Week Ten: Transcendentalism · PDF file · 2018-03-06the enterprise alone the last...

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Week Ten:Transcendentalism

Perkins−Perkins: Selections from American Literature

Ralph Waldo Emerson Author Bio © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2007

RALPH WALDO EMERSON(1803–1882)

The durability of Emerson for the general reader is one measure of his genius.Now, two centuries after his birth, the forum and the marketplace echo his wordsand ideas. As Ralph L. Rusk suggested, this is partly because “he is wise man, wit,and poet, all three,” and partly because his speculations proved prophetic, havingas firm a practical relationship with the conditions of our present age as with thehistory of humankind before him. “His insatiable passion for unity resembles Ein-stein’s” as much as Plato’s; and this passion unites serenity and practicality, Godand science, in a manner highly suggestive for those attempting to solve the dilem-mas which have seemed most desperately urgent in our time.

Emerson was born to the clerical tradition; his father was pastor of the FirstUnitarian Church of Boston and successor to a line of nonconformist and Puritanclergymen. William Emerson died in 1811, when the boy was eight, leaving hiswidow to face poverty and to educate their five sons. At Boston Latin School, atthe Latin school in Concord, and at Harvard College (where from 1817 to 1821he enjoyed a “scholarship” in return for services), young Emerson kindled no fires.His slow growth is recorded in his journal for the next eight years. He assisted athis brother William’s Boston “School for Young Ladies” (1821–1825), conductingthe enterprise alone the last year. In 1825 he entered Harvard Divinity School; inspite of an interval of illness, he was by 1829 associated with the powerful HenryWare in the pulpit of the Second Unitarian Church of Boston. That year he mar-ried Ellen Tucker, whose death, less than two years later, acutely grieved himthroughout his life.

In 1832, in the first flush of a genuine success in the pulpit, he resigned fromthe ministry. At the time, he told his congregation he could no longer find inherentgrace in the observation of the Lord’s Supper, and later he said that his ideas ofself-reliance and the general divinity of humanity caused him to conclude that “inorder to be a good minister it was necessary to leave the ministry.” His decisionwas not the result of hasty judgment. These ideas had long been available to himin his study of such nonconformists as Fénelon, George Fox, Luther, and Carlyle.They were later made explicit also in his poem “The Problem,” printed among theselections in this volume. Six years after his resignation from the ministry, in his“Divinity School Address” (1838), he clarified his position and made permanenthis breach with the church. The transcendental law, Emerson believed, was the“moral law,” through which human beings discover the nature of God, a livingspirit; yet it had been the practice of historical Christianity—“as if God weredead”—to formalize Him and to fundamentalize religion through fixed conven-tions of dogma and scripture. The true nature of life was energetic and fluid; itstranscendental unity resulted from the convergence of all forces upon the energetictruth, the heart of the moral law.

Meanwhile, his personal affairs had taken shape again. After resigning his pul-pit, he traveled (1832–1833) in France, Italy, and Great Britain, meeting such writ-

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ers as Landor, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Carlyle. All of these had been some-what influenced by the idealism of recent German philosophy, but Carlyle alonewas his contemporary, and the two became lasting friends. In 1833, Emersonlaunched himself upon the career of public lecturer, which thereafter gave him hismodest livelihood, made him a familiar figure in many parts of the country, andsupported one of his three trips abroad. In 1835, he made a second marriage, no-tably successful, and soon settled in his own house, near the ancestral Old Mansein Concord, where his four children were born. The firstborn, Waldo (1836), miti-gated Emerson’s loss of two younger and much-loved brothers in the two previousyears; but Waldo, too, died in his sixth year, in the chain of bereavements thatEmerson suffered.

The informal Transcendental Club began to meet at the Manse in 1836, in-cluding in its association a number of prominent writers of Boston, and others ofConcord, such as Bronson Alcott and, later, Thoreau, whom Emerson took for atime into his household. Margaret Fuller was selected as first editor of The Dial,their famous little magazine, and Emerson succeeded her for two years (1842–1844). He could not personally bring himself to join their cooperative Brook Farmcommunity, although he supported its theory.

After 1850 he gave much of his thought to national politics, social reforms,and the growing contest over slavery. By that time, however, the bulk of his im-portant work had been published, much of the prose resulting from lectures, some-times rewritten or consolidated in larger forms. Nature (1836), his first book, wasfollowed by his first Essays (1841), Essays: Second Series (1844), and Poems(1847). Emerson wrote and published his poems sporadically, as though they wereby-products, but actually they contain the core of his philosophy, which is essen-tially lyrical, and they are often its best expression. Earlier criticism neglected themor disparaged them for their alleged formal irregularity in an age of metrical con-formity. Later they were read in the light of rhythmic principles recovered byWhitman, whom Emerson first defended almost single-handedly; and their great-ness seems evident to readers awakened to the symbolism of ideas which is pres-ent in the long tradition from John Donne to T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens.Emerson authorized a second volume, May-Day and Other Poems, in 1867 and afinally revised Selected Poems in 1876.

In 1845, Emerson gave the series of lectures published in 1850 as Representa-tive Men. He took this series to England in 1847 and visited Paris again before re-turning to Concord. His later major works include the remarkable Journals andLetters, published after his death; the compilation Nature, Addresses, and Lec-tures (1849); and the provocative essays of English Traits (1856) and The Con-duct of Life (1860).

In 1871 the lofty intellect, now internationally recognized, began to fail. In1872 his house in Concord was damaged by fire, and friends raised a fund to sendhim abroad and to repair the damage in his absence; but the trip was not suffi-cient to stem the failing tide of health and memory. He recovered his energies spo-radically until 1877 and died in 1882.

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Emerson was not an original philosopher, and he fully recognized the fact. “Iam too young yet by several ages,” he wrote, “to compile a code.” Yet confrontedby his transcendent vision of the unity of life in the metaphysical Absolute, he de-clared, “I wish to know the laws of this wonderful power, that I may domesticateit.” That he succeeded so well in this mission is the evidence of his true originalityand his value for following generations of Americans. In the American soil, and inthe common sense of his own mind, he “domesticated” the richest experience ofmany lands and cultures; he is indeed the “transparent eyeball” through whichmuch of the best light of the ages is brought to a focus of usefulness for the pres-ent day.

Modern scholarly editions include Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, ed. W. H. Gilman andothers, 16 vols., 1960–1983; The Collected Works, ed. R. E. Spiller and others, in progress 1971–; EarlyLectures, ed. S. E. Whicher, R. E. Spiller, and W. E. Williams, 3 vols., 1959–1972; and The CompleteSermons, ed. Albert J. Frank, 43 vols., 1989–.

The Complete Works, 12 vols., Centenary Edition, was published 1903–1904; see also UncollectedWritings * * *, edited by C. C. Bigelow, 1912; The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson,10 vols., edited by E. W. Emerson and W. E. Forbes, 1909–1914; The Heart of Emerson’s Journals,edited by Bliss Perry, 1926, 1959; Uncollected Lectures, edited by C. F. Gohdes, 1933; Young EmersonSpeaks * * *, sermons, edited by A. C. McGiffert, 1938; The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 6 vols.,edited by R. L. Rusk and others, 1939–; and The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, edited byJoseph Slater, 1964.

One-volume selections are The Complete Essays and Other Writings * * *, edited by Brooks Atkin-son, 1940; Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative Selections, edited by F. J. Carpenter, 1934; Stephen E.Whicher, Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1957; Joel Porte, Emerson in His Journals, 1982; andRichard Poirier, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1990.

Recent excellent biographies include Lawrence Buell, Emerson, 2003, and Robert D. Richardson, Jr.,Emerson: The Mind on Fire, 1995. Still valuable is an earlier standard, R. L. Rusk, The Life of RalphWaldo Emerson, 1949. See also Gay Wilson Allen, Waldo Emerson: A Biography, 1981; Evelyn Barish,Emerson: The Roots of Prophecy, 1989; and Albert J. von Frank, An Emerson Chronology, 1994. Otherspecial studies are V. C. Hopkins, Spires of Form, 1951; S. Paul, Emerson’s Angle of Vision, 1952; S. E.Whicher, Freedom and Fate, 1953; F. J. Carpenter, Emerson Handbook, 1953; Joel Porte, Representa-tive Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Time, 1979; David Porter, Emerson and Literary Change, 1979;Barbara Packer, Emerson’s Fall, 1982; Julie Ellison, Emerson’s Romantic Style, 1984; David Van Leer,Emerson’s Epistemology: The Argument of the Essays, 1986; Richard Poirier, The Renewal of Litera-ture: Emersonian Reflections, 1987; Maurice Gonnard, Uneasy Solitude: Individual and Society in theWork of Ralph Waldo Emerson, trans. Lawrence Rosenwald, 1987; Lawrence Rosenwald, Emersonand the Art of the Diary, 1988; Alan D. Hodder, Emerson’s Rhetoric of Revelation: Nature, the Readerand the Apocalypse Within, 1989; David M. Robinson, Emerson and the Conduct of Life: Pragmatismand Ethical Purpose in the Later Works, 1993; and Laura Dassow Walls, Emerson’s Life in Science,2003.

Except where otherwise noted, the texts of Emerson below are Essays: Second Series, 1844; Nature,Addresses, and Lectures, edited by R. E. Spiller and A. R. Ferguson, 1972 (Vol. I of The Collected Worksof Ralph Waldo Emerson, a CEEA edition), for Nature, “The American Scholar,” and “The DivinitySchool Address”; Essays, revised 1847 and 1850; Representative Men, first edition, 1850; The Conductof Life, 1860; Selected Poems, 1876; Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks (here edited to presentclear texts); and Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson Ode to Beauty © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2004

Ode to Beauty1

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Who gave thee, O Beauty,The keys of this breast,—Too credulous loverOf blest and unblest?Say, when in lapsed agesThee knew I of old?Or what was the serviceFor which I was sold?When first my eyes saw thee,I found me thy thrall,By magical drawings,Sweet tyrant of all!I drank at thy fountainFalse waters of thirst;Thou intimate stranger,Thou latest and first!Thy dangerous glancesMake women of men;New-born, we are meltingInto nature again.

Lavish, lavish promiser,Night persuading gods to err!Guest of million painted forms,Which in turn thy glory warms!The frailest leaf, the mossy bark,The acorn’s cup, the rain-drop’s arc,The swinging spider’s silver line,The ruby of the drop of wine,The shining pebble of the pond,Thou inscribest with a bond,In thy momentary play,Would bankrupt nature to repay.

Ah, what avails itTo hide or to shunWhom the Infinite One

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1 The “Ode to Beauty,” distinguished among Emerson’s poems for a lyric grace that responds to feeling more than to idea, was published inThe Dial for October 1843. It was revised slightly for the Poems (1847), and finally, for the Selected Poems (1876), as given here.

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Hath granted his throne?The heaven high overIs the deep’s lover; The sun and sea,Informed by thee,Before me runAnd draw me on,Yet fly me still,As Fate refusesTo me the heart Fate for me chooses.Is it that my opulent soulWas mingled from the generous whole;Sea-valleys and the deep of skiesFurnished several supplies;And the sands whereof I’m madeDraw me to them, self-betrayed?I turn the proud portfolioWhich holds the grand designsOf Salvator, of Guercino,And Piranesi’s lines.2

I hear the lofty paeansOf the masters of the shell,3

Who heard the starry musicAnd recount the numbers well;Olympian bards who sungDivine Ideas below,4

Which always find us youngAnd always keep us so.Oft, in streets or humblest places,I detect far-wandered graces,Which, from Eden wide astray,In lowly homes have lost their way.

Thee gliding through the sea of form,Like the lightning through the storm,Somewhat not to be possessed,Somewhat not to be caressed,No feet so fleet could ever find,

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2 According to Emerson’s editors (Centenary Edition, Vol. IX, p. 432), Margaret Fuller had sent him the “portfolio” (l. 52). Salvator Rosa(1615–1673) was leader of the Neapolitan revival of landscape painting; Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, 1591–1666) was aBolognese eclectic painter; Giambattista Piranesi (1720–1778), Italian architect and painter, influenced both neoclassical architects and laterromantic writers by his engravings of classical antiquity.3 According to Greek myth, it was from a turtle shell that Apollo formed the lyre, instrument of the twin arts of music and poetry; hence poetsare “masters of the shell.”4 The Greek gods, dwelling on Mount Olympus, heard daily the poetry of divine bards; Orpheus, a mortal, taught by Apollo, “sung /Divineideas below.”

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No perfect form could ever bind.Thou eternal fugitive,Hovering over all that live,Quick and skilful to inspireSweet, extravagant desire,Starry space and lily-bellFilling with thy roseate smell,Wilt not give the lips to tasteOf the nectar which thou hast.

All that’s good and great with theeWorks in close conspiracy;Thou hast bribed the dark and lonelyTo report thy features only,And the cold and purple morningItself with thoughts of thee adorning;The leafy dell, the city mart,Equal trophies of thine art;E’en the flowing azure airThou hast touched for my despair;And, if I languish into dreams,Again I meet the ardent beams.Queen of things! I dare not dieIn Being’s deeps past ear and eye;Lest there I find the same deceiverAnd be the sport of Fate forever.Dread Power, but dear! if God thou be,Unmake me quite, or give thyself to me!

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Ralph Waldo Emerson Waldeinsamkeit © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2004

Waldeinsamkeit1

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I do not count the hours I spendIn wandering by the sea;The forest is my loyal friend,Like God it useth me.

In plains that room for shadows makeOf skirting hills to lie,Bound in by streams which give and takeTheir colors from the sky;

Or on the mountain-crest sublime,Or down the oaken glade,O what have I to do with time?For this the day was made.

Cities of mortals woe-begoneFantastic care derides,But in the serious landscape loneStern benefit abides.

Sheen will tarnish, honey cloy,And merry is only a mask of sad,But, sober on a fund of joy,The woods at heart are glad.

There the great Planter plantsOf fruitful worlds the grain,And with a million spells enchantsThe souls that walk in pain.

Still on the seeds of all he madeThe rose of beauty burns;Through times that wear and forms that fade,Immortal youth returns.

The black ducks mounting from the lake,The pigeon in the pines,

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1 Emerson’s son and editor translated this German title as “Forest Solitude,” and associated it with the woods of Walden, Thoreau’s hermitage.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson Waldeinsamkeit © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2004

The bittern’s boom, a desert makeWhich no false art refines.

Down in yon watery nook,Where bearded mists divide,The gray old gods whom Chaos knew,The sires of Nature, hide.

Aloft, in secret veins of air,Blows the sweet breath of song,O, few to scale those uplands dare,Though they to all belong!

See thou bring not to field or stoneThe fancies found in books;Leave authors’ eyes, and fetch your own,To brave the landscape’s looks.

Oblivion here thy wisdom is,Thy thrift, the sleep of cares;For a proud idleness like thisCrowns all thy mean affairs.

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Crosscurrents Transcendentalism, Women, and Social Ideas

© The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2007

Brook Farm (1841–1846) and Fruitlands (1843), agrarian experiments in com-munal living directly supported by transcendentalists, were two of many nine-

teenth-century attempts to create Utopian communities in America. In addition tothe attempt to create communities perfect in their self-sustaining isolation and inthe sharing of benefits and burdens, the effect of transcendental thinking on thejust treatment of laborers, the women’s movement, and the struggle for the aboli-tion of slavery can hardly be overstated.

The following selections illuminate some of the areas of social progress pro-moted by transcendental thought and action. Elizabeth Peabody explains the idealsbehind Brook Farm, the most famous transcendental community, jointly ownedby its members, whom she foresaw as both intellectual and physical laborers.Charles Dickens, visiting from England, reported how the Lowell mills, privatelyowned, achieved similar goals of community health, education, social equality,and cultural advancement for the unmarried young women who worked in them.Elizabeth Cady Stanton carried ideals of individual empowerment from Emersonand Margaret Fuller into the national struggle for equal rights for women, and in“Ar’n’t I a Woman” Sojourner Truth eloquently encapsulated some of the senti-ments of Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” applying them to women like herself. Finally,Fanny Fern expressed ideals of women’s independence in her popular newspapercolumns and showed how in mid-century the lives of many women remained farfrom ideal.

