Contemporary Notices and Reviews of 
Walden; or, Life in the Woods
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 "An American Diogenes" 
Chamber's Journal (21 November 1857): pp. 330-332.

When Philip of Macedon announced his intention to invade Corinth, the inhabitants of that city, overlooking, or feigning not to perceive, their utter incapacity of resistance, affected to make great preparations for defence; while Diogenes, who, like many of us, even at the present time, delighted to ridicule the follies he did not himself commit, rolled about his tub in an excited, bustling manner, by way of deriding the fussy, fruitless show of opposition made by the feeble Corinthians.  The transatlantic Diogenes, however, when he observed the foolish, aimless bustle made by the modern Corinthians of the world, in pursuit of the sacred dollar and its glittering accessories, instead of rolling about his tub, quietly sat down in it, and wrote an interesting book, replete with pithy, original observations, but strongly tinctured with the inevitable dogmatism that ever attends the one soi-disant wise man who assumes to be the teacher of all the rest of his race.  Henry D. Thoreau, the American Diogenes, if we may presume to term him so—assuredly we mean no offence—is a graduate of Harvard university, a ripe scholar, and a transcendentalist of the Emersonian school, though he goes much further than his master; his object, apparently, being the exaltation of mankind by the utter extinction of civilisation.  When Nat Lee was confined in Bedlam, the unfortunate dramatist roundly asserted his perfect sanity, exclaiming: 'All the world say that I am mad, but I say that all the world are mad; so being in the minority, I am placed here.'  Now, the truth, as it generally does, may have lain between the two extremes; and in like manner, Mr Thoreau, when he lazily lived in a hut, in a lonely wood, subsisting on beans, was not half so mad as his neighbours, the 'cute New Englanders,' supposed him to be; nor, on the other hand, were they so mad as he considered them, though they lived in comfortable houses, in towns, and ate beef and mutton, which they consequently worked hard to pay for.

             Mr Thoreau had 'tried school-keeping,' but without success, because he 'did not teach for the good of his fellow-men, but simply for a livelihood.'  He had tried commerce, but found 'that trade curses everything it handles; and though you trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the business.'  He had tried 'doing good,' but felt satisfied that it did not agree with his constitution.  Indeed he says: 'The greater part of what my neighbours call good, I believe in my soul to be bad; and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good-behaviour.'  At last, as he could fare hard, and did not wish to spend his life in earning rich carpets or other fine furniture, or a house in the Grecian or Gothic style, he concluded that 'the occupation of a day-labourer was the most independent of any, especially as it required only thirty or forty days' work to support a man for the whole year.  Besides, the labourer's day ends with the going down of the sun, and he is then free to devote himself to his chosen pursuit; but his employer, who speculates from month to month, has no respite from one end of the year to the other.'  So, borrowing an axe, he boldly marched into the woods of Concord, where, on the pleasant bank of Walden Pond, he built himself a hut, in which he lived alone for more than two years, subsisting chiefly on beans planted and gathered by his own hands.  In the book, already adverted to, his thoughts and actions during this period are pleasantly and interestingly related; though, like all solitary men, the author exaggerates the importance of his own thoughts, his I standing up like an obelisk in the midst of a level, though by no means barren expanse.

             The building of his hut gave rise to many reflections.  He wondered that in all his walks he never came across a man engaged in so simple and natural an occupation as building his own house.  'There is,' he says, 'some of the same fitness in a man's building his own house, as there is in a bird's building its own nest.  Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families, simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are thus engaged.'  So, as he hewed his studs and rafters, he sang—if not as musically, at least quite as unintelligibly as any bird—

                          'Men say they know many things;

                          But lo! they have taken wings—

                          The arts and sciences,

                          And a thousand appliances;

                          The wind that blows

                          Is all that anybody knows.'

