f.-'.f^f.:. 
 
(QdrtiEU Hmtrerattg Slibtara 
 
 Stljara, Sfem Jork 
 
 ' BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE 
 
 SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 J- . :■ > 
 
 HENRY W. SAGE ' 
 
 1891 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PS 3053.J79T3 
 
 Thoreau: a SLiiinPse 
 
 3 1924 022 199 396 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022199396 
 
HENRY D. THOREAU 
 
THOREAU: 
 
 A Glimpse 
 
 BY 
 
 SAMUEL ARTHUR JONES 
 
 "To be a voice outside the State, speaking to man- 
 kind or to the Future, perhaps shaking the actual 
 State to pieces in doing so, one man will sufficed 
 
 i- 
 
 CONCORD, MASS. /, 
 
 ALBERT LANE : THE ERUDITE PRESS 
 M C M I 1 1. 
 
Copyright 1903 by- 
 Albert Lane 
 
INTRODUCTORY NOTE 
 
 It was while engaged in collecting Carlyleana that the 
 writer of the Glimpse came upon Thoreau's impas- 
 sioned "Plea For Captain John Brown," wounded 
 and in prison. The spark found the tinder ready, and 
 the fire then kindled is burning yet. 
 
 The reading of a certain Life of Thoreau raised 
 doubts that could be solved only in Concord, and 
 a pilgrimage thither was made in the summer of 
 1890. Many venerable residents were still living 
 who had known the Thoreau family as only neighbors 
 can, and their testimony, freely and graciously given, 
 dispelled every disturbing doubt and has left a radiance 
 in the memory that only death can dim. 
 
 I found a genial guide who took me to Thoreau's 
 sylvan haunts and thereby made the pilgrimage a dream 
 of delight ; and from that day began a quest that ended 
 only. when he "went over to the majority." To many 
 and many a one whom Thoreau's life has touched to 
 finer issues "old Concord" can never again be to them 
 the Concord of which "Fred" is so large a part in 
 sunny recollections thereof. 
 
 It is a pious duty to his memory to correct the errors 
 of fact that were repeated and reported in the first 
 
INTRODUCTORY NOTE 
 
 edition of the Glimpse : corrections that are enabled 
 by the faithful, untiring, and unpretentious services of 
 the late Alfred "W. Hosmer. Indeed those -who have 
 read Mr. Henry S. Salt's "Life of Thoreau" can 
 little know how much that sympathetic record is 
 indebted for reliable material to Mr. Hosmer's inde- 
 fatigible zeal. 
 
 It had long been purposed to reproduce the privately 
 printed Glimpse of i8go, but what Mazzini used to 
 call "the cares of bread" were inexorable, — and now 
 he whose labors have weeded out the tares of error 
 has gone where they no longer see as in a glass darkly. 
 O Friend, Hail and Farewell ! 
 
 S. A. J. 
 
 June, 1903. 
 
THOREAU: A GLIMPSE 
 
: m" t'^:^>, :«:...,^ 
 
THOREAU : A GLIMPSE 
 
 His best biographer says that "on the spot where 
 Thoreau lived at Walden there is now a cairn of 
 stones, yearly visited by hundreds, and growing in 
 height as each friend of his muse adds a stone from the 
 shore of the fair water he loved so well." There is 
 another monument, also growing in height, the initial 
 contribution by Emerson, the very latest from the 
 hand of John Burroughs. Emerson's is a votive offer- 
 ing — cjTJress and rosemary — lovingly laid on Tho- 
 reau's grave more than a quarter of a century ago ; and 
 yet today as fresh as if the chaplet had been plucked in 
 Paradise from the Tree of Life. 
 
 Running down the long and growing list of contri- 
 butors, we find those who had known Thoreau in the 
 flesh and they who have studied him in his books. If 
 from all these sketches it were possible to make a 
 photographic "composite," I much doubt if the Record- 
 ing Angel could recognize the man by the picture. 
 
 The most subtle "Critical Essay" gives only the 
 measure of its writer — he betrays his own limitations 
 — and, at its best, the most searching study of a dead 
 
THOREAU: A GLIMPSE 
 
 author's "Life, Character, and Opinions" is only a 
 post-mortem examination. The spirit eludes ; the felic- 
 itous last word is still to be said. It is this expec- 
 tancy that gives to the proper study of an author's life 
 its special charm of "lastingness". By "proper study" 
 I mean such a breadth of research as includes all collat- 
 eral reading, so that, at last, you shall have rambled 
 along the many rivulets which united make the result- 
 ing river of fact. But no author, living or dead, is ever 
 known to his contemporaries. On the thirteenth of this 
 month "gruff Sam Johnson" will have been dead one 
 hundred and five years, yet we know absolutely more 
 of him than was possible even to Boswell : thanks to 
 Croker, Napier, and Dr. Birbeck Hill. 
 
 If, however, you are a proper student the discrep- 
 ancies and contradictions of criticism will send you 
 from the critics to the author himself ; and that result 
 I take to be about the happiest outcome of all criticism 
 — it certainly will be in Thoreau's case. 
 
 Another observable feature of the critical function is 
 the endeavor to account for an author by means of 
 such factors as heredity, environment, and the "Zeit- 
 Geist" — a certain "Spirit of the Age" that somehow 
 manages to mould a Luther and manufacture a Tetzel 
 by the same twist of the wrist; as if Nature threw 
 dice and loaded them on occasion! In Thoreau's 
 instance I feel obliged to eliminate largely the infiuence 
 
THOREAU: A GLIMPSE 
 
 of heredity. Considering his ancestry, Thor^au is 
 quite a psychological surprise. A maternal grandfather 
 turned from expounding the laws of God to confound- 
 ing those of the Commonwealth — dropped Theology 
 and took up Law. A maternal uncle was a "character" 
 — a free-and-easy, unstarched rambler who, with little 
 "property," no family, an utter indifference to "public 
 opinion," took life as easily as his famous nephew did 
 earnestly. There was too much of him for a "loafer" 
 and not enough for a philosopher. Thoreau's father 
 was "a small and unobtrusive man, grave and silent, 
 but inwardly cheerful and social, and noted for 'mind- 
 ing his own business'." Thoreau's mother, according 
 
 to a credible witness, 
 
 "Was one of the most unceasing talkers in Concord. Her gift 
 of speech was proverbial, and wherever she was, the conversation 
 fell largely to her share. 
 