ELIZABETH PEABODY(1804–1894)

The eldest of three remarkable sisters—Mary, the second, married the educationalreformer Horace Mann; Sophia became Mrs. Nathaniel Hawthorne—ElizabethPeabody was tutored in Greek by Emerson, opened the first kindergarten in theUnited States, and in her seventies lectured at Bronson Alcott’s School of Philoso-phy in Concord. She was the first woman bookseller in Boston and the first womanpublisher. A tireless reformer, she campaigned for the abolition of slavery and forwomen’s suffrage. In the 1880s, she traveled with Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins(whose Life Among the Piutes her sister Mary had assisted to publication). Eliza-beth lectured and Sarah wore tribal dress, told her story, and sang Indian songswhile they raised money for a school for Piute children.

CROSSCURRENTSTranscendentalism, Women, and Social Ideals

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Our excerpt comes from Peabody’s “Plan of the West Roxbury Community”(Brook Farm), first published in the transcendentalist magazine The Dial for Janu-ary 1842.

[Labor, Wages, and Leisure]

* * *In order to live a religious and moral life worthy the name, they1 feel it is nec-

essary to come out in some degree from the world, and to form themselves into acommunity of property, so far as to exclude competition and the ordinary rules oftrade;—while they reserve sufficient private property, or the means of obtaining it,for all purposes of independence, and isolation at will. They have bought a farm,in order to make agriculture the basis of their life, it being the most direct andsimple in relation to nature.

A true life, although it aims beyond the highest star, is redolent of the healthyearth. The perfume of clover lingers about it. The lowing of cattle is the naturalbass to the melody of human voices.

On the other hand, what absurdity can be imagined greater than the institutionof cities? They originated not in love, but in war. It was war that drove men togetherin multitudes, and compelled them to stand so close, and build walls around them.This crowded condition produces wants of an unnatural character, which resultedin occupations that regenerated the evil, by creating artificial wants. * * *

The plan of the Community, as an Economy, is in brief this: for all who haveproperty to take stock, and receive a fixed interest thereon; then to keep house orboard in commons, as they shall severally desire, at the cost of provisions pur-chased at wholesale, or raised on the farm; and for all to labor in community, andbe paid at a certain rate an hour, choosing their own number of hours, and theirown kind of work. With the results of this labor, and their interest, they are to paytheir board, and also purchase whatever else they require at cost, at the ware-houses of the Community, which are to be filled by the Community as such. Toperfect this economy, in the course of time they must have all trades, and all modesof business carried on among themselves, from the lowest mechanical trade, whichcontributes to the health and comfort of life, to the finest art which adorns it withfood or drapery for the mind.

All labor, whether bodily or intellectual, is to be paid at the same rate ofwages; on the principle, that as the labor becomes merely bodily, it is a greatersacrifice to the individual laborer, to give his time to it; because time is desirablefor the cultivation of the intellect, in exact proportion to ignorance. Besides, intel-lectual labor involves in itself higher pleasures, and is more its own reward, thanbodily labor.

Another reason, for setting the same pecuniary value on every kind of labor,is, to give outward expression to the great truth, that all labor is sacred, whendone for a common interest. Saints and philosophers already know this, but thechildish world does not; and very decided measures must be taken to equalizelabors, in the eyes of the young of the community, who are not beyond the moral

1. The members of the Brook Farm community.

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influences of the world without them. The community will have nothing donewithin its precincts, but what is done by its own members, who stand all in socialequality;—that the children may not “learn to expect one kind of service fromLove and Goodwill, and another from the obligation of others to render it,”—agrievance of the common society stated, by one of the associated mothers, as de-structive of the soul’s simplicity. Consequently, as the Universal Education will in-volve all kinds of operations, necessary to the comforts and elegances of life, everyassociate, even if he be the digger of a ditch as his highest accomplishment, will bean instructer in that to the young members. Nor will this elevation of bodily laborbe liable to lower the tone of manners and refinement in the community. The “chil-dren of light” are not altogether unwise in their generation. They have an invisiblebut all-powerful guard of principles. Minds incapable of refinement will not be at-tracted into this association. It is an Ideal community, and only to the ideally in-clined will it be attractive; but these are to be found in every rank of life, underevery shadow of circumstance. Even among the diggers in the ditch are to be foundsome, who through religious cultivation, can look down, in meek superiority, uponthe outwardly refined, and the book-learned.

Besides, after becoming members of this community, none will be engagedmerely in bodily labor. The hours of labor for the Association will be limited by ageneral law, and can be curtailed at the will of the individual still more; and meanswill be given to all for intellectual improvement and for social intercourse, calcu-lated to refine and expand. The hours redeemed from labor by community, willnot be reapplied to the acquisition of wealth, but to the production of intellectualgoods. This community aims to be rich, not in the metallic representative ofwealth, but in the wealth itself, which money should represent; namely, LEISURETO LIVE IN ALL THE FACULTIES OF THE SOUL. * * *

1842

CHARLES DICKENS(1812–1870)

In the factories of Lowell, Massachusetts, and the penal system of Philadelphia,Dickens found much to admire during his 1842 tour, especially when he comparedthem to the dismal mills and prisons of his homeland. When he visited the mills,which were located not far from Concord and Brook Farm, they had already foundfame as practical examples of a Utopian ideal, nurtured in the new country by ageneral revolutionary fervor and given specific impetus by transcendental thoughtand social activism. Dickens’s favorable first impressions of the United Statessoured as he continued his visit, however, and Americans took offense at the por-trayals in American Notes (1843), nonfiction, and Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–1844), a novel.

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From American Notes

[The Mill Girls of Lowell ]

There are several factories in Lowell, each of which belongs to what we shouldterm a Company of Proprietors, but what they call in America a Corporation. Iwent over several of these; such as a woollen factory, a carpet factory, and a cot-ton factory: examined them in every part; and saw them in their ordinary workingaspect, with no preparation of any kind, or departure from their ordinary every-day proceedings. I may add that I am well acquainted with our manufacturingtowns in England, and have visited many mills in Manchester and elsewhere inthe same manner. * * *

These girls, as I have said, were all well dressed: and that phrase necessarilyincludes extreme cleanliness. They had serviceable bonnets, good warm cloaks,and shawls; and were not above clogs and pattens. Moreover, there were places inthe mill in which they could deposit these things without injury; and there wereconveniences for washing. They were healthy in appearance, many of them re-markably so, and had the manners and deportment of young women; not of de-graded brutes of burden. * * *

The rooms in which they worked, were as well ordered as themselves. In thewindows of some, there were green plants, which were trained to shade the glass;in all, there was as much fresh air, cleanliness, and comfort, as the nature of theoccupation would possibly admit of. Out of so large a number of females, manyof whom were only then just verging upon womanhood, it may be reasonably sup-posed that some were delicate and fragile in appearance; no doubt there were. ButI solemnly declare, that from all the crowd I saw in the different factories that day,I cannot recall or separate one young face that gave me a painful impression; notone young girl whom, assuming it to be matter of necessity that she should gainher daily bread by the labour of her hands, I would have removed from thoseworks if I had had the power.

They reside in various boarding-houses near at hand. The owners of the millsare particularly careful to allow no persons to enter upon the possession of thesehouses, whose characters have not undergone the most searching and thoroughinquiry. Any complaint that is made against them, by the boarders, or by any oneelse, is fully investigated; and if good ground of complaint be shown to existagainst them, they are removed, and their occupation is handed over to some moredeserving person. There are a few children employed in these factories, but notmany. The laws of the State forbid their working more than nine months in theyear, and require that they be educated during the other three. For this purposethere are schools in Lowell; and there are churches and chapels of various persua-sions, in which the young women may observe that form of worship in which theyhave been educated.

At some distance from the factories, and on the highest and pleasantestground in the neighbourhood, stands their hospital, or boarding-house for thesick: it is the best house in those parts, and was built by an eminent merchant forhis own residence. Like that institution at Boston which I have before described, itis not parcelled out into wards, but is divided into convenient chambers, each ofwhich has all the comforts of a very comfortable home. The principal medical at-tendant resides under the same roof; and were the patients members of his own





family they could not be better cared for, or attended with greater gentleness andconsideration. The weekly charge in this establishment for each female patient isthree dollars, or twelve shillings English; but no girl employed by any of the cor-porations is ever excluded for want of the means of payment. That they do notvery often want the means, may be gathered from the fact, that in July 1841 nofewer than nine hundred and seventy-eight of these girls were depositors in theLowell Savings Bank: the amount of whose joint savings was estimated at onehundred thousand dollars, or twenty thousand English pounds.

I am now going to state three facts, which will startle a large class of readerson this side of the Atlantic, very much.

Firstly, there is a joint-stock piano in a great many of the boarding-houses.Secondly, nearly all these young ladies subscribe to circulating libraries. Thirdly,they have got up among themselves a periodical called THE LOWELL OFFERING, “Arepository of original articles, written exclusively by females actively employed inthe mills,”—which is duly printed, published, and sold; and whereof I broughtaway from Lowell four hundred good solid pages, which I have read from begin-ning to end.

The large class of readers, startled by these facts, will exclaim, with one voice,“How very preposterous!” On my deferentially inquiring why, they will answer,“These things are above their station.” In reply to that objection, I would beg toask what their station is.

It is their station to work. And they do work. They labour in these mills, uponan average, twelve hours a day, which is unquestionably work, and pretty tightwork too. Perhaps it is above their station to indulge in such amusements, on anyterms. Are we quite sure that we in England have not formed our ideas of the “sta-tion” of working people, from accustoming ourselves to the contemplation of thatclass as they are, and not as they might be? I think that if we examine our ownfeelings, we shall find that the pianos, and the circulating libraries, and even theLowell Offering, startle us by their novelty, and not by their bearing upon any ab-stract question of right or wrong.

For myself, I know no station in which, the occupation of to-day cheerfullydone and the occupation of to-morrow cheerfully looked to, any one of these pur-suits is not most humanizing and laudable. I know no station which is renderedmore endurable to the person in it, or more safe to the person out of it, by havingignorance for its associate. I know no station which has a right to monopolize themeans of mutual instruction, improvement, and rational entertainment; or whichhas ever continued to be a station very long, after seeking to do so.

1843

ELIZABETH CADY STANTON(1815–1902)

Born in Johnstown, New York, Elizabeth Cady studied in her father’s law officebut as a woman could not practice law. After her marriage to the abolitionist HenryBrewster Stanton in 1840, the couple honeymooned in England, where they attendedthe World Anti-Slavery Convention but discovered that women were barred fromparticipation. Lucretia Mott, also a delegate, suffered the same discrimination, and

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together the two women decided to organize a convention to discuss women’srights. Eight years later the historic occasion took place on July 19th and 20th inSeneca Falls, New York, where Elizabeth and her husband were then living. The“Declaration of Sentiments” reprinted below was probably jointly written by Stan-ton and Mott. It appeared in the Seneca County Courier on July 11, 1848.

Declaration of Sentiments

[Seneca Falls, 1848]

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of thefamily of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different fromthat which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature andof nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requiresthat they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are createdequal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; thatamong these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure theserights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent ofthe governed. Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of theseends, it is the right of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to in-sist upon the institution of a new government, laying its foundation on such prin-ciples, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likelyto effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that govern-ments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; andaccordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer,while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms towhich they were accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations,pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under ab-solute despotism, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to providenew guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of thewomen under this government, and such is now the necessity which constrainsthem to demand the equal station to which they are entitled.

The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations onthe part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of anabsolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the electivefranchise.

He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she hadno voice.

He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and de-graded men—both natives and foreigners.

Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen, the elective franchise,thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has op-pressed her on all sides.

He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns.





He has made her, morally, an irresponsible being, as she can commit manycrimes with impunity, provided they be done in the presence of her husband. Inthe covenant of marriage, she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband,he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master—the law giving him powerto deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement.

He has so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall be the proper causes,and in case of separation, to whom the guardianship of the children shall be given,as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of women—the law, in all cases, goingupon a false supposition of the supremacy of man, and giving all power into hishands.

After depriving her of all rights as a married woman, if single, and the ownerof property, he has taxed her to support a government which recognizes her onlywhen her property can be made profitable to it.

He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from thoseshe is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration. He closesagainst her all the avenues to wealth and distinction which he considers most hon-orable to himself. As a teacher of theology, medicine, or law, she is not known.

He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all col-leges being closed against her.

He allows her in Church, as well as State, but a subordinate position, claim-ing Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and, with some excep-tions, from any public participation in the affairs of the Church.

He has created a false public sentiment by giving to the world a different codeof morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which excludewomen from society, are not only tolerated, but deemed of little account in man.

He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his rightto assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and toher God.

He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence inher own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a de-pendent and abject life.

Now, in view of this entire disfranchisement of one-half the people of thiscountry, their social and religious degradation—in view of the unjust laws abovementioned, and because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, andfraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immedi-ate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens ofthe United States.

In entering upon the great work before us, we anticipate no small amount ofmisconception, misrepresentation, and ridicule; but we shall use every instrumen-tality within our power to effect our object. We shall employ agents, circulate tracts,petition the State and National legislatures, and endeavor to enlist the pulpit andthe press in our behalf. We hope this Convention will be followed by a series ofConventions embracing every part of the country.[1848]

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SOJOURNER TRUTH(c. 1797–1883)

Born a slave in Ulster County, New York, Sojourner Truth was called Isabella untilher mid-forties, when she took the name she has become known by. After New Yorkfreed its slaves in 1827, she supported herself as a domestic until she found God’scall as an itinerant preacher. She met and joined William Lloyd Garrison, FrederickDouglass, and other abolitionists and human rights workers, impressing her audi-ences with her physical size, imperial bearing, and impassioned speaking. Becauseshe was illiterate, her speeches exist only as others remember them. Our version of aspeech presented at the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, wastaken from The Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1878), where it was printed as re-membered by Frances Gage (1808–1880), the president of the convention.

[Ar’n’t I a Woman?]

“Slowly from her seat in the corner rose Sojourner Truth, who, till now, hadscarcely lifted her head. ‘Don’t let her speak!’ gasped half a dozen in my ear. Shemoved slowly and solemnly to the front, laid her old bonnet at her feet, and turnedher great, speaking eyes to me. There was a hissing sound of disapprobation aboveand below. I rose and announced ‘Sojourner Truth,’ and begged the audience tokeep silence for a few moments. The tumult subsided at once, and every eye wasfixed on this almost Amazon form, which stood nearly six feet high, head erect,and eye piercing the upper air, like one in a dream. At her first word, there was aprofound hush. She spoke in deep tones, which, though not loud, reached everyear in the house, and away through the throng at the doors and windows:—

“‘Well, chilern, whar dar is so much racket dar must be something out o’ kil-ter. I tink dat ’twixt de niggers of de Souf and de women at de Norf all a talkin’’bout rights, de white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all dis here talkin’’bout? Dat man ober dar say dat women needs to be helped into carriages, andlifted ober ditches, and to have de best place every whar. Nobody eber help me intocarriages, or ober mud puddles, or gives me any best place [and raising herself toher full height and her voice to a pitch like rolling thunder, she asked], and ar’n’t Ia woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! [And she bared her right arm to the shoul-der, showing her tremendous muscular power.] I have plowed, and planted, andgathered into barns, and no man could head me—and ar’n’t I a woman? I couldwork as much and eat as much as a man (when I could get it), and bear de lash aswell—and ar’n’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen chilern and seen ’em mos’ allsold off into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother’s grief, none but Jesusheard—and ar’n’t I a woman? Den dey talks ’bout dis ting in de head—what disdey call it?’ ‘Intellect,’ whispered some one near. ‘Dat’s it honey. What’s dat got todo with women’s rights or niggers’ rights? If my cup won’t hold but a pint andyourn holds a quart, would n’t ye be mean not to let me have my little half-measure full?’ And she pointed her significant finger and sent a keen glance at theminister who had made the argument. The cheering was long and loud.





“‘Den dat little man in black dar, he say women can’t have as much rights asman, cause Christ want a woman. Whar did your Christ come from?’ Rollingthunder could not have stilled that crowd as did those deep, wonderful tones, asshe stood there with outstretched arms and eye of fire. Raising her voice stilllouder, she repeated, ‘Whar did your Christ come from? From God and a woman.Man had nothing to do with him.’ Oh! what a rebuke she gave the little man.

“Turning again to another objector, she took up the defense of mother Eve. Icannot follow her through it all. It was pointed, and witty, and solemn, eliciting atalmost every sentence deafening applause; and she ended by asserting that ‘if defust woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down, all’lone, dese togedder [and she glanced her eye over us], ought to be able to turn itback and get it right side up again, and now dey is asking to do it, de men betterlet em.’ Long-continued cheering. ‘Bleeged to ye for hearin’ on me, and now oleSojourner ha’n’t got nothing more to say.’ * * *1851 1878

FANNY FERN(1811–1872)

Born in Portland, Maine, Sarah Payson Willis spent her childhood in Boston,where her father, Nathaniel Willis, edited newspapers. Her older brother, N. P.Willis, was an editor and writer. Neither father nor brother helped, however, whenshe began her writing career.

