Chapter XII: Poet, Moralist, and Philosopher

The character of poet is so high and so rare, in any modern civilization, and specially in our American career of nationality, that it behooves us to mark and claim all our true poets, before they are classified under some other name,--as philosophers, naturalists, romancers, or historians. Thus Emerson is primarily and chiefly a poet, and only a philosopher in his second intention; and thus also Thoreau, though a naturalist by habit, and a moralist by constitution, was inwardly a poet by force of that shaping and controlling imagination, which was his strongest faculty. His mind tended naturally to the ideal side. He would have been an idealist in any circumstances; a fluent and glowing poet, had he been born among a people to whom poesy is native, like the Greeks, the Italians, the Irish. As it was, his poetic light illumined every wide prospect and every narrow cranny in which his active, patient spirit pursued its task. It was this inward illumination as well as the star-like beam of Emerson's genius in "Nature," which caused Thoreau to write in his senior year at college, "This curious world which we inhabit is more wonderful than it is convenient; more beautiful than it is useful," and he cherished this belief through life. In youth, too, he said, "The other world is all my art, my pencils will draw no other, my jack-knife will cut nothing else; I do not use it as a means." It was in this spirit that he afterwards uttered the quaint parable, which was his version of the primitive legend of the Golden Age:--

"I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove,
and am still on their trail. Many are the travelers I have
spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what
calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard
the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the
dove disappear behind the cloud; and they seemed as anxious
to recover them as if they had lost them themselves."

In the same significance read his little-known verses, "The Pilgrims."

"When I have slumbered
I have heard sounds
As of travelers passing
These my grounds.

"'T was a sweet music
Wafted them by,
I could not tell
If afar off or nigh.

"Unless I dreamed it
This was of yore;
I never told it
To mortal before.

"Never remembered
But in my dreams,
What to me waking
A miracle seems."

It seems to have been the habit of Thoreau, in writing verse, to compose a couplet, a quatrain, or other short metrical expression, copy it in his journal, and afterward, when these verses had grown to a considerable number, to arrange them in the form of a single piece. This gives to his poems the epigrammatic air which most of them have. After he was thirty years old, he wrote scarcely any verse, and he even destroyed much that he had previously written, following in this the judgment of Mr. Emerson, rather than his own, as he told me one day during his last illness. He had read all that was best in English and in Greek poetry, but was more familiar with the English poets of Milton's time and earlier, than with those more recent, except his own townsmen and companions. He valued Milton above Shakespeare, and had a special love for Æschylus, two of whose tragedies he translated. He had read Pindar, Simonides, and the Greek Anthology, and wrote, at his best, as well as the finest of the Greek lyric poets. Even Emerson, who was a severe critic of his verses, says, "His classic poem on 'Smoke' suggests Simonides, but is better than any poem of Simonides." Indeed, what Greek would not be proud to claim this fragment as his own?

"Light winged smoke, Icarian bird!
Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight,
Lark without song, and messenger of dawn,--

* * * * *

Go thou, my incense, upward from this hearth,
And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame."

No complete collection of Thoreau's poems has ever been made. Amid much that is harsh and crude, such a book would contain many verses sure to survive for centuries.

As a moralist, the bent of Thoreau is more clearly seen by most readers; and on this side, too, he was early and strongly charged. In a college essay of 1837 are these sentences:--

"Truth neither exalteth nor humbleth herself. She is not
too high for the low, nor yet too low for the high. She is
persuasive, not litigious, leaving conscience to decide.
She never sacrificeth her dignity that she may secure for
herself a favorable reception. It is not a characteristic
of Truth to use men tenderly; nor is she overanxious about
appearances."

In another essay of the same year he wrote:--

"The order of things should be reversed: the seventh should
be man's day of toil, in which to earn his living by the
sweat of his brow, and the other six his Sabbath of the
affections and the soul, in which to range this wide-spread
garden, and drink in the soft influences and sublime
revelations of Nature."

This was an anticipation of his theory of labor and leisure set forth in "Walden," where he says:--

"For more than five years I maintained myself solely by the
labor of my hands, and I found that, by working about six
weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living;
the whole of my winters, as well as most of my summers, I
had free and clear for study. I found that the occupation
of day-laborer was the most independent of any, especially
as it required only thirty or forty days in the year to
support one."

This was true of Thoreau, because, as he said, his "greatest skill had been to want but little." In him this economy was a part of morality, or even of religion.

"The high moral impulse," says Channing, "never deserted him, and he resolved early to read no book, take no walk, undertake no enterprise, but such as he could endure to give an account of to himself." How early this austerity appeared in what he wrote, has been little noticed; but I discover it in his earliest college essays, before he was eighteen years old. Thus, in such a paper of the year 1834, this passage occurs:--

"There appears to be something noble, something exalted, in
giving up one's own interest for that of his fellow-beings.
He is a true patriot, who, casting aside all selfish
thoughts, and not suffering his benevolent intentions to
be polluted by thinking of the fame he is acquiring,
presses forward in the great work he has undertaken, with
unremitted zeal; who is as one pursuing his way through a
garden abounding with fruits of every description, without
turning aside, or regarding the brambles which impede his
progress, but pressing onward with his eyes fixed upon the
golden fruit before him. He is worthy of all praise; his
is, indeed, true greatness."

In contrast with this man the young philosopher sets before us the man who wishes, as the Greeks said, _pleonektein_,--to get more than his square meal at the banquet of life.

