The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau
Page 42
ANNOTATIONS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ANNOTATIONS
NATURAL HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
In January 1842, both Thoreau’s brother, John, and Emerson’s young son, Waldo, died, throwing Thoreau into several months of depression and inactivity. In April, in Boston, Emerson came upon a set of scientific reports, each four hundred or five hundred pages long, about the flora and fauna of Massachusetts, and he asked Thoreau to review them for the new transcendentalist journal The Dial. Thoreau soon had a draft essay, and in the July 1842 issue of The Dial this review appeared. As Robert D. Richardson, Jr., writes: “By one of those little ironies that make life harder to believe than fiction, Thoreau had been writing in his journal on the two days before John [died] about how books of natural history restored one to a sense of health.”
3 Audubon: John James Audubon (1785-1851), American naturalist, ornithologist, and artist. His five-volume Ornithological Biography, published between 1832 and 1839, mixes descriptions of American birds with anecdotes about his life and adventures. Volume 1 (1832) includes descriptions of the magnolia, the cottonwood tree, and the migrations of the ricebird. Volume 2 (1835) has two accounts of a visit to the Florida Keys.
3 rice-bird: the bobolink, Dolichonyx oryzivorus.
3 Within the circuit: Thoreau’s own poems, such as this one, appear in his work without quotation marks; poems by other writers appear in quotation marks.
3n Reports: Each of these was “published agreeably to an Order of the Legislature, by the Commissioners on the Zoological and Botanical Survey of the State.” They are: David Humphreys Storer, Reports on the Fishes, Reptiles, and Birds of Massachusetts (Boston: Dutton and Wentworth, 1839).
Chester Dewey, Report on the Herbaceous Flowering Plants of Massachusetts, and on the Quadrupeds of Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass.: Folsom, Wells, and Thurston, 1840).
Thaddeus William Harris, A Report on the Insects of Massachusetts, Injurious to Vegetation (Cambridge, Mass.: Folsom, Wells, and Thurston, 1841).
Augustus A. Gould, Report on the Invertebrata of Massachusetts, Comprising the Mollusca, Crustacea, Annelida, and Radiata (Cambridge, Mass.: Folsom, Wells, and Thurston, 1841).
4 Johnswort: Saint-John’s-wort. The common variety in New England is Hypericum perforatum, an herb with bright-yellow flowers.
4 mead: meadow.
4 fieldfare: British name of the European thrush Turdus pilaris.
4 hoar: white with frost.
4 service-berries: fruit of the shadbush, or serviceberry, a bush of the genus Amelanchier that flowers very early in the spring.
4 Labrador and East Main: sites in northern Canada. Labrador is the northeastern coast of what is now Newfoundland. East Main (or Eastmain) is a town on James Bay in northwestern Quebec, the oldest of the Hudson’s Bay Company posts.
4 wots: knows; is aware.
4 Great Pine Forest: or Great Pine Swamp, now Penn Forest in Carbon County, Pennsylvania. It is a site often mentioned by Audubon, who once had a cabin there.
4 Mohawk: a river in New York State.
4 Sing-Sing: a town on the Hudson River in New York; now Ossining.
4 Sullivan’s Island: on the north side of the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. Usually spelled “Sullivans Island.”
5 life-everlasting: a flower of the genus Gnaphalium.
5 Great Slave Lake: a three-hundred-mile-long lake in northern Canada that empties into the Mackenzie River.
5 Esquimaux: French spelling of “Eskimo.”
5 hyla: the spring peeper, a small brown tree frog, Hyla crucifer.
5 cupboard: clock case.
6 Thales: Greek philosopher (625?-546? B.C.) who gained fame for his knowledge of astronomy. He is said to have predicted a solar eclipse in 585 B.C.
6 Linnaeus: Carolus Linnaeus, the Latin pen name of Carl von Linné (1707-1778), Swedish naturalist and creator of the Latin binomial nomenclature by which living things are classified in terms of genus and species.
6 Russian campaign: In 1805 and 1806 Napoleon Bonaparte defeated the Russian army in a series of battles.
6 harvest-fly: the cicada. In the United States the “dog day harvest-fly” is Cicada tibicen.