Educated at Catharine Beecher’s Hartford Female Seminary, she married aBoston banker and had three children. When she was in her thirties, her youngestsister, her mother, her oldest daughter, and her husband all died. Penniless, she en-tered a marriage that ended in divorce, scandalizing her family, who refused tosupport her. To provide for herself and her children, she sewed, taught, and turnedto writing. Despite the discouragement of her brother, a famous writer who criti-cized her “vulgarity” and “indecency,” she found editors and a wide readershipunder the name Fanny Fern. Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio (1853) became abest seller. Ruth Hall (1855), a partly autobiographical novel, won the praise ofNathaniel Hawthorne: “I must say I enjoyed it a good deal. The woman writes asif the Devil was in her, and that is the only condition under which a woman everwrites anything worth reading * * *. When they throw off the restraints of de-cency and come before the public stark naked, as it were—then their books aresure to possess character and value.”

“Aunt Hetty on Matrimony” gives a spinster’s sharply observed advice towomen. “The Working-Girls of New York” suggests that the Lowell factory lifeDickens admired was not the rule everywhere.

Aunt Hetty on Matrimony1

“Now girls,” said Aunt Hetty, “put down your embroidery and worsted work; dosomething sensible, and stop building air-castles, and talking of lovers and honey-moons. It makes me sick; it is perfectly antimonial. Love is a farce; matrimony is a

1. First published in the Olive Branch.

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humbug; husbands are domestic Napoleons, Neroes, Alexanders,—sighing forother hearts to conquer, after they are sure of yours. The honey-moon is as short-lived as a lucifer-match;2 after that you may wear your wedding-dress at the washtub, and your night-cap to meeting, and your husband wouldn’t know it. You maypick up your own pocket-handkerchief, help yourself to a chair, and split yourgown across the back reaching over the table to get a piece of butter, while he islaying in his breakfast as if it was the last meal he should eat this side of Jordan.When he gets through he will aid your digestion,—while you are sipping your firstcup of coffee,—by inquiring what you’ll have for dinner; whether the cold lambwas all ate yesterday; if the charcoal is all out, and what you gave for the last greentea you bought. Then he gets up from the table, lights his cigar with the lastevening’s paper, that you have not had a chance to read; gives two or three whiffsof smoke,—which are sure to give you a headache for the forenoon,—and, just ashis coat-tail is vanishing through the door, apologizes for not doing ‘that errand’for you yesterday,—thinks it doubtful if he can to-day,—‘so pressed with busi-ness.’ Hear of him at eleven o’clock, taking an ice-cream with some ladies at aconfectioner’s, while you are at home new-lining his old coat-sleeves. Children bythe ears all day, can’t get out to take the air, feel as crazy as a fly in a drum; hus-band comes home at night, nods a ‘How d’ye do, Fan,’ boxes Charley’s ears,stands little Fanny in the corner, sits down in the easiest chair in the warmest cor-ner, puts his feet up over the grate, shutting out all the fire, while the baby’s littlepug nose grows blue with the cold; reads the newspaper all to himself, solaces hisinner man with a hot cup of tea, and, just as you are laboring under the hallucina-tion that he will ask you to take a mouthful of fresh air with him, he puts on hisdressing-gown and slippers, and begins to reckon up the family expenses! afterwhich he lies down on the sofa, and you keep time with your needle, while hesleeps till nine o’clock. Next morning, ask him to leave you a ‘little money,’—helooks at you as if to be sure that you are in your right mind, draws a sigh longenough and strong enough to inflate a pair of bellows, and asks you ‘what youwant with it, and if a half a dollar wont’ do?’—Gracious king! as if those littleshoes, and stockings, and petticoats could be had for half a dollar! Oh girls! setyour affections on cats, poodles, parrots or lap dogs; but let matrimony alone. It’sthe hardest way on earth of getting a living—you never know when your work isdone. Think of carrying eight or nine children through the measles, chicken pox,rash, mumps, and scarlet fever, some of ’em twice over; it makes my head ache tothink of it. Oh, you may scrimp and save, and twist and turn, and dig and delve,and economise and die, and your husband will marry again, take what you havesaved to dress his second wife with, and she’ll take your portrait for a fireboard,and,—but, what’s the use of talking? I’ll warrant every one of you’ll try it, the firstchance you get! there’s a sort of bewitchment about it, somehow. I wish one halfthe world warn’t fools, and the other half idiots, I do. Oh, dear!”

2. The common match of the time, quick to spark, ignite, and burn out.





The Working-Girls of New York3

Nowhere more than in New York does the contest between squalor and splendorso sharply present itself. This is the first reflection of the observing stranger whowalks its streets. Particularly is this noticeable with regard to its women. Jostlingon the same pavement with the dainty fashionist is the care-worn working-girl.Looking at both these women, the question arises, which lives the more miserablelife—she whom the world styles “fortunate,” whose husband belongs to threeclubs, and whose only meal with his family is an occasional breakfast, from year’send to year’s end; who is as much a stranger to his own children as to the reader;whose young son of seventeen has already a detective on his track employed byhis father to ascertain where and how he spends his nights and his father’s money;swift retribution for that father who finds food, raiment, shelter, equipages for hishousehold; but love, sympathy, companionship—never? Or she—this otherwoman—with a heart quite as hungry and unappeased, who also faces day by daythe same appalling question: Is this all life has for me?

A great book is yet unwritten about women. Michelet has aired his wax-dolltheories regarding them.4 The defender of “woman’s rights” has given us her views.Authors and authoresses of little, and big repute, have expressed themselves on thissubject, and none of them as yet have begun to grasp it: men—because they lackspirituality, rightly and justly to interpret women; women—because they dare not,or will not tell us that which most interests us to know. Who shall write this bold,frank, truthful book remains to be seen. Meanwhile woman’s millennium is yet agreat way off; and while it slowly progresses, conservatism and indifference gazethrough their spectacles at the seething elements of to-day, and wonder “what ailsall our women?”

Let me tell you what ails the working-girls. While yet your breakfast is pro-gressing, and your toilet unmade, comes forth through Chatham Street and theBowery, a long procession of them by twos and threes to their daily labor. Theirbreakfast, so called, has been hastily swallowed in a tenement house, where twoof them share, in a small room, the same miserable bed. Of its quality you maybetter judge, when you know that each of these girls pays but three dollars a weekfor board, to the working man and his wife where they lodge.

The room they occupy is close and unventilated, with no accommodations forpersonal cleanliness, and so near to the little Flinegans that their Celtic night-criesare distinctly heard. They have risen unrefreshed, as a matter of course, and theirill-cooked breakfast does not mend the matter. They emerge from the doorwaywhere their passage is obstructed by “nanny goats” and ragged children rooting

3. Collected in Folly as It Flies, 1868.4. Jules Michelet (1798–1874) wrote, among other historical works, L’amour (1858) and La Femme.His views on women correspond to the “cult of true womanhood,” holding that women should be re-stricted to the domestic sphere and subordinate to their husbands.

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together in the dirt, and pass out into the street. They shiver as the sharp wind ofearly morning strikes their temples. There is no look of youth on their faces; hardlines appear there. Their brows are knit; their eyes are sunken; their dress is flimsy,and foolish, and tawdry; always a hat, and feather or soiled artificial flower uponit; the hair dressed with an abortive attempt at style; a soiled petticoat; a greasydress, a well-worn sacque5 or shawl, and a gilt breast-pin and earrings.

Now follow them to the large, black-looking building, where several hundredof them are manufacturing hoop-skirts. If you are a woman you have worn plenty;but you little thought what passed in the heads of these girls as their busy fingersglazed the wire, or prepared the spools for covering them, or secured the tapeswhich held them in their places. You could not stay five minutes in that room,where the noise of the machinery used is so deafening, that only by the motion ofthe lips could you comprehend a person speaking.

Five minutes! Why, these young creatures bear it, from seven in the morningtill six in the evening; week after week, month after month, with only half an hourat midday to eat their dinner of a slice of bread and butter or an apple, which theyusually eat in the building, some of them having come a long distance. As I said,the roar of machinery in that room is like the roar of Niagara. Observe them asyou enter. Not one lifts her head. They might as well be machines, for any interestor curiosity they show, save always to know what o’clock it is. Pitiful! pitiful, youalmost sob to yourself, as you look at these young girls. Young? Alas! it is only inyears that they are young.

1868

5. A loose-fitting short coat, a sack.



Henry David Thoreau Author Bio © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2000

Henry David Thoreau(1817–1862)

RThoreau died at forty-four, having published relatively little of what he had written. He expressedhis characteristic dilemma when he declared: “My life has been the poem I would have writ,/ButI could not both live and utter it.” At his best, perhaps he succeeded in doing just that.

Thoreau’s outward life reflected his inward stature as a small and quiet pond reflects the dimin-ished outline of a mountain. Concord, the place where he lived and died, was tiny, but it was thecenter of an exciting intellectual world, and the poverty of his family did not prevent him from get-ting a good start in the classics at the local academy. At Harvard College in Cambridge, a few milesaway, he maintained himself frugally with the help of his aunts and by doing chores and teachingduring leisure hours and vacations. There he began his Journals, ultimately to become the largestof his works, a storehouse of his observations and ideas. Upon graduation he tried teaching, and fora time conducted a private school in Concord with his brother, John; but he had no inclinationtoward a career in the ordinary sense. Living was the object of life, and work was never an end initself, but merely the self-respecting means by which one paid his way in the world. While he madehis home with his father, he assisted him in his trade of pencil maker, but he lost interest as soon asthey had learned to make the best pencil to be had. When he lived with Emerson (1841–1843 and1847–1848) he did the chores, and he kept the house while Emerson was abroad. At the home ofEmerson’s brother William, on Staten Island in 1843, he tutored the children. In Concord vil-lage, he did odd jobs, hired himself out, and surveyed other men’s lands without coveting them.

Meanwhile, his inward life, as recorded in the Journals, was vastly enriched by experience andsteady reading. In the year of his graduation from Harvard (1837), his Concord neighbor, Emerson,made his address on “The American Scholar,” and both the man and the essay became Thoreau’searly guide. The next year he delivered his first lecture, at the Concord Lyceum; he later gavelectures from Bangor, Maine, to Philadelphia, but never acquired Emerson’s skill in communicatingto his audience. On his journeys he made friends as various as Orestes Brownson, Horace Greeley,John Brown, and Walt Whitman; he and Emerson were the two who recognized Whitman’s geniusfrom the beginning. At home in Concord he attended Alcott’s “conversations,” and shared theintellectual excitements and stimulation of the informal Transcendental Club which met at Concordand Boston. The Club sponsored The Dial (1840–1844), to which he contributed essays drawn fromhis Journals and his study of natural history and philosophy.

Posthumously collected volumes of Thoreau, in addition to those mentioned in the text, were Excursions, 1863, Early Spring in Massachusetts, 1881,Summer, 1884, Winter, 1888, Autumn, 1892, and Poems of Nature, 1895. A critical edition of the poems is Collected Poems, edited by Carl Bode,1943, enlarged, 1966.The Riverside Edition, 10 vols., 1894, is superseded by the Manuscript Edition and the standard Walden Edition (from the same plates), TheWritings * * *, 20 vols., 1906. A definitive edition of the Works is in progress at Princeton, 1971–. Letters are in Familiar Letters * * * , 1894,included as Vol. VI of the Walden Edition; and Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, edited by Carl Bode and Walter Harding, 1958. The Journals(1837–1861), edited by Bradford Torrey, available as Vols. VII–XX of the Walden Edition, were newly edited by Francis H. Allen, 1949, andagain in 2 vols. with a foreword by Walter Harding, 1963. Consciousness in Concord: Thoreau’s Lost Journal (1840–41) was published by PerryMiller, 1958. The Heart of Thoreau’s Journals was edited by Odell Shepard, 1927.The best biography is Walter Harding’s The Days of Henry Thoreau, 1965. See also William Howarth, The Book of Concord: Thoreau’s Life as a Writer,1982; and Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Henry David Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, 1986. For scholarship and criticism see J. B. Atkinson, Henry Thoreau,the Cosmic Yankee, 1927; H. S. Canby, Thoreau, 1939; J. W. Krutch, Henry David Thoreau, 1948; R. L. Cook, Passage to Walden, 1949; H. B.Hough, Thoreau of Walden, 1956; S. Paul, The Shores of America, 1958; W. Harding, Thoreau: A Century of Criticism, 1954, and with M. Meltzer,A Thoreau Profile, 1962; Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden, 1972; Michael Meyer, Several More Lives to Live: Thoreau’s PoliticalReputation in America, 1977; Robert Sayre, Thoreau and the American Indians, 1977; W. Harding and M. Meyer, The New Thoreau Handbook,1980; Robert Sattelmeyer, Thoreau’s Reading: A Study in Intellectual History, 1988; and Steven Fink, Prophet in the Marketplace:Thoreau’s Development as a Professional Writer, 1992.The prose texts in this volume are those of first appearance in a book, unless otherwise noted.

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Henry David Thoreau Author Bio © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2000

Emerson meant only praise in declaring that “his biography is in his verses”; it is true thatthe same lyrical response to ideas pervades his poetry, his prose, and his life. Thoreau tacitly rec-ognized this by incorporating much of his poetry in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers(1849) and Walden (1854), the two volumes that were published before his death. But it is a mis-take to suppose that the serene individualism of his writings reflects only an unbroken serenity oflife. Many Massachusetts neighbors, and even some transcendentalists, regarded Thoreau as anextremist, especially on public and economic issues. There were painful clashes of temperamentwith Emerson. In his personal life he suffered deep bereavements. His older brother, John, who wasalso his best friend, revealed his love for Ellen Sewall, the girl whom Henry hoped to marry; sherefused them both. Two years later, John died of lockjaw at twenty-seven, first victim of the fami-ly frailty. The beloved sister Helen died at thirty-six, and Thoreau’s death occurred after seven yearsof tuberculosis.

Two aspects of Thoreau’s life provided the bulk of his literary materials: his active concernwith social issues and his feeling for the unity of humanity and nature. He took an early interestin abolition, appearing as speaker at antislavery conventions, once in company with John Brown,whom he later publicly defended after the terrifying and bloody raid at Harpers Ferry. (See “Slaveryin Massachusetts,” 1854, and “A Plea for John Brown,” 1859.) He was able also to associate his pri-vate rebellion with large social issues, as in his resistance to taxation. He refused to pay the churchtaxes (1838) because they were levied on all alike, as for an “established” church. In his refusal topay the poll tax, which cost him a jail sentence (1846), he was resisting the “constitutional” con-cept which led Massachusetts to give support in Congress to southern leadership, as represented bythe Mexican War and repugnant laws concerning slave “property.” Three years later he formal-ized his theory of social action in the essay “Civil Disobedience,” the origin of the modern conceptof pacific resistance as the final instrument of minority opinion, which found its spectacular demon-stration in the lives of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Thoreau’s works at all points reveal his economic and social individualism, but until recent-ly his readers responded chiefly to his accurate and sympathetic reporting of nature, his interest-ing use of the stored learning of the past, and the wit, grace, and power of his style. His descriptionof nature was based on his journals of his various “excursions,” as he called them. A Week on theConcord and Merrimack Rivers, his first published volume, described a boat trip with his brother,John, in 1839. Other trips of literary significance were his explorations of the Penobscot forests ofMaine (1846, 1853, and 1857) and his walking tours in Cape Cod (1840, 1850, 1855, and 1857)and in Canada. Certain essays on these adventures were published in magazines before his death;later his friends published The Maine Woods (1864), Cape Cod (1865), and A Yankee in Canada(1866), which resulted from a trip to Canada with W. E. Channing in 1850.

Almost all of the richness of Thoreau is in Walden, which we give here in its entirety. In hisrevelation of the simplicity and divine unity of nature, in his faith in humanity, in his own sturdyindividualism, in his deep-rooted love for one place as an epitome of the universe, Thoreau remindsus of what we are and what we yet may be.

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Henry David Thoreau Walden — Visitors © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2007

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

From Walden1

Visitors

I think that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to fasten myselflike a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded man that comes in my way. Iam naturally no hermit, but might possibly sit out the sturdiest frequenter of thebar-room, if my business called me thither.

