The fortune of Henry Thoreau as an author of books has been peculiar, and such as to indicate more permanence of his name and fame than could be predicted of many of his contemporaries. In the years of his literary activity (twenty-five in all), from 1837 to 1862,—when he died, not quite forty-five years old,—he published but two volumes, and those with much delay and difficulty in finding a publisher. But in the thirty-two years after his death, nine volumes were published from his manuscripts and fugitive pieces,—the present being the tenth. Besides these, two biographies of Thoreau had appeared in America, and two others in England, with numerous reviews and sketches of the man and his writings,—enough to make several volumes more. Since 1894 other biographies and other volumes have appeared, and now his writings in twenty volumes are coming from the press. The sale of his books and the interest in his life are greater than ever; and he seems to have grown early into an American classic, like his Concord neighbors, Emerson and Hawthorne. Pilgrimages are made to his grave and his daily haunts, as to theirs,—and those who come find it to be true, as was said by an accomplished woman (Miss Elizabeth Hoar) soon after his death, that "Concord is Henry's monument, adorned with suitable inscriptions by his own hand." When Horace wrote of a noble Roman family,— "Crescit occulto velut arbor aevo Fama Marcelli,"— he pointed in felicitous phrase to the only fame that posterity has much regarded,—the slow-growing, deep-rooted laurel of renown. And Shakespeare, citing the old English rhyming saw,— "Small herbs have grace, Great weeds do grow apace,"— signified the same thing in a parable,—the popularity and suddenness of transient things, contrasted with the usefully permanent. There were plenty of authors in Thoreau's time (of whom Willis may be taken as the type) who would have smiled loftily to think that a rustic from the Shawsheen and Assabet could compete with the traveled scholar or elegant versifier who commanded the homage of drawing-rooms and magazines, for the prize of lasting remembrance; yet who now are forgotten, or live a shadowy life in the alcoves of libraries, piping forth an ineffective voice, like the shades in Virgil's Tartarus. But Thoreau was wiser when he wrote at the end of his poem, "Inspiration,"— "Fame cannot tempt the bard Who's famous with his God; Nor laurel him reward Who has his Maker's nod." He strove but little for glory, either immediate or posthumous, well knowing that it is the inevitable and unpursued result of what men do or say,— "Our fatal shadow that walks by us still." The Letters of Thoreau, though not less remarkable For this purpose I have chosen many letters and mere notes, illustrating his domestic and gossipy moods,—for that element was in his mixed nature, inherited from the lively maternal side,—and even the colloquial I have not rejected the common and trivial in these letters; being well assured that what the increasing number of Thoreau's readers desire is to see this piquant original just as he was,—not arrayed in the paradoxical cloak of the Stoic sage, nor sitting complacent in the cynic earthenware cave of Diogenes, and bidding Alexander stand out of his sunshine. He did those acts also; but they were not the whole man. He was far more poet than cynic or stoic; he had the proud humility of those sects, but still more largely that "Saevis projectus ab undis and then goes on thus with his parable:— "Within a humble cot that looks to sea, Daily I breathe this curious warm life; Beneath a friendly haven's sheltering lee My noiseless day with mystery still is rife. "'T is here, they say, my simple life began,— And easy credence to the tale I lend, For well I know 't is here I am a man,— But who will simply tell me of the end? "These eyes, fresh-opened, spied the far-off Sea, That like a silent godfather did stand, Nor uttered one explaining word to me, While introducing straight godmother Land. "And yonder still stretches that silent Main, With many glancing ships besprinkled o'er; And earnest still I gaze and gaze again Upon the selfsame waves and friendly shore. "Infinite work my hands find there to do, Gathering the relics which the waves upcast: Each storm doth scour the sea for something new, And every time the strangest is the last. "My neighbors sometimes come with lumbering carts. As if they wished my pleasant toil to share; But straight they go again to distant marts, For only weeds and ballast are their care." "Only weeds and ballast?" that is exactly what Thoreau's neighbors would have said he was gathering, for the most of his days; yet now he is seen to have collected something more durable and precious than they with their implements and market-carts. If they viewed him with a kind of scorn and pity, it must be said that he returned the affront; only time seems to have sided with the poet in the controversy that he maintained against his busy age. Superiority,—moral elevation, without peevishness or condescension,—this was Thoreau's distinguishing quality. He softened it with humor, and sometimes sharpened it with indignation; but he directed his satire and his censure as often against himself as against mankind; men he truly loved,—if they would not obstruct his humble and strictly chosen path. The letters here printed show this, if I mistake not,—and the many other epistles of his, still uncollected, would hardly vary the picture he has sketched of himself, though they would add new facts. Those most to be sought for are his replies to the generous letters of his one English correspondent.[1] The profile portrait reproduced in photogravure for this volume is less known than it should be,—for it alone of the four likenesses extant shows the aquiline F. B. S. Concord Mass., March 1, 1906. FAMILIAR LETTERS OF Henry D. Thoreau, from the Ricketson Medallion |