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Oriental (Oklahoma, United States) (search for this): chapter 4
discovered that Thoreau's whole attitude has been needlessly distorted. Lowell says that his shanty-life was 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. My Study Windows, p. 208. But what a man of straw is this that Lowell is constructing! What is this shanty-life ? A young man living in a country village, and having a passion for the minute observation of nature, and a love for Greek and Oriental reading, takes it into his head to build himself a study, not in the garden or the orchard, but in the woods, by the side of a lake. Happening to be poor, and to live in a time when social experiments are in vogue at Brook Farm and elsewhere, he takes a whimsical satisfaction in seeing how cheaply he can erect his hut, and afterwards support himself by the labor of his hands. He is not really banished from the world, nor does he seek or profess banishment: indeed, his house is not two mil
Worcester (Massachusetts, United States) (search for this): chapter 4
thing less than heroic. There is nothing finer in literary history than his description, in his unpublished diary, of receiving from his publisher the unsold copies — nearly the whole edition — of his Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and of his carrying the melancholy burden up-stairs on his shoulders to his study. I have now a library, he says, of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself. By the kindness of my friend H. G. O. Blake, Esq., of Worcester, Mass., the custodian of Thoreau's manuscripts, I am enabled to print this entire passage at the end of this chapter. It will always be an interesting question, how far Thoreau's peculiar genius might have been modified or enriched by society or travel. In his diary he expresses gratitude to Providence, or, as he quaintly puts it, to those who have had the handling of me, that his life has been so restricted in these directions, and that he has thus been compelled to extract its utmost n
Concord River (Maine, United States) (search for this): chapter 4
n that which begins its real growth after the death of an author; and such is the fame of Thoreau. Before his death he had published but two books, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and Walden. Four more have since been printed, besides a volume of his letters and two biographies. One of these last appeared within a yeliterary history than his description, in his unpublished diary, of receiving from his publisher the unsold copies — nearly the whole edition — of his Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and of his carrying the melancholy burden up-stairs on his shoulders to his study. I have now a library, he says, of nearly nine hundred vo53:-- For a year or two past, my publisher, Munroe, has been writing from time to time to ask what disposition should be made of the copies of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, still on hand, and at last suggesting that he had use for the room they occupied in his cellar. So I had them all sent to me here; and they
New England (United States) (search for this): chapter 4
grapher. Both admirer and censor, both Channing in his memoir, and Lowell in his well-known criticism, have brought the eccentricities of Thoreau into undue prominence, and have placed too little stress on the vigor, the good sense, the clear perceptions, of the man. I have myself walked, talked, and corresponded with him, and can testify that the impression given by both these writers is far removed from that ordinarily made by Thoreau himself. While tinged here and there, like most New England thinkers of his time, with the manner of Emerson, he was yet, as a companion, essentially original, wholesome, and enjoyable. Though more or less of a humorist, nursing his own whims, and capable of being tiresome when they came uppermost, he was easily led away from them to the vast domains of literature and nature, and then poured forth endless streams of the most interesting talk. He taxed the patience of his companions, but not more so, on the whole, than is done by many other emine
Newport (Rhode Island, United States) (search for this): chapter 4
ional excursion into the deeper wilderness at a distance. He earns an honest living by gardening and land-surveying, makes more close and delicate observations on nature than any other American has ever made, and writes the only book yet written in America, to my thinking, that bears an annual perusal. Can it be really true that this is a life so wasted, so unpardonable? The artist LaFarge built himself a studio as bare as Thoreau's and almost as lonely, among the Paradise Rocks, near Newport, and used to withdraw from the fashionable summer world to that safe retreat. Lowell himself has celebrated in immortal verse the self-seclusion of Professor Gould, who would lock himself into his Albany observatory, and leave his indignant trustees to admire the keyhole's contour grand from without. Is the naturalist's work so much inferior to the artist's,--are the stars of thought so much less important than those of space,--that LaFarge and Gould are to be praised for their self-devot
