Thoreau was country born,- he alone of the Concord school' of writers was native to the place he spent a sturdy, barefooted boyhood, went to the village school, an excellent one, and at sixteen was fitted for Harvard College from which he was graduated in 1837 very well equipped with a knowledge of languages and a quite remarkable ability to make use of his pen. For several years he taught school with his brother John, then from 1841 to 1843 — the Dial period he lived as a member of the Emerson household in the capacity of gardener and general helper even to the helping to edit the famous Transcendental mouthpiece the Dial. He studied for no profession,- he was too independent to tie himself to anything that savored of slavery. He did what he pleased: surveyed land for the farmers, made gardens, or turned to lead-pencil making, his father's business, which, despite certain stories to the contrary, he followed intermittently during the rest of his life. His well-known experiment at Walden Pond began in 1845. He was a restless soul. He made excursions to Cape Cod, to Canada, and to Minnesota, and numberless shorter trips to the Maine Woods and other near regions, all the experiences and observations of which he carefully recorded in his journals.

Much misinformation has been circulated concerning Thoreau. He was eccentric, undoubtedly, an extreme among a rather extreme group of reformers and dreamers, but he was not a hermit. He went to Walden Pond to prove a sociological theory. Even while he was making his home in the woods he went almost daily to the village to meet with his friends. He took delight in the town lyceum, read papers before it, and delivered lectures even in Boston, and was intensely interested in all the stirring events of his time. After the capture of John Brown at Harper's Ferry, he was so stirred that he summoned a meeting of his townsmen and addressed them in hot indignation and later delivered the same address to Theodore Parker's congregation in Boston.

His first literary ambition seems to have turned in the direction of poetry. To the Dial he contributed a small sheaf of verse, much of which he reproduced in his first volume, A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, 1849, that curious mélange of material.- miscellany from his note-book, essays, poems, papers delivered before the Concord lyceum, translations, Oriental philosophy, muskrats, sunsets, and botany. His residence at the home of Emerson and his help as a kind of assistant editor of the Dial had brought him into the heart of the Transcendentalist group and had emphasized his individualism. To understand the evolution of his mind one must study his rather large mass of contributions to the famous periodical poems, translations,-- he furnished a metrical version of Prometheus Bound entire, and versions of Anacreon and Pindar - studies of Aulus Persius Flaccus, the Laws of Menu, the Chinese Four Books, The Sayings of Confucius, the Preaching of Buddba, and the Ethnical Scriptures: Hermes Trismegistus, a paper on Poetry, one on natural history, and an essay entitled A Winter Walk, the beginning of his nature writings.

His Walden appeared in 1854, but nothing else until after his death. His fame has been a posthumous one. Lowell in his well-known essay was unjust to Thoreau, and it was largely this essay that caused the decline in interest in the poet-naturalist during the two decades after his death. Since the eighties, however, the nature school has arisen and has discovered in Thoreau its founder and leading exponent. The reformer is no longer thought of, and it was chiefly as a reformer that Lowell had considered him. His complete journal has been published. and more and more he is becoming recognized as one of the real original and stimulating writers of his generation.

Say not that Cæsar was victorious,
With toil and strife who stormed the House
of Fame:

ΙΟ

A PRAYER

5

vour, and no morsel could have been too
savage for me. The wildest scenes had
become unaccountably familiar. I found
in myself, and still find, an instinct toward
a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life,
as do most men, and another toward a
primitive, rank, and savage one, and I
reverence them both. I love the wild not
less than the good. The wildness and
adventure that are in fishing still recom- 10
mend it to me. I like sometimes to take
rank hold on life and spend my day more
as the animals do. Perhaps I have owed
to this employment and to hunting, when
quite young, my closest acquaintance with 15
Nature. They early introduce us to and
detain us in scenery with which other-
wise, at that age, we should have little ac-
quaintance. Fishermen, hunters, wood-
choppers, and others, spending their lives 20
in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense
a part of Nature themselves, are often
in a more favorable mood for observing
her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than
philosophers or poets even, who approach 25
her with expectation. She is not afraid
to exhibit herself to them. The traveler
on the prairie is naturally a hunter, on
the head waters of the Missouri and
Columbia a trapper, and at the Falls of 30
St. Mary a fisherman. He who is only
a traveler learns things at second-hand
and by the halves, and is poor authority.
We are most interested when science re-
ports what those men already know prac-
tically or instinctively, for that alone is a
true humanity, or account of human ex-
perience.

est friend of the animals hunted, not excepting the Humane Society.