"Aristocrats may say what they please,--liberty and equal
rights are and ever will be grateful, till nature herself
shall change; and he who is ambitious to exercise authority
over his fellow-beings, with no view to their benefit or
injury, is to be regarded as actuated by peculiarly selfish
motives. Self-gratification must be his sole object.
Perhaps he is desirous that his name may be handed down to
posterity; that in after ages something more may be said
of him than that he lived and died. His deeds may never be
forgotten; but is this greatness? If so, may I pass through
life unheeded and unknown!"

What was his own ambition--a purpose in life which only the unthinking could ever confound with selfishness--was expressed by him early in a prayer which he threw into this verse:--

"Great God! I ask Thee for no meaner pelf,
Than that I may not disappoint myself;
That in my conduct I may soar as high
As I can now discern with this clear eye.
That my weak hand may equal my firm faith,
And my life practice more than my tongue saith;
That my low conduct may not show,
Nor my relenting lines,
That I thy purpose did not know,
Or overrated thy designs."

And it may be said of him that he acted this prayer as well as uttered it. Says Channing again:--

"In our estimate of his character, the moral qualities form
the basis; for himself rigidly enjoined; if in another,
he could overlook delinquency. Truth before all things;
in all your thoughts, your faintest breath, the austerest
purity, the utmost fulfilling of the interior law; faith
in friends, and an iron and flinty pursuit of right, which
nothing can tease or purchase out of us."

Thus it is said that when he went to prison rather than pay his tax, which went to support slavery in South Carolina, and his friend Emerson came to the cell and said, "Henry, why are you here?" the reply was, "Why are you _not_ here?"

In this act, which even his best friends at first denounced as "mean and sneaking and in bad taste,"--this refusal to pay the trifling sum demanded of him by the Concord tax-gatherer,--the outlines of his political philosophy appear. They were illuminated afterwards by his trenchant utterances in denunciation of slavery and in encomium of John Brown, who attacked that monster in its most vulnerable part. It was not mere whim, but a settled theory of human nature and the institution of government, which led him, in 1838, to renounce the parish church and refuse to pay its tax, in 1846 to renounce the State and refuse tribute to it, and in 1859 to come forward, first of all men, in public support of Brown and his Virginia campaign. This theory found frequent expression in his lectures. In 1846 he said:--

"Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a
majority of one already."

And again:--

"I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if
ten men whom I could name,--if ten _honest_ men only,--ay,
if one honest man, _ceasing to hold slaves_, were actually
to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in
the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of
slavery in America. Under a government which imprisons any
unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison."

This sounded hollow then, but when that embodiment of American justice and mercy, John Brown, lay bleeding in a Virginia prison, a dozen years later, the significance of Thoreau's words began to be seen; and when a few years after our countrymen were dying by hundreds of thousands to complete what Brown, with his single life, had begun, the whole truth, as Thoreau had seen it, flashed in the eyes of the nation.

In this same essay of 1846, on "Civil Disobedience," the ultimate truth concerning government is stated in a passage which also does justice to Daniel Webster, our "logic-fencer and parliamentary Hercules," as Carlyle called him in a letter to Emerson in 1839. Thoreau said:--

"Statesmen and legislators, standing so completely
within the institution (of government) never distinctly
and nakedly behold it. They speak of moving society,
but have no resting-place without it. They are wont to
forget that the world is not governed by policy and
expediency. Webster never goes behind government, and
so cannot speak with authority about it. His words are
wisdom to those legislators who contemplate no essential
reform in the existing government; but for thinkers, and
those who legislate for all time, he never once glances
at the subject. Yet compared with the cheap professions
of most reformers, and the still cheaper wisdom and
eloquence of politicians in general, his are almost the
only sensible and valuable words, and we thank heaven for
him. Comparatively, he is always strong, original, and,
above all, practical; still his quality is not wisdom, but
prudence. Truth is always in harmony with herself, and
is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may
consist with wrong-doing. For eighteen hundred years the
New Testament has been written; yet where is the legislator
who has wisdom and practical talent enough to avail himself
of the light which it sheds on the science of government?"

Such a legislator, proclaiming his law from the scaffold, at last appeared in John Brown:--

"I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible,
or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that
'whatsoever I would that men should do unto me, I should do
even so to them.' It teaches me further to 'remember them
that are in bonds as bound with them.' I endeavored to act
up to that instruction. I say that I am yet too young to
understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe
that, to have interfered as I have done in behalf of His
despised poor, was not wrong, but right."

Before these simple words of Brown, down went Webster and all his industry in behalf of the "compromises of the Constitution." When Thoreau heard them, and saw the matchless behavior of his noble old friend, he recognized the hour and the man.

"For once," he cried in the church-vestry at Concord, "we
are lifted into the region of truth and manhood. No man, in
America, has ever stood up so persistently and effectively
for the dignity of human nature; knowing himself for a
man, and the equal of any and all governments. The only
government that I recognize,--and it matters not how few
are at the head of it, or how small its army,--is that
power which establishes justice in the land."

Words like these have proved immortal when spoken in the cell of Socrates, and they lose none of their vitality, coming from the Concord philosopher.

The weakness of Webster was in his moral principles; he could not resist temptation; could not keep out of debt; could not avoid those obligations which the admiration or the selfishness of his friends forced upon him, and which left him, in his old age, neither independence nor gratitude. Thoreau's strength was in his moral nature, and in his obstinate refusal to mortgage himself, his time, or his opinions, even to the State or the Church. The haughtiness of his independence kept him from a thousand temptations that beset men of less courage and self-denial.