberto Muggiati. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio. 126 pages. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2007

January: Dr. David Scott argued, in “Rewalking Thoreau and Asia: ‘Light from the East’ for ‘A Very Yankee Sort of Oriental’,” Philosophy East and West (Volume 57, Number 1, pages 14-39), that the usual alternative “Was Thoreau more inspired by what he studied of Buddhism and Taoism or more by what he studied of Hinduism?” should actually offer also a 3d option, of being inspired by what he studied of Islamic Sufism: DOWNLOAD IT ALL, FOR $14

Within Thoreau’s Hindu appropriations, the “practical” importance for Thoreau of yogic practices is reemphasized. Thoreau’s often-cited Buddhist links are questioned. Instead, it is Thoreau’s explicit use of Confucian and Persian Sufi materials that deserve reemphasis, as do, in retrospect, some striking thematic convergences with Taoism. Thoreau’s “Light from the East” focuses on ethical and mystical techniques, infused with lessons from Nature for “a very Yankee sort of Oriental.” ... Thoreau’s Persian inspirations were primarily through the matrix of Sufism, the esoteric mystical side of Islam. Sufi egalitarianism and interfaith pluralism was one feature that Thoreau thought well of:119

A WEEK: There are theoretical reformers at all times, and all the PEOPLE OF world over, living on anticipation. Wolff, travelling in the A WEEK deserts of Bokhara, says, “Another party of derveeshes came to me and observed, ‘The time will come when there shall be no difference between rich and poor, between high and low, when property will be in common, even wives and children.’” But forever I ask of such, What then? The derveeshes in the deserts of Bokhara and the reformers in Marlboro’ Chapel sing the same song. “There’s a good time coming, boys,” but, asked one of the audience, in good faith, “Can you fix the date?” Said I, “Will you help it along?”

REVEREND JOSEPH WOLFF

More important than travelogues was Persian poetry. This was generally accorded high status in Transcendentalist circles, as in Emerson’s 1844 essay “The Poet,” with Thoreau noting how “poetry is the mysticism of mankind.”120 Consequently, Thoreau could lament “the narrowness of his European culture and the exclusiveness of his reading. None of her children has done justice to the poets and philosophers of Persia.”121 Such soaring Sufi verses pointed toward direct experiential contemplative 119. A WEEK, referring to Wolff’s NARRATIVE OF A MISSION TO BOKHARA (1845), a travel source discussed in Christie, THOREAU AS WORLD TRAVELER, pp. 132-135. Elsewhere, in A WEEK, Thoreau asked “hast thou not heard of a Sufi, who was hammering some nails into the sole of his sandal; an officer of cavalry took him by the sleeve, saying, Come along and shoe my horse.” 120. A WEEK 121. A WEEK HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN transformation, expressions, and focus that were of direct interest to Thoreau, as well as to Emerson.122 Hafiz (d. 1389) was one Sufi master who attracted Thoreau’s attention.123 Thus, Thoreau could mention how “‘yesterday, at dawn,’ says Hafiz, ‘God delivered me from all worldly affliction; and amidst the gloom of night presented me with the water of immortality.’”124 Hafiz’s poetry had also attracted Emerson’s interest, as in his presentation of verses “From the Persian of Hafiz” (1847) and extracts in “The Liberty Bell” (1851). A more sustained Sufi interest came for Thoreau, as also for Emerson, with Mosleh Od-Din Sa’di (d. ca. 1291), with extracts “From the Gulistan [Rose Garden] of Saadi” appearing in “Ethical Scriptures” in The Dial in January 1844.125 Thoreau first mentioned Saadi in his JOURNAL on March 23, 1842, with some mentions in A WEEK. One example was in passing, where “in the life of Sadi by Dowlat Shah occurs this sentence: ‘The eagle of the immaterial soul of Shaikh Sadi shook from his plumage the dust of his body.”’126 Elsewhere Thoreau recounted how “Sadi tells who may travel; among others, ‘A common mechanic, who can earn a subsistence by the industry of his hand, and shall not have to stake his reputation for every morsel of bread, as philosophers have said.’ He may travel who can subsist on the wild fruits and game of the most cultivated country.”127 Thoreau also evoked Saadi in WALDEN, where Saadi had been the first

122. J. Yohannan, “The Influence of Persian Poetry upon Emerson's Work,” American Literature 14 (1943): 25-41. 123. General profile in INTOXICATION, EARTHLY AND HEAVENLY: SEVEN STUDIES ON THE POET HAFIZ OF SHIRAZ, ed. M. Glunz and J. Burgel (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1991). 124. A WEEK 125. General profile in J. Yohannan, THE POET SA'DI (Washington: University Press of America, 1987). Also see Emerson’s poem “Saadi” in The Dial, October 1842; “Saadi,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1864; and his preface to Gladwin’s 1865 translation of SAADI, THE GULISTAN OR ROSE GARDEN. 126. A WEEK 127. A WEEK HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN exemplar of his “Wise Old Man.”128 In that vein, Thoreau advised:

