The First and Last Journeys of Thoreau, Volume 1/Addendum
ADDENDUM
FROM MANUSCRIPTS WHICH HAVE BUT
RECENTLY COME TO LIGHT
ADDENDUM
Since the preceding pages of this volume were printed, Mr. Bixby has acquired a number of other unpublished MSS. of Thoreau, recently discovered among the papers of the Thatcher family, mostly dating from the years before 1845. For many years they remained in obscurity with these distant relatives of Thoreau, to whom they had been left by his sister Sophia at her death. She gave most of her brother's papers to Mr. Blake, who left them as a heritage to Mr. E. H. Russell, of Worcester, Mass.; but it appears that for some reason she wished to keep these particular MSS. in the family, and so left them with the Thatchers, with whom she was staying at the time of her death. Some of these contain poems quoted in part in The Week in 1849; and several of these poems are first drafts, or more complete forms of those previously printed in The Dial, or omitted, by the fastidiousness of Emerson, from The Winter's Walk; or by Thoreau himself from The Week, or from Walden. These, with the prose passages with which they were originally connected, are given in this Appendix. A number of the poems were written on paged sheets, with other memoranda, showing that they were originally written in some Journal from which they were torn out and preserved from destruction,—most of the early Journals having perished. Others were written on separate sheets, but for some reason were never printed. Facsimiles of four of the manuscript poems are inserted in this volume.
The earlier MS. gives the following wording of the poem entitled Morning printed on page xiv of this volume:—
Heathen without reproach,
Who dost upon the civil day encroach,—
Who, ever since thy birth,
Has trod the outskirts of the earth:—
The coward's hope, the brave man's way
And distant promise of a day,—
While the late-risen world goes west,
You daily bend my steps to east.
Mountains were always singularly attractive to Thoreau (see page xxiv), as indeed they are to poets generally. The verses originally printed in The Dial on Mountains were begun in August, 1841, and then entitled To the Mountains. These unprinted lines seem to have been intended as a closing to the poem, although they appear in the original on a separate sheet (see facsimile of original MS.), under the following heading:—
TO THE MOUNTAINS
And when the sun puts out his lamp
We'll sleep serene within the camp,
Trusting to His invet'rate skill
Who leads the stars o'er yonder hill;
Whose discipline doth never cease
To watch the slumberings of peace,
And from the virtuous hold afar
The melancholy din of war;
For ye, our sentries still outlie,—
The earth your pallet, and your screen the sky.
From steadfastness I will not swerve,
Remembering my sweet reserve.
With all your kindness shown from year to year
Ye do but civil demons still appear;
Still, to my mind,
Ye are inhuman and unkind,
And bear an untamed aspect to my sight,
After the "civil-suited" night;
As if ye had lain out
Like to the Indian scout
Who lingers in the purlieus of the towns
With unexplored grace and savage frowns.
[A little more than a year later, Thoreau wrote the following in his Journal, this fragment of which was rescued and preserved by the Thatcher family]:—
Thursday, I went over to Naushautuct[1] only to look into the horizon; for, as long as I have lived here, and as many times as I have been there, I could not have told how it appeared. When I discovered over how many miles of Bedford and Carlisle and Acton my eye ranged, even into Billerica and Framingham,—which never had occurred to me before, though I was familiar with the roads leading thither,—the nearest horizon seemed proportionately to extend itself, and to embrace many Actons and Carlisles; and I thought I would not travel to see these places, and balk the Fates who placed them thus under my eyes. The most familiar and best-known facts leave no distinct impression on our minds; no man can tell how his horizon looks at evening. We do not know, till the time comes, which way the river runs, which hills range, or that the hill takes in our homestead in its sweep. At first our birth and existence sunder all things, as if, like a wedge, we had been thrust up through into Nature, and not till the wound heals do we begin to see her unity.
Page xxvii.—The passage beginning, "Here the Woodcutters" has nothing to do with the preceding passage on Music, and should have been detached from it. In connection with it, however, may now be read that unpublished poem, never quite finished, the last lines of which were taken to enrich the epigram on Mist. The title here is—
FOG
Dull water-spirit and Protean god,
Descended cloud, fast anchored to the earth,
That drawest too much air for shallow coasts;
Thou ocean branch that flowest to the sun,
Incense of earth, perfumed with flowers;
Spirit of lakes and rivers, seas and rills,
Come to revisit now thy native scenes;
Night thoughts of earth,—dream drapery,
Dew cloth and fairy napkin;
Thou drifting wind-blown meadow of the air.