6 Anacreon: Greek lyric poet (570?-485? B.C.) known for short, urbane poems on love and wine. Thoreau translated a group of Anacreon’s poems from the Greek, two of them appearing here and the rest in The Dial, April 1843.
6 “We pronounce thee”: Thoreau’s version of a poem by Anacreon.
7 death-watch: common name of a number of small beetles that bore into old wood and make a clicking sound, supposed to be an omen of death.
7 snowbird: the junco, the common snowbird in the United States being Junco hiemalis.
8 Teian poet: Anacreon, who was born in Teos, a city on the western coast of Asia Minor north of Ephesus. The poem following, “Return of Spring,” is Thoreau’s version of another poem by Anacreon.
8 Titan: the sun.
8 harrows: diagonals.
8 on its beam ends: tipped on its side.
9 Nuttall: Thomas Nuttall (1786-1859) was a botanist and ornithologist who had been the director of the Harvard Botanical Garden and then held the Chair of Natural History at Harvard until replaced by Asa Gray in 1842. Nuttall wrote the standard bird book used during much of the nineteenth century, A Manual of the Ornithology of the United States and of Canada, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Hilliard and Brown; Boston: Hilliard, Gray, 1832-1834).
9 Argonautic expedition: In Greek mythology the Argonauts were heroes who sailed in search of the Golden Fleece.
9 flight over Parnassus: figuratively, to rise to poetry or song, Parnassus being the Greek mountain sacred to the Muses.
9 Goldsmith: Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774), English poet, playwright, and novelist. Goldsmith describes the bittern in A History of the Earth and Animated Nature, writing that of all the sounds to be heard “by the sedgy sides of unfrequented rivers …, there is none so dismally hollow as that which comes from the bittern’s croaking voice.”
9 quire: variant of “choir.”
10 Philip: Metacomet (1639?-1676), a leader of the Wampanoag Indians, called Philip by the English settlers. In 1662 Metacomet renewed the treaties that his father had made with the settlers. The colonists, however, encroached on native lands, and Metacomet formed a confederation of tribes and led an uprising now known as King Philip’s War.
10 Powhatan: Algonquian Indian leader (1550?-1618) whose real name was Wahun-sen-a-cawh. He was the chief of the Powhatan Confederacy of Algonquian tribes, in what is now Virginia, when the English first settled there in 1607. He was supposed to have been set to kill the Englishman John Smith when his daughter, Pocahontas, intervened and saved Smith’s life.
10 Winthrop: John Winthrop (1588-1649). With about seven hundred Puritan settiers, Winthrop in 1630 landed in Massachusetts, where he was then the English colonial administrator and first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
11 Smith: John Smith (1579?-1631), English colonizer in North America who in 1607 helped establish Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement.
13 Penobscot: a Native American tribe formerly dwelling around the Penobscot River in Maine. The Penobscot were the Indians Thoreau actually knew. They used to set up camp along the rivers in Concord and Cambridge, and they were his guides on trips to Maine. 1
3 Pilpay: a collection of ancient Hindu fables drawn from the Pancha Tantra, also known as the Fables of Bidpai or the Book of Kalilah and Dimna. Thoreau might have known them from the 1819 English translation by the Reverend Wyndham Knatchbull. See also the note for “Veeshnoo Sarma,” page 59 of “Paradise (To Be) Regained.”
13 Æsop: Greek fabulist of the sixth century B.C., to whom are ascribed such fables as “The Fox and the Grapes.”
14 Angler’s Souvenir: a book by William Andrew Chatto (1799-1864), The Angler’s Souvenir (London: C. Tilt, 1835).
14 fain: glad; pleased.
Thoreau more often uses the word as an adverb meaning happily or gladly.
14 “Can such things be”: Macbeth III.iv.111-12. Emerson cited the full sentence in Nature (1836): “Can such things be, / And overcome us like a summer’s cloud, / Without our special wonder?”
14 seines of flax: fishnets.
15 wain: wagon.
15 Ararat: traditionally, the Asian mountain where Noah’s ark came to rest after the Flood.
16 Nahshawtuck: a hill that sits where the Assabet and Sudbury Rivers join to form the Concord River. Also spelled Nawshawtuck.
