The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau

by Henry David Thoreau

  45 Fourier: Charles Fourier (1772-1837), French philosopher and socialist whose writings set out ambitious plans for cooperative living. Fourier imagined reorganizing society by dividing it into communes, or phalanxes, each to number sixteen hundred individuals living in a large communal building surrounded by a collective farm. Fourier’s ideas were introduced into the United States by Albert Brisbane (1809-1890), author of The Social Destiny of Man (published in 1840 by C. F. Stollmeyer of Philadelphia, who also published Etzler’s later work). For more than a year before Thoreau wrote this review, Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune had been publishing a daily column by Brisbane discussing Fourier’s doctrines. In 1843 Brisbane and his friends established a Fourierist community in Red Bank, New Jersey, the North American Phalanx. Between 1840 and 1850, in fact, at least forty phalanxes were founded in America, the most famous being Brook Farm (1841-1847) in West Roxbury. Massachusetts.

  45 “Fellow-men!”: As with other citations from Etzler, Thoreau reproduces the sense of the text but silently makes dozens of small changes (about forty in this paragraph alone), as if he were a copy editor working with an unpublished manuscript. Etzler writes that canals will “intersect every-where the land,” for example, and Thoreau changes this to “intersect the land everywhere.” Most of Thoreau’s changes improve or at least standardize Etzler’s usage.

  46 ails: ailments.

  46 Hygeia: Greek goddess of health.

  47 magnetism, the daguerreotype, electricity: Great advances in the uses of electricity and magnetism marked the 1830s. Between 1830 and 1831, for example, the British physicist and chemist Michael Faraday (1791-1867) discovered electromagnetic induction, and the American physicist Joseph Henry (1797-1878) made the first powerful electromagnets, the first true “magnetic” telegraph, and one of the first electromagnetic motors. A daguerreotype is a photograph made on a light-sensitive metallic plate. The method was invented in France in 1837 by Louis Daguerre (1789-1851) and became the first widely practiced form of photography. The earliest images of Thoreau himself, made in 1856, were daguerreotypes.

  48 Hymettus: a high mountain in Attica, bounding the Athenian plain on the southeast. Its bees produce a flavorful honey from the mountain’s aromatic herbs.

  48 Hybla: an ancient town in Sicily, Hybla Major, on the river Symaethus.

  48 Columella: Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella, a first-century Roman agricultural writer who, along with other Latin authors (Pliny, Cato, Varro, Palladius), influenced Thoreau’s thinking about agriculture. Around 1838 Thoreau had read Columella’s Of Husbandry in an English translation.

  48 in extenso: at full length; in full.

  48 behoof: benefit.

  49 “‘life is short, but art is long’”: an aphorism of Hippocrates (460?-370? B.C.) on the art of healing (“Life is short, the art long, opportunity fleeting, experiment treacherous, judgment difficult”), better known in abbreviated Latin form, Ars longa, vita brevis.

  49 “Mechanical System”: The New World; or, Mechanical System, to Perform the Labours of Man and Beast by Inanimate Powers, That Cost Nothing, for Producing and Preparing the Substances of Life (Philadelphia: C. F. Stollmeyer, 1841).

  50 chip: “ship” in the first printing.

  50 careening: turning a ship on its side for cleaning, caulking, or repairing.

  50 point d’appui: French: point of support; fulcrum; base.

  50 spring and neap tide: Spring tides are the highest and lowest, occurring at new and full moons; neap tides have the least difference between high and low and occur at the first and third quarters of the moon.

  50 terrae infirmae: unsteady lands, Thoreau’s inversion of the standard terra firma, firm or solid ground.

  51 terreners: “dry-landers,” Thoreau’s neologism to match “mariners.”

  51 Green Mountains: part of the Appalachian range running from southern Que bec through Vermont and into western Massachusetts.

  51 burning-mirrors: concave mirrors by which the rays of the sun may be concentrated on an object so as to burn it. Legend has it that Archimedes constructed such mirrors to set Roman ships on fire during the siege of Syracuse.

  52 rood: variant spelling of “rod,” a rod being both a unit of linear measure (sixteen and a half feet) and a unit of square measure (the fourth part of an acre), the latter being the sense here.

  53 matting: fabric woven of coarse material such as hemp, bast, or grass.

