Henry David Thoreau

 Hawthorne said that Thoreau was “tedious, tiresome and intolerable.” But, he also added “he has great qualities of intellect and character.”  “He seemed born for great enterprise and for command,” Emerson said years later at Thoreau’s funeral, “and I so much regret the loss of his rare powers of action, that I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had not ambition. Wanting this, instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of the Huckleberry party.”

HHe was born David Henry Thoreau in Concord, Massachussetts, in HHis father was a pencil maker; his mother took in boarders, one of them being Emerson’s sister. TThoreau’s attachment to Concord was established early in his life as he would wander the woods with his fishing pole.

 He attended Harvard in 1833 and graduated in the middle of his class.  At Harvard he became familiar with English literature and with German philosophers who provided much of the underpinnings of Transcendentalism.  He was independent and eccentric.

 Thoreau would eventually depart for Walden Pond where Emerson had offered him the use of some land.  “The experiment at Walden Pond was an attempt to rediscover the grandeur and heroism inherent in a simple life led close to Nature” (205).  “I wish to meet the facts of life,” he wrote in his journal, “the vital facts, which are the phenomenon or actuality the gods meant to show us…and so I came down here.”

Walden  Again and again in Walden, Thoreau would return to images drawn from Greek and Latin epics, “asserting the essential brotherhood between the adventurers of the mythic past and the truth-seeking voyager of the present” (205).

 “The mass of men,” as one of his most famous sentences in Walden puts it, “lead lives of quiet desperation.”  “When he look toward town, Thoreau saw his prosperous fellow citizens so caught up in the material pursuits of making a living that they had become one- dimensional” (206).

 Walden is considered one of the greatest works ever produced in America. It successfully blends style and content; his style is simple- at least on the surface.  “For Thoreau, as for Emerson and the Romantics who preceded them, Nature itself was a form of language; behind its outward appearance, Nature contained spiritual reality. Nature spoke to us, if we could understand the message about those ‘vital facts’ which ‘the gods meant to show us’” (206).

 While at Walden, as a protest against the Mexican War (seen as an attempt to extend American slave owning territory), Thoreau refused to pay his poll tax and spent a night in jail until someone paid it for him.  He was vocally and radically opposed to slavery.

 Thoreau remained at Walden for a little over two years. In 1847, he moved in with Emerson and did odds jobs to help pay his room and board.  He eventually moved to his father’s house in Concord, where he remained for the rest of his life. He became a kind of Concord record keeper, tracking rainfall, snowfall, the first days of frost and the first days of spring.  He died of tuberculosis in 1862.

 Sam staple told Emerson that he, “never saw a man dying with so much pleasure and peace.”  “Henry, have you made your peace with God?” his aunt is said to have asked him toward the end. “Why Aunt,” he replied, “I didn’t know we ever quarreled.”