 "She was also subject to sharp and sudden flashes of gossip and 
 malice, which never quite amounted to ill-nature, but greatly pro- 
 voked the prim and commonplace that she so often came in con- 
 tact with." 
 
 If her "flashes" ever took the shape of "sheet-light- 
 ning," we can but hope that Thoreau pere was a non- 
 conductor ! 
 
 So much for heredity ; but it were unjust to leave the 
 Thoreau family in the shadow of such a picture. Says 
 one who had lived with them : 
 
 "The atmosphere of earnest purpose which pervaded the great 
 movement for the emancipation of the slaves, gave to the Thoreau 
 
 3 
 
THOREAU: A GLIMPSE 
 
 family an elevation of character which was ever afterwards percep- 
 tible, and imparted an air of dignity to the trivial details of life. 
 The children of the house, there were four of them, as they grew 
 up all became school-teachers, and each displayed peculiar gifts in 
 that profession. But they were all something more than teachers, 
 and becoming enlisted early in the anti-slavery cause or in that 
 broader service of humanity which 'plain living and high thinking' 
 imply, they gradually withdrew from that occupation, — declining 
 the opportunities by which other young persons, situated as they 
 were, rise to worldly success, and devoting themselves, within lim- 
 its somewhat narrow to the pursuit of lofty ideals. * * * To 
 meet one of the Thoreaus was not the same as to encounter any 
 other person who might happen to cross your path. Life to them 
 was something more than a parade of pretensions, a conflict of 
 ambition, or an incessant scramble for the common objects of 
 desire. * * * Without wealth, or power, or social prominence, 
 they still held a rank of their own, in scrupulous independence, and 
 with qualities that put condescension out of the question." 
 
 That "great movement for the emancipation of the 
 slaves" was somewhat extensive. In the year 1835 
 there were in the United States not less than two thou- 
 sand Anti-Slavery Societies, and you can imagine what 
 a membership that implies ! How many families, 
 think you, did "the atmosphere of earnest purpose" 
 thus transfigure ? We are to remember that this very 
 "atmosphere" could put nothing into the Thoreau fam- 
 ily; it could only develope that which ^was already 
 there. It did not "give them" an elevation of character, 
 — it simply supplied the conditions that revealed their 
 moral altitude. There were not a few in those days — 
 and all too many of them clergymen — whom that very 
 "movement", despite the "atmosphere of earnest pur- 
 4 
 
THOREAU: A GLIMPSE 
 
 pose," sank lower than the common sewers. It was an 
 asphyxiating atmosphere to Things ; it was fatal to all 
 two-legged invertebrates : it was respirable only by 
 true manhood ; and those Thoreaus throve in it, shot 
 up to^vards Heaven, and their altitude "was ever after- 
 wards^erceptible. ' ' 
 
 ;( Thoreau's immediate environment was severely 
 "Transcendental", as he was bom, lived, and died in 
 
 Concord; and there of course Emerson was the "deus 
 ex machina" — quite an addition to any environment. 
 Thoreau enjoyed an unusual intimacy with Emerson, 
 having lived for quite a while in his family ; and this I 
 presume gave Mr. Lowell the opportunity to call Tho- 
 reau "a pistillate plant kindled to fruitage by the Emer- 
 sonian pollen." It seems to me as if Lowell gets on 
 all fours whenever he mentions Emerson ; he always 
 writes of him as if all the gods of Olympus had put on 
 clean linen when Emerson was moulded — an admira- 
 tion that dwindles into adulation. 
 
 It was fortunate for Lydia Maria Childs that she did 
 not live in Concord, or some of her own ideas would 
 have been ascribed to "Emersonian pollen" floating 
 around to the detriment of other people's originality. 
 You remember the famous couplet, — 
 
 "And, striving to be man, the worm 
 Mounts through all the spires of form." 
 
THOREAU: A GLIMPSE 
 
 It is the keystone of Conway's claim that Emerson, 
 not Darwin, first broached the idea of evolution. Well, 
 this couplet first appears in the second edition of Emer- 
 son's "Nature", published in 1849. If you should read 
 Mrs. Child's "Letters from New York, First Series" 
 — a somewhat notable book in its day — possibly you 
 may find in Letter XXVI, written in September, 1842 
 and published in 1843, the pollen that "kindled to fruit- 
 age" the Emersonian idea. Emerson's son has nobly 
 said, — "The charge of imitating Emerson, too often 
 made against Thoreau, is idle and untenable, though 
 unfortunately it has received some degree of sanction 
 in high quarters. * * * ^Thoreau was incapable of 
 conscious imitation. His faults, if any, lay in exactly 
 the other" direction." A pronouncement which speaks 
 volumes for the sagacity and critical insight of Dr. 
 Edward \A^aldo Emerson. 
 
 The same well-qualified authority also gives us this 
 statement, namely: "The history of Mr. Emerson's 
 first acquaintance with Mr. Thoreau is this : \A^hen the 
 former was delivering a new lecture in Concord, Miss 
 Helen Thoreau said to Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Emerson's 
 sister, 'There is a thought almost identical with that in 
 Henry's journal,' which she soon after brought to Mrs. 
 Brown. The latter carried it to Mr. Emerson, who 
 was interested, and asked her to bring this youth to 
 see him. She did, and thus began a relation that 
 6 
 
THOREAU: A GLIMPSE 
 
 lasted all their lives of strong respect and even affec- 
 tion, but of a Roman character." 
 
 So far as concerns environment, if Thoreau got a 
 stimulus from it he was also a stimulus in it. As dia- 
 mond cuts diamond, so the attrition of mind against 
 mind brings out the facets of character, and the pro- 
 cess that shaped Thoreau also gave shape to others. 
 
