Chapter VI (1)

Henry weighs in his hand a book that has just come from the press. A duodecimo, bearing on its back: H. D. THOREAU--A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMAC RIVERS.

From it rises a faintly insipid odour of glue and ink. But it is no cardboard tomb that he has wished to raise to the memory of the dear companion to whom these pages are dedicated. He is wondering how the delight of a week like that, two adventurous weeks passed with his brother, could possibly be contained between two layers of brown cardboard, and he has half a mind to fling the volume into the corner. It is less true than that arrow-head there on the table.

He is examining his first book, which has at last appeared. It is a mere trifle of pulp or dirty rags, boiled down, flattened into sheets, dried and finally blackened with ink. And beyond that? How about all the things he had meant to put into it? The best part has been lost between the manuscript and the composing-stick. A book that is nothing more than a book may be a very attractive accessory among the drawing-room furnishings of people of taste if the shade of the binding harmonizes with the hangings and the rugs. To a man of the woods whose eye prefers to linger on bare boards and plain whitewashed walls, a book is a useless knick-knack, a rather sorry one, mere dust in a cardboard box.

In this scrap-book of verse and prose (the verse--old verse, for he has ceased to write it--like dried flowers pressed between the leaves) in which the glorious voyage ... yes, ten summers ago now ... serves only as a pretext for personal digressions, he would have liked to put the whole world, with its blowing winds, its floods of light, the fragrance of the river-banks at dawn and all the surprises under heaven that had been gathered in by a twenty-year-old heart. A book of which the first outlines had been sketched under a tent and the chapters had been assembled in a cabin in the woods was not intended merely for the mahogany shelves of Mr. Pettifogger the bibliophile. It should dance and plash like the boat that had borne the two conquerors; it should preserve a little of the flavour of the melons they had carried on board. What was the use of it otherwise? There were enough cemeteries of books already, full of the other kind, with mortuary emblems watching over them.

Did they amount to as much as one dip of an oar in a river spangled with reflexions, these few hundred pages, black on white? (See if you can find any black in nature.) Well, anyway, the book had come out. Not without difficulty. The publishers would have nothing to do with it. In the end he had had to resign himself to a “published by the author.” Another fling of the adventurer, launching his bark for the conquest of the world, with the good Jersey blood of the mariner in his veins. It was for the public now to do its duty by demanding _Weeks_ and _Weeks_ from the booksellers, enough weeks to make up the life of a centenarian, or at least the age of the author. Here’s a book for you, just out, a thousand copies, by Henry Thoreau, out of his own head, every word of it, from the title to the last period. Quite a different affair from an article published in a magazine, between a cream-puff and a sermon.

When you have cherished from college days an ambition to be a writer there is naturally a little warmth in the hand that holds the back of the first book. You have made your bow in the world, you have started, you have set out for the antipodes; you are off on a voyage that will never end. You have openly confessed your secret passion, accepted the ordeal of the daylight that shines on a larger world than Concord. The Sage has encouraged you to try your luck. You are going to see. The author is not greatly troubled in advance about the judgment of the world on the first fruits of a writer of thirty-two. In his silent communion with his notebooks, during the dozen years that he has been preparing himself to write, Henry has fortified himself with assurances that have nothing to do with success or failure.

Curious Journal, curious confidant, a work that is to be continued through many volumes--eight or ten already exist--and that will never be finished till the day when the universe ceases to surprise him, the day when his two eager eyes are closed at last. As the farmer has been in no hurry to sell his crop while he was reaping it, his barn contains the harvest of several years. It has been necessary to add one floor after another in order to get it all stored away. Heaven knows whether all this will keep; but he has taken good care that all the garnered sheaves shall be quite dry.