  53 as Columbus did: In his journal for October 11, 1492, Columbus, describes seeing, that night, a light in the distance. Columbus’s original journal has been lost, but the summary of it made by Bartolomé de Las Casas says that “the Admiral had seen a light at ten in the evening … . The light was spotted a couple of times, and it was like a small wax candle being raised and lowered, which struck very few people as being a sign of land, but the Admiral was certain that he was near land.” The next day Columbus did in fact make landfall. Thoreau knew the story from Washington Irving’s A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, 4 vols. (London: J. Murray, 1831).

  54 term-time: period of gestation.

  54 “tie up the rudder and sleep before the wind”: phrase from a passage in Christian Morals by Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682): “In this virtuous Voyage of thy Life hull not about like the Ark, without the use of Rudder, Mast, or Sail, and bound for no port … . Think not that you are Sailing from Lima to Manillia [sic], when you may fasten up the Rudder, and sleep before the Wind; but expect rough Seas, Flaws, and contrary Blasts.”

  54 Manilla: or Manila, capital city of the Philippines, founded in 1571. To sail from Lima to Manila is to cross the Pacific east to west, carried by the South Equatorial Current, which flows in that direction. 5

  4 crystal palaces: In 1840 at Chatsworth (the gardens of the duke of Devonshire), the English gardener and architect Sir Joseph Paxton (1801-1865) built a three-hundred-foot-long conservatory using newly developed techniques for making large sheets of glass. This in turn became the model for the famous Crystal Palace that Paxton built for London’s 1851 Great Exhibition, which stood 108 feet high and was at the time the largest building in the world. A replica of it was built in New York in 1853. Thoreau is writing in 1843, so his phrase either refers to Paxton’s early conservatory or is a prescient figure of speech.

  54 Fox: George Fox (1624-1691), English preacher who founded the Society of Friends (the Quakers). When a young man, Fox traveled around England wearing a gray leather outfit (breeches, doublet, and hat), a mode of dress associated with working people and indicating the disdain for fashion typical of religious dissenters.

  54 “glutinated”: glued, as with gluten.

  57 prevalence: effective power or force; influence.

  58 Mλλε τò θε oν δ’στ τooτoν φσε: Euripides, Orestes, line 420. Menelaus has just asked Orestes, “Does not Loxias [Apollo] shield you from these evils?” and Orestes replies with this line: “He delays: such is the nature of the divine.” Thoreau alters the Greek punctuation slightly.

  59 Mahometan’s heaven: Heaven in the Qur’an is a place of gardens, running streams, and liquors that intoxicate without intoxicating. The pure are promised beautiful maidens (houri) as their consorts. Muslim theologians have stressed the metaphorical and spiritual nature of such images, but Westerners (Edward Gibbon, for example, in his history of Rome) have emphasized their carnality so that, in Thoreau’s time, it was known as a heaven of “comfort and pleasure merely.”

  59 Veeshnoo Sarma: or Vishnu-Sarma, the legendary author of the Hitopadésa, an ancient collection of Hindu animal fables and proverbial wisdom. In 1842 Thoreau read, and here cites from, an early translation from Sanskrit, The Htpds of Vshn-Srm, in a Series of Connected Fables, Interspersed with Moral, Prudential, and Political Maxims (Bath, U.K.: R. Cruttwell, 1787). In his introduction the translator, Charles Wilkins, notes that the Hitopadésa “resembles” what was also known in English as The Fables of Pilpay.

  60 Raleigh: Sir Walter Raleigh
(1554-1618), English writer and explorer, prominent at the court of Queen Elizabeth I, Thoreau had lectured on Raleigh before the Concord Lyceum in February 1843. This citation is from Raleigh’s The History of the World, chap. 1, sec. 11.

  KTAADN

  Thoreau traveled to Mount Katahdin in Maine at the end of August 1846. He was living at Walden Pond at the time; he finished a draft of this essay before he left the pond the following autumn. In March 1848 he sent it to his friend Horace Greeley, editor of the New-York Tribune, who arranged for its publication (in five installments) in John Sartain’s Union Magazine of Literature and Art, July to November 1848. The version printed here has revisions that Thoreau made in later years when he prepared the manuscript for inclusion in The Maine Woods, a posthumous collection published in 1864.

  63 Ktaadn: now spelled Katahdin; at 5,267 feet, the highest mountain in Maine.

  63 a relative: George A. Thatcher, the husband of Thoreau’s cousin Rebecca Billings.