 How far was Thoreau influenced by the "Zeit- 
 
 Geist?" It was indeed a potent "Geist." Emerson 
 
 writes of it to Carlyle, — 
 
 "We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social 
 Teform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new Community 
 in his waistcoat pocket. I am gently mad myself, and am resolved 
 to live cleanly". 
 
 It is believed that Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus" had a 
 hand in the raising of that Geist ; and it was a spj.rit^ 
 that would not be laid by bell and candle. Kant's 
 /"Critique of Pure Reason" put anew leaven into the 
 minds of men, and the fermenting process was called 
 "Transcendentalism." Germany had it, France had it, 
 and New England had it in the superlative degree. O. 
 B. Frothingham, its best historian says, — "New 
 England furnished the only plot of ground on the 
 planet, where the transcendental philosophy had a 
 chance to show what it was and what it proposed." 
 The Yankee, as usual, outdid "all creation!" 
 
 A dozen years ago a semi-clerical mountebank said 
 in a public lecture: "^Vhat is Transcendentalism? 
 
 7 
 
THOREAU: A GLIMPSE 
 
 You will not suspect me of possessing the mood of 
 that acute teacher, who, on the deck of a Mississippi 
 steamer, -was asked this question, and replied, 'See the 
 holes made in the bank yonder by the S'wallows. Take 
 away the bank and leave the holes, and this is Tran- 
 scendentalism'." This is just the kitchen wit of a 
 Cook. The very tornado that prostrates the lordly oak 
 also fills the air -with flying straws and the refuse of the 
 roadside ; just so this storm of transcendental thought 
 caught up both strong men and weak, and thus it got 
 both a sublime aspect and a ludicrous. From one point 
 of view you can discover such whimsical antics as 
 would make an angel weep ; and from another you can 
 see some of the noblest of our race striving to scale 
 Heaven by the very ladder that Jacob saw in his 
 dream. That they could not take the whole world 
 with them is the chief failure of Transcendentalism — 
 and only a sodden fool can laugh at that. 
 
 In the Communities to which the Transcendental 
 thought gave rise — and these bankrupted the generous 
 souls who gave their all to found them — one thing is 
 noticeable, namely, they banded themselves together 
 to help one another to that higher life for which they 
 yearned. 
 
 Thoreau could easily have joined Ripley's Commun- 
 ity at Brook Farm or Alcott's at Fruitlands. He did 
 neither. He built his shanty at ^Valden and went 
 8 
 
THOREAU: A GLIMPSE 
 
 there ALONE. Here was the sanity of genius recog- 
 nizing the divine behest, — "Work Out Your Own Sal- 
 vation!" 
 
 Lowell is pleased to regard this Walden episode as 
 a pastoral masquerade, a "Transcendentalist" theatri- 
 cality, a sham. Dr. Garnett thinks Lowell's critical 
 essay "half reveals a suspicion that the apostle of Nat- 
 ture may have been something of a charlatan." Low- 
 ell had arraigned the dead-and-buried Thoreau in this 
 wise : 
 
 "His shanty-life was a mere impossibility, so far as his own 
 conception of it goes, as an entire independency of mankind. 
 The tub of Diogenes had a. sounder bottom. Thoreau's experi- 
 ment actually presupposes all that complicated civilization which 
 it theoretically abjured. He squats on another man's land; he 
 borrows an axe ; his boards, his nails, his bricks, his mortar, his 
 books, his lamp, his fish-hooks, his plough, his hoe, all turn 
 state's evidence against him as an accomplice in the sin of that 
 artiiicial civilization which rendered it possible that such a person 
 as Henry D. Thoreau should exist at all." 
 
 This is perhaps the most explicit indictment that has 
 been filed against Thoreau. It is a misconception : it 
 has in it traces of even a malignant misconception, — 
 the wish being father to the thought. I seriously 
 question if any literature contains a more pitiful inepti- 
 tude. Emerson says, "we descend to meet." I think 
 it would hold good -if Thoreau had an appointment 
 with his critic. In depicting Thoreau, Lowell looked 
 down and saw the shadow of him in a mud-puddle : 
 
THOREAU: A GLIMPSE 
 
 he should have looked up at the man and had the azure 
 heavens for a background. 
 
 Thoreau had proved himself a man of principles and 
 of convictions, a man who had found some things on 
 which he not only could stand, but MUST : and all this 
 before he had borrowed Alcott's axe to cut the sills of 
 his Walden shanty. Lowell should have remembered 
 this ; for while he could sing his stinging stanzas in 
 the slave's behalf, Thoreau had spoken the words that 
 blistered where they touched. Hear him on the con- 
 duct of certain newspapers, when slavery stained the 
 sunlight that fell on the monument at Concord Bridge : 
 
 "Could slavery suggest a more complete servility than some of 
 these journals exhibit ? Is there any dust which their conduct 
 does not lick and make still fouler with its slime ? I do not know 
 whether the Boston Herald is still in existence, but I remember to 
 have seen it about the streets when Simms was carried off. Did it 
 not act its part well — serve its master faithfully ? How could it 
 have gone lower on its belly? * * « When I have taken up 
 this paper with my cuffs turned up, I have heard the gurgling of 
 the common sewer in its every column." 
 
 He also said in the same address, 
 
 "I would remind my countrymen that they are to be men first, 
 and Americans only at a late and convenient hour. No matter 
 how valuable the law may be to protect property, even to keep soul 
 and body together, if it do not keep you and humanity together." 
 
 One Other instance, still from the same address. A 
 slave, Anthony Burns, had been apprehended in Mass- 
 achusetts and the most intense excitement prevailed. 
 The Commissioner, Mr. Edward G. Loring, was called 
 
 10 
 
THOREAU: A GLIMPSE 
 
 by the State to examine the law and decide if the 
 
 slave must be given up. Thoreau said, 
 
 "Massachusetts sat waiting Mr. Loring's decision, as if that 
 could in any way affect her own criminality. Her crime, the most 
 conspicuous and fatal crime of all, was permitting him to be the 
 umpire in such a case. It was really the trial of Massachusetts. 
 Every moment that she hesitated to set this man free, every 
 moment that she now hesitates to atone for her crime, she is con- 
 victed. The Commissioner on her case is God; not Edward G. 
 God, but simple God." 
 