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three forsociety. When visitors came in larger and unexpected numbers there was but thethird chair for them all, but they generally economized the room by standing up.It is surprising how many great men and women a small house will contain. I havehad twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof, and yetwe often parted without being aware that we had come very near to one another.Many of our houses, both public and private, with their almost innumerable apart-ments, their huge halls and their cellars for the storage of wines and other muni-tions of peace, appear to me extravagantly large for their inhabitants. They are sovast and magnificent that the latter seem to be only vermin which infest them. Iam surprised when the herald blows his summons before some Tremont or Astoror Middlesex House,2 to see come creeping out over the piazza for all inhabitantsa ridiculous mouse, which soon again slinks into some hole in the pavement.

One inconvenience I sometimes experienced in so small a house, the difficultyof getting to a sufficient distance from my guest when we began to utter the bigthoughts in big words. You want room for your thoughts to get into sailing trimand run a course or two before they make their port. The bullet of your thoughtmust have overcome its lateral and ricochet motion and fallen into its last andsteady course before it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it may plough out again

1. The earliest manuscript of this world-famous book, titled “Walden, or Life in the Woods,” was pre-pared, as Thoreau there states, “about 1846.” It was later revised in the preparation of readings formeetings of the Concord Lyceum and again for publication as a volume in 1854, the source of the pre-sent text. As in previous issues, we have silently corrected Thoreau’s printed text to conform with thefew unmistakable verbal changes made in his hand on a “correction copy”; these were published in fullby Reginald L. Cook (Thoreau Society Bulletin, Winter, 1953). A very few of Thoreau’s glosses or mar-ginal comments are represented in our footnotes but plainly ascribed to Thoreau. For a summary of tex-tual scholarship, see Walden and Civil Disobedience: A Norton Critical Edition, edited by OwenThomas, 1966, p. 222, and Preface, p. vi. See also Walden, edited by J. L. Shanley, 1971; J. L. Shanley,The Making of “Walden,” 1957, repr. 1966; W. Harding, ed., The Variorum Walden, 1962; and P. V. D.Stern, ed., The Annotated Walden, 1970. Thoreau’s knowledge was a constant fact of his intellect, notthe result of the mere memory of information. Consequently, Walden is a complex organization ofthemes related to the central concept of individualism: such as the economy of individualism (the exper-iment at Walden Pond); the spiritual and temporal values of individualism in society or in solitude; thesurvival of self-reliance amid depersonalizing social organizations; the related observation of animal andplant life; and the transcendental concept of the accomplished human personality, simultaneously awareof relations both with Time and the Timeless.2. Hotels in Boston, New York, and Concord.

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through the side of his head. Also, our sentences wanted room to unfold and formtheir columns in the interval. Individuals, like nations, must have suitable broadand natural boundaries, even a considerable neutral ground, between them. I havefound it a singular luxury to talk across the pond to a companion on the oppositeside. In my house we were so near that we could not begin to hear,—we could notspeak low enough to be heard; as when you throw two stones into calm water sonear that they break each other’s undulations. If we are merely loquacious andloud talkers, then we can afford to stand very near together, cheek by jowl, andfeel each other’s breath; but if we speak reservedly and thoughtfully, we want tobe farther apart, that all animal heat and moisture may have a chance to evapo-rate. If we would enjoy the most intimate society with that in each of us which iswithout, or above, being spoken to, we must not only be silent, but commonly sofar apart bodily that we cannot possibly hear each other’s voice in any case. Re-ferred to this standard, speech is for the convenience of those who are hard ofhearing; but there are many fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout.As the conversation began to assume a loftier and grander tone, we graduallyshoved our chairs farther apart till they touched the wall in opposite corners, andthen commonly there was not room enough.

My “best” room, however, my withdrawing room, always ready for company,on whose carpet the sun rarely fell, was the pine wood behind my house. Thitherin summer days, when distinguished guests came, I took them, and a priceless do-mestic swept the floor and dusted the furniture and kept the things in order.

If one guest came he sometimes partook of my frugal meal, and it was no in-terruption to conversation to be stirring a hasty-pudding, or watching the risingand maturing of a loaf of bread in the ashes, in the mean while. But if twenty cameand sat in my house there was nothing said about dinner, though there might bebread enough for two, more than if eating were a forsaken habit; but we naturallypractised abstinence; and this was never felt to be an offence against hospitality,but the most proper and considerate course. The waste and decay of physical life,which so often needs repair, seemed miraculously retarded in such a case, and thevital vigor stood its ground. I could entertain thus a thousand as well as twenty;and if any ever went away disappointed or hungry from my house when theyfound me at home, they may depend upon it that I sympathized with them at least.So easy is it, though many housekeepers doubt it, to establish new and better cus-toms in the place of the old. You need not rest your reputation on the dinners yougive. For my own part, I was never so effectually deterred from frequenting aman’s house, by any kind of Cerberus3 whatever, as by the parade one made aboutdining me, which I took to be a very polite and roundabout hint never to troublehim so again. I think I shall never revisit those scenes. I should be proud to havefor the motto of my cabin those lines of Spenser which one of my visitors inscribedon a yellow walnut leaf for a card:—

“Arrivéd there, the little house they fill,Ne looke for entertainment where none was;

Rest is their feast, and all things at their will:The noblest mind the best contentment has.”4

3. A three-headed dog who guarded the entrance to the land of the dead.4. The quotation is from The Faerie Queene, Book I, Canto i, Stanza 35.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden — Visitors 273



When Winslow,5 afterward governor of the Plymouth Colony, went with acompanion on a visit of ceremony to Massassoit on foot through the woods, andarrived tired and hungry at his lodge, they were well received by the king, butnothing was said about eating that day. When the night arrived, to quote theirown words,—“He laid us on the bed with himself and his wife, they at the oneend and we at the other, it being only plank, laid a foot from the ground, and athin mat upon them. Two more of his chief men, for want of room, pressed byand upon us; so that we were worse weary of our lodging than of our journey.” Atone o’clock the next day Massassoit “brought two fishes that he had shot,” aboutthrice as big as a bream; “these being boiled, there were at least forty looked for ashare in them. The most ate of them. This meal only we had in two nights and aday; and had not one of us bought a partridge, we had taken our journey fasting.”Fearing that they would be light-headed for want of food and also sleep, owing to“the savages’ barbarous singing, (for they used to sing themselves asleep,)” andthat they might get home while they had strength to travel, they departed. As forlodging, it is true they were but poorly entertained, though what they found an in-convenience was no doubt intended for an honor; but as far as eating was con-cerned, I do not see how the Indians could have done better. They had nothing toeat themselves, and they were wiser than to think that apologies could supply theplace of food to their guests; so they drew their belts tighter and said nothing aboutit. Another time when Winslow visited them, it being a season of plenty with them,there was no deficiency in this respect.

As for men, they will hardly fail one any where. I had more visitors while Ilived in the woods than at any other period of my life; I mean that I had some.I met several there under more favorable circumstances than I could any whereelse. But fewer came to see me upon trivial business. In this respect, my companywas winnowed by my mere distance from town. I had withdrawn so far within thegreat ocean of solitude, into which the rivers of society empty, that for the mostpart, so far as my needs were concerned, only the finest sediment was depositedaround me. Beside, there were wafted to me evidences of unexplored and unculti-vated continents on the other side.

Who should come to my lodge this morning but a true Homeric or Paphla-gonian6 man,—he had so suitable and poetic a name that I am sorry I cannot printit here,—a Canadian, a wood-chopper and post-maker, who can hole fifty posts ina day, who made his last supper on a woodchuck which his dog caught. He, too,has heard of Homer, and, “if it were not for books,” would “not know what todo rainy days,” though perhaps he has not read one wholly through for manyrainy seasons. Some priest who could pronounce the Greek itself taught him toread his verse in the testament in his native parish far away; and now I must trans-late to him, while he holds the book, Achilles’ reproof to Patroclus7 for his sadcountenance.—“Why are you in tears, Patroclus, like a young girl?”—

5. Edward Winslow (1595–1655); Massasoit was chief of the friendly Wampanoags; he made a treatyof peace with the Pilgrims (1621).6. Paphlagonia was a Greek outpost in northern Asia Minor on the Black Sea.7. The friendship between the heroic Achilles and Patroclus is a memorable theme in Homer’s Iliad. Thequotation is from Book XVI.

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“Or have you alone heard some news from Phthia?They say that Menœtius lives yet, son of Actor,And Peleus lives, son of Æacus, among the Myrmidons,Either of whom having died, we should greatly grieve.”

He says, “That’s good.” He has a great bundle of white-oak bark under his armfor a sick man, gathered this Sunday morning. “I suppose there’s no harm in goingafter such a thing to-day,” says he. To him Homer was a great writer, though whathis writing was about he did not know. A more simple and natural man it wouldbe hard to find. Vice and disease, which cast such a sombre moral hue over theworld, seemed to have hardly any existence for him. He was about twenty-eightyears old, and had left Canada and his father’s house a dozen years before to workin the States, and earn money to buy a farm with at last, perhaps in his nativecountry. He was cast in the coarsest mould; a stout but sluggish body; yet grace-fully carried, with a thick sunburnt neck, dark bushy hair, and dull sleepy blueeyes, which were occasionally lit up with expression. He wore a flat gray clothcap, a dingy wool-colored greatcoat, and cowhide boots. He was a great consumerof meat, usually carrying his dinner to his work a couple of miles past my house,—for he chopped all summer,—in a tin pail; cold meats, often cold woodchucks,and coffee in a stone bottle which dangled by a string from his belt; and some-times he offered me a drink. He came along early, crossing my bean-field, thoughwithout anxiety or haste to get to his work, such as Yankees exhibit. He wasn’ta-going to hurt himself. He didn’t care if he only earned his board. Frequently hewould leave his dinner in the bushes, when his dog had caught a woodchuck bythe way, and go back a mile and a half to dress it and leave it in the cellar of thehouse where he boarded, after deliberating first for half an hour whether he couldnot sink it in the pond safely till nightfall,—loving to dwell long upon thesethemes. He would say, as he went by in the morning, “How thick the pigeons are!If working every day were not my trade, I could get all the meat I should want byhunting,—pigeons, woodchucks, rabbits, partridges,—by gosh! I could get all Ishould want for a week in one day.”

He was a skilful chopper, and indulged in some flourishes and ornaments inhis art. He cut his trees level and close to the ground, that the sprouts which cameup afterward might be more vigorous and a sled might slide over the stumps; andinstead of leaving a whole tree to support his corded wood, he would pare it awayto a slender stake or splinter which you could break off with your hand at last.

He interested me because he was so quiet and solitary and so happy withal; awell of good humor and contentment which overflowed at his eyes. His mirth waswithout alloy. Sometimes I saw him at his work in the woods, felling trees, and hewould greet me with a laugh of inexpressible satisfaction, and a salutation inCanadian French, though he spoke English as well. When I approached him hewould suspend his work, and with half-suppressed mirth lie along the trunk of apine which he had felled, and, peeling off the inner bark, roll it up into a ball andchew it while he laughed and talked. Such an exuberance of animal spirits had hethat he sometimes tumbled down and rolled on the ground with laughter at anything which made him think and tickled him. Looking round upon the trees hewould exclaim,—“By George! I can enjoy myself well enough here chopping; Iwant no better sport.” Sometimes, when at leisure, he amused himself all day inthe woods with a pocket pistol, firing salutes to himself at regular intervals as he




walked. In the winter he had a fire by which at noon he warmed his coffee in akettle; and as he sat on a log to eat his dinner the chicadees would sometimes comeround and alight on his arm and peck at the potato in his fingers; and he said thathe “liked to have the little fellers about him.”

In him the animal man chiefly was developed. In physical endurance and con-tentment he was cousin to the pine and the rock. I asked him once if he was notsometimes tired at night, after working all day; and he answered, with a sincereand serious look, “Gorrappit, I never was tired in my life.” But the intellectualand what is called spiritual man in him were slumbering as in an infant. He hadbeen instructed only in that innocent and ineffectual way in which the Catholicpriests teach the aborigines, by which the pupil is never educated to the degree ofconsciousness, but only to the degree of trust and reverence, and a child is notmade a man, but kept a child. When Nature made him, she gave him a strong bodyand contentment for his portion, and propped him on every side with reverenceand reliance, that he might live out his threescore years and ten a child. He was sogenuine and unsophisticated that no introduction would serve to introduce him,more than if you introduced a woodchuck to your neighbor. He had got to findhim out as you did. He would not play any part. Men paid him wages for work,and so helped to feed and clothe him; but he never exchanged opinions with them.He was so simply and naturally humble—if he can be called humble who never as-pires—that humility was no distinct quality in him, nor could he conceive of it.Wiser men were demigods to him. If you told him that such a one was coming, hedid as if he thought that any thing so grand would expect nothing of himself, buttake all the responsibility on itself, and let him be forgotten still. He never heardthe sound of praise. He particularly reverenced the writer and the preacher. Theirperformances were miracles. When I told him that I wrote considerably, he thoughtfor a long time that it was merely the handwriting which I meant, for he couldwrite a remarkably good hand himself. I sometimes found the name of his nativeparish handsomely written in the snow by the highway, with the proper Frenchaccent, and knew that he had passed. I asked him if he ever wished to write histhoughts. He said that he had read and written letters for those who could not,but he never tried to write thoughts,—no, he could not, he could not tell what toput first, it would kill him, and then there was spelling to be attended to at thesame time!

I heard that a distinguished wise man and reformer asked him if he did notwant the world to be changed; but he answered with a chuckle of surprise in hisCanadian accent, not knowing that the question had ever been entertained before,“No, I like it well enough.” It would have suggested many things to a philosopherto have dealings with him. To a stranger he appeared to know nothing of things ingeneral; yet I sometimes saw in him a man whom I had not seen before, and I didnot know whether he was as wise as Shakspeare or as simply ignorant as a child,whether to suspect him of a fine poetic consciousness or of stupidity. A townsmantold me that when he met him sauntering through the village in his small close-fitting cap, and whistling to himself, he reminded him of a prince in disguise.

His only books were an almanac and an arithmetic, in which last he was con-siderably expert. The former was a sort of cyclopædia to him, which he supposedto contain an abstract of human knowledge, as indeed it does to a considerableextent. I loved to sound him on the various reforms of the day, and he never failed

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to look at them in the most simple and practical light. He had never heard of suchthings before. Could he do without factories? I asked. He had worn the home-made Vermont gray, he said, and that was good. Could he dispense with tea andcoffee? Did this country afford any beverage beside water? He had soaked hem-lock leaves in water and drank it, and thought that was better than water in warmweather. When I asked him if he could do without money, he showed the conve-nience of money in such a way as to suggest and coincide with the most philo-sophical accounts of the origin of this institution, and the very derivation of theword pecunia.8 If an ox were his property, and he wished to get needles and threadat the store, he thought it would be inconvenient and impossible soon to go onmortgaging some portion of the creature each time to that amount. He could de-fend many institutions better than any philosopher, because, in describing them asthey concerned him, he gave the true reason for their prevalence, and speculationhad not suggested to him any other. At another time, hearing Plato’s definition ofa man,—a biped without feathers,—and that one exhibited a cock plucked andcalled it Plato’s man, he thought it an important difference that the knees bent thewrong way. He would sometimes exclaim, “How I love to talk! By George, I couldtalk all day!” I asked him once, when I had not seen him for many months, if hehad got a new idea this summer. “Good Lord,” said he, “a man that has to workas I do, if he does not forget the ideas he has had, he will do well. May be the manyou hoe with is inclined to race; then, by gorry, your mind must be there; youthink of weeds.” He would sometimes ask me first on such occasions, if I hadmade any improvement. One winter day I asked him if he was always satisfiedwith himself, wishing to suggest a substitute within him for the priest without,and some higher motive for living. “Satisfied!” said he; “some men are satisfiedwith one thing, and some with another. One man, perhaps, if he has got enough,will be satisfied to sit all day with his back to the fire and his belly to the table, byGeorge!” Yet I never, by any manœuvring, could get him to take the spiritual viewof things; the highest that he appeared to conceive of was a simple expediency,such as you might expect an animal to appreciate; and this, practically, is true ofmost men. If I suggested any improvement in his mode of life, he merely answered,without expressing any regret, that it was too late. Yet he thoroughly believed inhonesty and the like virtues.