On his rambles the explorer scribbles on the spot a note or a few cabalistic signs, while he is under the direct impression of the phenomenon or the landscape he is observing. On his return the note is copied out, more deliberately. Later, in its final form, it will be incorporated in the Journal. What Henry, the writer, adds in the evening to the visions and thoughts of the day’s walk in no way destroys their freshness, for they are thoughts of a true Pilgrim, flowers that have unfolded in the rhythm of the walk and that he turns over in his hands at home, in the evening, with his spirit bathed in the open air, so as to study their tints. It might be called, this Journal, the account of a journey that never comes to an end, for the world about Concord is immense and has a genius for metamorphosis; or perhaps the review of a spectacle that is performed for himself alone, with a programme that is constantly renewed, action and setting, with the strange encounters one has after a performance, the people one likes, the people one laughs at. Or the “love story” of a boy who is looking for his own affinities and finds them oftener in the world of plants than in human form. It is illustrated now and then by rude sketches carefully recording some observation or discovery. But whether it is to be called a report, a review, a story or the music of the day, the notebook contains nothing that is not veracious testimony. A descendant of merchants and like them a hoarder of treasures, Henry reckons up in the Journal the gains of the day. He too is in business, and he keeps his accounts with the meticulous exactness of a book-keeper. You can examine his books. Observe the debits and the credits. If the profits do not strike you as very clear, it is because you have singular ideas about wealth, my dear fellow.

The harvest might well have remained in the barn. No purchasers appear, but at times the desire seizes him to sell a few armfuls if only to see whether or not it is keeping well--perhaps, too, for the fun of having a little cash. Now and then Henry wants to buy some fine old book, if only to escape the bother of having to go to the library to read it, or he needs a good pair of boots. Then he draws from his Journal the substance of an article and sends it off to a magazine. Horace Greeley, whose acquaintance he has made in New York, has been of great service in finding a place for his work and has even agreed to advance him a small sum. But Concordians propose and editors dispose. The manuscript is too long, or they will not countenance some of his audacities of thought. Or, what is more likely to happen, the article is printed and the author is swindled. What, dear sir, you are not satisfied with the honour of appearing in print in my celebrated sheet? You expect to be paid for it? You can dig in your own pockets. This misadventure befell him long since with the editor of a certain _Boston Miscellany_ and more recently with that of _Graham’s Magazine_, who published his essay on Carlyle, written at Walden. There you are! You are a Concord hayseed, and these fine gentlemen are giving you a lesson in humility. One doesn’t write for money. Pocket the lesson and clench your fist. And get back to work at your Journal.

And now it has appeared, after all, this volume he has just brought back, freshly bound, from his printer Monroe’s, at whose shop he has been to see it through the press on this twenty-sixth of May. Henry examines his first book, and he does not feel so very proud. He is the author of _A Week on the Concord_. It has been introduced to the public. What next? One must sometimes have confidence in one’s fellowmen and place a figure before a line of zeros.

(Yes, a book is born, and almost at once someone close to you dies, someone whose loss hurts you deeply and blots out all thought of books. Henry loses his sister Helen, the eldest--called back, she too, to the grandfather--Helen who had his features, his eyes, and was so sympathetic with his ideas. Helen has gone, not yet thirty-seven, to keep John company in the cemetery.)

The writer also appears in public when he gives a lecture. It is in the Concord Lyceum that Waldo distributes the honey from his hives. Since he made his first appearance at twenty-one, Henry has spoken there every year. He has been chosen secretary. The honour of addressing one’s fellow-citizens from a chair that has been occupied by a sage of European fame is worth the effort of trying to do it graciously. From the fund on which he can draw to organize his series of winter lectures, Henry can offer in exceptional cases ten dollars to an orator of note; he himself pockets only the thanks of the committee. But the neighbouring Lyceums ask him to come and speak in other towns. Last year his friend Hawthorne, who has left Concord and now lives in Salem, arranged for him to be invited there and asked him to stay at his house. Henry received twenty dollars for his trouble. A fine haul. This year he is taking his eloquence to Worcester, where Harrison Blake lives.