 Who shall say that even in such audacity there is not 
 
 righteousness ? If the Recording Angel had to write it 
 
 down, who does not believe that it also dropped a 
 
 tear to blot it out ? But pray tell me what would that 
 
 pitying angel do with this utterance : 
 
 "It was while in the Lower House of Congress that Franklin 
 Pierce took that stand on the slavery question from which he has 
 never since swerved by a hair's breadth. He fully recognized, by 
 his votes and his voice, the rights pledged to the South by the 
 Constitution. This, at the period when he declared himself, was 
 an easy thing to do. But when it became more difficult, when the 
 first imperceptible murmer of agitation had grown almost to a 
 convulsion, his course was still the same. Nor did he ever shun 
 the obloquy that sometimes threatened to pursue the Northern 
 man who dared to love that great and sacred reality — his whole 
 united country — ^better than the mistiness of a philanthropic the- 
 ory." 
 
 Before Heaven's Chancery I would rather be the 
 
 hot-blooded Thoreau than the author of the "Life of 
 
 Franklin Pierce". Well and truly did Thoreau say, 
 
 "What is wanted is not men of policy, but men of probity, — • ,who 
 recognize a higher law than the Constitution or the decision of the 
 
 II 
 
Thoreau: a glimpse 
 
 majority. The fate of the country does not depend on what kind 
 of paper you drop into the ballot box, but on the kind of man you 
 drop from your chamber into the street every morning." 
 
 \A^hen voting is only a matter of counting noses, 
 when it becomes a game in which Judas Iscariot is as 
 "strong" as Jesus Christ — as Carlyle declared — 
 —Thoreau disclaimed the ballot. He repudiated his alle- 
 giance to the Commonwealth and refused to pay taxes 
 that were used to uphold slavery. He was put in jail. 
 His friend, Mr. Emerson, learned of his arrest and has- 
 tened to see him. He stood before the cell door and 
 asked, ''Henry, why are you here ?" and from the cell 
 came the suggestive reply : "Why are you NOT here ?" 
 
 Of this event in Thoreau's life John Burroughs says, 
 "His carrying his opposition to the State to the point 
 of allowing himself to be put in jail rather than pay a 
 paltry tax, savors a little bit of the grotesque and the 
 melodramatic." It has been already affirmed in your 
 hearing that "the most subtle critical essay" which 
 aims to sum up a man gives only the measure of its 
 writer ; he betrays his own limitations. 
 
 John Hampden refused to pay a "paltry tax" of 
 twenty shillings "Ship money." That is not grotes- 
 que and melodramatic," but tragic and sublime because 
 in the end a king's head dropped from his shoulders 
 "in the open street before Whitehall." 
 
 Considering their respective worldly goods, John 
 
 12 
 
THOREAU: A GLIMPSE 
 
 Hampden's twenty shillings sterling was the paltrier 
 tax. But the PRINCIPLE (which a President's "ad- 
 vertising agent" failed to discern)! Tried by results 
 that the world takes note of, one resistance decapitated 
 a man ; in the ultimate, the other enfranchised six mil- 
 lion slaves, and in a manner neither "grotesque nor 
 melo-dramatic' ' — to any other than advertising agents ! 
 Some weak-backed friend, mayhap of the advertising 
 agent species, ever after paid Thoreau's taxes and so 
 his one night's imprisonment "savors a little bit of the 
 grotesque and melodramatic" — but what if the "salt" 
 in the man had lost its savor ? All advertising agents 
 whatsoever will do well to consider that ! 
 
 Hampden's recalcitration ushered in a tragedy. 
 Because of non-payment? Because the Hampdens 
 and Pyms and Fairfaxes and Cromwells — not being of 
 advertising agent limitations — said, "resistance to 
 tyrants is obedience to God." — and the great heart of 
 England throbbed its Amen 1 — 
 
 Thoreau could live up to a conviction though to do it 
 jwere a minority of one with the universe against it. 
 Burroughs sees only a "paltry tax" — so different the 
 measure of men. And yet, look at the contradictions 
 of these same "critics," for this identical John Bur- 
 roughs, in the same essay, says of this very Thoreau, 
 "His -devotion to principle, to the ideal was absolute ; 
 it was like that of the Hindu to his idol. If it devoured 
 
 13 
 
THOREAU: A GLIMPSE 
 
 him or crushed him — ■what business was that of his ? 
 There was no conceivable failure in adherence to prin- 
 ciple." Yet such "devotion" can become "grotesque 
 and melodramatic" on occasion! Such are the paper 
 flowers of rhetoric. 
 
 On the 30th of October, 1859, Thoreau spoke in 
 defense of 'John Brown, when to do that required a 
 moral backbone whose every vertebra was as solid as 
 the everlasting hills. It is an unequivocal endorsement 
 of Brown in the face of the most overwhelming public 
 opinion — a deprecatory murmur even among anti-slav- 
 ery men. Emerson says, "Before the first friendly 
 word had been spoken for Captain John Brown, after 
 the arrest, Thoreau sent notices to most houses in 
 Concord that he would speak in a public hall on the 
 condition and character of John Brown, on Sunday 
 evening, and invited all people to come. The Repub- 
 lican Committee, the Abolitionist Committee, sent him 
 word that it was premature and unadvisable. He 
 replied "I did not send to you for advice, but to 
 announce that I am to speak." 
 
 Burroughs calls this event "the most significant act 
 of his life. It clinches him : it makes the colors fast. 
 We know he means what he says after that . . . 
 It shows what thoughts he fed his soul on, what school 
 he had schooled himself in, what his devotion meant." 
 If virtue were only contagious and Thoreau's speech 
 
 14 
 
THOREAU: A GLIMPSE 
 
 were read in our churches from time to time it might 
 change the relative value of Jesus and Judas at the 
 polls! 
 
 James Russell Lowell has written that Thoreau 
 "looked with utter contempt on the august drama of 
 destiny of Which his country was the scene, and on 
 which the curtain had already arisen" . . an awful 
 charge to make over a dead man's grave. 
 