             As Mr Thoreau squatted, he paid no rent; but the glass, ironwork, and other materials of his hut, which he could not make himself, cost twenty-eight dollars.  The first year he lived in the wood, he earned, by day-labour, thirteen dollars, and the surplus produce of his beans he sold for twenty-three dollars; and as his food and clothing during that period cost him thirteen dollars only, he thus secured [excellent] health, and independence, besides a comfortable house, as long as he chose to occupy it.  Rich Indian meal, beans, and molasses, were his principal articles of food.  He sometimes caught a mess of fish; and the wood gratuitously supplied him with fuel for warmth and cooking.  Work agreed with his constitution as little as 'doing good.'  He tells us: 'I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a reverie, amidst the pines, and hickories, and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life; but so much over and above my usual allowance. This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting.'

             As he walked in the woods to see the birds and squirrels, so he sometimes walked in the village to see the men and boys.  The village appeared to him as a great newsroom: its vitals were the grocery, the bar-room, the post-office, and the bank; and as a necessary part of the machinery, it had a bell, a big gun, and a fire-engine.  The houses were arranged to make the most of mankind, in lanes and fronting one another, so that every traveller had to run the gantlet, and every man, woman, and child might get a lick at him.  But to one of his village visits there hangs a tale, which he shall tell himself: 'One afternoon, near the end of the first summer, when I went to the village to get a shoe from the cobbler's, I was seized and put into jail, because, as I have elsewhere related, I did not pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of, the state which buys and sells men, women, and children, like cattle at the door of its senate-house. I had gone down to the woods for other purposes. But, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run a muck [sic] against society; but I preferred that society should run a muck [sic] against me, it being the desperate party. However, I was released the next day, obtained my mended shoe, and returned to the woods in season to get my dinner of huckleberries on Fair Haven Hill.'

             Mr Thoreau failed in making any converts to his system; one person only, an idiotic pauper, from the village poor-house, expressed a wish to live as he did.  An honest, hard-working, shiftless Irishman, however, seemed a more promising subject for conversion.  This man worked for a farmer, turning up meadow, with a spade, for ten dollars an acre, with the use of the land and manure for one year, while a little broad-faced son worked cheerfully at his side.  So as Mr Thoreau relates: 'I tried to help him with my experience, telling him that he was one of my nearest neighbors, and that I too, who came a-fishing here, and looked like a loafer, was getting my living like himself; that I lived in a tight light and clean house, which hardly cost more than the annual rent of such a ruin as his commonly amounts to; and how, if he chose, he might in a month or two build himself a palace of his own; that I did not use tea, nor coffee, nor butter nor milk, nor fresh meat, and so did not have to work to get them; again, as I did not work hard, I did not have to eat hard, and it cost me but a trifle for my food; but as he began with tea, coffee, and butter, and milk, and beef, he had to work hard to pay for them, and when he had worked hard he had to eat hard again to repair the waste of his system. And so it was as broad as it was long—indeed, it was broader than it was long, for he was discontented and wasted his life into the bargain. I told him, that as he worked so hard at bogging, he required thick boots and stout clothing, which yet were soon soiled and worn out, but I wore light shoes and thin clothing, which cost not half so much; and in an hour or two, without labor, but as a recreation, I could, if I wished, catch as many fish as I should want for two days, or earn enough money to support me a week. If he and his family would live simply, they might all go a huckleberrying in the summer for their amusement.'

             Puzzled, but not convinced, the Irishman and his 'greasy-faced wife' stared and scratched their heads.  Such teaching must have sounded strangely to them, who had crossed the Atlantic to do their share of work in the world, and enjoy its reward in the form of tea, coffee, butter, and beef.  Patrick, however, was silly enough to leave his work for that afternoon, and go a-fishing with the philosopher; but his 'derivative old-country mode of fishing disturbed only two fins.'  So he wisely went back to his work the next morning, probably studying the proverb of his country which teaches, that 'hunger and ease is a dog's life;' and our author thus rather uncourteously dismisses him: 'With his horizon all his own, yet he is a poor man, born to be poor, with his inherited Irish poverty, or poor life, his Adam's grandmother and boggy ways, not to rise in this world, he nor his posterity, till their wading, webbed, bog-trotting feet get talaria to their heels.' 