There was a certain positive originality, however slight, to be detected in him,and I occasionally observed that he was thinking for himself and expressing hisown opinion, a phenomenon so rare that I would any day walk ten miles to ob-serve it, and it amounted to the re-origination of many of the institutions of soci-ety. Though he hesitated, and perhaps failed to express himself distinctly, healways had a presentable thought behind. Yet his thinking was so primitive andimmersed in his animal life, that, though more promising than a merely learnedman’s, it rarely ripened to any thing which can be reported. He suggested thatthere might be men of genius in the lowest grades of life, however permanentlyhumble and illiterate, who take their own view always, or do not pretend to see atall; who are as bottomless even as Walden Pond was thought to be, though theymay be dark and muddy.

8. That the Latin for “money” is derived from pecus, “cattle,” gives point to the following illustration.




Many a traveller came out of his way to see me and the inside of my house,and, as an excuse for calling, asked for a glass of water. I told them that I drank atthe pond, and pointed thither, offering to lend them a dipper. Far off as I lived, Iwas not exempted from that annual visitation which occurs, methinks, about thefirst of April, when every body is on the move; and I had my share of good luck,though there were some curious specimens among my visitors. Half-witted menfrom the almshouse and elsewhere came to see me; but I endeavored to make themexercise all the wit they had, and make their confessions to me; in such cases mak-ing wit the theme of our conversation; and so was compensated. Indeed, I foundsome of them to be wiser than the so called overseers of the poor and selectmen ofthe town, and thought it was time that the tables were turned. With respect to wit,I learned that there was not much difference between the half and the whole. Oneday, in particular, an inoffensive, simple-minded pauper, whom with others I hadoften seen used as fencing stuff, standing or sitting on a bushel in the fields to keepcattle and himself from straying, visited me, and expressed a wish to live as I did.He told me, with the utmost simplicity and truth, quite superior, or rather inferior,to any thing that is called humility, that he was “deficient in intellect.” These werehis words. The Lord had made him so, yet he supposed the Lord cared as muchfor him as for another. “I have always been so,” said he, “from my childhood; Inever had much mind; I was not like other children; I am weak in the head. It wasthe Lord’s will, I suppose.” And there he was to prove the truth of his words. Hewas a metaphysical puzzle to me. I have rarely met a fellow-man on such promis-ing ground,—it was so simple and sincere and so true all that he said. And, trueenough, in proportion as he appeared to humble himself was he exalted. I did notknow at first but it was the result of a wise policy. It seemed that from such a basisof truth and frankness as the poor weak-headed pauper had laid, our intercoursemight go forward to something better than the intercourse of sages.

I had some guests from those not reckoned commonly among the town’s poor,but who should be; who are among the world’s poor, at any rate; guests who ap-peal, not to your hospitality, but to your hospitalality; who earnestly wish to behelped, and preface their appeal with the information that they are resolved, forone thing, never to help themselves. I require of a visitor that he be not actuallystarving, though he may have the very best appetite in the world, however he gotit. Objects of charity are not guests. Men who did not know when their visit hadterminated, though I went about my business again, answering them from greaterand greater remoteness. Men of almost every degree of wit called on me in the mi-grating season. Some who had more wits than they knew what to do with; run-away slaves with plantation manners, who listened from time to time, like the foxin the fable, as if they heard the hounds a-baying on their track, and looked at mebeseechingly, as much as to say,—

“O Christian, will you send me back?”

One real runaway slave, among the rest, whom I helped to forward toward thenorthstar. Men of one idea, like a hen with one chicken, and that a duckling; menof a thousand ideas, and unkempt heads, like those hens which are made to takecharge of a hundred chickens, all in pursuit of one bug, a score of them lost inevery morning’s dew,—and become frizzled and mangy in consequence; men ofideas instead of legs, a sort of intellectual centipede that made you crawl all over.

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One man proposed a book in which visitors should write their names, as at theWhite Mountains; but, alas! I have too good a memory to make that necessary.

I could not but notice some of the peculiarities of my visitors. Girls and boysand young women generally seemed glad to be in the woods. They looked in thepond and at the flowers, and improved their time. Men of business, even farmers,thought only of solitude and employment, and of the great distance at which Idwelt from something or other; and though they said that they loved a ramble inthe woods occasionally, it was obvious that they did not. Restless committed men,whose time was all taken up in getting a living or keeping it; ministers who spokeof God as if they enjoyed a monopoly of the subject, who could not bear all kindsof opinions; doctors, lawyers, uneasy housekeepers who pried into my cupboardand bed when I was out,—how came Mrs.——— to know that my sheets werenot as clean as hers?—young men who had ceased to be young, and had concludedthat it was safest to follow the beaten track of the professions,—all these generallysaid that it was not possible to do so much good in my position. Ay! there was therub. The old and infirm and the timid, of whatever age or sex, thought most ofsickness, and sudden accident and death; to them life seemed full of danger,—what danger is there if you don’t think of any?—and they thought that a prudentman would carefully select the safest position, where Dr. B.9 might be on hand ata moment’s warning. To them the village was literally a com-munity, a league formutual defence, and you would suppose that they would not go a-huckleberryingwithout a medicine chest. The amount of it is, if a man is alive, there is alwaysdanger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in propor-tion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs. Fi-nally, there were the self-styled reformers, the greatest bores of all, who thoughtthat I was forever singing,—

This is the house that I built;This is the man that lives in the house that I built;

but they did not know that the third line was,—

These are the folks that worry the manThat lives in the house that I built.

I did not fear the hen-harriers, for I kept no chickens; but I feared the men-harriers rather.

I had more cheering visitors than the last. Children came a-berrying, railroadmen taking a Sunday morning walk in clean shirts, fishermen and hunters, poetsand philosophers, in short, all honest pilgrims, who came out to the woods forfreedom’s sake, and really left the village behind, I was ready to greet with,—“Wel-come, Englishmen! welcome, Englishmen!”1 for I had had communication withthat race.1846 1854

9. Identified as a Concord physician, Josiah Bartlett II.1. The legendary welcome of the Indian Samoset to the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth.



Henry David Thoreau Walden — Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors


HENRY DAVID THOREAU

From Walden1

Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors

I weathered some merry snow storms, and spent some cheerful winter evenings bythe fire-side, while the snow whirled wildly without, and even the hooting of theowl was hushed. For many weeks I met no one in my walks but those who cameoccasionally to cut wood and sled it to the village. The elements, however, abettedme in making a path through the deepest snow in the woods, for when I had oncegone through the wind blew the oak leaves into my tracks, where they lodged, andby absorbing the rays of the sun melted the snow, and so not only made a dry bedfor my feet, but in the night their dark line was my guide. For human society I wasobliged to conjure up the former occupants of these woods. Within the memory ofmany of my townsmen the road near which my house stands resounded with thelaugh and gossip of inhabitants, and the woods which border it were notched anddotted here and there with their little gardens and dwellings, though it was thenmuch more shut in by the forest than now. In some places, within my own remem-brance, the pines would scrape both sides of a chaise at once, and women andchildren who were compelled to go this way to Lincoln alone and on foot did itwith fear, and often ran a good part of the distance. Though mainly but a humbleroute to neighboring villages, or for the woodman’s team, it once amused the trav-eller more than now by its variety, and lingered longer in his memory. Where nowfirm open fields stretch from the village to the woods, it then ran through a mapleswamp on a foundation of logs, the remnants of which, doubtless, still underliethe present dusty highway, from the Stratten, now the Alms House, Farm, to Bris-ter’s Hill.

East of my bean-field, across the road, lived Cato Ingraham, slave of DuncanIngraham, Esquire, gentleman of Concord village; who built his slave a house, andgave him permission to live in Walden Woods;—Cato, not Uticensis, but Concor-

1. The earliest manuscript of this world-famous book, titled “Walden, or Life in the Woods,” was pre-pared, as Thoreau there states, “about 1846.” It was later revised in the preparation of readings formeetings of the Concord Lyceum and again for publication as a volume in 1854, the source of the pre-sent text. As in previous issues, we have silently corrected Thoreau’s printed text to conform with thefew unmistakable verbal changes made in his hand on a “correction copy”; these were published in fullby Reginald L. Cook (Thoreau Society Bulletin, Winter, 1953). A very few of Thoreau’s glosses or mar-ginal comments are represented in our footnotes but plainly ascribed to Thoreau. For a summary of tex-tual scholarship, see Walden and Civil Disobedience: A Norton Critical Edition, edited by OwenThomas, 1966, p. 222, and Preface, p. vi. See also Walden, edited by J. L. Shanley, 1971; J. L. Shanley,The Making of “Walden,” 1957, repr. 1966; W. Harding, ed., The Variorum Walden, 1962; and P. V. D.Stern, ed., The Annotated Walden, 1970. Thoreau’s knowledge was a constant fact of his intellect, notthe result of the mere memory of information. Consequently, Walden is a complex organization ofthemes related to the central concept of individualism: such as the economy of individualism (the exper-iment at Walden Pond); the spiritual and temporal values of individualism in society or in solitude; thesurvival of self-reliance amid depersonalizing social organizations; the related observation of animal andplant life; and the transcendental concept of the accomplished human personality, simultaneously awareof relations both with Time and the Timeless.

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diensis.2 Some say that he was a Guinea Negro. There are a few who rememberhis little patch among the walnuts, which he let grow up till he should be old andneed them; but a younger and whiter speculator got them at last. He too, how-ever, occupies an equally narrow house at present. Cato’s half-obliterated cellarhole still remains, though known to few, being concealed from the traveller by afringe of pines. It is now filled with the smooth sumach, (Rhus glabra), and one ofthe earliest species of goldenrod (Solidago stricta) grows there luxuriantly.

Here, by the very corner of my field, still nearer to town, Zilpha, a coloredwoman, had her little house, where she spun linen for the townsfolk, making theWalden Woods ring with her shrill singing, for she had a loud and notable voice.At length, in the war of 1812, her dwelling was set on fire by English soldiers,prisoners on parole, when she was away, and her cat and dog, and hens were allburned up together. She led a hard life, and somewhat inhumane. One old fre-quenter of these woods remembers, that as he passed her house one noon he heardher muttering to herself over her gurgling pot,—“Ye are all bones, bones!” I haveseen bricks amid the oak copse there.

Down the road, on the right hand, on Brister’s Hill, lived Brister Freeman, “ahandy Negro,” slave of Squire Cummings once,—there where grow still the apple-trees which Brister planted and tended; large old trees now, but their fruit stillwild and ciderish to my taste. Not long since I read his epitaph in the old Lincolnburying-ground, a little on one side, near the unmarked graves of some Britishgrenadiers who fell in the retreat from Concord,—where he is styled “Sippio Bris-ter,”—Scipio Africanus3 he had some title to be called,—“a man of color,” as if hewere discolored. It also told me, with staring emphasis, when he died; which wasbut an indirect way of informing me that he ever lived. With him dwelt Fenda, hishospitable wife, who told fortunes, yet pleasantly,—large, round, and black,blacker than any of the children of night, such a dusky orb as never rose on Con-cord before or since.

Farther down the hill, on the left, on the old road in the woods, are marks ofsome homestead of the Stratton family; whose orchard once covered all the slopeof Brister’s Hill, but was long since killed out by pitch-pines, excepting a fewstumps, whose old roots furnish still the wild stocks of many a thrifty village tree.4

Nearer yet to town, you come to Breed’s location, on the other side of theway, just on the edge of the wood; ground famous for the pranks of a demon notdistinctly named in old mythology, who has acted a prominent and astoundingpart in our New England life, and deserves, as much as any mythological charac-ter, to have his biography written one day; who first comes in the guise of a friendor hired man, and then robs and murders the whole family,—New-England Rum.But history must not yet tell the tragedies enacted here; let time intervene in some

2. I.e., not the Roman statesman Cato, who died in Utica, but Cato of Concord.3. The Roman general Scipio the Elder, who defeated Hannibal, invader from Carthage, was given thehonorary name “Africanus.”4. “Surveying for Cyrus Jarvis Dec. 23 ’56—he shows me a deed of this lot containing 6 A. 52 rods allon the W. of the Wayland Road—& ‘consisting of plowland, orcharding & woodland’—sold by JosephStratton to Samuel Swan of Concord In holder Aug. 11th 1777” [Thoreau’s note].

Henry David Thoreau, Walden — Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors 281




measure to assuage and lend an azure tint to them. Here the most indistinct anddubious tradition says that once a tavern stood; the well the same, which tem-pered the traveller’s beverage and refreshed his steed. Here then men saluted oneanother, and heard and told the news, and went their ways again.

Breed’s hut was standing only a dozen years ago, though it had long been un-occupied. It was about the size of mine. It was set on fire by mischievous boys,one Election night, if I do not mistake. I lived on the edge of the village then, andhad just lost myself over Davenant’s Gondibert,5 that winter that I labored with alethargy,—which, by the way, I never knew whether to regard as a family com-plaint, having an uncle who goes to sleep shaving himself, and is obliged to sproutpotatoes in a cellar Sundays, in order to keep awake and keep the Sabbath, or asthe consequence of my attempt to read Chalmers’ collection of English poetry6

without skipping. It fairly overcame my Nervii.7 I had just sunk my head on thiswhen the bells rung fire, and in hot haste the engines rolled that way, led by astraggling troop of men and boys, and I among the foremost, for I had leaped thebrook. We thought it was far south over the woods,—we who had run to fires be-fore,—barn, shop, or dwelling-house, or all together. “It’s Baker’s barn,” criedone. “It is the Codman Place,” affirmed another. And then fresh sparks went upabove the wood, as if the roof fell in, and we all shouted “Concord to the rescue!”Wagons shot past with furious speed and crushing loads, bearing, perchance,among the rest, the agent of the Insurance Company, who was bound to go how-ever far; and ever and anon the engine bell tinkled behind, more slow and sure,and rearmost of all, as it was afterward whispered, came they who set the fire andgave the alarm. Thus we kept on like true idealists, rejecting the evidence of oursenses, until at a turn in the road we heard the crackling and actually felt the heatof the fire from over the wall, and realized, alas! that we were there. The very near-ness of the fire but cooled our ardor. At first we thought to throw a frog-pond onto it; but concluded to let it burn, it was so far gone and so worthless. So we stoodround our engine, jostled one another, expressed our sentiments through speakingtrumpets, or in lower tone referred to the great conflagrations which the worldhas witnessed, including Bascom’s shop, and, between ourselves, we thought that,were we there in season with our “tub,”8 and a full frog-pond by, we could turnthat threatened last and universal one into another flood. We finally retreated with-out doing any mischief,—returned to sleep and Gondibert. But as for Gondibert, Iwould except that passage in the preface about wit being the soul’s powder,—“butmost of mankind are strangers to wit, as Indians are to powder.”

It chanced that I walked that way across the fields the following night, aboutthe same hour, and hearing a low moaning at this spot, I drew near in the dark,and discovered the only survivor of the family that I know, the heir of both itsvirtues and its vices, who alone was interested in this burning, lying on his stom-

5. Unfinished epic by William D’Avenant (1606–1668), English dramatist and poet.6. Alexander Chalmers, The Works of the English Poets from Chaucer to Cowper (London, 1810), 21vols.7. A northern European tribe which was defeated by Julius Caesar in 57 B.C.8. A hand-drawn fire engine.

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ach and looking over the cellar wall at the still smouldering cinders beneath, mut-tering to himself, as is his wont. He had been working far off in the river mead-ows all day, and had improved the first moments that he could call his own to visitthe home of his fathers and his youth. He gazed into the cellar from all sides andpoints of view by turns, always lying down to it, as if there was some treasure,which he remembered, concealed between the stones, where there was absolutelynothing but a heap of bricks and ashes. The house being gone, he looked at whatthere was left. He was soothed by the sympathy which my mere presence implied,and showed me, as well as the darkness permitted, where the well was covered up;which, thank Heaven, could never be burned; and he groped long about the wallto find the well-sweep which his father had cut and mounted, feeling for the ironhook or staple by which a burden had been fastened to the heavy end,—all that hecould now cling to,—to convince me that it was no common “rider.”9 I felt it, andstill remark it almost daily in my walks, for by it hangs the history of a family.

Once more, on the left, where are seen the well and lilac bushes by the wall,in the now open field, lived Nutting and Le Grosse. But to return toward Lincoln.

Farther in the woods than any of these, where the road approaches nearest tothe pond, Wyman the potter squatted, and furnished his townsmen with earthenware, and left descendants to succeed him. Neither were they rich in worldlygoods, holding the land by sufferance while they lived; and there often the sheriffcame in vain to collect the taxes, and “attached a chip,”1 for form’s sake, as I haveread in his accounts, there being nothing else that he could lay his hands on. Oneday in midsummer, when I was hoeing, a man who was carrying a load of potteryto market stopped his horse against my field and inquired concerning Wyman theyounger. He had long ago bought a potter’s wheel of him, and wished to knowwhat had become of him. I had read of the potter’s clay and wheel in Scripture,but it had never occurred to me that the pots we use were not such as had comedown unbroken from those days, or grown on trees like gourds somewhere, and Iwas pleased to hear that so fictile an art was ever practised in my neighborhood.