 The name of HENRY D. THOREAU does not 
 appear on the roster or on the muster-roll of any Mass- 
 achusetts regiment because, while he lived, the war 
 was only for the preservation of a Union that sanc- 
 tioned Slavery, and occasion would make him a slave- 
 hunter. Before the Emancipation Proclamation was 
 written, Thoreau was in his grave ; Lowell's relatives 
 went to death in that "august drama of destiny," but 
 Lowell lives — in the capacity of a Massachusetts 
 "mugwump." Such is the difference between carbon- 
 ate of lime and cartilage in a man's backbone. 
 
 I have dwelt at this length on Thoreau as an aboli- 
 tionist in order to show him unswervingly steadfast to 
 principle, and to correct an unrighteous aspersion. I 
 think the time well spent, although it makes my 
 remaining moments too few for an adequate glance at 
 Thoreau as a "loafer" a loafer; "by Divine right," an 
 inspired loafer. 
 
 Novalis cSiUed Spinosa a "God-intoxicated man" ; 
 
 IS 
 
THOREAU: A GLIMPSE 
 
 Thoreau was Nature-intoxicated, "if he waked up 
 from a trance in a Concord swamp, he could tell by the 
 plants what time of the year it was within two days." 
 His knowledge of nature -was microscopic ; trees, plants, 
 animals, birds, fishes, all told him their secrets, almost 
 unasked, — and he lived chiefly amongst them. In an 
 essay entitled "Lfife without Principle" he says : "To 
 have done anything by which you earned money 
 MERELY, is to have been idle or worse." 
 
 He was a good gardener, an excellent surveyor, 
 unusually handy with tools ; said he had "as many 
 trades as fingers ;" was also college bred, and yet with 
 all this equipment he devoutly believed that the worst 
 use you could put a man to was to — hang him ? No ; 
 set him to "Making Money." 
 
 He proved that a man could earn enough in six 
 weeks to support him a year — did so support himself, 
 for he lived in his shanty at Walden Pond on some 
 fifteen dollars a year. He says of that episode in his 
 life, "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- 
 i6 
 
THOREAU; A GLIMPSE 
 
 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 lo'west terms, and if it proved to be 
 mean, ■why then to get the ■whole and genuine mean- 
 ness 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 in my next excursion." 
 
 "Able to give a true account of it in my Next excur- 
 sion" — that journey made with closed eyes and folded 
 hands ! 
 
 All around him was a surging humanity, toiling, 
 sweating, and groaning in travail, as if "resignation" to 
 life were necessary; and yet he said, "I am convinced 
 that to maintain oneself on this earth is not a hardship, 
 but a pastime, if ■we ■will live simply and wisely; as 
 the pursuits of simpler nations are still the sports of 
 the more artificial." 
 
 "The essential facts of life" — the pearl of great 
 price — ■were an ever-present and a solemn reality to 
 Thoreau. The thought of them filled him with "a 
 feeling of awfulness" just as it did John ^Voolman, 
 and George Fox, and Mohammed, and Hini of Naza- 
 reth. I think it must have been some day when these 
 essential facts had gotten obscured in the murky mist 
 arising from the Slough of Despond that he wrote : "It 
 is hard to be a good citizen of the ■world in any great 
 sense ; but if we do render no interest or increase to 
 
 17 
 
THOREAU: A GLIMPSE 
 
 mankind out of that talent God gave us, 'we can at 
 least preserve the principal unimpaired." 
 
 This is he of whom Lowell said, "Did his life seem 
 a selfish one, he condemns doing good as one of the 
 weakest of superstitions" — - and he the while sweating 
 in the arena, despairing of "interest or increase," and 
 yet girding up his loins to "preserve the principal 
 unimpaired." 
 
 Says Moncure D. Conway, "Emerson took me to 
 see Thoreau, and I remember that he asked me what 
 we were studying at Divinity College. I answered, 
 "The Scriptures." "Which ?" he asked. I was puzzled 
 until Emerson said, 'I fear you will find our Thoreau a 
 sad Pagan.' " Thoreau recognized several Bibles in 
 which men were gasping for God in atmospheres more 
 or less respirable. He did not seek the solution of the 
 great secret in printed Bibles. Men had sought it there 
 for thousands of years : that they had found it there 
 was a postulate contradicted by their conduct of life. 
 He contrasts men and animals, and finds a large bal- 
 ance in favor of the brute. He says, "I must receive 
 my life as passively as the willow leaf that flutters 
 over the brook. I must not be for myself, but for 
 God's work, and that is always good. I will wait the 
 breezes patiently, and grow as they determine. My 
 fate cannot but be grand so. We may live the life of 
 a plant or an animal without living an animal life. The 
 x8 
 
THOREAU: A GLIMPSE 
 
 constant and universal content of the animal comes of 
 resting quietly in God's palm." 
 
 The animal is wiser than man, he concludes ; and at 
 once a great suspicion dawns upon his mind: the 
 animal lives nearer to Nature, lives more in accord 
 with her, more in obedience to her, and it is through 
 Nature — God's Bible — that the Creator reveals him- 
 self to the creature. A Revelation in Nature : all 
 earnest souls seek that ! That much-misunderstood 
 Walt \Vhitman writes, "While I cannot understand it 
 or argue it out, I fully believe in a clue and purpose in 
 Nature, entire and several ; and invisible spiritual 
 results, just as real and definite as the visible, event- 
 uate all concrete life and all materialism through time." 
 
 From that supreme moment onward, to this man 
 Thoreau every created thing was a divine message 
 from its Maker and his. Oh, if he could but catch the 
 meaning of the message or of the messenger ! Hence 
 his mystical allegory : "I long ago lost a hound, a bay 
 horse, and a turtle dove, and am still on their trail. 
 Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning 
 them, describing their tracks and what calls they 
 responded to. I have met one or two who had heard 
 the hound, and ther tramp of the horse, and even seen 
 the dove disappear behind the cloud, and they seemed 
 as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them 
 themselves." Alas for us all! they had lost them, 
 
 19 
 
THOREAU: A GLIMPSE 
 
 , even as we have : for what is the hound but the divine 
 scent that finds the trail : what the bay horse but 
 sagacity and strength to carry us in pursuit ; what the 
 turtle-dove but innocence to secure us the Divine pro- 
 tection ? And we have lost them all. Are we still on 
 the trail ? Thoreau kept there "till he disappeared 
 behind the cloud." 
 