             Another Irishman, of a very different stamp, a squatter of the woods of Walden, might have proved a more facile subject for conversion; but he died just after making Mr Thoreau's acquaintance.  This man's name was Quoil; and when he did work, which was very seldom—for he liked work as little as Mr Thoreau himself did—followed the occupation of a ditcher.  Having, however, been a soldier in the British army, his American neighbours gave him the brevet rank of colonel.  Colonel Quoil, Mr Thoreau tells us, 'was a man of manners, like one who has seen the world, and was capable of more civil speech than you could well attend to. He wore a great coat in mid-summer, being affected with the trembling delirium, and his face was the colour of carmine. He died in the high-road. Before his house was pulled down, when his comrades avoided it as "an unlucky castle," I visited it. There lay his old clothes curled up by use, as if they were himself, upon his raised plank-bed. His pipe lay broken on the hearth, instead of a bowl broken at the fountain. The last could never have been the symbol of his death, for he confessed to me that, though he had heard of Brister's spring, he had never seen it; and soiled cards—diamonds, spades, and hearts—were scattered over the floor. One black chicken—black as night, and as silent—still went to roost 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, though it was now harvest-time.'

             The natural sights and sounds of the woods, as described by Mr Thoreau, form much pleasanter reading than his vague and scarcely comprehensible social theories.  He says: 'I had this advantage, at least, in my mode of life, over those who were obliged to look abroad for amusement, to society and the theatre, that my life itself was become my amusement and never ceased to be novel. It was a drama of many scenes, and without an end. As I sit at my window this summer afternoon, hawks are circling about my clearing; the tantivy of wild pigeons, flying by twos and threes athwart my view, or perching restless on the white pine boughs behind my house, gives a voice to the air; a fish-hawk dimples the glassy surface of the pond, and brings up a fish; a mink steals out of the marsh before my door, and seizes a frog by the shore; the sedge is bending under the weight of the reed-birds flitting hither and thither; and for the last half-hour I have heard the rattle of railroad-cars—now dying away, and then reviving like the beat of a partridge—conveying travellers from Boston to the country. At night,' he continues, 'when other birds are still, the screech-owls take up the strain, like mourning women their ancient u-lu-lu. Their dismal scream is truly Ben Jonsonian. "Wise midnight hags!" It is no honest and blunt tu-whit tu-who of the poets, but, without jesting, a most solemn graveyard ditty, the mutual consolations of suicide lovers remembering the pangs and the delights of supernal love in the infernal groves. Yet I love to hear their wailing, their doleful responses, trilled along the wood-side; reminding me sometimes of music and singing-birds; as if it were the dark and tearful side of music, the regrets and sighs that would fain be sung. They are the spirits, the low spirits and melancholy forebodings of fallen souls that once in human shape night-walked the earth and did the deeds of darkness, no expiating their sins with their wailing hymns or threnodies in their scenery of their transgressions. They give me a new sense of variety and capacity of that nature which is our common dwelling. Oh-o-o-o-o that I never had been bor-r-r-r-r-n! sighs one on this side of the pond, and circles with the restlessness of despair to some new perch on the gray oaks. Then—that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n! echoes another on the farther side with tremulous sincerity, and—bor-r-r-r-n! comes faintly from far in the Lincoln woods. In the meanwhile, all the shore rang with the trump of bull-frogs, the sturdy spirits of ancient wine-bibbers and wassailers, still unrepentant, trying to sing a catch in their Stygian lake, though their voices have waxed hoarse and solemnly grave, mocking at mirth, and the wine has lost its flavor, and become only liquor to distend their paunches, and sweet intoxication never comes to drown the memory of the past, but mere saturation and water-loggedness, and distention. The most aldermanic, with his chin upon a heart-leaf, which serves for a napkin to his drooling chaps, under this northern shore quaffs a deep draught of the once scorned water, and passign round the cup with the ejaculation tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r-oonk! and straightway comes over the water, from some distant cove, the same password repeated, where the next in seniority and girth has gulped down to his mark; and when this observance has made the circuit of the shores, then ejaculates the master of ceremonies, with satisfaction, tr-r-r-oonk! and each in his turn repeats the same down to the least distended, leakiest, and flabbiest paunched, that there be no mistake; and then the bowl goes round again and again, until the sun disperses the morning mist, and only the patriarch is not under the pond, but vainly bellowing troonk from time to time, and pausing for a reply.'