What do you think of the lecturer? Hm, hm.... In the first place, he doesn’t speak, he “reads” a paper elaborately written; he doesn’t drop his manuscript for an instant, and he utters it all in a desperately earnest, monotonous voice. A bad method. He pronounces his r’s harshly. And he is not exactly engaging, this young man. He doesn’t give himself. The people listen attentively to this sober soul who talks to them about things that interest them very little; they are not repelled, they are not indignant, they are simply bored. And the worst of it is that Henry not only believes in what he says but is quite aware of the freezing effect his little discourse has upon people; he plods along with imperturbable gravity. It is as if he had started with some such little preamble as this in his mind: You blockheads down there listening to me, what do I care whether I interest you or not? You seem to think I’ve come here to give you lollypops. Here are a few sour apples and some acorns I’ve collected for you. Do what you like with them. What can a man expect from such frozen wits? It’s quite useless to waste any finesse on these dolts. They wouldn’t see anything in it. They make no personal effort; they don’t come half-way to meet you.... If you go on speaking just the same, it is because you are sustained by the hope of finding one or two living beings among these mummies, a few simple and impressionable souls thanks to whom your pains will not be lost. As a rule, no one comes up after the lecture to tell you how extraordinarily good it is. Well, never mind; you can go home, ladies and gentlemen. There is something to be said for you for having listened without a murmur to such a trying pedant.

No, Henry doesn’t hit it off with the audience at all. You don’t get very far with these good people with paradoxes and ferocious affirmations; you must have the art of flattering and tickling them, putting them into a good humour and touching their hearts. This fellow here doesn’t know the first thing about his business. There is nothing these people like better than to be amused in a sociable kind of way, and he doesn’t even know how to make himself agreeable. He is the worst bore in New England. If you have all that faith, my boy, hand it out in little sandwiches that can be taken with a cup of tea. Add a little water-cress, sprinkle it with a pinch of salt, and serve it with a smile. See what will happen then.

Henry, you are no sort of cook at all. You are only up to boiling gruel in your cabin. It’s pathetic to see a man satisfied with being as poor an orator as he is a man of letters. This refusal to yield to the ways of the world gets to be irritating after a while. No use for him to want to be a writer; he will never enter the paradise of the literary. He would merely bring to it an absurd respect for his art and the firm intention of pleasing himself before pleasing others. Henry, the lover of good work, takes a workman’s pains in perfecting his page. Thanks to the erasures, this manuscript has become an illegible scrawl, not because in the first draught the writing was so uncertain but because the author is so extremely severe with himself. He has a pitiless blue pencil. No “almosts.” Nothing that savours of improvisation. Every word that is not alive, that is merely a word, must disappear. Struggle and toil count for nothing, he must get there. If you could only find me some sort of eraser that would obliterate from this page the exact things that ought to be obliterated: that invention would be even more useful than the best pencil bearing the mark of Thoreau and Son. In everyday life with your neighbours garrulity is irritating enough; in art it is intolerable. The work that comes from Henry’s hands is to the point. You can take it and see how firm the texture is. The man who made it wears corduroy clothes because they are durable and take on an exquisite tone with time. Very well. But let me repeat that with these principles you will never be anybody in the literary world. There copy is knitted by the yard for firms that do a thriving trade.

And isn’t it just as odd to have such a passionate love for plants, animals, minerals, to study with such fervour all these physical phenomena, and yet to have so little in common with the scientists? Science consists of shells, stuffed animals, glass phials, long names, dissertations in musty books, and what interests Henry is the living animal in all its wildness and freedom, the plant with its sap, the phenomenon seized alive in its natural setting. In spite of his tastes and his gift for exact observation, the poet and the lover in him are too exigent to yield precedence to the naturalist. And besides, there is a strange animal that interests him enormously; namely, himself. This is a very poor sort of recommendation among scientists.

On three occasions, however, he sends Concord fish from Walden to Agassiz, who is preparing his great work on the fishes of America. Agassiz is very grateful and promises to pay a visit to his Concord “colleague.” The latter has been appointed a corresponding member of the Society of Natural History in Boston; he has just sent it a goshawk, a rare bird. Even in the village, people have fallen into the way of consulting him as an authority on botanical and ornithological matters. This does not prevent him from being very sarcastic whenever the subject of science and scientists comes up. Just speak to him about the specialists who write a big book on turtles--to amuse a man who knows how turtles live! Or about this or that communication to some learned society.... He says very little about his own zoölogical or botanical observations; he confides them to his Journal alone, for the benefit of those knowing persons who are going to jeer some day at the amateur naturalist and his discoveries. Go ahead and stuff your birds, pedants. Give them your Latin names. See if you can find one that any tree or quadruped pronounces with its branches or its caperings. In this Journal living animals pass, birds call, fishes glide through the water, the loon flings its laughter over the pond, the sap rises in the plants, the trees quiver to the tips of their branches, juicy bay-bushes scent the air: Hebrew for your Latin. These fancies are enough to show that he doesn’t belong to the profession. Leave him to his innocent pastimes.