 The vision of "the constant and universal content of 
 the animal" was Thoreau's apocalypse, and from that 
 moment he put his ear to the great heart of Nature as 
 lovingly as a child lays its head on its mother's breast. 
 He wrote in his journal on the 31st of March, 1852 
 (just ten years before he was translated), "The song- 
 sparrow and the transient fox-colored sparrow, have 
 they brought me no message this year ? Is not the 
 coming of the fox-sparrow something more earnest 
 and significant than I have dreamed of ? Have I heard 
 what this tiny messenger has to say while it flits from 
 tree to tree ? God did not make this world in jest, no, 
 nor in indifference. These migratory swallows all 
 bear messages that concern my life. I do not pluck 
 the fruits in their season. I see that the sparrow 
 cheeps and flits, and sings adequately to the great 
 design of the universe, that man does not communi- 
 cate with it, understand its language, because he is not 
 at one with it." I suppose it was considering the 
 respective messages they brought that led him to rank 
 20 
 
THOREAU: A GLIMPSE 
 
 the D. D's below the Chick-a-de-dees — one preaches 
 
 for a stipend, the other brings word from Heaven. 
 
 The "practical man" can see nothing in this sentimental 
 
 "twaddle about sparrows": the "practical man" is too 
 
 often the Devil's "right bower" for that very reason- 
 
 An old Book, somewhat obsolete now-a-days, but in 
 
 precious esteem with aged people, says : 
 
 "Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings ? and not one of them 
 is forgotten of God." 
 
 I notice many sparrows in this little leafy town of 
 ours ; I find them about our streets in the dead of the 
 harshest winter ; I do not learn that any of them has 
 ever made application to the overseer of the poor — 
 they "rest quietly in God's palm." Is there no "mes- 
 sage" in this? 
 
 I crave your patience for one more quotation which 
 may, or may not, have meaning for you : 
 
 "The ultimate expression or fruit of any created thing is a fine 
 effluence which only the most ingenuous worshiper perceives at n 
 reverent distance from its surface even. The cause and effect are 
 equally evanescent and intangible, and the former must be investi- 
 gated with the same reverence with which the latter is perceived. 
 Science is often like the grub which, though it may have nestled in 
 the germ of a plant, has merely blighted or consumed it, never truly 
 tasted it. The rude and ignorant finger is probing in the rind still, 
 for in this case, the angles of incidence and exidence are equal, and 
 the essence is as far on the other side of the surface or matter, as 
 reverence detains the worshiper on this, and only reverence can find 
 out this angle instinctively. Shall we presume to alter the angle at 
 which God chooses to be worshipped ?" 
 
 21 
 
THOREAU; A GLIMPSE 
 
 This "fine effluence" is that "invisible spiritual 
 result" for which Thoreau hungered and thirsted and 
 ceaselessly sought, though he had lost hound, horse 
 and turtle-dove. Sir Galahad sought the Holy Grail : 
 the Concord "loafer" had a higher quest. 
 
 If I have attained my highest expectation, this 
 glimpse of Thoreau will leave you wholly unsatisfied. 
 Can you be persuaded to turn from the contemplation 
 of such sacerdotal scarecrows as "Robert Elsmere," 
 and "John ^A^ard" to read the writings of a rare man, 
 a flesh-and-blood reality, whose whole life was a 
 strenuous endeavor to apprehend — lay hold of — 
 eternity ? His books contain so much that will "find" 
 you, as Coleridge says. Let me give you a thought of 
 his that comes home most touchingly to those of us 
 who are "ayont" the fifties. He says, "The youth 
 gets together his materials to build a bridge to the 
 moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, 
 and at length the middle-aged man concludes to build 
 a wood-shed with them." ( My white-haired friend, 
 how is it ? ) And yet he finely reproaches us for being 
 content with a "wood-shed. "If," he says, "you have 
 built castles in the air, your work need not be lost : 
 that is where they should be. Now put the founda- 
 tions under them." Aye, the boulders of truths 
 eternal. 
 
 Of any earnest man he declares, "In proportion as 
 
 22 
 
THOREAU: A GLIMPSE 
 
 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." Thus 
 grandly doth he "justify the ways of God to man." 
 He says with ever increasing emphasis, "If life is with 
 us a soul-wearying struggle, the fault is in us : we are 
 violating those laws of the universe which, unbroken, 
 make heavenly harmony." 
 
 Emerson called this man "a sad pagan," and there is 
 deep meaning in the word spoken in jest, for, with the 
 Elizabethan writers, "sad" and "serious" were syno- 
 nymes — and a serious "pagan" Thoreau most surely 
 was. The only other "pagan," known to me, equally 
 serious in the consideration of that mystery we call 
 "Life," is Marcus Aurelius. 
 
 Looking beyond the stars on a cloudless night we 
 can easily imagine them walking hand in hand in 
 fields of amaranth and asphodel. 
 
 23 
 
HOME OF HENRY D. THOREALI AT WALDEN POND 
 
THOREAU'S INHERITANCE 
 
THOREAU'S INHERITANCE 
 
 [The Glimpse was written from a fervid impulse rather than adequate 
 knowledge : and, worse, the light that led astray was not "from 
 Heaven" : at least, if many Concord folk are to be believed — and of 
 a certainty they are. 
 
 In a certain university town the little church on the corner was the 
 first to open friendly arms to the stranger-student regardless of the 
 quality of his garments, and thither the students, the real students, 
 flocked. For them a busy country doctor wrote of the discovery he 
 had made so late in his own life : that of a Man ! 
 