The last inhabitant of these woods before me was an Irishman, Hugh Quoil,(if I have spelt his name with coil enough,) who occupied Wyman’s tenement,—Col. Quoil, he was called. Rumor said that he had been a soldier at Waterloo. Ifhe had lived I should have made him fight his battles over again. His trade herewas that of a ditcher. Napoleon went to St. Helena: Quoil came to Walden Woods.All I know of him is tragic. He was a man of manners, like one who had seen theworld, and was capable of more civil speech than you could well attend to. Hewore a great coat in mid-summer, being affected with the trembling delirium, andhis face was the color of carmine. He died in the road at the foot of Brister’s Hillshortly after I came to the woods, so that I have not remembered him as a neigh-bor. Before his house was pulled down, when his comrades avoided it as “an un-lucky castle,” I visited it. There lay his old clothes curled up by use, as if they werehimself, upon his raised plank bed. His pipe lay broken on the hearth instead of abowl broken at the fountain. The last could never have been the symbol of his

9. The top rail of a fence.1. Confiscated a worthless item.





death, for he confessed to me that, though he had heard of Brister’s Spring, he hadnever seen it; and soiled cards, kings of diamonds spades and hearts, were scat-tered over the floor. One black chicken which the administrator could not catch,black as night and as silent, not even croaking, awaiting Reynard, still went toroost in the next apartment. In the rear there was the dim outline of a garden,which had been planted but had never received its first hoeing, owing to those ter-rible shaking fits, though it was now harvest time. It was over-run with Romanwormwood and beggar-ticks, which last stuck to my clothes for all fruit. The skinof a woodchuck was freshly stretched upon the back of the house, a trophy of hislast Waterloo; but no warm cap or mittens would he want more.

Now only a dent in the earth marks the site of these dwellings, with buriedcellar stones, and strawberries, raspberries, thimbleberries, hazel-bushes, andsumachs growing in the sunny sward there; some pitch-pine or gnarled oak occu-pies what was the chimney nook, and a sweet-scented black-birch, perhaps, waveswhere the door-stone was. Sometimes the well dent is visible, where once a springoozed; now dry and tearless grass; or it was covered deep,—not to be discoveredtill some late day,—with a flat stone under the sod, when the last of the race de-parted. What a sorrowful act must that be,—the covering up of wells! coincidentwith the opening of wells of tears. These cellar dents, like deserted fox burrows,old holes, are all that is left where once were the stir and bustle of human life, and“fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute,”2 in some form and dialect or other wereby turns discussed. But all I can learn of their conclusions amounts to just this,that “Cato and Brister pulled wool”;3 which is about as edifying as the history ofmore famous schools of philosophy.

Still grows the vivacious lilac a generation after the door and lintel and the sillare gone, unfolding its sweet-scented flowers each spring, to be plucked by themusing traveller; planted and tended once by children’s hands, in front-yardplots,—now standing by wall-sides in retired pastures, and giving place to new-rising forests;—the last of that stirp, sole survivor of that family. Little did thedusky children think that the puny slip with its two eyes only, which they stuck inthe ground in the shadow of the house and daily watered, would root itself so,and outlive them, and house itself in the rear that shaded it, and grown man’s gar-den and orchard, and tell their story faintly to the lone wanderer a half centuryafter they had grown up and died,—blossoming as fair, and smelling as sweet, asin that first spring. I mark its still tender, civil, cheerful, lilac colors.

But this small village, germ of something more, why did it fail while Concordkeeps its ground? Were there no natural advantages,—no water privileges, for-sooth? Ay, the deep Walden Pond and cool Brister’s Spring,—privilege to drinklong and healthy droughts at these, all unimproved by these men but to dilute theirglass. They were universally a thirsty race. Might not the basket, stable-broom, mat-making, corn-parching, linen-spinning, and pottery business have thrived here,making the wilderness to blossom like the rose, and a numerous posterity have in-herited the land of their fathers? The sterile soil would at least have been proof

2. Milton, Paradise Lost, II, 554.3. I.e., performed menial tasks.

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against a low-land degeneracy. Alas! how little does the memory of these humaninhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape! Again, perhaps, Nature will try,with me for a first settler, and my house raised last spring to be the oldest in thehamlet.

I am not aware that any man has ever built on the spot which I occupy. De-liver me from a city built on the site of a more ancient city, whose materials areruins, whose gardens cemeteries. The soil is blanched and accursed there, and be-fore that becomes necessary the earth itself will be destroyed. With such reminis-cences I repeopled the woods and lulled myself asleep.

At this season I seldom had a visitor. When the snow lay deepest no wandererventured near my house for a week or fortnight at a time, but there I lived as snugas a meadow mouse, or as cattle and poultry which are said to have survived for along time buried in drifts, even without food; or like that early settler’s family inthe town of Sutton, in this state, whose cottage was completely covered by the greatsnow of 1717 when he was absent, and an Indian found it only by the hole whichthe chimney’s breath made in the drift, and so relieved the family. But no friendlyIndian concerned himself about me; nor needed he, for the master of the house wasat home. The Great Snow! How cheerful it is to hear of! When the farmers couldnot get to the woods and swamps with their teams, and were obliged to cut downthe shade trees before their houses, and when the crust was harder cut off the treesin the swamps ten feet from the ground, as it appeared the next spring.

In the deepest snows, the path which I used from the highway to my house,about half a mile long, might have been represented by a meandering dotted line,with wide intervals between the dots. For a week of even weather I took exactlythe same number of steps, and of the same length, coming and going, stepping de-liberately and with the precision of a pair of dividers in my own deep tracks,—tosuch routine the winter reduces us,—yet often they were filled with heaven’s ownblue. But no weather interfered fatally with my walks, or rather my going abroad,for I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep anappointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow-birch, or an old acquaintance amongthe pines; when the ice and snow causing their limbs to droop and so sharpeningtheir tops had changed the pines into fir-trees; wading to the tops of the highesthills when the snow was nearly two feet deep on the level, and shaking down an-other snow-storm on my head at every step; or sometimes creeping and flounder-ing thither on my hands and knees, when the hunters had gone into winterquarters. One afternoon I amused myself by watching a barrel owl (Strix nebu-losa) sitting on one of the lower dead limbs of a white-pine, close to the trunk, inbroad daylight, I standing within a rod of him. He could hear me when I movedand cronched the snow with my feet, but could not plainly see me. When I mademost noise he would stretch out his neck, and erect his neck feathers, and open hiseyes wide; but their lids soon fell again, and he began to nod. I too felt a slumber-ous influence after watching him half an hour, as he sat thus with his eyes halfopen, like a cat, winged brother of the cat. There was only a narrow slit left be-tween their lids, by which he preserved a peninsular relation to me; thus, withhalf-shut eyes, looking out from the land of dreams, and endeavoring to realizeme, vague object or mote that interrupted his visions. At length, on some loudernoise or my nearer approach, he would grow uneasy and sluggishly turn about on





his perch, as if impatient at having his dreams disturbed; and when he launchedhimself off and flapped through the pines, spreading his wings to unexpectedbreadth, I could not hear the slightest sound from them. Thus, guided amid thepine boughs rather by a delicate sense of their neighborhood than by sight, feelinghis twilight way as it were with his sensitive pinions, he found a new perch, wherehe might in peace await the dawning of his day.

As I walked over the long causeway made for the railroad through the mead-ows, I encountered many a blustering and nipping wind, for nowhere has it freerplay; and when the frost had smitten me on one cheek, heathen as I was, I turnedto it the other also. Nor was it much better by the carriage road from Brister’s Hill.For I came to town still, like a friendly Indian, when the contents of the broad openfields were all piled up between the walls of the Walden road, and half an hour suf-ficed to obliterate the tracks of the last traveller. And when I returned new driftswould have formed, through which I floundered, where the busy north-west windhad been depositing the powdery snow round a sharp angle in the road, and not arabbit’s track, nor even the fine print, the small type, of a meadow (deer) mousewas to be seen. Yet I rarely failed to find, even in mid-winter, some warm andspringy swamp where the grass and the skunk-cabbage still put forth with peren-nial verdure, and some hardier bird occasionally awaited the return of spring.

Sometimes, notwithstanding the snow, when I returned from my walk atevening I crossed the deep tracks of a woodchopper leading from my door, andfound his pile of whittlings on the hearth, and my house filled with the odor of hispipe. Or on a Sunday afternoon, if I chanced to be at home, I heard the cronchingof the snow made by the step of a long-headed farmer, who from far through thewoods sought my house, to have a social “crack;” one of the few of his vocationwho are “men on their farms;” who donned a frock instead of professor’s gown,and is as ready to extract the moral out of church or state as to haul a load of ma-nure from his barn-yard. We talked of rude and simple times, when men sat aboutlarge fires in cold bracing weather, with clear heads; and when other dessert failed,we tried our teeth on many a nut which wise squirrels have long since abandoned,for those which have the thickest shells are commonly empty.

The one who came from farthest to my lodge, through deepest snows andmost dismal tempests, was a poet.4 A farmer, a hunter, a soldier, a reporter, even aphilosopher, may be daunted; but nothing can deter a poet, for he is actuated bypure love. Who can predict his comings and goings? His business calls him out atall hours, even when doctors sleep. We made that small house ring with boisterousmirth and resound with the murmur of much sober talk, making amends then toWalden vale for the long silences. Broadway was still and deserted in comparison.At suitable intervals there were regular salutes of laughter, which might have beenreferred indifferently to the last uttered or the forthcoming jest. We made many a“bran new” theory of life over a thin dish of gruel, which combined the advan-tages of conviviality with the clear-headedness which philosophy requires.

I should not forget that during my last winter at the pond there was anotherwelcome visitor,5 who at one time came through the village, through snow and

4. William Ellery Channing the younger.5. Amos Bronson Alcott (1799–1888), transcendentalist and educator.

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rain and darkness, till he saw my lamp through the trees, and shared with me somelong winter evenings. One of the last of the philosophers,—Connecticut gave himto the world,—he peddled first her wares, afterwards, as he declares, his brains.These he peddles still, prompting God and disgracing man, bearing for fruit hisbrain only, like the nut its kernel. I think that he must be the man of the most faithof any alive. His words and attitude always suppose a better state of things thanother men are acquainted with, and he will be the last man to be disappointed asthe ages revolve. He has no venture in the present. But though comparatively dis-regarded now, when his day comes, laws unsuspected by most will take effect, andmasters of families and rulers will come to him for advice.—

“How blind that cannot see serenity!”

A true friend of man; almost the only friend of human progress. An Old Mortal-ity,6 say rather an Immortality, with unwearied patience and faith making plainthe image engraven in men’s bodies, the God of whom they are but defaced andleaning monuments. With his hospitable intellect he embraces children, beggars,insane, and scholars, and entertains the thought of all, adding to it commonlysome breadth and elegance. I think that he should keep a caravansary on theworld’s highway, where philosophers of all nations might put up, and on his signshould be printed, “Entertainment for man, but not for his beast. Enter ye thathave leisure and a quiet mind, who earnestly seek the right road.” He is perhapsthe sanest man and has the fewest crotchets of any I chance to know; the sameyesterday and tomorrow. Of yore we had sauntered and talked, and effectuallyput the world behind us; for he was pledged to no institution in it, freeborn, in-genuus.7 Whichever way we turned, it seemed that the heavens and the earth hadmet together, since he enhanced the beauty of the landscape. A blue-robed man,whose fittest roof is the overarching sky which reflects his serenity. I do not seehow he can ever die; Nature cannot spare him.

Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and whittled them,trying our knives, and admiring the clear yellowish grain of the pumpkin pine. Wewaded so gently and reverently, or we pulled together so smoothly, that the fishesof thought were not scared from the stream, nor feared any angler on the bank,but came and went grandly, like the clouds which float through the western sky,and the mother-o’-pearl flocks which sometimes form and dissolve there. Therewe worked, revising mythology, rounding a fable here and there, and buildingcastles in the air for which earth offered no worthy foundation. Great Looker!Great Expecter! to converse with whom was a New England Night’s Entertain-ment. Ah! such discourse we had, hermit and philosopher, and the old settler Ihave spoken of,—we three,—it expanded and racked my little house; I should notdare to say how many pounds’ weight there was above the atmospheric pressureon every circular inch; it opened its seams so that they had to be calked with muchdulness thereafter to stop the consequent leak;—but I had enough of that kind ofoakum already picked.

6. Referring to the conduct of the leading character of Old Mortality, a novel by Sir Walter Scott.7. Latin: freeborn.





There was one other8 with whom I had “solid seasons,” long to be remem-bered, at his house in the village, and who looked in upon me from time to time;but I had no more for society there.

There too, as every where, I sometimes expected the Visitor who never comes.The Vishnu Purana9 says, “The house-holder is to remain at eventide in his court-yard as long as it takes to milk a cow, or longer if he pleases, to await the arrivalof a guest.” I often performed this duty of hospitality, waited long enough to milka whole herd of cows, but did not see the man approaching from the town.1846 1854

8. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), Thoreau’s neighbor, friend, and mentor.9. A Hindu scripture.

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Henry David Thoreau Civil Disobedience © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2007

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Civil Disobedience1

I heartily accept the motto,—“That government is best which governs least;”2 andI should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, itfinally amounts to this, which also I believe,—“That government is best which gov-erns not at all;” and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of govern-ment which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but mostgovernments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The ob-jections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many andweighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing gov-ernment. The standing army is only an arm of the standing government. The gov-ernment itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to executetheir will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can actthrough it. Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a fewindividuals3 using the standing government as their tool; for, in the outset, thepeople would not have consented to this measure.

This American government,—what is it but a tradition, though a recent one,endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing someof its integrity? It has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a singleman can bend it to his will. It is a sort of wooden gun to the people themselves.But it is not the less necessary for this; for the people must have some complicatedmachinery or other, and hear its din, to satisfy that idea of government which theyhave. Governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed on, even im-pose on themselves, for their own advantage. It is excellent, we must all allow. Yetthis government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity withwhich it got out of its way. It does not keep the country free. It does not settle theWest. It does not educate. The character inherent in the American people has doneall that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if thegovernment had not sometimes got in its way. For government is an expedient bywhich men would fain succeed in letting one another alone; and, as has been said,when it is most expedient, the governed are most let alone by it. Trade and com-

1. “Civil Disobedience” was neglected for more than half a century, although it formulates democraticideas inherent in Walden. Thoreau believed, and demonstrated by example, that if government, respond-ing to expediency or majority pressures, infringes upon the fundamental freedom of thought or choice ofmoral alternatives of the individual or the minority, the remedy is nonviolent, or pacific, resistance. Re-cently these ideas have had increasing attention wherever rising population and industrial pressures en-danger the preservation of democratic individualism. More strikingly, through its influence on MahatmaGandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., the essay became associated with movements of incalculable signifi-cance. This essay first appeared in the anthology Aesthetic Essays (1849), edited by Elizabeth Palmer Pea-body, transcendentalist bookseller in Boston. There it was titled “Resistance to Civil Government.” Underits present title it appeared in the posthumous collections A Yankee in Canada (1866) and Miscellanies(1893).2. These words echo Paine and Jefferson; the belief that government was a social contract sanctionedonly by necessity was an active influence during the Revolution and the Constitutional Convention.3. The war was regarded by Northern reformers as resulting primarily from the selfish interest of South-ern politicians and Northern cotton merchants in extending slave territory.

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merce, if they were not made of india-rubber, would never manage to bounce overthe obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way; and, if onewere to judge these men wholly by the effects of their actions and not partly bytheir intentions, they would deserve to be classed and punished with those mis-chievous persons who put obstructions on the railroads.

But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselvesno-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a bettergovernment. Let every man make known what kind of government would com-mand his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.

