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Updated: June 10, 2025
In thinking of Gilbert White one invariably thinks also of Selborne, his open-air parish; in thinking of Thoreau one as naturally recalls his humble shelter on the banks of Walden Pond; and it is coming to pass that in thinking of John Burroughs one thinks likewise of his hidden farm high on the wooded hills that overlook the Hudson, nearly opposite Poughkeepsie.
Every pilgrim to the mystic land of spring knows hallowed places in sunny valleys where the tender goddess first reveals herself at Nature's living altars. Yet he can scarcely tell at which shrine she will first appear. She delights in surprising her votaries. Thoreau was right in saying that no man was ever alert enough to behold the first manifestation of spring.
One day they perambulated the Lincoln line, the next day the Bedford line, the next day the Carlisle line, and so on, and kept on their rounds for a week. Thoreau felt soiled and humiliated. "A fatal coarseness is the result of mixing in the trivial affairs of men. Though I have been associating even with the select men of this and adjoining towns, I feel inexpressibly begrimed."
The scholarly and academic Lowell could not tolerate Whitman, and if Lowell has ever written any true poetry, I have not seen it. What Longfellow thought of him, I do not know. Thoreau saw his greatness at a glance and went to see him. In England, I am told, Tennyson used to read him aloud in select company. I know that the two poets corresponded.
My old ideal of being a great adventurer and traveller had vanished, and, in its stead, came the desire to live a quiet life, devoted entirely to writing poetry, as the poet Gray lived his. I drifted inland to Concord, a-foot, as a pilgrim to the town where Emerson and Thoreau had lived.
They fear the Truth; they fear the Light; they fear Justice; and the man who turns on the Light and speaks the Truth and cries out for Justice is their greatest enemy. So they have always tried this process of putting ideas into jail. Years ago, when the Mexican War was being fought, an American named Henry D. Thoreau refused to pay his war tax.
In W.E. Channing's book about Thoreau as the "Poet-Naturalist," there is a passage from his journal in which Thoreau speaks of Hosmer as the last of the farmers worthy of mention. "Human life may be transitory and full of trouble," he says, "but the perennial mind whose survey extends from that spring to this from Columella to Hosmer is superior to change.
Thoreau on the fifth day of January, 1856, writes as follows:... "The thin snow now driving from the north and lodging on my coat consists of those beautiful star crystals, not cottony and chubby spokes as on the 13th of December, but thin and partly transparent crystals.
He fell asleep after a time; but even sleep could not drive from him the clinging obsession of the thought that strange things were to happen in this taking of Jan Thoreau. With the gray dawn there was nothing to mark the passing of the storm except freshly fallen snow, and Blake was on the trail before it was light enough to see a hundred yards ahead.
I did not think it needful to say that I wished to see Thoreau quite as much because he had suffered in the cause of John Brown as because he had written the books which had taken me; and when he said that Thoreau prided himself on coming nearer the heart of a pine-tree than any other human being, I could say honestly enough that I would rather come near the heart of a man.
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