Page xxix.—On Love and Friendship, several poems and fragments appear in the newly discovered MSS. They show the same ideality and hyperbole which appear in the passages already published on these topics. For example, we discover the following lines, entitled The Friend,—not dated, but evidently as early as 1847:—
THE FRIEND
The great Friend
Dwells at the land's end,—
There lives he
Next to the Sea;
Fleets come and go,
Carrying commerce to and fro,—
But still sits he on the sand,
And maketh firm that headland;
Mariners steer them by his light,
Safely in the darkest night:
He holds no visible communion,
For his friendship is a union.
Many men dwell far in land,
But he alone sits on the strand,
Whether he ponders men or books
Ever still he seaward looks,
Feels the sea-breeze on his cheek,
At each word the landsmen speak;
From some distant port he hears,
Of the ventures of past years,
In the sullen ocean's roar
Of wrecks upon a distant shore;
In every companion's eye
A sailing vessel doth descry;
Marine news he ever reads
And the slightest glances heeds.
Near is India to him
Though his native shore is dim,
But the bark which long was due,
Never—never—heaves in view,
Which shall put an end to commerce
And bring back what it took from us,
(Which shall make Siberia free
Of the climes beyond the sea)
Fetch the Indies in its hold,
All their spices and their gold,
And men sail the sea no more,—
The sea itself become a shore
To a broader deeper sea,
A pro founder mystery.
Page 11.—The following is a more complete amplification of the thought recorded at the top of the above page, with a poem suggested by it:—
There dwelt along at considerable distances on this interval a quiet agricultural and pastoral people, with every house its well (as we sometimes proved), and other customary fixtures; and every household, though never so still and remote, it received in the noon-tide its dinner hour and probably its dinner about these times. There they lived on, those New England people, farmer-lives,—father and grandfather and great-grandfather, on and on without noise; keeping up tradition, and expecting besides fair weather and abundant harvest, we did not learn what. Contented were they to live, since it was so contrived for them, and where their lives had fallen.
THE BATTLE OF LIFE
How little curious is man,
Who hath not searched his mystery a span,
But dreams of mines of treasure,
Which he neglects to measure!
For three-score years and ten
Walks to and from amid his fellow men,
O'er this small tract of continental land,
His fancy bearing no divining wand.
Our uninquiring corpses lie more low
Than our life's curiosity doth go,
Our most ambitious steps climb not so high
As in their hourly sport the sparrows fly.
And yonder cloud's blown farther in a day
Than our most vagrant feet may ever stray.
Surely, O Lord, he hath not greatly erred
Who hath so little from his birthplace stirred.
He wanders through this low and shallow world,
Scarcely his bolder thoughts and hopes unfurled;
Through this low-walled world which his huge sin
Hath hardly room to rest and harbor in.
Bearing his head just o'er some fallow ground,
Some cowslipped meadows where the bitterns sound,
He wanders round until his end draws nigh,
And then lays down his aged head to die,—
And this is life;
This is that famous strife!
Page 62.—To this chapter the following on Autumn and Winter should be added:—
THE THREADBARE TREES
The threadbare trees so poor and thin,
They are no wealthier than I,
But with as brave a core within,
They rear their boughs to the October sky.
Poor knights they are that bravely wait
The charge of winter's cavalry,
Keeping a simple Roman state,
Discumbered of their Persian luxury.
I hearing get, who had but ears,
And sight, who had but eyes before,
I moments live, who lived but years,
And truth discern, who knew but learning's lore.
These changes we already beheld with prophetic vision, for summer passes into autumn in some unimaginable epoch and point of time, like the turning of a leaf. It is pleasant to hear once more the crackling flight of grasshoppers amid the stubble. It is pleasant when summer is drawing to a close to hear the cricket piping a Niebelungenlied in the grass.
