<h2><SPAN name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII">CHAPTER VIII.</SPAN><br/><br/> THE WALDEN HERMITAGE.</h2>
<p>It is by his two years' encampment on
the shore of a small lake in the Walden
woods, a mile south of Concord village, that
Thoreau is best known to the world; and
the book which relates how he lived and
what he saw there is still, as it always was,
the most popular of his writings. Like all
his books, it contains much that might as
well have been written on any other subject;
but it also describes charmingly the
scenes and events of his sylvan life,—his
days and nights with Nature. He spent
two years and a half in this retreat, though
often coming forth from it.</p>
<p>The localities of Concord which Thoreau
immortalized were chiefly those in the
neighborhood of some lake or stream,—though
it would be hard to find in that
well-watered town, especially in springtime,
any place which is not neighbor either<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</SPAN></span>
to the nine-times circling river Musketaquid,
to the swifter Assabet,</p>
<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">"That like an arrowe clear<br/></span>
<span class="i0">Through Troy rennest aie downward to the sea,"—<br/></span></div>
</div></div>
<p>to Walden or White Pond, to Bateman's
Pond, to the Mill Brook, the Sanguinetto,
the Nut-Meadow, or the Second Division
Brook. All these waters and more are renowned
again and again in Thoreau's books.
Like Icarus, the ancient high-flyer, he tried
his fortune upon many a river, fiord, streamlet,
and broad sea,—</p>
<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">"Where still the shore his brave attempt resounds."<br/></span></div>
</div></div>
<p>He gave beauty and dignity to obscure
places by his mention of them; and it is
curious that the neighborhood of Walden,—now
the most romantic and poetical region
of Concord, associated in every mind with
this tender lover of Nature, and his worship
of her,—was anciently a place of
dark repute, the home of pariahs and lawless
characters, such as fringed the sober
garment of many a New England village in
Puritanic times.</p>
<p>Close by Walden is Brister's Hill, where,
in the early days of emancipation in Massachusetts,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</SPAN></span>
the newly freed slaves of Concord
magnates took up their abode,—</p>
<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">"The wrathful kings on cairns apart,"<br/></span></div>
</div></div>
<p>as Ossian says. Here dwelt Cato Ingraham,
freedman of 'Squire Duncan Ingraham,
who, when yet a slave in his master's backyard,
on the day of Concord fight, was
brought to a halt by the fierce Major Pitcairn,
then something the worse for 'Squire
Ingraham's wine, and ordered to "lay down
his arms and disperse," as the rebels at
Lexington had been six hours earlier. Here
also abode Zilpha, a black Circe, who spun
linen, and made the Walden Woods resound
with her shrill singing:—</p>
<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">"Dives inaccessos ubi Solis filia lucos<br/></span>
<span class="i0">Assiduo resonat cantu, tectisque superbis<br/></span>
<span class="i0">Urit odoratam nocturna in lumina cedrum,<br/></span>
<span class="i0">Arguto tenues percurrens pectine telas."<br/></span></div>
</div></div>
<p>But some paroled English prisoners in the
War of 1812, burnt down her proud abode,
with its imprisoned cat and dog and hens,
while Zilpha was absent. Down the road
towards the village from Cato's farm and
Zilpha's musical loom and wheel, lived
Brister Freeman, who gave his name to
the hill,—Scipio Brister, "a handy negro,"<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</SPAN></span>
once the slave of 'Squire Cummings,
but long since emancipated, and in Thoreau's
boyhood set free again by death, and
buried in an old Lincoln graveyard, near
the ancestor of President Garfield, but still
nearer the unmarked graves of British grenadiers,
who fell in the retreat from Concord.