  63 batteau: a large, flat-bottomed boat. One that Thoreau measured on a later trip was at its extremities 31 feet long and 5½ feet wide.

  64 Jackson: Charles T. Jackson (1805-1880) was the brother of Emerson’s wife Lydia and of Lucy Jackson Brown, a boarder in the Thoreau home. Thoreau met him at least once, when he lectured at the Concord Lyceum in 1843. Jackson’s report of climbing Katahdin is in the Second Annual Report on the Geology of the Public Lands, Belonging to the Two States of Maine and Massachusetts (Augusta, Maine: Luther Severance, 1838), pp. 16-19.

  64 two young men: Edward Everett Hale and William Francis Channing. Hale published an account of the journey in the Boston Daily Advertiser, August 15, 1845. Channing was the cousin of Thoreau’s friend William Ellery Channing.

  64 Sawyer: the stock surname of one who runs a sawmill.

  64 riddle: usually an instrument for cleaning grain, being a large sieve with a perforated bottom that permits grain to pass through but retains the chaff.

  66 “hogging”: bowed; bent.

  66 Charlevoix: Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix (1682-1761), French Jesuit missionary to Canada and author of Histoire et description générale de la Nouvelle France … . 3 vols. (Paris: Chez la Veuve Ganeau, 1744).

  67 Abenaki: the Algonquian-speaking native North Americans, the Penobscot be ing one of five primary tribes. The Abenaki Confederacy had allied itself with the French in the seventeenth century, and those who converted to Christianity became Roman Catholics.

  67 fish-hawk: the osprey.

  67 some troops: a reference to the Aroostook War of 1839-1842. The issue was the boundary between Maine and New Brunswick or, more important, timber rights on disputed land. The Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842 established a permanent boundary before any shots were fired, which is why Thoreau says the troops marched “towards Mars’ Hill, though not to Mars’ field.”

  67 what the name implies: The Abenaki word “Passadumkeag” means “where the water goes into the river above the falls.”

  68 scions: the cut shoots or twigs containing buds from a woody plant, used in grafting.

  69 Pomola: the storm bird of Penobscot tradition, said to live on the summit of Katahdin. Thoreau knew to ask this question because he had read Jackson’s Second Annual Report, which describes an 1837 ascent of the mountain. Louis Neptune had been Jackson’s guide, and Jackson reports that when the party was hit with a snowstorm, “Louis declared that Pomola was angry with us for presuming to measure the height of the mountain, and revenged himself upon us by this storm.” For a full account of Pomola, see Fannie Hardy Eckstorm, “The Katahdin Legends,” Appalachia, December 1924, pp. 39-52. Eckstorm says that the Indians spell the name “Bumole,” “which they pronounce Bahmolai.” Some say the name is pronounced onomatopoetically, in imitation of thunder.

  69 he had planted letter: Thoreau’s sense is obscure; he may be capturing Neptune’s syntax and referring to a custom of leaving messages on mountaintops.

  71 patent hay-scales: Around 1830 the Vermont farmer Thaddeus Fairbanks (1796-1886) invented a platform scale that could weigh a cartload of hay. The mechanism for balancing the scale lay in a shallow chamber below the platform, which was itself the size of a farmer’s cart.

  71 bespoken: ordered; arranged for.

  71 penetralia: the innermost parts of a building.

  71 the burning: the land being cleared by burning it over.

  71 canalés: percussion caps for a gun with a grooved bore.

  72 to be laid down: Forest soils are not particularly fertile, but if the trees and brush are burned, the ash provides a few years of fertility; farmers at the time would clear by burning, then take a crop or two of grain, after which the land would be “laid down” to grass.

  72 Province man: one from the province of New Brunswick, Canada.

  72 Greenleaf’s Map of Maine: Moses Greenleaf (1777-1834), cartographer. Thoreau used his book A Survey of the State of Maine (Portland, Maine: Shirley and Hyde, 1829). His map of Maine was published posthumously in 1844.

  72 tow: the coarse and broken part of flax or hemp, used to stop the charge of powder in a gun and for pressing it close to the shot.

  72 Map of the Public Lands: a large, sectional map, produced to help resolve land disputes between Maine and Massachusetts. The legend reads, in part: “A Plan of the Public Lands in the State of Maine Surveyed under Instructions from the Commissioners & Agents of the States of Massachusetts and Maine … . Copied from the original surveys … & corrected by Geo. W. Coffin, Land Agent of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts … . 1835. Pendleton’s Lithography, Boston. Drawn on stone by J. Eddy.” The Concord Free Public Library owns Thoreau’s copy of the section showing Mount Katahdin, a portion of which is reproduced in Robert F. Stowell’s A Thoreau Gazetteer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 15. There are full copies of the map in the Maine State Library, Augusta, and in the Public Record Office, London, England (reference: CO. 700/21).