The feathered race are, perhaps, the truest heralds of the season, since they appreciate a thousand delicate changes in the atmosphere which is their own element, of which man cannot be aware. The occasional and transient notes of such birds as migrate early, heard in midsummer or later, are among the earliest indications of the advancing year, plaintively recalling the spring. The clear whistle of the oriole is occasionally heard among the elms at this time, as if striving to reawaken the love season, or, as if, in the long interval since the spring it had but paused a moment to secure its prey. It harmonizes with the aftermath springing under our feet. The faint, flitting note of the goldfinch marks the turning point of the year, and is heard in the gardens by the middle of August, as if this little harbinger of the Fall were prompting Nature to make haste. Its lisping, peeping note, so incessant and universal that it is hardly distinguished, more than the creak of the crickets, is one of Nature's ground-tones, and is associated with the rustling of the leaves and the swift lapse of time. The lark too sometimes sings again down in the meadow, as in the spring, and the robin peeps, and the bluebirds, old and young, revisit their boxes and hollow trees, as if they would fain repeat the summer without the intervention of winter.
Dense flocks of bobolinks, russet and rustling like seeds of the meadow grass floating on the wind, or like ripe grain threshed out by the gale, rise before us in our walk. Each tuft gives up its bird. The purple finch or American linnet is seen early in October moving south in straggling flocks and alighting on the apple trees, reminding us of the pine and spruce, juniper and cedar, on whose berries it feeds. In its plumage are the crimson hues of October evenings, as if it had caught and preserved some of their beams. Many a serene evening lies snugly packed under its wing. Then, one after another these little passengers wing their way seasonably to the haunts of summer, with each a passing warning to man:—
Until at length the north winds blow,
And beating high mid ice and snow,
The sturdy goose brings up the rear,
Leaving behind the cold, cold year.
Page 83.—Continuing his remarks on Lovelace, Thoreau says:
Poetry is a purer draught of life.
Thursday.—I am pleased with the manner in which Quarles and his contemporaries speak of Nature. The utmost poetry of their expression is after all a sort of gallantry—of a knight to his lady. They do not speak as sincere lovers of Nature or as very conversant with her; but as possessing a thorough respect for her, and a good title to her acquaintance. They can speak of, and to her, well and manfully because their lips are not closed by affection. "The pale faced lady of the black-eyed light [sic]," says Quarles.
I do not think there was in that age an unusual devotion to Nature; but she certainly held her court then, and all authors were her gentlemen and esquires then, and had always ready an abundance of courtly expressions.
Quarles is always full-mouthed; he is not often weak or shallow, though he is coarse and untasteful. He writes lines which it employs the whole tongue to utter.
He runs in conceits, as well as Herbert. He uses many able-bodied and strong-back words, which have a certain rustic fragrance and force, like countrymen come to town—as if now first devoted to literature, after having served sincere and stern purposes.
Page 104.—The following verses, with the prose accompanying them may be added under Love (see also bottom of page 106):—
THE VIRGIN
With her calm, inquiring eyes
She doth tempt the earth to rise;
With humility over all,
She doth tempt the sky to fall.
In her place she still doth stand,
A pattern unto the firm land;
While revolving spheres come round
To embrace her stable ground.
Page 108.—The following poem continues the thought recorded on the 108th page, and connects it with page 109:—
SOLITUDE
We walk in Nature still alone,
And know no one,
Discern no lineament nor feature
Of any creature.
Though all the firmament
Is o'er us bent.
Yet still we miss the grace
Of an intelligent and kindred face.
We still must seek the friend
Who does with Nature blend,
Who is the person in her mask,
He is the man we ask:
Who is the expression of her meaning,
Who is the uprightness of her leaning,
Who is the grown child of her weaning,—
The site of human life,
The face of Nature;
Some sure foundation
And nucleus of a nation.
We twain would walk together
Through every weather,
And see this aged Nature
Go with a bending stature.
I was made erect and lone,
And within me is the bone.
Still my vision will be clear,
Still my life will not be drear.
To the center all is near.
Where I sit there is my throne;
If age choose to sit apart,
If age choose, give me the start;
Take the sap and leave the heart.
But after all, men do not wend asunder, their courses do not diverge; but as the web of destiny is woven it is fulled, and they are cast more and more into the centre. "Although friendship between good men is interrupted, still their principles remain unaltered. The stalk of the lotus may be broken, and the fibres remain connected." Persons are only the vessels which contain the nectar, and the hydrostatic paradox is the symbol of Love's law. Love finds its level and rises to its fountain-head in all breasts, and its slenderest column balances the ocean.—
Love equals swift and slow
And high and low,
Racer and lame,
The hunter and his game.