WALDEN: Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but endeavor PEOPLE OF to become one of the worthies of the world. WALDEN I read in the Gulistan, or Flower Garden, of Sheik Sadi of Shiraz, that “They asked a wise man, saying; Of the many celebrated trees which the Most High God has created lofty and umbrageous, they call none azad, or free, excepting the cypress, which bears no fruit; what mystery is there in this? He replied; Each has its appropriate produce, and appointed season, during the continuance of which it is fresh and blooming, and during their absence dry and withered; to neither of which states is the cypress exposed, being always flourishing; and of this nature are the azads, or religious independents. –Fix not thy heart on that which is transitory; for the Dijlah, or Tigris, will continue to flow through Bagdad after the race of caliphs is extinct: if thy hand has plenty, be liberal as the date tree; but if it affords nothing to give away, be an azad, or free man, like the cypress.”

CYPRESS ANDROMEDA MOSLEH OD-DIN SA’DI

This section, from Saadi’s chapter on “Rules for Conduct in Life,” was the passage from Thoreau that Burroughs subsequently chose to conclude his own 1882 profile of Thoreau.129 As with the Laws of Manu and the Gita, Thoreau was happy to use nature imagery as deeper pointers. An extended treatment, “Assimilating Saadi,” emerges from Thoreau’s JOURNAL [entry for August 8, 1852, quoted below], Thoreau started from a more pluralist interfaith perspective where “a certain elevation makes all men of one religion. It is always some base alloy that creates the distinction of sects. Thought greets thought over the widest gulfs of time with unerring freemasonry.” Within that universal pluralist fraternity came the following sequence: “I know, for instance, that Sadi entertained once identically the same thought that I do, and thereafter I can find no essential difference between Sadi and myself. He is not Persian, he is not ancient, he is not strange to me.” Thoreau’s readiness to go across time and identity can be commented on, as seen already in his treatment of Zoroaster and of Hindu wisdom. In turn came Thoreau’s “by the identity of his thoughts with mine he [Mosleh Od-Din Sa’di] still survives. It makes no odds what atoms serve us,” which evokes Sufi expression (e.g., Rumi) and Whitman’s subsequent verses in “A Persian Lesson” (1891), which started with “the greybeard Sufi” and moved on to talk of how “it is the central urge in every atom, (often unconscious) ... to return to its divine origins.”130 Saadi was to become the continuing vehicle 128. J. Steadman, “The motif of the Wise Old Man in Walden,” Modern Language Notes 75 (1960): 201-204, at p. 202 n. 3. 129. J. Burroughs, “Henry David Thoreau,” The Century 24 (July 1882): 368-380, at p. 379. 130. W. Whitman, “A Persian Lesson,” COMPLETE POETRY AND COLLECTED PROSE, ed. J. Kaplan (New York: the Library of America, 1982), pp. 650-651. Also, M. Farzan, “Whitman and Sufism: Towards ‘A Persian Lesson,’” American Literature 47 (1976): 572-582, for technical details. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN there for Thoreau’s own ‘stream of consciousness,’ so that “by sympathy with Sadi I have embowelled him. In his thought I have a sample of him, a slice from his core, which makes it unimportant where certain bones which the thinker once employed may lie; but I could not have got this without being equally entitled to it with himself.... Methinks I can be as intimate with the essence of an ancient worthy as, so to speak, he was with himself.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2008

The Japan & Stuff Press issued a simplified, shortened version of Henry Thoreau’s WALDEN, in its series “Classics Retold to be Read, Not just Revered.” READ FIRST FEW PAGES TIMELINE OF WALDEN The Georgia Guidestones were defaced by local Christians regarding them as “The Ten Commandments of the Antichrist.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2010

A showing of Charles Ephraim Burchfield’s work at the Whitney on Manhattan Island, as “Heat Waves in a Swamp,” was put together by Robert Gober. In The New Yorker magazine, the watercolor “Song of the Telegraph” was characterized by Peter Schjeldahl as “the most successful attempt I know, by anyone, to convey sound visually: a landscape alive to the buzz of wires on a march of poles in fleeing perspective.”

Translation of Thoreau materials into Portuguese in Brazil: WALDEN. Coleção L&PM Pocket. Apresentação de Eduardo Bueno. Tradução de Denise Bottmann. Contém em apêndice “Thoreau,” necrológio de Ralph Waldo Emerson. Porto Alegre: L&PM. 335 pages. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2011

Translation of Thoreau materials into Portuguese in Brazil: CAMINHADA. Tradução de Davi Araújo. Içara: Dracaena. 56 pages. Also, VIDA SEM PRINCÍPIO. Tradução de José Luiz Perota. Içara: Dracaena. 48 pages. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Arjen de Leeuw’s and Walter van Broekhuizen’s short movie “Une Condition Naturelle” about life in the woods, in a 3-sided set constructed of cardboard to more or less resemble Henry Thoreau’s shanty in the Walden Woods. UNE CONDITION NATURELLE THOREAU AND GOFFMAN