16 Golden Horn: an inlet off the Bosporus that is the natural harbor of Istanbul.
16 crate, or jack: a basket or cage.
17 cucullo: firefly; also spelled “cucuyo.”
17 Charon: in Greek myth the ferryman who carries the shades of the dead over the river Styx. In Roman myth Pluto is the ruler of the underworld.
17 weight: pounds.
19 “winter of their discontent”: altering the first line of Richard III, “Now is the winter of our discontent.”
19 Baffin’s Bay: a sea passage west of Greenland.
19 Mackenzie’s River: The Mackenzie River rises in the Canadian Rocky Mountains and flows northwest into the Beaufort Sea.
19 Minerva: Roman goddess of handicrafts, arts, and trade. Like the Greek Athena, she embodies the powers of calculation and invention.
19 Ceres: goddess of grain and harvest in old Italian mythology, later identified by the Romans with the Greek earth goddess Demeter.
19 Nereus: a Greek sea god with shape-shifting powers.
19 Triton: a son of Poseidon, human in his upper body and a fish below; often described riding over the sea on sea monsters or horses.
19 hoar-frost: white frost formed by the freezing of dew.
20 creatures of but one law: Robert D. Richardson, Jr., points out that Thoreau was much influenced by an 1837 reading of Goethe’s Italian Journey. Goethe had long sought an “original” plant form, one that might have given rise to all other forms. “While walking in the Public Garden of Palermo,” Goethe wrote, “it came to me in a flash that in the organ of the plant which we are accustomed to call the leaf lies the true Proteus who can hide or reveal himself in all vegetal forms. From first to last, the plant is nothing but leaf.” Thoreau expands the idea, claiming that the law governing plants governs all kinds of growth, including the growth of crystals.
22 Bigelow: Jacob Bigelow (1786-1879), American botanist. Thoreau knew two of Bigelow’s books, American Medical Botany (Boston: Cummings and Hilliard, 1817-1821 ) and Florula Bostoniensis: A Collection of Plants of Boston and Its Environs … . 2nd ed. (Boston: Cummings, Hilliard, & Co., 1824).
22 demoniacal: arising from an indwelling spirit, a demon, or genius.
23 Baconian: in the style of Francis Bacon (1561-1626), English statesman and philosopher whose method of inquiry was a forerunner of modern empiricism. In scientific study, Bacon wrote, “all depends on keeping the eye steadily fixed upon the facts of nature, and so receiving their images simply as they are; for God forbid that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world.” Thoreau’s natural science would keep the first clause, the careful attention to detail, but invert the second, believing that we cannot know the world unless imagination is added to the data that the senses impart. As Emerson says in his essay on transcendentalism, “The senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they can not tell.”
A WINTER WALK
In May 1843 Thoreau moved from Concord to Staten Island, New York, where he wrote the final draft of this essay. It was first published in the October 1843 issue of The Dial. Before it appeared, it was edited considerably by Emerson, and Thoreau apparently accepted the changes. Emerson’s journal entry on the essay is often cited: “Henry Thoreau sends me a paper with the old fault of unlimited contradiction. The trick of his rhetoric is soon learned: it consists in substituting for the obvious word and thought its diametrical antagonist. He praises wild mountains and winter forests for their domestic air; snow and ice for their warmth; villagers and wood-choppers for their urbanity, and the wilderness for resembling Rome and Paris … . [William Elleryl Channing declared the piece is excellent: but it makes me nervous and wretched to read it, with all its merits.” This was, of course, the Emerson whose “Self-Reliance” essay argues eloquently against consistency and in favor of contradiction.
28 Tartarean: having to do with Tartarus, the deepest underworld in Greek mythology.
29 “the sea smokes”: The source for this citation is not known.
30 fain: happily; gladly.
31 gadding: restless and idle.
32 “The foodless wilds”: lines 233-34 of “Winter, a Poem,” part of The Seasons by the Scottish poet James Thomson (1700-1748).