With this Scipio Africanus Brister Libertinus,
in the edge of the Walden Woods,
"dwelt Fenda, his hospitable wife, who
told fortunes, yet pleasantly—large, round,
and black,—such a dusky orb as never
rose on Concord, before or since," says
Thoreau. Such was the African colony on
the south side of Concord village among
the woods, while on the northern edge of
the village, along the Great Meadows, there
dwelt another colony, headed by Cæsar Robbins,
whose descendants still flit about the
town. Older than all was the illustrious
Guinea negro, John Jack, once a slave on
the farm which is now the glebe of the Old
Manse, but who purchased his freedom
about the time the Old Manse was built in
1765-66. He survives in his quaint epitaph,
written by Daniel Bliss, the young
Tory brother of the first mistress of the<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</SPAN></span>
manse (Mrs. William Emerson, grandmother
of Emerson, the poet):—</p>
<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">"<em>God wills us free, Man wills us slaves,</em><br/></span>
<span class="i0"><em>I will as God wills: God's will be done.</em><br/></span></div>
</div></div>
<p class="center">
Here lies the body of<br/>
<span class="smcap">John Jack,</span><br/>
A native of Africa, who died<br/>
March, 1773, aged about sixty years.<br/>
Though born in a land of slavery,<br/>
He was born free;<br/>
Though he lived in a land of liberty,<br/>
He lived a slave;<br/>
Till by his honest though stolen labors<br/>
He acquired the source of slavery<br/>
Which gave him his freedom;<br/>
Though not long before<br/>
Death the grand tyrant<br/>
Gave him his final emancipation,<br/>
And put him on a footing with kings.<br/>
Though a slave to vice,<br/>
He practised those virtues<br/>
Without which kings are but slaves."<br/></p>
<p>This epitaph, and the anecdote already
given concerning Cæsar Robbins, may illustrate
the humanity and humor with which
the freedmen of Concord were regarded,
while an adventure of Scipio Brister's, in<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</SPAN></span>
his early days of freedom, may show the
mixture of savage fun and contempt that
also followed them, and which some of their
conduct may have deserved.</p>
<p>The village drover and butcher once had
a ferocious bull to kill, and when he had
succeeded with some difficulty in driving
him into his slaughter-house, on the Walden
road, nobody was willing to go in and
kill him. Just then Brister Freeman, from
his hill near Walden, came along the road,
and was slyly invited by the butcher to go
into the slaughter-house for an axe,—being
told that when he brought it he should have
a job to do. The unsuspecting freedman
opened the door and walked in; it was shut
behind him, and he found the bull drawn up
in line of battle before him. After some
pursuit and retreat in the narrow arena,
Brister spied the axe he wanted, and began
attacking his pursuer, giving him a blow
here or there as he had opportunity. His
employers outside watched the bull-fight
through a hole in the building, and cheered
on the matador with shouts and laughter.
At length, by a fortunate stroke, the African
conquered, the bull fell, and his slayer<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</SPAN></span>
threw down the axe and rushed forth unhurt.
But his tormentors declared "he was
no longer the dim, sombre negro he went
in, but literally white with terror, and what
was once his wool straightened out and
standing erect on his head." Without waiting
to be identified, or to receive pay for
his work, Brister, affrighted and wrathful,
withdrew to the wooded hill and to the
companionship of his fortune-telling Fenda,
who had not foreseen the hazard of her
spouse.</p>
<p>It was along the same road and down
this hill, passing by the town "poor-farm"
and poor-house,—the last retreat of these
straggling soldiers of fortune,—that Thoreau
went toward the village jail from his
hermitage, that day in 1846, when the town
constable carried him off from the shoemaker's
to whose shop he had gone to get
a cobbled shoe. His room-mate in jail for
the single night he slept there, was introduced
to him by the jailer, Mr. Staples (a
real name), as "a first-rate fellow and a
clever man," and on being asked by Thoreau
why he was in prison, replied, "Why,
they accuse me of burning a barn, but I<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</SPAN></span>
never did it." As near as Thoreau could
make out, he had gone to bed in a barn
when drunk, and smoked his pipe there.