Besides, this “amateur” places too high a value on ignorance to be taken seriously by the academies. This man who reads Latin and French as well as his mother tongue, Greek fluently, German, Italian, Spanish a little, has a thorough knowledge of old English literature and is more interested than a philologist in the development of the life of a word, as a beautiful plant among plants, runs about the country every day like a schoolboy throwing to the winds the knowledge learned from books. The consciousness that he knows so little delights him so much that he is willing to make his ignorance the very apex of knowledge. Absurd Henry, to be so infatuated with his not-knowing.

Sometimes, as seldom as possible, he goes to the city, for now and then he wants to consult some book that interests him. It is a sad business, reading in a big library. Fresh books, vibrant, vagabond, libertine books, how in the world can you stay so still among those rows of shrivelled corpses? The friend who comes to see you at intervals pities your distress.

When he has finished his reading, the villager invariably goes off to consume a dish of boiled apple pudding at some cheap eating-house (he distrusts their accursed stews), then crosses the town without stopping till he reaches the end of Long Wharf, where his grandfather had his store. There he looks at the sea, the ships, the piles of merchandise. Save for a glance at the market on his way, this is all he sees of Boston. The stir of the metropolis means nothing to him whatever; the fronts of the substantial houses and the faces of men seem to shut him out. Everything here, to the very stones, reeks of respectability. The windows full of idlers and the brawling vulgarity of the streets make him ill. The city is a pickpocket who wants to filch from you the most precious possession you have and leave you on the sidewalk dejected and destitute in a vast solitude. This is because you were not born, because you never played as a boy in one of these crowded neighbourhoods, because you grew up on the bank of a river that wanders through the fields, bathing the whole world with its freshness. For others no doubt, among its stones, the city has wondrous gifts; for a boy who is thinking of old Minot’s cottage on the hillside it is full of shams and shoddy, and what this boy demands is the real. There is a club in Boston made up of some very sympathetic people who meet on the last Saturday of every month; among them are Emerson, Agassiz and Henry James. But although Henry has been invited he never goes there. Quick, take the train and put twenty miles between yourself and this dismal burden of stone house-fronts. Quick, get back to Concord where the village is merely a shabby excrescence amid the verdure. At Concord there are no steamers, no Long Wharves, no crowds in the streets, no immigrants, no big, bustling shops, no special editions; and you feel as if you were at the heart of the world. In Boston there are no humming and singing telegraph-poles where you can listen to the news from afar. Call it parochialism, if you like, but parish towers answer one another. Concordance is no empty word.

At Concord you have a chance to remain simple. Suppose you were to become a great writer or a fashionable lecturer or a light of science and lose the simplicity of heart that alone permits you to have access to the unknown riches that surround you. That would be a fine advancement! There you would be with the esteem of everybody, with your glory or your hard cash, wondering how in the world you could get rid of all these substantial advantages and recover your boyish ingenuousness, and the keen, inquisitive nose, the gift of marvelling at the commonest object that have always so astonished the good William. You would have taken a false step indeed. You would have been transformed into one of those men who are too sober-minded, too dignified or too intelligent to stop and pick a tempting huckleberry beside their path. Your eyes would be dead to the miracle of every day. You would no longer want to be a sailor and skirt the bays and promontories of “some fair wild island in the ocean,” suggested by an oak-leaf. You would lose your elasticity. You would become old before your time, old, respectable and unhappy. You might even pose as a little saint and cease to feel yourself a man complete with his virtues and his vices, no better at bottom than the neighbour he scoffs at and lectures. You would be a success, and you would have lost everything, while at Concord one never becomes a success.