Friends are indeed the ancient and honorable of the earth, for this especially is a natural and durable league.
Because I stand aloof from politics, and devote myself to the search after truth, let me not be accused of a want of patriotism, or of indifference to my country. "On the contrary," as Anaxagoras replied in a like case, pointing to the heavens, "I esteem it infinitely." My country is free!
The authority of government, even such as I am willing to submit to—for I will cheerfully obey those who know and can do better than I, and in many things even those who know and can do much less—is still an impure one: to be strictly just it must have the sanction and consent of the governed. It can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it.—
Spes sibi quisque.
Each one his own hope.
TRUE FREEDOM
Wait not till slaves pronounce the word
To set the captive free,—
Be free yourselves, be not deferred,
And farewell, slavery!
Ye all are slaves, ye have your price,
And gang but cries to gang;
Then rise, the highest of ye rise;—
I hear your fetters clang.
Think not the tyrant sits afar;
In your own breasts ye have
The District of Columbia,
And power to free the slave.
The warmest heart the north doth breed
Is still. too cold and far;
The colored man's release must come
From outcast Africa.
"Make haste and set the captive free!"
Are ye so free that cry?
The lowest depths of slavery
Leave freedom for a sigh.
What is your whole Republic worth?
Ye hold out vulgar lures;
Why will ye be disparting earth
When all of heaven is yours?
He's governed well who rules himself,
No despot vetoes him;
There s no defaulter steals his pelf,
Nor revolution grim.
'Tis neither silver, rags, nor gold,
'S the better currency;
The only specie that will hold,
Is current honesty.
The minister of state hath cares,
He cannot get release,—
Administer his own affairs,
Nor settle his own peace.
'Tis easier to treat with kings
And please our country's foes,
Than treat with Conscience of the things
Which only Conscience knows.
There's but the party of the great,
And party of the mean;
And if there is an Empire State,
'Tis the upright, I ween.
Ages are past; as the work of today is present, so some flitting perspectives and demi-experiences of the life that is in Nature are in time veritably future; or rather outside to time, perennial, young, divine, in the wind and rain which never die.
OUR NEIGHBORS
The respectable folks,
Where dwell they?
They whisper in the oaks,
And they sigh in the hay,
Summer and winter, night and day,
Out on the meadow, there dwell they.
They drink at the brooks and the pilgrim's cup,[2]
And with the owl and the nighthawk sup;
They suck the breath of the morning wind,
And they make their own all the good they find.
They never die,
Nor snivel nor cry,
For they have a lease of immortality.
A sound estate forever they mend,
To every asker readily lend,
To the ocean, wealth,
To the meadow, health,
To Time, his length,
To the rocks, strength,
To the stars, light,
To the weary, night,
To the busy, day,
To the idle, play,—
And so their good cheer never ends,
For all are their debtors and all their friends.
Such is a race which has long had a foothold in this land, and which these vagrant immigrants shall never displace.
TRANSCENDENTAL FARMING
What have I to do with plows? I cut an other furrow than you see. Where the off ox treads, there is it not; it is farther off; where the nigh ox walks, it will not be; it is nigher still. If corn fails, my crop fails not. What of drought, what of rain!
My ground is high,
But 'tis not dry;
What you call dew
Comes filtering through.
Buy a farm? Buy a broom! What have I to pay for a farm with, that a farmer will take?—
If from your price ye will not swerve,
Why then I ll think the gods reserve
A greater bargain there above;
Out of their superabundant love,
Have meantime better for me cared,
And so will get my stock prepared;
Plows of new pattern, hoes the same,
Designed a different soil to tame;
And sow my seed broadcast in air,
Certain to reap my harvest there.
INDEPENDENCE
Ye princes, keep your realms
And circumscribéd power,-
Not wide as are my dreams,
Nor rich as is this hour.
What can ye give which I have not?
What can ye take which I have got?
Can ye defend the dangerless?
Can ye inherit nakedness?
Can ye instruct who have not learned?
Or can ye learn who will not hear?
Can ye inflame who have not burned
To Virtue's cause or Love's career?
Ye are late comers into life,
Who have not learned your heritage,
But proved your right with toil and strife
Unto your thrones, and title war to wage.