 At that day all that was accessible to him was the semi-hysterical 
 rhapsody, "Thoreau. The Poet-Naturalist," the quasi "Life" by H. 
 A. Page, and a certain biography written by one of Thoreau's towns- 
 men. Then the writer of the Glimpse could take the Concordian 
 biographer at his own word : today he is not capable of such an 
 audacity. Nevertheless he was sorely perplexed in his endeavors to 
 reconcile the high moral and ethical altitude of the Thoreau children 
 with the character and condition of the household in which they were 
 reared : a snuffy nobody for a father and a gossip-mongering mother, 
 who was reinforced by a relay of aunts of the like species ! There 
 was nothing for such dubiety save a visit to Concord. That visit 
 was made, and ever since to that visitor biographies are like veal pies, 
 — "all very well when you know the man that makes them." 
 
 But the worst "break" in the Glimpse was corrected by a writer in 
 "The Inlander" some two years afterward ; and his paper is appended 
 as correcting the following mis-statement : 
 
 "In Thoreau's instance I feel obliged to eliminate the influence of 
 heredity. Considering his ancestry, Thoreau is quite a psycholog- 
 ical surprise." 
 
 After reading "Thoreau's Inheritance" the "surprise" took an 
 entirely new shape. Editor.] 
 
 27 
 
THOREAU'S INHERITANCE 
 
 T 
 
 THOREAU'S shanty-life at Walden is the epi- 
 sode by -which he is chiefly known and from 
 which he is generally misunderstood. That 
 really serious and far-reaching experiment in "plain 
 living and high thinking" is considered a transcendental 
 fete champetre or as one of the various freaks of the 
 disciples of "The Newness." It was unfavorably 
 judged by Lo-well, whose criticism of Thoreau's life 
 and aims has given the cue to that respectable major- 
 ity who think by proxy when they think at all. In 
 Lowell's opinion, Thoreau at W^alden was masquerad- 
 ing as a "hermit" whose whole environment pro- 
 claimed him a pretence ; and even the genial genius who 
 presides "over the teacups" mentions him as "the 
 Robinson Crusoe of Walden pond, who carried out a 
 school-boy whim to its full proportions." The atmos- 
 phere in which alone a Lowell and a Holmes could 
 burst into blossom would only stifle a Thoreau, and 
 men so different can never interpret, much less com- 
 prehend, each other. 
 
 Thoreau's adventure at Walden was a crucial experi- 
 ment in the science and art of living ; an earnest grap- 
 pling with the mysteries that vex and perplex this 
 earthly existence. He had concluded that "the mass 
 of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is 
 called resignation is confirmed desperation," and in the 
 very soul of him he believed that such lives impugn 
 28 
 
THOREAU'S INHERITANCE 
 
 the wisdom, the justice, and the compassion of the 
 Divine Arbiter. Moreover, he had found that a man 
 who was willing to live sanely, "close to the bone, 
 where life is s^weetest," could earn by six weeks' labor 
 sufficient to support him for the remainder of the year. 
 The richest of the Concord farmers were not doing so 
 well as that; they were "so occupied with the facti- 
 tious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that 
 its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them." Yet these 
 very fruits — an intercourse and intimacy with Nature, 
 Avhose countless delights made life one ceaseless round 
 of rapture — were his continual harvest, spring, sum- 
 mer, autumn and winter. 
 
 Thoreau was happily constituted; he was strong 
 and alert ; a tireless pedestrian, and endowed with 
 such a refinement of the special senses as made him a 
 marvel to his intimates. His sight was almost micro- 
 scopical ; his scent so acute that he detected a peculiar 
 odor coming from such inhabited houses as he hap- 
 pened to pass at night, and he heard rapturous harmo- 
 nies in the vibrations of a wind-shaken telegraph wire. 
 He revelled in the luxury of these gifts and became 
 the epicure of Nature. Now it was the austere flavor 
 of a wild apple from his well-stored pockets or that 
 of some simple bark which he stripped as he walked ; 
 then it was the perfume of the clethra or the fern as 
 he strode through them on his daily ramble ; again it 
 
 29 
 
THOREAU'S INHERITANCE 
 
 was the song of the birds, which he ■was so skillful 
 in translating into syllabic similitudes ; and always 
 there was the painted landscape of the varied year, the 
 gilded sunsets and the calm night's silvered clouds. 
 Did HE make all these for the deaf and the blind ! Did 
 HE tempt the children of men with these ineffable 
 visions and then so order their lives that they should 
 have "no time" to enjoy them! It is what the fool 
 hath said in his heart : they are wide-spread as the 
 earth, free as the air, and to drink in their delights is 
 verily "to glorify God and enjoy Him forever." Thoreau 
 recognized his inheritance and entered upon it with 
 joy. 
 
 But his inheritance included also the endowment of 
 heredity : a potent factor which has not yet had just 
 and due consideration from any of his biographers. 
 
 A gentleman who attended the school kept by the 
 Thoreau brothers once wrote to me : "Henry Thoreau 
 was not a superior scion upon an inferior stock, neither 
 was he begotten by a North-west wind, as many have 
 supposed. There were good and sufficient reasons 
 for the Thoreau childrens' love of, and marked taste 
 for. Botany and Natural History. John Thoreau and 
 his wife were to be seen, year after year, enjoying the 
 pleasures of nature, in their various seasons, on the 
 banks of the Assabet, at Fairhaven, Lee's Hill, W^alden 
 and elsewhere ; and this too without neglecting the 
 30 
 
THOREAU'S INHERITANCE 
 
 various duties of their humble sphere. Indeed, such 
 was Mrs. Thoreau's passion for these rambles that one 
 of her children narrowly escaped being bom in a favor- 
 ite haunt on Liee's Hill. 
 
 "The father was a very cautious and secretive man, 
 a close observer, methodical and deliberate in action, 
 and he produced excellent results. His marbled paper 
 and his pencils were the best in the market, while his 
 stove polish and his plumbago for electrot5T)ing have 
 never, to my knowledge, been excelled. He was a 
 French gentleman rather than a 'Yankee,' and once 
 having his confidence, you had a very shrewd and 
 companionable friend to commune with. Then, when 
 there were no unauthorized listeners about, the other- 
 wise quiet man, who had such a faculty for 'minding 
 his own business,' would sit with you by the stove in 
 his little shop and chat most delightftilly. 
 