There may have been a moment when Henry wondered if the art of writing could not support the writer; but this moment had passed. He understood the trade and the taste of its customers only too well. Precarious as his other resources might be, they were better than that. As a small boy, running barefoot in the fields and up to all sorts of mischief, and later as an ingenious older boy, he had learned how to dig, plane, paint houses, plant, survey. And now Henry continues to work by the day, as occasion offers. A precious thing, manual labour. It stops babbling tongues and toughens a frail body. It gives a tone to what you write afterwards. Your qualities as a workingman reappear when you come to weigh and balance words. When you have finished a fence of pickets and lattice at $1.50 for every five yards, or built a woodshed by contract for six dollars, it is very pleasant to receive the money; but that is not everything. You must also reckon the pleasure you have had. And add to this the profit you have received in indirect ways, such as the quality of the page on which you relate the impressions of the day. Henry does surveying, and he also helps his father in the workshop. When he is not engaged elsewhere, he gives him his mornings. The family industry is being transformed. The Thoreau pencils are selling fairly well, and a new market has opened for the famous plumbago powder--the secret. It happens to fit exactly the needs of a new invention--electrotyping--and the people give them ten dollars a pound for it. Even though they can sell only a few hundred pounds of it a year, this is not a bad stroke of business for the little family. The pencils have become only a side-issue; they work for the big industry. But Henry makes a trip to New York to dispose of a lot he has made, for he has a large debt to pay.

The poorer you are in Concord, the better you know your true wealth. It is all very clever to create happiness with a thousand costly accessories, but to create happiness out of nothing, to be happiness yourself, is much more interesting, and happiness of this kind has quite a different quality. To have been born poor is a privilege too. In the most authentic great man, no matter how magnificent and complete he is in appearance, never to have worn rags or gone without a meal, never to have been able to toss his dignified respectability to the winds, never to have known what hardship means is a lacuna that can never be filled up. Think of that poor, great Goethe, too well brought up, as he said, to have had any intercourse in his childhood with the boys in the streets.... Whatever you may say, the boy who has never set his bare, smarting feet on the hard ground has missed one of the best of gifts. He has not been judged worthy of experiencing the real savour of this world. Henry has no inclination to make a profession of his poverty, to set himself up in the square for the admiration of connoisseurs. He saves it for himself because it keeps him warm, as a sheepskin coat warms a driver in winter. It has a taste that he likes and it helps him to keep up his good spirits. It lives with him like a comrade in the attic he has arranged for himself in the new house, the yellow one, where his parents have been living on Main Street since August, 1850. He is very much at home there and William lives across the way. At the foot of his garden the boat is moored.

There in his den Henry lives like a king among the spoils of his expeditions, his collections of birds’ eggs, mosses, plants, arrow-heads, his bedside books, his manuscripts--and always a store of nuts to take the place of pipe and bottle. There he sleeps and works and talks with his comrade, enjoying the tawny shade of the latter’s eyes and blessing the fate that has provided for him so generously. Recently his classmates have asked him for an account of himself for the record they are preparing of the class of 1837 at Harvard. Henry’s reply is as follows:

Am not married. I don’t know whether mine is a profession, or a
trade, or what not. It is not yet learned, and in every instance
has been practised long before being studied. The mercantile part
of it was begun by myself alone. It is not one but legion. I
will give you some of the monster’s heads. I am a Schoolmaster,
a private Tutor, a Surveyor, a Gardener, a Farmer, a Painter (I
mean a House Painter), a Carpenter, a Mason, a Day-labourer, a
Pencil-maker, a Glass-paper-maker, a Writer, and sometimes a
Poetaster. If you will act the part of Iolas, and apply a hot
iron to any of these heads, I shall be greatly obliged to you. My
present employment is to answer such orders as may be expected from
so general an advertisement as the above. That is, if I see fit,
which is not always the case, for I have found out a way to live
without what is commonly called employment or industry, attractive
or otherwise. Indeed, my steadiest employment, if such it can be
called, is to keep myself at the top of my condition, and ready for
whatever may turn up in heaven or on earth. The last two or three
years I lived in Concord woods, alone, something more than a mile
from any neighbour, in a house built entirely by myself.

