Contemporary Notices and Reviews of 
Walden; or, Life in the Woods
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[T. Starr King,] "New Publications"
Christian Register [Boston] (26 August 1854):  p. 135, cols. 5-6.

A young man, eight years out of college, of fine scholarship and original genius, revives, in the midst of our bustling times, the life of an anchorite.  By the side of a secluded pond in Concord, he builds with his own hands a hut which cost him twenty-eight dollars and twelve and a half cents; and there he lived two and a half years, "cultivating poverty," because he "wanted to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and suck out all its marrow."  Here he found that the labor of six weeks would support him through the year; and so he had long quiet days for reading, observation, and reflection, learning to free himself from all the hollow customs and false shows of the world, and to pity those who by slavery to inherited property seemed to be doing incredible and astonishing penance.  In the account he gives us of his clothes, house, food, and furniture, we find mingled many acute and wise criticisms upon modern life; while in his descriptions of all living things around him, birds, fishes, squirrels, mice, insects, trees, flowers, weeds, it is evident that he had the sharpest eye and the quickest sympathy.  One remarkable chapter is given to the sounds that came to his ear, with suggestions, full of poetry and beauty, of the feelings which these sounds awakened.  But nothing interested him so much as the Pond, whose name gives the title to his book.  He describes it as a clear sheet of water, about a mile in circumference; he bathed in it every morning; its cool crystal depths were his well, ready dug; he sailed upon its bosom in summer, he noted many curious facts pertaining to its ice in winter; in short, it became to him a living thing, and he almost worshipped it.  But we must not describe the contents of this book any farther.  Its opening pages may seem a little caustic and cynical; but it mellows apace, and playful humor and sparkling thought appear on almost every page.  We suppose its author does not reverence many things which we reverence; but this fact has not prevented our seeing that he has a reverential, tender, and devout spirit at bottom.  Rarely have we enjoyed a book more, or been more grateful for many and rich suggestions.  Who would have looked to Walden Pond for a Robinson Crusoe, or for an observer like the author of the Natural History of Selborne, or for a moralist like the writer of Religio Medici?  Yet paragraphs in this book have reminded us of each of these.  And as we shut the book up, we ask ourselves, will the great lesson it teaches of the freedom and beauty of a simple life be heeded?  Shall this struggle for wealth, and this bondage to the impedimenta of life, continue forever?  Will the time ever come when it will be fashionable to be poor, that is, when men will be so smitten with a purpose to seek the true ends of life that they will not care about laying up riches on the earth? Such times we know there have been, and thousands listened reverently to the reply, given in the last of these two lines, to the inquiry contained in the first;

                          "O where is peace, for thou its path hast trod?"

                          "In poverty, retirement, and with God."

             Who can say that it is impossible that such a time may come round, although the fashion of this world now runs with such a resistless current in the opposite direction.

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