32 Lapland … Spitzbergeners: a list of northern places and peoples, Lapland being the most northerly part of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Labrador being the northern coast of Newfoundland, Esquimaux (now Eskimo or Inuit) being the original inhabitants of Arctic coastal North America, Knistenaux (more commonly called the Cree) being the original inhabitants of north-central Canada, Dog-Ribs being an Athabascan group of northwest Canada, Novazemblaites and Spitzbergeners being the inhabitants of Arctic islands (Novaya Zemlya, north of Russia, and Spitsbergen, north of Norway).
32 caddis-worms: the aquatic larvae of caddis flies or mayflies.
32 Plicipennes: obsolete name of the order Trichoptera, the caddis flies.
32 Seine or Tiber: rivers in northern France and central Italy, respectively.
33 Palmyra: ancient Syrian city in the desert northeast of Damascus destroyed in A.D. 273 and now famous for its ruins.
33 Hecatompolis: or Hecatompylos, ancient capital of Parthia, the ruins of which lie in present-day Iran, two hundred miles east of Tehran.
33 flexure: bend or curve.
34 Abu Musa: Abu Musa al-Ashari, seventh-century Muslim governor and religious teacher from Yemen. Thoreau’s source for the citation is not known. Thoreau was living on Staten Island when he wrote this essay, and a letter to Emerson from July 1843 makes it clear that he was homesick for Concord: “My thoughts revert to those dear hills … . Others may say, ‘Are there not the cities of Asia?’ But what are they? Staying at home is the heavenly way.”
35 deal table: one made of fir or pine.
35 Alexander: Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.), king of Macedonia and conqueror of Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, Babylonia, and Persia.
37 Parry or Franklin: Sir William Edward Parry (1790-1855) and Sir John Franklin (1786-1847), celebrated English Arctic explorers. Thoreau had read both Parry’s Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific … . 2 vols. (New York: Harper’s Family Library, 1841) and Franklin’s Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea (Philadelphia: H. C. Carey & I. Lea, 1824).
37 “the mower whet his scythe”: John Milton, “L’Allegro,” line 66 (“the Mower whets his sithe”).
38 cabinet of curiosities: display of rare and odd items.
38 hortus siccus: dry garden; a herbarium.
38 screw or gum: referring to the method by which naturalists then collected samples of plants.
38 dreadnaught: garment made of thick cloth for protection against the weather.
39 Nootka Sound: an inlet of the Pacific, on the west coast of Vancouver Island in southwest British Columbia, Canada.
39 “The snowflakes fall”: Iliad XII.278-86.
39 entablature: the part of a classical building lying above the columns.
40 “Drooping the lab’rer ox”: lines 240-42, slightly altered, from Thomson’s “Winter.” See the note for page 32 above.
41 “the mansion of the northern bear”: The source for this citation is not known. The “bear” is the constellation Ursa Major, the Big Dipper.
41 “The full ethereal round”: lines 738-41 of Thomson’s “Winter.” S
ee the note for page 32 above.
PARADISE (TO BE) REGAINED
This book review, written while Thoreau was living on Staten Island, New York, was first published in the United States Magazine, and Democratic Review 13 (November 1843). The text of the first printing differs from the text used here because someone, almost certainly Thoreau, revised the essay before it was reprinted as part of the volume A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers (1866).
45 Etzler: John Adolphus Etzler, a German immigrant who had come to the United States in 1831 as a member of the Mühlhausen Emigration Society. Influenced by Charles Fourier (see below), he spent much of his life writing about and then trying to establish utopian communities, first in Cincinnati and finally in Venezuela. Little is known about him before he emigrated in 1831, and nothing after the failure of his enterprise in Venezuela in 1846. Etzler was a passionate inventor of large machines such as Thoreau describes. Some were actually built in prototype, though none ever worked very well. By contrast, another German, John Augustus Roebling (1806-1869), who accompanied Etzler to the United States in 1831, went on to design the first-ever suspension bridge (across the Ohio River in Cincinnati) and, finally, the Brooklyn Bridge.
45 originally published: in 1833 by Etzler and Reinhold, that is, by Etzler himself, in Pittsburgh, where he was then living and editing a German-language newspaper. The book was perhaps the first technological utopia published in America, and Thoreau’s review the first rebuttal.