Such were the former denizens of the Walden
woods—votaries of Bacchus and Apollo,
and extremely liable to take fire upon
small occasion,—like Giordano Bruno's
sonneteer, who, addressing the Arabian
Phenix, says,—</p>
<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">"<em>Tu bruci 'n un, ed io in ogni loco,</em><br/></span>
<span class="i0"><em>Io da Cupido, hai tu da Febo il foco</em>."<br/></span></div>
</div></div>
<p>It seems by the letter of Margaret Fuller
in 1841 (cited in chapter <SPAN href="#Margaret_Fuller">VI</SPAN>.), that Thoreau
had for years meditated a withdrawal
to a solitary life. The retreat he then had
in view was, doubtless, the Hollowell Farm,
a place, as he says, "of complete retirement,
being about two miles from the village,
half a mile from the nearest neighbor,
and separated from the highway by a broad
field." The house stood apart from the
road to Nine-Acre Corner, fronting the
Musketaquid on a green hill-side, and was
first seen by Thoreau as a boy, in his earliest
voyages up the river to Fairhaven
Bay, "concealed behind a dense grove of
red maples, through which I heard the<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</SPAN></span>
house-dog bark." This place Thoreau once
bought, but released it to the owner, whose
wife refused to sign the deed of sale. In
his Walden venture he was a squatter, using
for his house-lot a woodland of Mr. Emerson's,
who, for the sake of his walks and his
wood-fire, had bought land on both sides of
Walden Pond.</p>
<p>How early Thoreau formed his plan of
retiring to a hut among these woods, I have
not learned; but in a letter written to him
March 5, 1845, by his friend Channing, a
passage occurs concerning it; and it was in
the latter part of the same month that Thoreau
borrowed Mr. Alcott's axe and went
across the fields to cut the timber for his
cabin. Channing writes:—</p>
<div class="blockquot">
<p>"I see nothing for you in this earth but that
field which I once christened 'Briars;' go out
upon that, build yourself a hut, and there begin
the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I
see no alternative, no other hope for you. Eat
yourself up; you will eat nobody else, nor anything
else. Concord is just as good a place as
any other; there are, indeed, more people in the
streets of that village than in the streets of this."
[He was writing from the Tribune Office, in<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</SPAN></span>
New York.] "This is a singularly muddy town;
muddy, solitary, and silent. I saw Teufelsdröckh
a few days since; he said a few words to me
about you. Says he, 'That fellow Thoreau
might be something, if he would only take a
journey through the Everlasting No, thence for
the North Pole. By G—,' said the old clothes-bag,
warming up, 'I should like to take that fellow
out into the Everlasting No, and explode him
like a bombshell; he would make a loud report;
it would be fun to see him pick himself up.
He needs the Blumine flower business; that
would be his salvation. He is too dry, too composed,
too chalky, too concrete. Does that execrable
compound of sawdust and stagnation L.
still prose about nothing? and that nutmeg-grater
of a Z. yet shriek about nothing? Does
anybody still think of coming to Concord to live?
I mean new people? If they do, let them beware
of you philosophers.'"</p>
</div>
<p>Of course, this imaginary Teufelsdröckh,
like Carlyle's, was the satirical man in the
writer himself, suggesting the humorous
and contradictory side of things, and glancing
at the coolness of Thoreau, which his
friends sometimes found provoking. In his
own person Channing adds:—</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</SPAN></span></p>
<div class="blockquot">
<p>"I should be pleased to hear from Kamchatka
occasionally; my last advices from the Polar
Bear are getting stale. In addition to this I find
that my corresponding members at Van Diemen's
Land have wandered into limbo. I hear occasionally
from the World; everything seems to
be promising in that quarter; business is flourishing,
and the people are in good spirits. I feel
convinced that the Earth has less claims to our
regard than formerly; these mild winters deserve
severe censure. But I am well aware that the
Earth will talk about the necessity of routine,
taxes, etc. On the whole it is best not to complain
without necessity."</p>
</div>
<p>It is well to read this shrewd humor,
uttered in the opposite sense from Thoreau's
paradoxical wit in his "Walden," as an introduction
or motto to that book. For
Thoreau has been falsely judged from the
wit and the paradox of "Walden," as if he
were a hater of men, or foolishly desired all
mankind to retire to the woods. As Channing
said, soon after his friend's death,—</p>
<div class="blockquot">
<p>"The fact that our author lived for a while
alone in a shanty, near a pond, and named one
of his books after the place where it stood, has
led some to say he was a barbarian or a misanthrope.
It was a writing-case; here in this
wooden inkstand he wrote a good part of his<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</SPAN></span>
famous 'Walden,' and this solitary woodland
pool was more to his Muse than all oceans of the
planet, by the force of imagination. Some have
fancied, because he moved to Walden, he left his
family. He bivouacked there and really lived
at home, where he went every day."</p>
</div>
<p>This last is not literally true, for he was
sometimes secluded in his hut for days together;
but he remained as social at Walden
as he had been while an inmate of Mr.