After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of thepeople, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule is not be-cause they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to theminority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in whichthe majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men under-stand it. Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually de-cide right and wrong, but conscience?4—in which majorities decide only thosequestions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever fora moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why hasevery man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects af-terward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for theright. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time whatI think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but acorporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. Law nevermade men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. A common and natural result ofan undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain,corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order overhill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense andconsciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpita-tion of the heart. They have no doubt that it is damnable business in which theyare concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? orsmall movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man inpower? Visit the Navy-Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an Americangovernment can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts,—a mereshadow and reminiscene of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and al-ready, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments, though itmay be,—

“Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,As his corse to the rampart we hurried;

Not a soldier discharged his farewell shotO’er the grave where our hero we buried.”5

4. Recalling a principal controversy of the Constitutional Convention, where the conservative minority,represented by Hamilton and Adams, were overcome by the Jeffersonians, who favored majority rule.5. Charles Wolfe (1791–1823), Irish clergyman who died at thirty-two, won several decades of remem-brance by his “Burial of Sir John Moore at Coruna” (1817), of which this is the opening.

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The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines,with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables,posse comitatus,6 etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judg-ment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood andearth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will servethe purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lumpof dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such asthese even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others—as most legislators,politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders—serve the state chiefly with theirheads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to servethe devil, without intending it, as God. A very few,—as heroes, patriots, martyrs,reformers in the great sense, and men—serve the state with their consciences also,and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as en-emies by it. A wise man will only be useful as a man, and will not submit to be“clay,” and “stop a hole to keep the wind away,”7 but leave that office to his dustat least:—

“I am too high-born to be propertied,To be a secondary at control,Or useful serving-man and instrumentTo any sovereign state throughout the world.”8

He who gives himself entirely to his fellow-men appears to them useless andselfish; but he who gives himself partially to them is pronounced a benefactor andphilanthropist.

How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.9 I cannot foran instant recognize that political organization as my government which is theslave’s government also.

All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegianceto, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great andunendurable. But almost all say that such is not the case now. But such was thecase, they think, in the Revolution of ’75. If one were to tell me that this was abad government because it taxed certain foreign commodities brought to its ports,it is most probable that I should not make an ado about it, for I can do withoutthem. All machines have their friction; and possibly this does enough good tocounterbalance the evil. At any rate, it is a great evil to make a stir about it. Butwhen the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are or-ganized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer. In other words, when asixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of lib-erty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a for-

6. Legal Latin, meaning “having the authority of the county”; cf. the sheriff’s “posse.”7. Cf. Shakespeare, Hamlet, V, i, 236–237.8. Cf. Shakespeare, King John, V, ii, 79–82.9. Many accused Polk’s administration (1845– 1849) of strengthening slavery through fugitive-slavelaws and the Mexican War.




eign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honestmen to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the factthat the country1 so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.

Paley,2 a common authority with many on moral questions, in his chapter onthe “Duty of Submission to Civil Government,” resolves all civil obligation intoexpediency; and he proceeds to say “that so long as the interest of the whole soci-ety requires it, that is, so long as the established government cannot be resisted orchanged without public inconveniency, it is the will of God . . . that the estab-lished government be obeyed,—and no longer. This principle being admitted, thejustice of every particular case of resistance is reduced to a computation of thequantity of the danger and grievance on the one side, and of the probability andexpense of redressing it on the other.” Of this, he says, every man shall judge forhimself. But Paley appears never to have contemplated those cases to which therule of expediency does not apply, in which a people, as well as an individual,must do justice, cost what it may. If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drown-ing man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself. This, according to Paley,would be inconvenient. But he that would save his life, in such a case, shall loseit.3 This people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though itcost them their existence as a people.

In their practice, nations agree with Paley; but does any one think that Mas-sachusetts does exactly what is right at the present crisis?

“A drab of state, a cloth-o’-silver slut,To have her train borne up, and her soul trail in the dirt.”

Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are not a hun-dred thousand politicians at the South, but a hundred thousand merchants andfarmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they arein humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico, costwhat it may. I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home,coöperate with, and do the bidding of, those far away, and without whom the lat-ter would be harmless. We are accustomed to say, that the mass of men are unpre-pared; but improvement is slow, because the few are not materially wiser or betterthan the many. It is not so important that many should be as good as you, as thatthere be some absolute goodness somewhere; for that will leaven the whole lump.4

There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, whoyet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming themselves childrenof Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and saythat they know not what to do, and do nothing; who even postpone the questionof freedom to the question of free trade, and quietly read the prices-current alongwith the latest advices from Mexico, after dinner, and, it may be, fall asleep overthem both. What is the price-current of an honest man and patriot to-day? They

1. Mexico.2. William Paley (1743–1805), British thinker, whose utilitarianism motivates this quotation from hisPrinciples of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785).3. Cf. Luke 9:24.4. Cf. 1 Corinthians 5:6.

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hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing inearnest and with effect. They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy theevil, that they may no longer have it to regret. At most, they give only a cheapvote, and a feeble countenance and God-speed, to the right, as it goes by them.There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man.But it is easier to deal with the real possessor of a thing than with the temporaryguardian of it.

All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slightmoral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and bet-ting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked. I cast myvote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that rightshould prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore,never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it.It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise manwill not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through thepower of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be becausethey are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abol-ished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his vote can hasten theabolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote.

I hear of a convention to be held at Baltimore,5 or elsewhere, for the selectionof a candidate for the Presidency, made up chiefly of editors, and men who arepoliticians by profession; but I think, what is it to any independent, intelligent,and respectable man what decision they may come to? Shall we not have the ad-vantage of his wisdom and honesty, nevertheless? Can we not count upon someindependent votes? Are there not many individuals in the country who do not at-tend conventions? But no: I find that the respectable man, so called, has immedi-ately drifted from his position, and despairs of his country, when his country hasmore reason to despair of him. He forthwith adopts one of the candidates thus se-lected as the only available one, thus proving that he is himself available for anypurposes of the demagogue. His vote is of not more worth than that of any un-principled foreigner or hireling native, who may have been bought. O for a manwho is a man, and, as my neighbor says, has a bone in his back which you cannotpass your hand through! Our statistics are at fault: the population has been re-turned too large. How many men are there to a square thousand miles in this coun-try? Hardly one. Does not America offer any inducement for men to settle here?The American has dwindled into an Odd Fellow,6—one who may be known bythe development of his organ of gregariousness, and a manifest lack of intellectand cheerful self-reliance; whose first and chief concern, on coming into the world,is to see that the almshouses are in good repair; and, before yet he has lawfullydonned the virile garb,7 to collect a fund for the support of the widows and or-

5. The Democratic convention at Baltimore, in May 1848, fulfilled Thoreau’s prediction of expediencyin its platform and in its man, Lewis Cass, “a northern man with southern principles.”6. The Independent Order of Odd Fellows, one of numerous secret fraternal societies then being devel-oped for social diversion and mutual insurance.7. Cf. the toga virilis, which the Roman boy was permitted to wear on attaining the age of fourteen.




phans that may be; who, in short, ventures to live only by the aid of the MutualInsurance company, which has promised to bury him decently.

It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradica-tion of any, even the most enormous, wrong; he may still properly have other con-cerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if hegives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. If I devote myselfto other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursuethem sitting upon another man’s shoulders. I must get off him first, that he maypursue his contemplations too. See what gross inconsistency is tolerated. I haveheard some of my townsmen say, “I should like to have them order me out to helpput down an insurrection of the slaves, or to march to Mexico;—see if I wouldgo;” and yet these very men have each, directly by their allegiance, and so indi-rectly, at least, by their money, furnished a substitute. The soldier is applaudedwho refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to sustain theunjust government which makes the war; is applauded by those whose own actand authority he disregards and sets at naught; as if the state were penitent to thatdegree that it hired one to scourge it while it sinned, but not to that degree that itleft off sinning for a moment. Thus, under the name of Order and Civil Govern-ment, we are all made at last to pay homage to and support our own meanness.After the first blush of sin comes its indifference; and from immoral it becomes, asit were, unmoral, and not quite unnecessary to that life which we have made.

The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtueto sustain it. The slight reproach to which the virtue of patriotism is commonlyliable, the noble are most likely to incur. Those who, while they disapprove of thecharacter and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and support,are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently the mostserious obstacles to reform. Some are petitioning the State to dissolve the Union,to disregard the requisitions of the President. Why do they not dissolve it them-selves,—the union between themselves and the State,—and refuse to pay theirquota into its treasury? Do not they stand in the same relation to the State thatthe State does to the Union? And have not the same reasons prevented the Statefrom resisting the Union which have prevented them from resisting the State?

How can a man be satisfied to entertain an opinion merely, and enjoy it? Isthere any enjoyment in it, if his opinion is that he is aggrieved? If you are cheatedout of a single dollar by your neighbor, you do not rest satisfied with knowingthat you are cheated, or with saying that you are cheated, or even with petitioninghim to pay you your due; but you take effectual steps at once to obtain the fullamount, and see that you are never cheated again. Action from principle, the per-ception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentiallyrevolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. It not onlydivides States and churches, it divides families; ay, it divides the individual, sepa-rating the diabolical in him from the divine.

Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor toamend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress themat once? Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought towait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if theyshould resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of thegovernment itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is

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it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish itswise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not en-courage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and do better than itwould have them? Why does it always crucify Christ, and excommunicate Coper-nicus and Luther,8 and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?

One would think, that a deliberate and practical denial of its authority wasthe only offense never contemplated by government; else, why has it not assignedits definite, its suitable and proportionate penalty? If a man who has no propertyrefuses but once to earn nine shillings for the State, he is put in prison for a periodunlimited by any law that I know, and determined only by the discretion of thosewho placed him there; but if he should steal ninety times nine shillings from theState, he is soon permitted to go at large again.

If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government,let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth,—certainly the machine will wearout. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively foritself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse thanthe evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injusticeto another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop themachine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to thewrong which I condemn.

As for adopting the ways which the State has provided for remedying the evil,I know not of such ways. They take too much time, and a man’s life will be gone.I have other affairs to attend to. I came into this world, not chiefly to make this agood place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad. A man has not everythingto do, but something; and because he cannot do everything, it is not necessary thathe should do something wrong. It is not my business to be petitioning the Gover-nor or the Legislature any more than it is theirs to petition me; and if they shouldnot hear my petition, what should I do then? But in this case the State has pro-vided no way: its very Constitution is the evil. This may seem to be harsh andstubborn and unconciliatory; but it is to treat with the utmost kindness and con-sideration the only spirit that can appreciate or deserves it. So is all change for thebetter, like birth and death, which convulse the body.

I do not hesitate to say, that those who call themselves Abolitionists should atonce effectually withdraw their support, both in person and property, from thegovernment of Massachusetts, and not wait till they constitute a majority of one,before they suffer the right to prevail through them. I think that it is enough ifthey have God on their side, without waiting for that other one.9 Moreover, anyman more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.

I meet this American government, or its representative, the State government,directly, and face to face, once a year—no more—in the person of its tax-gatherer;this is the only mode in which a man situated as I am necessarily meets it; and itthen says distinctly, Recognize me; and the simplest, the most effectual, and, in the

8. Copernicus was on his deathbed (1543) when his description of the solar system was published, laterto come under the ban of the Church; but Luther, the founder of the German Reformation, was offi-cially excommunicated in 1521, twenty-five years before his death.9. Cf. the proverb, “One on God’s side is a majority.”




present posture of affairs, the indispensablest mode of treating with it on this head,of expressing your little satisfaction with and love for it, is to deny it then. My civilneighbor, the tax-gatherer, is the very man I have to deal with,—for it is, after all,with men and not with parchment that I quarrel,—and he has voluntarily chosento be an agent of the government. How shall he ever know well what he is anddoes as an officer of the government, or as a man, until he is obliged to considerwhether he shall treat me, his neighbor, for whom he has respect, as a neighborand well-disposed man, or as a maniac and disturber of the peace, and see if he canget over this obstruction to his neighborliness without a ruder and more impetuousthought or speech corresponding with his action. I know this well, that if one thou-sand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I could name,—if ten honest men only,—ay,if one HONEST man, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were ac-tually to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county jailtherefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America.1 For it matters not howsmall the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done forever. But welove better to talk about it: that we say is our mission. Reform keeps many scoresof newspapers in its service, but not one man. If my esteemed neighbor, the State’sambassador,2 who will devote his days to the settlement of the question of humanrights in the Council Chamber, instead of being threatened with the prisons of Car-olina, were to sit down the prisoner of Massachusetts, that State which is so anx-ious to foist the sin of slavery upon her sister,—though at present she can discoveronly an act of inhospitality to be the ground of a quarrel with her,—the Legislaturewould not wholly waive the subject the following winter.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a justman is also a prison. The proper place to-day, the only place which Massachusettshas provided for her freer and less desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be putout and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already put them-selves out by their principles. It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexicanprisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race shouldfind them; on that separate, but more free and honorable ground, where the Stateplaces those who are not with her, but against her,—the only house in a slave State inwhich a free man can abide with honor. If any think that their influence would belost there, and their voices no longer afflict the ear of the State, that they wouldnot be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know by how much truth isstronger than error, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combatinjustice who has experienced a little in his own person. Cast your whole vote, nota strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while itconforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible whenit clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, orgive up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand

1. An example of the operation of passive resistance, the doctrine for which Gandhi acknowledged in-debtedness to Thoreau, later followed also by Martin Luther King, Jr.2. Samuel Hoar (1778–1856), distinguished Concord lawyer and congressman, was officially delegatedto South Carolina to test certain laws denying the ports to black seamen on Massachusetts ships, underpenalty of arrest and possible enslavement. Hoar was forcibly expelled from South Carolina by actionof the legislature.

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men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent andbloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit vio-lence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revo-lution, if any such is possible. If the tax-gatherer, or any other public officer, asksme, as one has done, “But what shall I do?” my answer is, “If you really wish todo anything, resign your office.” When the subject has refused allegiance, and theofficer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished. But even sup-pose blood should flow. Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience iswounded? Through this wound a man’s real manhood and immortality flow out,and he bleeds to an everlasting death. I see this blood flowing now.

I have contemplated the imprisonment of the offender, rather than the seizureof his goods,—though both will serve the same purpose,—because they who assertthe purest right, and consequently are most dangerous to a corrupt State, com-monly have not spent much time in accumulating property. To such the State ren-ders comparatively small service, and a slight tax is wont to appear exorbitant,particularly if they are obliged to earn it by special labor3 with their hands. If therewere one who lived wholly without the use of money, the State itself would hesi-tate to demand it of him. But the rich man—not to make any invidious compari-son—is always sold to the institution which makes him rich. Absolutely speaking,the more money, the less virtue; for money comes between a man and his objects,and obtains them for him; and it was certainly no great virtue to obtain it. It putsto rest many questions which he would otherwise be taxed to answer; while theonly new question which it puts is the hard but superfluous one, how to spend it.Thus his moral ground is taken from under his feet. The opportunities of livingare diminished in proportion as what are called the “means” are increased. Thebest thing a man can do for his culture when he is rich is to endeavor to carry outthose schemes which he entertained when he was poor. Christ answered the Hero-dians according to their condition. “Show me the tribute-money,” said he;—andtook one penny out of his pocket;—if you use money which has the image of Cae-sar on it and which he has made current and valuable, that is, if you are men ofthe State, and gladly enjoy the advantages of Caesar’s government, then pay himback some of his own when he demands it. “Render therefore to Caesar that whichis Caesar’s, and to God those things which are God’s,”4—leaving them no wiserthan before as to which was which; for they did not wish to know.

When I converse with the freest of my neighbors, I perceive that, whateverthey may say about the magnitude and seriousness of the question, and their re-gard for the public tranquillity, the long and the short of the matter is, that theycannot spare the protection of the existing government, and they dread the conse-quences to their property and families of disobedience to it. For my own part,I should not like to think that I ever rely on the protection of the State. But, ifI deny the authority of the State when it presents its tax-bill, it will soon take andwaste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end. This is

3. Referring to his stand against the Massachusetts church tax and poll tax, assessed againstall males.4. Cf. Matthew 22:16–21.




hard. This makes it impossible for a man to live honestly, and at the same timecomfortably, in outward respects. It will not be worth the while to accumulateproperty; that would be sure to go again. You must hire or squat somewhere, andraise but a small crop, and eat that soon. You must live within yourself, and de-pend upon yourself always tucked up and ready for a start, and not have many af-fairs. A man may grow rich in Turkey even, if he will be in all respects a goodsubject of the Turkish government. Confucius5 said: “If a state is governed by theprinciples of reason, poverty and misery are subjects of shame; if a state is notgoverned by the principles of reason, riches and honors are the subjects of shame.”No: until I want the protection of Massachusetts to be extended to me in somedistant Southern port, where my liberty is endangered, or until I am bent solely onbuilding up an estate at home by peaceful enterprise, I can afford to refuse alle-giance to Massachusetts, and her right to my property and life. It costs me less inevery sense to incur the penalty of disobedience to the State than it would to obey.I should feel as if I were worth less in that case.