[We close this Appendix with an introductory prose passage, and a poem of considerable length, originally written, as shown by a date on the Journal-page, Friday, October 14, 1842; but used in part by Thoreau in the manuscripts of his Winter Walk, which were published by Emerson a year later in The Dial of October, 1843. But this scrupulous editor omitted most of the author's verses. It seems best, therefore, to print them here entire, with the prose immediately preceding them in the preserved fragment of the Journal in which they appear. The whole of the verses were originally written on pages 194-198 of the Journal for the autumn of 1842,—long since destroyed,—after using most of its contents either in The Week or in Walden.]
THE WINTER WALK
Silently we unlatch the door, letting the drift fall in, and step forth like knights encased in steel—to sport with the cutting air. Still through the drifts I see the farmer's early candle—like a paled star—emitting a lonely beam from the cottage indoors as, one by one, the sluggish smoke begins to ascend from the chimneys of the farm-houses midst the trees. Thus from each domestic altar does incense go up each morning to the heavens. Once the stars lose some of their sparkle and a deep blue mist skirts the eastern horizon, a lurid and brazen light foretells the approaching day. You hear the sound of woodchopping at the farmer's door—the baying of the housedog and the distant clarion of cocks. The frosty air seems to convey only, and with new distinctness, the finer particles of sound to our ears. It comes clear and round like a bell, as if there were fewer impediments than in the green atmosphere of summer, to make it faint and ragged. And beside, all Nature is tight drawn and sonorous like seasoned wood. Sounds now come to our ears from a greater distance in the horizon than in the summer. For then Nature is never silent, and the chirp of crickets is incessant, but now the farthest and faintest sound takes possession of the vacuum. Even the barking of dogs and lowing of cattle is melodious. The jingling of the ice on the trees is meet and liquid. I have heard a sweeter music in some lone dale, where flowed a rill released by the noonday sun from its own frosty fetters—while the icicles were melting upon the apple trees, and the ever present chic-a-dee and nuthatch flitted about.
A WINTER AND SPRING SCENE
The willows droop,
The alders stoop,
The pheasants group
Beneath the snow;
The fishes glide
From side to side,
In the clear tide,
The ice below.
The ferret weeps,
The marmot sleeps,
The owlet keeps
In his snug nook.
The rabbit leaps,
The mouse out-creeps,
The flag out-peeps,
Beside the brook.
The snow-dust falls,
The otter crawls,
The partridge calls
Far in the wood;
The traveller dreams,
The tree-ice gleams,
The blue jay screams
In angry mood.
The apples thaw,
The ravens caw,
The squirrels gnaw
The frozen fruit;
To their retreat
I track the feet
Of mice that eat
The apple's root.
The axe resounds,
And bay of hounds,
And tinkling sounds
Of wintry fame;
The hunter's horn
Awakes the dawn
On field forlorn,
And frights the game.
The tinkling air
Doth echo bear
To rabbit's lair,
With dreadful din;
She scents the air,
And far doth fare,
Returning where
She did begin.
The fox stands still
Upon the hill
Not fearing ill
From trackless wind.
But to his foes
The still wind shows
In treacherous snows
His tracks behind.
Now melts the snow
In the warm sun.
The meadows flow,
The streamlets run.
The spring is born,
The wild bees bum,
The insects hum,
And trees drop gum.
And winter's gone,
And summer's come.
The chic-a-dee
Lisps in the tree,
The winter bee
Not fearing frost;
The small nuthatch
The bark doth scratch
Some worm to catch
At any cost.
The catkins green
Cast o'er the scene
A summer sheen,
A genial glow.
I melt, I flow,
And rippling run,
Like melting snow
In this warm sun.
- ↑ This is the way Thoreau then spelled the Indian name of the hill between the two rivers Assabet and Musketaquid, which he so often visited from the Parkman house (where the Library now stands) in which he was living in 1842. It commands a view of nine or ten townships,—Acton, Bedford, Billerica, Carlisle, Concord, Lincoln, Lexington, Sudbury, Wayland and Framingham,—in whole or in part; and was often the resort of the villagers. Wachusett, Watatic and Monadnoc with the nearer Peterboro Hills can be descried from it in clear weather, and Nobscot, the nearest high hill in Framingham, above the Wayside Inn.—Ed.
- ↑ The four lines in italics are struck out by the author in the original.