Emerson's family in 1841-43, or again in
1847-48, after giving up his hermitage. He,
in fact, as he says himself,—</p>
<div class="blockquot">
<p>"Went to the woods because he wished to live
deliberately, to front only the essential facts of
life, and see if he could not learn what it had to
teach, and not, when he came to die, discover
that he had not lived."</p>
</div>
<p>In another place he says he went to
Walden to "transact some private business,"
and this he did to good purpose. He
edited there his "Week," some portions of
which had appeared in the "Dial" from
1840 to 1844, but which was not published
as a volume until 1849, although he had
made many attempts to issue it earlier. It
was at Walden, also, that he wrote his essay<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</SPAN></span>
on Carlyle, which was first published in
"Graham's Magazine," at Philadelphia, in
1847, through the good offices of Horace
Greeley, of which we shall hear more in the
next chapter.</p>
<p>Thoreau's hermit life was not, then,
merely a protest against the luxury and the
restraints of society, nor yet an austere
discipline such as monks and saints have
imposed upon themselves for their souls'
good. "My purpose in going to Walden
was not to live cheaply, nor to live dearly
there, but to transact some private business
with the fewest obstacles." He lived a
life of labor and study in his hut. Emerson
says, "as soon as he had exhausted the
advantages of that solitude, he abandoned
it." He had edited his first book there;
had satisfied himself that he was fit to be
an author, and had passed his first examinations;
then he graduated from that gymnasium
as another young student might
from the medical college or the polytechnic
school. "I left the woods for as good a
reason as I went there." His abandoned
hut was then taken by a Scotch gardener,
Hugh Whelan by name, who removed it<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</SPAN></span>
some rods away, to the midst of Thoreau's
bean-field, and made it his cottage for a few
years. Then it was bought by a farmer,
who put it on wheels and carried it three
miles northward, toward the entry of the
Estabrook Farm on the old Carlisle road,
where it stood till after Thoreau's death,—a
shelter for corn and beans, and a favorite
haunt of squirrels and blue jays. The
wood-cut representing the hermitage in the
first edition of "Walden," is from a sketch
made by Sophia Thoreau, and is more exact
than that given in Page's "Life of Thoreau,"
but in neither picture are the trees
accurately drawn.</p>
<p>On the spot where Thoreau lived at Walden
there is now a cairn of stones, yearly
visited by hundreds, and growing in height
as each friend of his muse adds a stone from
the shore of the fair water he loved so
well.</p>
<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">"Beat with thy paddle on the boat<br/></span>
<span class="i0">Midway the lake,—the wood repeats<br/></span>
<span class="i0">The ordered blow; the echoing note<br/></span>
<span class="i0">Is ended in thy ear; yet its retreats<br/></span>
<span class="i0">Conceal Time's possibilities;<br/></span>
<span class="i0">And in this Man the nature lies<br/></span>
<span class="i4">Of woods so green,<br/></span>
<span class="i4">And lakes so sheen,<br/></span>
<span class="i0">And hermitages edged between.<br/></span><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</SPAN></span>
<span class="i0">And I may tell you that the Man was good,<br/></span>
<span class="i0">Never did his neighbor harm,—<br/></span>
<span class="i0">Sweet was it where he stood,<br/></span>
<span class="i0">Sunny and warm;<br/></span>
<span class="i0">Like the seat beneath a pine<br/></span>
<span class="i0">That winter suns have cleared away<br/></span>
<span class="i0">With their yellow tine,—<br/></span>
<span class="i0">Red-cushioned and tasseled with the day."<br/></span></div>
</div></div>
<p>The events and thoughts of Thoreau's
life at Walden may be read in his book of
that name. As a protest against society,
that life was ineffectual,—as the communities
at Brook Farm and Fruitlands had
proved to be; and as the Fourierite phalansteries,
in which Horace Greeley interested
himself, were destined to be. In one sense,
all these were failures; but in Thoreau's
case the failure was slight, the discipline
and experience gained were invaluable. He
never regretted it, and the Walden episode
in his career has made him better known
than anything else.</p>
<hr class="chap" />
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</SPAN></span></p>
<div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />
1 of 2
2 of 2
Previous
Next
Update Required
To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.