Some years ago, the State met me in behalf of the Church, and commandedme to pay a certain sum toward the support of a clergyman whose preaching myfather attended, but never I myself. “Pay,” it said, “or be locked up in the jail.”6 Ideclined to pay. But, unfortunately, another man saw fit to pay it. I did not seewhy the schoolmaster should be taxed to support the priest, and not the priest theschoolmaster; for I was not the State’s schoolmaster, but I supported myself byvoluntary subscription. I did not see why the lyceum should not present its tax-bill, and have the State to back its demand, as well as the Church. However, at therequest of the select men, I condescended to make some such statement as this inwriting:—“Know all men by these presents, that I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish tobe regarded as a member of any incorporated society which I have not joined.”This I gave to the town clerk; and he has it. The State, having thus learned that Idid not wish to be regarded as a member of that church, has never made a like de-mand on me since; though it said that it must adhere to its original presumptionthat time. If I had known how to name them, I should then have signed off in de-tail from all the societies which I never signed on to; but I did not know where tofind a complete list.

I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account,for one night;7 and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or threefeet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating whichstrained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institu-tion which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be lockedup. I wondered that it should have concluded at length that this was the best use itcould put me to, and had never thought to avail itself of my services in some way.

5. Confucius (551?–479? B.C.) was primarily a utilitarian and social philosopher; his formulation of Chi-nese “wisdom,” preserved in the Analects, was familiar in translation to the transcendentalists.6. Thoreau’s resistance to compulsory church taxes occurred in 1838, and he was not jailed. The failureto comply with the poll tax probably began in 1840.7. Bronson Alcott had resisted the tax and been jailed for one night in 1843. The fundamental reasonfor resistance, for both men, was repugnance at supporting a state that recognized slavery, as Massachu-setts still did in legal fact. H. S. Canby in his Thoreau (p. 473) dates Thoreau’s experience in jail as July23 or 24, 1846.

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I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was astill more difficult one to climb or break through before they could get to be asfree as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a greatwaste of stone and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax.They plainly did not know how to treat me, but behaved like persons who are un-derbred. In every threat and in every compliment there was a blunder; for theythought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall. I couldnot but smile to see how industriously they locked the door on my meditations,which followed them out again without let or hindrance, and they were really allthat was dangerous. As they could not reach me, they had resolved to punish mybody; just as boys, if they cannot come at some person against whom they have aspite, will abuse his dog. I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid asa lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from itsfoes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it.

Thus the State never intentionally confronts a man’s sense, intellectual ormoral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty,but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breatheafter my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude?They only can force me who obey a higher law than I. They force me to becomelike themselves. I do not hear of men being forced to live this way or that by massesof men. What sort of life were that to live? When I meet a government which saysto me, “Your money or your life,” why should I be in haste to give it my money?It may be in a great strait, and not know what to do: I cannot help that. It musthelp itself; do as I do. It is not worth the while to snivel about it.I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society. I amnot the son of the engineer. I perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall sideby side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obeytheir own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can, till one, per-chance, overshadows and destroys the other. If a plant cannot live according to itsnature, it dies; and so a man.

The night in prison was novel and interesting enough. The prisoners in theirshirt-sleeves were enjoying a chat and the evening air in the doorway, when I en-tered. But the jailer said, “Come, boys, it is time to lock up;” and so they dis-persed, and I heard the sound of their steps returning into the hollow apartments.My room-mate was introduced to me by the jailer as “a first-rate fellow and aclever8 man.” When the door was locked, he showed me where to hang my hat,and how he managed matters there. The rooms were white-washed once a month;and this one, at least, was the whitest, most simply furnished, and probably theneatest apartment in the town. He naturally wanted to know where I came from,and what brought me there; and, when I had told him, I asked him in my turnhow he came there, presuming him to be an honest man, of course; and, as theworld goes, I believe he was. “Why,” said he, “they accuse me of burning a barn;but I never did it.” As near as I could discover, he had probably gone to bed in abarn when drunk, and smoked his pipe there; and so a barn was burnt. He had

8. American dialect for “honest,” “kind.”




the reputation of being a clever man, had been there some three months waitingfor his trial to come on, and would have to wait as much longer; but he was quitedomesticated and contented, since he got his board for nothing, and thought thathe was well treated.

He occupied one window, and I the other; and I saw that if one stayed therelong, his principal business would be to look out the window. I had soon read allthe tracts that were left there, and examined where former prisoners had brokenout, and where a grate had been sawed off, and heard the history of the variousoccupants of that room; for I found that even here there was a history and a gos-sip which never circulated beyond the walls of the jail. Probably this is the onlyhouse in the town where verses are composed, which are afterward printed in cir-cular form, but not published. I was shown quite a long list of verses which werecomposed by some young men who had been detected in an attempt to escape,who avenged themselves by singing them.

I pumped my fellow-prisoner as dry as I could, for fear I should never seehim again; but at length he showed me which was my bed, and left me to blowout the lamp.

It was like traveling into a far country, such as I had never expected to behold,to lie there for one night. It seemed to me that I never had heard the town clockstrike before, nor the evening sounds of the village; for we slept with the windowsopen, which were inside the grating. It was to see my native village in the light ofthe Middle Ages, and our Concord was turned into a Rhine stream, and visions ofknights and castles passed before me. They were the voices of old burghers that Iheard in the streets. I was an involuntary spectator and auditor of whatever wasdone and said in the kitchen of the adjacent village-inn,—a wholly new and rareexperience to me. It was a closer view of my native town. I was fairly inside of it.I never had seen its institutions before. This is one of the peculiar institutions; for itis a shire town. I began to comprehend what its inhabitants were about.

In the morning, our breakfasts were put through the hole in the door, in smalloblong-square tin pans, made to fit, and holding a pint of chocolate, with brownbread, and an iron spoon. When they called for the vessels again, I was greenenough to return what bread I had left; but my comrade seized it, and said that Ishould lay that up for lunch or dinner. Soon after he was let out to work at hayingin a neighboring field, whither he went every day, and would not be back till noon;so he bade me good-day, saying that he doubted if he should see me again.

When I came out of prison,—for some one interfered, and paid that tax,9—Idid not perceive that great changes had taken place on the common, such as heobserved who went in a youth and emerged a tottering and gray-headed man; andyet a change had to my eyes come over the scene,—the town, and State, and coun-try,—greater than any that mere time could effect. I saw yet more distinctly theState in which I lived. I saw to what extent the people among whom I lived couldbe trusted as good neighbors and friends; that their friendship was for summerweather only; that they did not greatly propose to do right; that they were a dis-

9. It is legendary but unlikely that Emerson paid the tax. Family reminiscence ascribed the deed to hisAunt Maria.

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tinct race from me by their prejudices and superstitions, as the Chinamen andMalays are; that in their sacrifices to humanity they ran no risks, not even to theirproperty; that after all they were not so noble but they treated the thief as he hadtreated them, and hoped, by a certain outward observance and a few prayers, andby walking in a particular straight though useless path from time to time, to savetheir souls. This may be to judge my neighbors harshly; for I believe that many ofthem are not aware that they have such an institution as the jail in their village.

It was formerly the custom in our village, when a poor debtor came out of jail,for his acquaintances to salute him, looking through their fingers, which werecrossed to represent the grating of a jail window, “How do ye do?” My neighborsdid not thus salute me, but first looked at me, and then at one another, as if I hadreturned from a long journey. I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker’sto get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceededto finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberryparty, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half anhour,—for the horse was soon tackled,—was in the midst of a huckleberry field, onone of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.

This is the whole history of “My Prisons.”1

I have never declined paying the highway tax, because I am as desirous of beinga good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject; and as for supporting schools, I amdoing my part to educate my fellow-countrymen now. It is for no particular item inthe tax-bill that I refuse to pay it. I simply wish to refuse allegiance to the State, towithdraw and stand aloof from it effectually. I do not care to trace the course ofmy dollar, if I could, till it buys a man or a musket to shoot one with,—the dollar isinnocent,—but I am concerned to trace the effects of my allegiance. In fact, I qui-etly declare war with the State, after my fashion, though I will still make what useand get what advantage of her I can, as is usual in such cases.

If others pay the tax which is demanded of me, from a sympathy with theState, they do but what they have already done in their own case, or rather theyabet injustice to a greater extent than the State requires. If they pay the tax from amistaken interest in the individual taxed, to save his property, or prevent his goingto jail, it is because they have not considered wisely how far they let their privatefeelings interfere with the public good.

This, then, is my position at present. But one cannot be too much on his guardin such a case, lest his action be biased by obstinancy or an undue regard forthe opinions of men. Let him see that he does only what belongs to himself and tothe hour.

I think sometimes, Why, this people mean well, they are only ignorant; theywould do better if they knew how: why give your neighbors this pain to treat youas they are not inclined to? But I think again, This is no reason why I should do asthey do, or permit others to suffer much greater pain of a different kind. Again, Isometimes say to myself, When many millions of men, without heat, without ill

1. English translation of the title Le mie prigioni (1832), a record of his years of hard labor in Austrianprisons by Silvio Pellico (1789–1854), Italian poet, playwright, and patriot.




will, without personal feeling of any kind, demand of you a few shillings only, with-out the possibility, such is their constitution, of retracting or altering their presentdemand, and without the possibility, on your side, of appeal to any other millions,why expose yourself to this overwhelming brute force? You do not resist cold andhunger, the winds and the waves, thus obstinately; you quietly submit to a thou-sand similar necessities. You do not put your head into the fire. But just in propor-tion as I regard this as not wholly a brute force, but partly a human force, andconsider that I have relations to those millions as to so many millions of men, andnot of mere brute or inanimate things, I see that appeal is possible, first and instan-taneously, from them to the Maker of them, and, secondly, from them to them-selves. But if I put my head deliberately into the fire, there is no appeal to fire or tothe Maker of fire, and I have only myself to blame. If I could convince myself thatI had any right to be satisfied with men as they are, and to treat them accordingly,and not according, in some respects, to my requisitions and expectations of whatthey and I ought to be, then, like a good Mussulman and fatalist, I should endeavorto be satisfied with things as they are, and say it is the will of God. And, above all,there is this difference between resisting this and a purely brute or natural force,that I can resist this with some effect; but I cannot expect, like Orpheus,2 to changethe nature of the rocks and trees and beasts.

I do not wish to quarrel with any man or nation. I do not wish to split hairs,to make fine distinctions, or set myself up as better than my neighbors. I seekrather, I may say, even an excuse for conforming to the laws of the land. I am buttoo ready to conform to them. Indeed, I have reason to suspect myself on thishead; and each year, as the tax-gatherer comes round, I find myself disposed to re-view the acts and position of the general and State governments, and the spirit ofthe people, to discover a pretext for conformity.

“We must affect our country as our parents,And if at any time we alienateOur love or industry from doing it honor,We must respect effects and teach the soulMatter of conscience and religion,And not desire of rule or benefit.”

I believe that the State will soon be able to take all my work of this sort out of myhands, and then I shall be no better a patriot than my fellow-countrymen. Seenfrom a lower point of view, the Constitution, with all its faults, is very good; thelaw and the courts are very respectable; even the State and this American gov-ernment are, in many respects, very admirable, and rare things, to be thankfulfor, such as a great many have described them; but seen from a point of view a littlehigher, they are what I have described them; seen from a higher still, and the high-est, who shall say what they are, or that they are worth looking at or thinking ofat all?

However, the government does not concern me much, and I shall bestow thefewest possible thoughts on it. It is not many moments that I live under a govern-

2. Orpheus, a mythical Greek poet-musician, caused “rocks and trees and beasts” to follow the musicof his lute.

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ment, even in this world. If a man is thought-free, fancy-free, imagination-free,that which is not never for a long time appearing to be to him, unwise rulers or re-formers cannot fatally interrupt him.

I know that most men think differently from myself; but those whose lives areby profession devoted to the study of these or kindred subjects content me as littleas any. Statesmen and legislators, standing so completely within the institution,never distinctly and nakedly behold it. They speak of moving society, but have noresting-place without it. They may be men of a certain experience and discrimina-tion, and have no doubt invented ingenious and even useful systems, for which wesincerely thank them; but all their wit and usefulness lie within certain not verywide limits. They are wont to forget that the world is not governed by policy andexpediency. Webster3 never goes behind government, and so cannot speak withauthority about it. His words are wisdom to those legislators who contemplate noessential reform in the existing government; but for thinkers, and those who legis-late for all time, he never once glances at the subject. I know of those whose sereneand wise speculations on this theme would soon reveal the limits of his mind’srange and hospitality. Yet, compared with the cheap professions of most reform-ers, and the still cheaper wisdom and eloquence of politicians in general, his arealmost the only sensible and valuable words, and we thank Heaven for him. Com-paratively, he is always strong, original, and, above all, practical. Still, his qualityis not wisdom, but prudence. The lawyer’s truth is not Truth, but consistency or aconsistent expediency. Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not con-cerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing. He well de-serves to be called, as he has been called, the Defender of the Constitution. Thereare really no blows to be given by him but defensive ones. He is not a leader, but afollower. His leaders are the men of ’87.4 “I have never made an effort,” he says,“and never propose to make an effort; I have never countenanced an effort, andnever mean to countenance an effort, to disturb the arrangement as originallymade, by which the various States came into the Union.” Still thinking of the sanc-tion which the Constitution gives to slavery, he says, “Because it was a part of theoriginal compact,—let it stand.” Notwithstanding his special acuteness and abil-ity, he is unable to take a fact out of its merely political relations, and behold it asit lies absolutely to be disposed of by the intellect,—what, for instance, it behoovesa man to do here in America to-day with regard to slavery,—but ventures, or isdriven, to make some such desperate answer as the following, while professing tospeak absolutely, and as a private man,—from which what new and singular codeof social duties might be inferred? “The manner,” says he, “in which the govern-ments of those States where slavery exists are to regulate it is for their own consid-eration, under their responsibility to their constituents, to the general laws ofpropriety, humanity, and justice, and to God. Associations formed elsewhere,

3. Daniel Webster’s respect for authority won him the title (mentioned later in this paragraph) “De-fender of the Constitution”; he was therefore willing to compromise about slavery while itwas “constitutional,” thus losing many Northern supporters.4. I.e., the framers of the Constitution, which was sent to the states for ratification in 1787.




springing from a feeling of humanity, or any other cause, have nothing whateverto do with it. They have never received any encouragement from me, and theynever will.”

They who know of no purer sources of truth, who have traced up its streamno higher, stand, and wisely stand, by the Bible and the Constitution, and drink atit there with reverence and humility; but they who behold where it comes tricklinginto this lake or that pool, gird up their loins once more, and continue their pil-grimage toward its fountain-head.

No man with a genius for legislation has appeared in America. They are rarein the history of the world. There are orators, politicians, and eloquent men, bythe thousand; but the speaker has not yet opened his mouth to speak who iscapable of settling the much-vexed questions of the day. We love eloquence for itsown sake, and not for any truth which it may utter, or any heroism it may inspire.Our legislators have not yet learned the comparative value of free trade and offreedom, of union, and of rectitude, to a nation. They have no genius or talent forcomparatively humble questions of taxation and finance, commerce and manu-factures and agriculture. If we were left solely to the wordy wit of legislators inCongress for our guidance, uncorrected by the seasonable experience and the ef-fectual complaints of the people, America would not long retain her rank amongthe nations. For eighteen hundred years, though perchance I have no right to sayit, the New Testament has been written; yet where is the legislator who has wis-dom and practical talent enough to avail himself of the light which it sheds on thescience of legislation?

The authority of government, even such as I am willing to submit to,—for Iwill cheerfully obey those who know and can do better than I, and in many thingseven those who neither know nor can do so well,—is still an impure one; to bestrictly just, it must have the sanction and consent of the governed. It can have nopure right over my person and property but what I concede to it. The progressfrom an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy,is a progress toward a true respect for the individual. Even the Chinese philoso-pher was wise enough to regard the individual as the basis of the empire. Is ademocracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is itnot possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights ofman? There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comesto recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all itsown power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myselfwith imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treatthe individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsis-tent with its own repose if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it,nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men. AState which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened,would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also Ihave imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.1848 1849, 1866

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Week Ten: Transcendentalism · PDF file · 2018-03-06the enterprise alone the last...

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