  73 diet-drink: medicated liquors; drink prepared with medicinal liquors.

  73 whistler-duck: the American goldeneye.

  73 pigeon-woodpecker: the flicker.

  73 bran new: or “brand-new,” said of a manufactured item so new that the brand has not worn off.

  76 “Elegy”: “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” poem by Thomas Gray (1716-1771). The phrases and verse that follow come from lines 45-60.

  78 white pine: Pinus strobus. The largest tree in the old-growth forests of New England, the white pine could grow to four hundred years of age and stand two hundred feet high. They were cut as masts for ships and as lumber. No old-growth trees remain in New England.

  78n Springer: John S. Springer, Forest Life and Forest Trees: Comprising Winter Camp-Life among the Loggers, and Wild-Wood Adventure; with Descriptions of Lumbering Operations on the Various Rivers of Maine and New Brunswick (New York: Harper & Bros., 1851), pp. 68-71. Springer, born in Maine in 1811, worked in the Maine woods for a decade when a young man, first as a lumberjack, later as a boss hand. At the time he wrote his book, he was a Methodist minister in Massachusetts.

  79 intervale: a low, level track of land.

  79 Kennebec man: one from the Kennebec River region, in central Maine.

  80 life-ever-lasting: wild flowers of the genus Gnaphalium.

  80 axe-helves: ax handles.

  81 Wandering Jew: Eugène Sue’s novel Le Juif errant (1844-1845) had recently been translated from the French and published in several American editions.

  81 Criminal Calendar: an annual product, for example, The United States Criminal Calendar: or, An Awful Warning to the Youth of America; Being an Account of the Most Horrid Murders, Piracies, Highway Robberies, compiled from the best authorities by Henry St. Clair (Boston: C. Gaylord, 1835).

  81 Parish’s Geography: Elijah Parish (1762-1825), A New System of Modern Geography. There were many editions; for example, Newburyport, Mass.: Thomas and Whipple, 1810.

  81 flash novels: novels about crime; cheap popular ficti
on.

  82 Hodge: James T. Hodge (1816-1871), whose remark cited here comes from a section (“Mr. Hodge’s Report”) of Jackson’s Second Annual Report, p. 52. Jackson calls Hodge “my excellent assistant.”

  82 buck-beans: Menyanthes trifoliata; also called bog beans.

  83 beer: made from the young twigs of black spruce.

  85 thole pins: wooden pegs set in pairs in the gunwales of a boat to serve as an oarlock.

  86 Argo … Symplegades: In Greek mythology the Argo was the boat that Jason and his companions sailed in search of the Golden Fleece. The Symplegades were dangerous rocks guarding the entrance to the Euxine Sea.

  86 “the torrent’s smoothness”: from Thomas Campbell (1777-1844), “Gertrude of Wyoming,” part III, stanza v, line 4.

  87 boom: “made by fastening the ends of the trunks of long trees, so as to prevent them from scattering over the lake on the breaking up of the ice” (Springer, Forest Life and Forest Trees, p. 159).

  87n Abnaquiois: Abenaki; see the note for page 67 above.

  87n No. 10 Relations, for 1647: Jesuit Relations. Relation de ce qui s’est passé en la Nouvelle France, en l’années 1633-1672 (Paris: [various publishers], 1633-1672). The Harvard Library owned most of this vast series of reports by Jesuit missionaries in Canada, and Thoreau read everything it had.

  88 Emerson’s Address: a thirty-four-page pamphlet, An Address Delivered in the Court-House in Concord, Massachusetts, on 1st August, 1844: On the Anniversary of the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies (Boston: James Munroe and Company, 1844).

  88 Liberty party: an antislavery party founded in 1840.

  88 Westminster Review: British quarterly established in 1824 by James Mill and Jeremy Bentham.

  88 History of the Erection of the Monument on the Grave of Myron Holley: A pamphlet by this title was published in Utica, New York, by H. H. Curtiss in 1844. Holley (1779-1841), from Rochester, New York, was one of the founders of the Liberty Party.