Brice Matthieussent’s French translation of Henry-Davod Thoreau’s WALDEN with a preface by Jim Harrison and notes by Michel Granger, published by Le Mot et le reste as part of its collection Attitudes. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2012

Translation of Thoreau materials into Portuguese in Brazil: A DESOBEDIÊNCIA CIVIL. TRADUÇÃO DE JOSÉ GERALDO COUTO. Contém “A desobediência civil,” “Onde vivi, e para quê,” “A escravidão em Massachusetts,” “Caminhar,” “Vida sem princípios.” São Paulo: Penguin/ Companhia. 152 pages. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

“Thoreau, la Vie Sublime,” a French manga by Maximilien le Roy and A. Dan “de l’américain Henry Thoreau, père de la désobéissance civile et de l’écologie, qui permet surtout de partager une pensée philosophique et politique majeure, surtout très actuelle...”

En mars 1845, Henry Thoreau emprunte une hache au maréchal ferrant de Concord, dans le Massachusetts. Ce poète philosophe a décidé de se bâtir une masure dans la nature, à l’écart de la civilisation humaine dont il ne partage pas vraiment l’idéologie expansionniste et capitaliste. Il refuse impérieusement d’être complice d’un pays qui pratique l’esclavagisme et qui n’a de cesse de rechercher le profit. Lui est intrinsèquement pacifiste. Dès lors, il vit isolé, en ermite, cultive un bout de terre qui lui suffit amplement à se sustenter, confectionne un herbier et profite de l’apaisement de la nature pour écrire. Charitable et ouvert, il ne refuse néanmoins jamais l’accueil aux voyageurs de passage. Toute son âme tend vers un objectif ultime: sucer la moelle de la vie, le plus intensément possible, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN jusqu’à mettre en déroute tout ce qui n’est pas la vie. Certes, il y a bien quelque autorité pour l’emprisonner, en raison d’une taxe dont il ne s’est pas acquitté... Mais Thoreau n’en a cure: le moindre détail du quotidien est devenu son amusement, qui ne cesse de se renouveler. Quelques mois plus tard, il donne des conférences et partage ainsi sa philosophie de vie avec le plus grand nombre, appelant à la révolution pacifique... Maximilien le Roy est un auteur à part, mais assurément engagé. Après s’être intéressé à Nietzsche et aux communistes du vietminh (Dans la nuit, la liberté nous écoute), il livre aujourd’hui une biographie en one-shot consacrée à Henry David Thoreau. Cet américain du XIXème siècle (1817-1862), que la postérité a classé comme poète et philosophe – quasi prophète – est surtout le père d’un courant de pensées très actuel. En effet, Thoreau a été à la fois naturaliste, non-violent, objecteur de croissance et apôtre d’une civilisation plus en harmonie avec la nature. Ermite, incompris en son époque, il a ensuite fait bien des émules – dont Gandhi, Kennedy et Luther King – et aura une grande influence politique et sociale sur l’humanité en marche (fin de l’esclavagisme, écologie, désobéissance civile...). Notre actualité se fait quotidiennement l’écho de ce bien beau programme. Dans sa narration, la biographie BD occulte toute l’enfance de Thoreau et démarre à partir de sa période militante et philosophique. Evidemment, si vous cherchez le divertissement léger ou une intrigue à rebondissements, passez votre chemin... Il s’agit tout de même, pour toute trame, de dévoiler la destinée et la pensée d’un poète pacifiste vivant reclus dans la nature et se permettant, au plus tumultueux, quelques conférences pour se dégourdir les muscles. En revanche, si vous avez été touchés par des films tels que Into the wild ou Le cercle des poètes disparus, l’album étoffera plus encore en vous une certaine idée de la vie. Un peu de culture et de philosophie politique n’a jamais fait de mal à personne, or Maximilien le Roy présente la chose on ne peut mieux. C’est-à-dire avec la sobriété requise, sans idolâtrie déplacée, avec des focus calibrés et didactiques desdites pensées, et suffisamment de talent pour «rythmer» pertinemment ce destin hors norme. En parfait accord avec l’esprit de Thoreau, le dessinateur A. Dan accorde beaucoup de place à la contemplation de la nature au travers de son dessin semi-réaliste... complété par la colorisation aux teintes décalées de le Roy. Les préceptes avant-gardistes de ce libertaire pourraient s’avérer salutaires à notre XXIème siècle en crise, à condition de faire l’effort de les découvrir, de les partager et de les appliquer.

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2014

The Fluid Text edition of WALDEN presented 7 successive versions of Thoreau’s book using the Versioning Machine tool and Text Encoding Initiative mark-up. You can now view the evolution of Walden as Thoreau honed it over 8 years. This has been based on the scholarship of Dr. Ronald Earl Clapper. A simple click on the text will highlight the cross-edition variations. You can step behind the screen to examine TEI mark-up and XSLT. RONALD EARL CLAPPER TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Walden “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2017

Julia X. Du’s translation into Mandarin of Jeffrey S. Cramer’s annotated edition of WALDEN.

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THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN 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 2018. 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: May 28, 2018 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF 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.

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE TIMELINE OF WALDEN 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.