Henry D. Thoreau: 1817-1862.

While several of those who composed this group of transcendental thinkers in the Concord circle became more or less noted either for eccentricity or utterance, the most remarkable among them all, after Emerson, was Henry David Thoreau. A genuine lover of nature -- a naturalist first of all -- he was also a philosopher and a poet, too, although a crude one. He was misunderstood by most of those who knew or heard of him while he lived, -- and these were not many, -- but by the inner circle of the transcendentalists he was comprehended and beloved. It is characteristic of his career that but two of his books were published in his lifetime while his published writings now number twenty volumes.

In 1845, Thoreau built for himself a cabin on the shore of Walden Pond, and here for two years he lived, cultivating potatoes, corn, and beans sufficient for his subsistence, recording his observations of all natural phenomena, and transcribing from his journal the narrative of an excursion taken with his brother in 1839. It is this experience in his life with its subsequent record which has more than anything else aroused interest in the personality of Thoreau. “Walden, or Life in the Woods”, contains the story and the thought of these two years; it reveals Thoreau at his best and has long since become an American classic. The book was published in 1854.

In 1849 there appeared a volume named “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”. It is about the voyage which is the basis of its chapters and had occurred ten years previous, when its author, two years out of college, together with his brother, in a boat built by their own hands, had explored the courses of these beautiful streams. Richly descriptive, the “Week” is also full of the philosophy of Thoreau, sometimes expanded into essay-like proportions, sometimes expressed in queer, crude lines of verse. It is in his prose that the essayist oftenest shows himself a poet.

Shortly after leaving college he had begun to keep a journal which was both diary and commonplace book; and this journal he continued throughout his life. From this source he drew the material of the “Week” and of “Walden” as well as of his posthumous books and his lectures, essays, and addresses. The journal was also drawn upon by others after his death to make books and magazine articles, and in 1906 was published in its entirety in fourteen volumes.

Various articles by Thoreau were published in “The Dial”, in the New York magazines as well as in the Tribune itself. Thoreau never married, he lived simply and unconventionally in his own independent way. He developed consumption, and died in his forty-fifth year, at his home in Concord.

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