             Those were the summer sounds; in winter nights he heard the forlorn but melodious note of the hooting-owl, such a tone as the frozen earth would yield if struck with a suitable plectrum. 'I seldom opened my door in a winter evening without hearing it:  hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo, sounded sonorously, and the first three syllables accented somewhat like how der do; or sometimes hoo hoo hoo only. One night in the beginning of winter, before the pond froze over, about nine o'clock, I was startled by the loud honking of a goose, and, stepping to the door, heard the sound of their wings like a tempest in the woods as they flew low over my house. They passed over the pond toward Fair Haven, seemingly deterred from settling by my light, their commodore honking all the while with a regular beat. Suddenly an unmistakable cat owl from very near me, with the most harsh and tremendous voice I ever heard from any inhabitant of the woods responded at regular intervals to the goose, as if determined to expose and disgrace this intruder from Hudson's Bay by exhibiting a greater compass and volume of voice in a native, and boo-hoo him out of Concord horizon. What do you mean by alarming the citadel at this time of night consecrated to me? Do you think I am ever caught napping at such an hour, and that I have not got lungs and a larynx as well as yourself? Boo-hoo, boo-hoo, boo-hoo! It was one of the most thrilling discords I ever heard. And yet, if you had a discriminating ear, there were in it the elements of a concord such as these plains never saw nor heard.'

             'Sometimes,' Mr Thoreau continues, 'I heard the foxes as they ranged over the snow crust, in moonlight nights, in search of a partridge or other game, barking raggedly and demoniacally like forest dogs, as if laboring with some anxiety, or seeking expression, struggling for light and to be dogs outright and run freely in the streets; for if we take the ages into our account, may there not be a civilization going on among brutes as well as men? They seemed to me to be rudimental, burrowing men, still standing on their defence, awaiting their transformation. Sometimes one came near to my window, attracted by my light, barked a vulpine curse at me, and then retreated.'

             Mr Thoreau went to the woods, because he wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see whether he could learn what it had to teach; so that when he came to die, he might not discover that he had not lived.  After supporting animal and intellectual life for two years, at the cost of thirteen dollars per annum, he 'left the woods for as good a reason as he went there.'  It seemed to him that he had several more lives to live, so he could not spare any more time for that particular one.  He learned, however, by his experiment, 'that it is not necessary a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow; and to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely.  Moreover, if a man advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.  In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.'

             Who is it, we have more than once mentally inquired, when penning the preceding sketch, that Mr Thoreau reminds us of?  Surely it cannot be—yes, it is—no other than his renowned compatriot Barnum.  As homespun, beans, and water differ from fine linen, turtle, and champagne, so do the two men differ in tastes, habits, disposition, and culture; yet we cannot think of the one without an ideal association of the other.  In one respect only do they seem to agree—both have an antipathy to hard work; but while one prefers diminishing his wants, the other, increasing them, invents extraordinary schemes for their gratification.  If Barnum's autobiography be a bane, Thoreau's woodland experiences may be received as its antidote; but, unfortunately, the former musters its readers by tens of thousands, the latter probably in hundreds only.  It is to be hoped, however—though all of us have a reasonable predilection for beef, pudding, and the society of our fellow-creatures—that there are few readers of this Journal who would not prefer eating beans in the woods with Thoreau to living on the fat of the earth, in the best show in all Vanity Fair, with Barnum.   

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