Contemporary Notices and Reviews of 
Walden; or, Life in the Woods
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"Notices of New Books"
Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer (9 September 1854): p. 2, col. 4.

Half mad, but never silly; and the half that is not mad, full of truths which if they are not entirely new, have at least lain hidden under the crust of fashion, folly, and listlessness so long as to seem new on being dug out and placed boldly before us.  Mr. THOREAU built himself with his own hands a hut, shanty, or cottage on the shores of Walden pond, near Concord, Mass., and lived there two years and two months doing all his own working and thinking.  In this volume we have such of the results of his work and thought as can be put on paper; and to a reflecting, well trained mind it is a book full of matter for careful consideration.  It is at times repulsively selfish in its tone, and might easily help a bad man to be worse; but to readers of an opposite character who peruse it, not with the intent of imitating the author in his mental or physical habits, but for its suggestiveness, it cannot prove other than an occasion for healthy mental exercise.  In style it partakes of the characteristics of THOMAS CARLYLE and Sir THOMAS BROWNE: indeed had not the Clothes-Philosophy and the Pseudo-doxia Epidemica and the Urn Burial been written, Walden would probably never have seen the light.  The author has CARLYLE's hatred of shams and CARLYLE's way of showing it: he has Sir THOMAS BROWNE's love of pregnant paradox and stupendous joke, and utters his paradoxes and his jokes with a mysterious phlegm quite akin to that of the Medical Knight who "existed only at the periphery of his being."  Walden is a book which should have many readers, if readers were always sound thinkers.

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