 "When I recollect, too, what an exacting woman 
 his excellent wife was, and that he fully met her 
 inflexible demands, I can by no means regard him as 
 the mediocre 'plodder' depicted by one of his famous 
 son's biographers. No ; the tree is known by its fruits, 
 and John Thoreau begot brains of a high order, with 
 sound, healthy bodies to go with them ; and I feel 
 certain that his highest earthly aspirations were real- 
 ized in his children." 
 
 Nor was this sterling man yoked with an unworthy 
 
 31 
 
THOREAU'S INHERITANCE 
 
 helpmate, despite the biographer who represents her 
 as a gossip-monger prompt to "take her share in the 
 village bickerings." This ascription, so sadly at vari- 
 ance with the sweet charity that spares the dead, was 
 sharply contradicted by a lady friend of Mrs. Thoreau 
 in the Boston "Daily Advertiser," but, alas ! the ephe- 
 meral newspaper perishes with the day that brought it 
 forth, while the printed book lives on and 
 
 "Like a tall bully, lifts its head and lies." 
 One biographer bears glowing testimony to the high 
 moral altitude of the Thoreau children, but quite for- 
 gets to explain how they could possibly attain to such 
 a lofty ethical grandeur in the atmosphere of a home 
 that was moulded and managed by a gossip-loving 
 mother. Such a discrepancy should not be left to dis- 
 figure and disgrace the American Men of Letters 
 Series. Marcus Antoninus was indeed the putative 
 father of that Commodus whose ear was deaf to the stir- 
 ring "Meditations" that were written for his guidance; 
 but we feel assured that Faustina corrupted the stream 
 of gentle blood which came untainted from the heart 
 of Annius Verus, and her son sustained the calumnies 
 that without him would have perished. There is no 
 baleful cloud to cast this dark shadow on John Tho- 
 reau's village home, and in that favored environment — 
 of which it is written, "perpetuity, indeed, and hered- 
 itary transmission of everything that by nature and 
 32 
 
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THOREAU'S INHERITANCE 
 
 good sense can be inherited, are amongst the charac- 
 teristics of Concord" — the Thoreau children throve 
 and were a blessing to their home. 
 
 Such were the human sources of Thoreau' s inheri- 
 tance ; enviable on both the spear side and the spindle ; 
 but most probably his ruling passion can be traced to 
 one of them chiefly. A mother whom the woodland , 
 nymphs are surprised to see smitten with the throes 
 of maternity while she is straying in their haunts, is 
 likely by the rule of heredity to impress her deepest- 
 rooted trait upon the son that most closely resembled 
 her, and it is more than probable that Henry D. Tho- 
 reau's intense Nature-love caught its life-long fire from 
 his mother's fervor ; while the clear sanity of his gen- 
 ius is as distinctly attributable to the plain but solid 
 virtues of his sire. The marriage of quiet John Tho- 
 reau and vivacious Cynthia Dunbar was a happy con- 
 junction of diverse temperaments and opposite traits, 
 of substantial virtues and of simple habits ; and with 
 bodies undefiled by luxury and minds unsophisticated 
 by social dissimulation they made a home, and its 
 lowly hearth became a shrine whose incense brought 
 blessings to their offspring. 
 
 That impulse, the culminating momentum of which 
 impelled Thoreau to seek the solitude of \A^alden, was 
 a two-fold force : the mystery of Life pressing upon 
 him for solution and the maternal love of Nature 
 
 33 
 
THOREAU'S INHERITANCE 
 
 sending him to Nature with his burden. Of a certainty 
 he was swayed more by instinct than reason ; it was 
 a sacred oestrus soliciting the marriage of Nature and 
 Man's soul — better say the re-marriage, for in the 
 golden age these two were one. 
 
 Thoreau says he does not know why he went to 
 live in Walden woods and on looking back long after he 
 had forsaken his shanty, he frankly acknowledges 
 that he is equally at a loss to say why he left it. But 
 whether in that sojourn he correctly settled the prob- 
 lem or not, he has left us in "Walden : or Life in the 
 Woods," one of the most sanative books in all litera- 
 ture. This volume is equalled only by the example of 
 his clean, pure life, which is like a winter morning, 
 austere to the rebuking of all slothfulness ; clear as 
 the water of Life, serene as an Alpine summit and 
 bracing as its atmosphere ; and the lesson of his trust- 
 ful death, which is like the setting of a summer sun ere 
 yet the harvest time has fully come : there is still need 
 for the ripening rays to longer linger, but still the 
 ineffable glory of the fading effulgence has in it the 
 Eternal's promise of another day. 
 
 Emerson once playfully called him "a sad pagan," 
 and many, not Emersons, to this day deem him irre- 
 ligious, and from the manner in which he flouted their 
 false gods, even sacreligious. As Schiller says, 
 "Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in 
 
 34 
 
THOREAU'S INHERITANCE 
 
 vain." Take a retrospect of his life — the only 
 "religion" that will "smell sweet and blossom in the 
 dust" — and what are its gleaming mountain-tops ? A 
 sacred care for his body to keep it undefiled, and a 
 sleepless vigilance to preserve unsullied the purity of 
 his mind ; an obedience to the Voice within fully as 
 pious as. the devotion of Socrates to his daemon ; a 
 justification of the ways of God to man that makes a 
 "back number" of all catechisms; a resignation to 
 death that needed not the agony of Gethsemane. 
 
 Who can read unmoved that last letter of his, 
 written at dictation and signed by proxy : 
 
 "I have not been engaged in any particular work on Botany" [Oh, 
 the perfume of the young buds in the wind!] "though if I were to live, 
 I should have much to report on Natural History generally. 
 
 "You ask particularly after my health. I suppose 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." 
 
 In the matter of "religion" it would appear that his 
 began where so many are apt to fall away — at the 
 yawning brink of a grave. 
 
 He kept the temple as divine 
 
 Wherein his soul abided ; 
 He heard the Voice within the shrine 
 
 And followed as it guided ; 
 He found no bane of bitter strife, 
 
 But laws of His designing ; 
 He quaffed the brimming cup of Life 
 
 And went forth unrepining. 
 
 35