Moreover, when at the pond, I wished sometimes to add fish to my fare for variety. I have actually fished from the same kind of necessity that the first fishers did. Whatever humanity I might conjure up against it was all factitious, and con cerned my philosophy more than my feelings. I speak of fishing only now, for I had long felt differently about fowling, and sold my gun before I went to the woods. Not that I am less humane than others, but I did not perceive that my feelings were much affected. I did not pity the fishes nor the worms. This was habit. As for fowling, during the last years that I carried a gun my excuse was that I was studying ornithology, and sought only new or rare birds. But I confess that I am now inclined to think that there is a finer way of studying ornithology than this. It requires so much closer attention to the habits of the birds, that, if for that reason only, I have been willing to omit the gun. Yet notwithstanding the objection on the score of humanity, I am compelled to doubt if equally valuable sports are ever substituted for these; and when some of my friends have asked me anxiously about their boys, whether they should let them hunt, I have answered, yes,-remembering that it was one of the best parts of my education, make them hunters, though sportsmen only at first, if possible, mighty hunters at last, so that they shall not find game large enough for them They mistake who assert that the in this or any vegetable wilderness,Yankee has few amusements, because he 40 hunters as well as fishers of men. Thus

35

far I am of the opinion of Chaucer's nun, who,

has not so many public holidays, and men and boys do not play so many games as they do in England, for here the more primitive but solitary amusements of hunting, fishing, and the like have not yet 45 That saith that hunters ben not holy men.'

given place to the former. Almost every New England boy among my contemporaries shouldered a fowling-piece between the ages of ten and fourteen; and his hunting and fishing grounds were not 50 limited like the preserves of an English nobleman, but were more boundless even than those of a savage. No wonder, then, that he did not oftener stay to play on the common. But already a change is 55 taking place, owing, not to an increased humanity, but to an increased scarcity of game, for perhaps the hunter is the great

gave not of the text a pulled hen

There is a period in the history of the individual, as of the race, when the hunters are the best men,' as the Algonquins called them. We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun; he is no more humane, while his education has been sadly neglected. This was my answer with respect to those youths who were bent on this pursuit, trusting that they would soon outgrow it. No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature, which

holds its life by the same tenure that he does. The hare in its extremity cries like a child. I warn you, mothers, that my sympathies do not always make the usual philanthropic distinctions.

faint intimation, yet so are the first streaks of morning. There is unquestionably this instinct in me which belongs to the lower order of creation; yet with every year I 5 am less a fisherman, though without more humanity or even wisdom; at present I am no fisherman at all. But I see that if I were to live in a wilderness I should again be tempted to become a fisher and o hunter in earnest. Beside, there is something essentially unclean about this diet and all flesh, and I began to see where housework commences, and whence the endeavor, which costs so much, to wear a tidy and respectable appearance each day, to keep the house sweet and free from all ill odors and sights. Having been my own butcher and scullion and cook, as well as the gentleman for whom the dishes were served up, I can speak from an unusually complete experience. The practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness: and, besides, when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth. Like many of my contemporaries, I had rarely for many years used animal food, or tea, or coffee, etc.; not so much because of any ill effects which I had traced to them, as because they were not agreeable to my imagination. The repugnance to animal food is not the effect of experience, but is an instinct. It appeared more beautiful to live low and fare hard in many respects; and though I never did so, I went far enough to please my imagination. I believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much food of any kind. It is a significant fact, stated by entomologists, I find it in Kirby and Spence, that some insects in their perfect state, though furnished with organs of feeding, make no use of them'; and they lay it down as a general rule, that almost all insects in this state eat much less than in that of larvæ. The voracious caterpillar when transformed into a butterfly,' . . . and the gluttonous maggot when become a fly,' content themselves with a drop or two of honey or some

Such is oftenest the young man's introduction to the forest, and the most original part of himself. He goes thither at first as a hunter and fisher, until at last, if he has the seeds of a better life in him, he distinguishes his proper objects, as a poet or naturalist it may be, and leaves the gun and fish-pole behind. The mass 1 of men are still and always young in this respect. In some countries a hunting par- 15 son is no uncommon sight. Such a one might make a good shepherd's dog, but is far from being the Good Shepherd. I have been surprised to consider that the only obvious employment, except wood- 20 chopping, ice-cutting, or the like business, which ever to my knowledge detained at Walden Pond for a whole half day any of my fellow-citizens, whether fathers or children of the town, with just one ex- 25 ception, was fishing. Commonly they did not think that they were lucky, or well paid for their time, unless they got a long string of fish, though they had the opportunity of seeing the pond all the while. 30 They might go there a thousand times before the sediment of fishing would sink to the bottom and leave their purpose pure; but no doubt such a clarifying process would be going on all the while. The 35 governor and his council faintly remember the pond, for they went a-fishing there when they were boys; but now they are too old and dignified to go a-fishing, and so they know it no more forever. Yet 40 even they expect to go to heaven at last. If the legislature regards it, it is chiefly to regulate the number of hooks to be used there; but they know nothing about the hook of hooks with which to angle 45 for the pond itself, impaling the legislature for a bait. Thus, even in civilized communities, the embryo man passes through the hunter stage of development. I have found repeatedly, of late years, 50 that I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect. I have tried it again and again. I have skill at it, and, like many of my fellows, a certain instinct for it, which revives from time to time, but al- 55 ways when I have done I feel that it would have been better if I had not fished. I think that I do not mistake. It is a