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Updated: June 8, 2025
My dogs and Indian are with Thoreau." "And from there from Thoreau's it is a long distance to the place you call home?" The Little Missioner rubbed his hands in a queer rasping way. The movement of those rugged hands and the curious, chuckling laugh that accompanied it, radiated a sort of cheer. They were expressions of more than satisfaction.
Brokaw was buttoning the thick collar of his shirt close up about his neck. On his face, too, there came for a moment a grim and determined smile. "Come on," he said, "we'll make Thoreau's or die." "Sure," said Billy, stepping quickly to his side. "I suppose I might lie down in the snow, an' refuse to budge. I'd win my game then, wouldn't I? But we'll play it on the square. It's Thoreau's, or die.
He is described in the fourteenth chapter of "Walden" as among Thoreau's winter visitors at his hut: "On a Sunday afternoon, if I chanced to be at home, I heard the cronching of the snow made by the step of a long-headed farmer, who from far through the woods sought my house, to have a social 'crack'; one of the few of his vocation who are 'men on their farms'; who donned a frock instead of a professor's gown, and is as ready to extract the moral out of church or state as to haul a load of manure from his barn-yard.
But to-day I could not stay. I entered one of the paths, passed into the grand, silent woods, found a comfortable seat on a bed of pine needles, with the trunk of a tall maple tree for a back, and prepared to wait. I would test Thoreau's assertion that if one will sit long enough in some attractive spot in the woods, sooner or later every inhabitant of it will pass before him.
Thoreau's reaction from the ordinary humdrum, respectable, and comfortable country life was so intense, and his ideal of the free and austere life he would live so vivid, that he could thus see in this besotted vagabond a career and a degree of wisdom that he loved to contemplate.
But he was of Thoreau's mind, that if you can "make your failure tragical by courage, it will not differ from success." He could look back without confusion to his enthusiastic promise.
Thoreau's life was a search for the wild. He was the great disciple of the Gospel of Walking. He elevated walking into a religious exercise. One of his most significant and entertaining chapters is on "Walking." No other writer that I recall has set forth the Gospel of Walking so eloquently and so stimulatingly. Thoreau's religion and his philosophy are all in this chapter. It is his most mature, his most complete and comprehensive statement. He says: I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going
Franklin's Autobiography and Thoreau's Walden are only just, within the last few years, beginning to find their way into English popular reprints of the "classics." Few Englishmen would listen with patience to an argument that the contribution to literature of the Concord school was of greater or more permanent value than, let us say, the work of the Lake Poets.
Now Thoreau's content and ecstasy in living was, we may say, like a plant that he had watered and tended with womanish solicitude; for there is apt to be something unmanly, something almost dastardly, in a life that does not move with dash and freedom, and that fears the bracing contact of the world. In one word, Thoreau was a skulker.
Emerson believed in wealth. Poverty did not attract him. It was not suited to his cast of mind. Poverty was humiliating. Emerson accumulated a fortune, and it added to his self-respect. Thoreau's pride in his poverty must have made Emerson shiver.
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