Merrimack (United States) (search for this): chapter 4
ns its real growth after the death of an author; and such is the fame of Thoreau. Before his death he had published but two books, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and Walden. Four more have since been printed, besides a volume of his letters and two biographies. One of these last appeared within a year or two in Engthan his description, in his unpublished diary, of receiving from his publisher the unsold copies — nearly the whole edition — of his Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and of his carrying the melancholy burden up-stairs on his shoulders to his study. I have now a library, he says, of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seveyear or two past, my publisher, Munroe, has been writing from time to time to ask what disposition should be made of the copies of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, still on hand, and at last suggesting that he had use for the room they occupied in his cellar. So I had them all sent to me here; and they have arrived to
Massachusetts (Massachusetts, United States) (search for this): chapter 4
ibrary of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself. Is it not well that the author should behold the fruits of his labor? My works are piled up in my chamber, half as high as my head, my opera omnia. This is authorship. These are the work of my brain. There was just one piece of good luck in the venture. The unbound were tied up by the printer four years ago in stout paper wrappers, and inscribed, H. D. Thoreau's Concord River, fifty copies. So Munroe had only to cross out River, and write Mass., and deliver them to the expressman at once. I can see now what I write for, and the result of my labors. Nevertheless, in spite of this result, sitting beside the inert mass of my works, I take up my pen tonight to record what thought or experience I may have had, with as much satisfaction as ever. Indeed, I believe that this result is more inspiring and better than if a thousand had bought my wares. It affects my privacy less, and leaves me freer.
Maine (Maine, United States) (search for this): chapter 4
ss, and made it essentially the same with that of his critics. For a permanent residence it seemed to me that there could be no comparison between this [Concord] and the wilderness, necessary as the latter is for a resource and a background, the raw material of all our civilization. The wilderness is simple almost to barrenness. The partially cultivated country it is which chiefly has inspired, and will continue to inspire, the strains of poets such as compose the mass of any literature. Maine Woods, p. 159; written in 1846. Seen in the light of such eminently sensible remarks as these, it will by and by be discovered that Thoreau's whole attitude has been needlessly distorted. Lowell says that his shanty-life was 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. My Study Windows, p. 208. But what a man of straw is this that Lowell is constructing! What is this shanty-life ? A youn
Providence, R. I. (Rhode Island, United States) (search for this): chapter 4
ulders to his study. I have now a library, he says, of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself. By the kindness of my friend H. G. O. Blake, Esq., of Worcester, Mass., the custodian of Thoreau's manuscripts, I am enabled to print this entire passage at the end of this chapter. It will always be an interesting question, how far Thoreau's peculiar genius might have been modified or enriched by society or travel. In his diary he expresses gratitude to Providence, or, as he quaintly puts it, to those who have had the handling of me, that his life has been so restricted in these directions, and that he has thus been compelled to extract its utmost nutriment from the soil where he was born. Yet in examining these diaries, even more than in reading his books, one is led to doubt, after all, whether this mental asceticism was best for him, just as one suspects that the vegetable diet in which he exulted may possibly have shortened his life. A larger
Salem (Massachusetts, United States) (search for this): chapter 4
tellectual standards, so that he could never, like some of his imitators, treat literary art as a thing unmanly and trivial. His selection of points in praising his favorite books shows this discrimination. He loves to speak of the elaborate beauty and finish, and the lifelong literary labors of the ancients . . . works as refined, as solidly done, and as beautiful almost, as the morning itself. Walden, p. 113. I remember how that fine old classical scholar, the late John Glen King, of Salem, used to delight in Thoreau as being the only man who thoroughly loved both nature and Greek. Thoreau died at forty-four, without having achieved fame or fortune. It is common to speak of his life as a failure; but to me it seems, with all its drawbacks, to have been a great and eminent success. Even testing it only by the common appetite of authors for immortality, his seems already a sure and enviable place. Time is rapidly melting away the dross from his writings, and exhibiting the
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