P. S. I beg that the class will not consider me an object of
charity, and if any of them are in want of any pecuniary assistance
and will make known their case to me, I will engage to give them
some advice of more worth than money.

As he sends off this description and thinks of his fellows at college, he sees this poor devil, at the head of a factory, condemned to sweat money out of his machines and his workmen ... this poor devil, launched in politics or absorbed in business, deep in the auriferous mire ... this poor devil reduced to working as some high office-holder ... this poor devil, consenting to spend his life manufacturing counterfeit money stamped with the effigy of Jesus, the enemy of all money ... a whole list of poor devils, with round shoulders or an air of satisfaction, who have not wasted the money their fathers sacrificed to send them to college. He sees them with their positions, their prestige, their prosperous households, their wives, their children, their mothers-in-law and heaven knows what, and himself beside them, the failure, without position, bank-account or influence, with his workman’s clothes, earning a meagre living by the labour of his hands, hands which, like theirs, have thumbed so many books. And how glad and privileged he feels in his attic with his tawny-eyed companion! He would be only too happy to work in their gardens or split the wood for their stoves, offering them his pity in exchange for their dollars. If he met the most fortunate of them all, he would feel like hanging a placard round his neck: “Have pity on a poor rich man”--for some passer-by with a generous heart to slip into his hand a pennyworth of compassion. And if no charitable passer-by appeared, he would gladly give the poor fellow his own mite. You are magnanimous when you are a success.

Is it not from the worst that we often get the very best? Then why not meet ill fortune with a high heart and refuse, on the dullest day, not to be happy over a mere nothing, a trembling leaf, a swaying twig, or the smile of old Minot’s house on the hillside--happy, you don’t know why, because you are happy, happy as a child who plays with his poverty as a comrade, finding in its eyes the colour of your own real wealth?

When you are a rich man like Henry you want to treat yourself, now and then, to some little trip. For one who disposes of his time as he pleases, this is merely a matter of gathering together a few odds and ends. A week or so of surveying, a windfall in the shape of a lecture or a cheque for an article provides you with the means of surveying good fortune for many hours, a week, two weeks, not to mention a store of memories. This is one of the satisfactions of the lot of a man who is free, as all men ought to be free. It is good to work on your manuscripts. But you never write a story to be compared with those that are traced by your feet as you welcome the surprises of the road.

There are always more surprises in Concord than anywhere else; but the world is wide and you want to see how the sun shines in other places. And besides, you want to give your old notions an airing; no matter how wide open you keep your window, they are always in danger of getting a little musty.... There are those hills on the horizon towards the West behind which, at nightfall, from the top of the Cliffs, you see that blazing reflection. The land of the sunset is a powerful magnet.

What if you were to explore one of those hills that rise up, like a challenge and a promise, beyond that stretch of country over there--climb it, brush your boots on its brow, watch the sun rise from up there and see if you can discover the faraway spot in the valley from which you set out? That ought to do your soul good and expand your lungs. There is that solitary Wachusett, for example, forever crouching there in the distance, as if it were watching over some treasure; you would like to go and ask that brother if he finds his solitude bitter or friendly. His younger brother from Concord is coming to make him a visit. That blue wall is not a fabulous vision; it is a solid reality, in harmony with the woods, the fields, the river. It belongs to the family too. Another time the thirty-seven hundred feet of Monadnoc draw him up. He has to prolong his visit, live with the mountain a while, become familiar with the dawn and the sunset on those heights. The visitor camps for one night, two nights, in the open, on the summit of the vision that holds him aloft with all its mass till a small man, on this pedestal, has the illusion of being a somebody.

On the day before, in the morning, well before dawn, he had set out on foot with a companion. They passed through villages and woods, with staves in their hands like pilgrims. The fields were full of fragrance for the early risers, the farms still asleep in the twilight of dawn; save for one reaper already sharpening his scythe, they were the first that morning to tread the July countryside; they passed through the hop-fields, rested on the fence-rails of a farm from which the sound of music reached them; and in the afternoon in the valley they sought shelter from the broiling heat and bathed their feet in the streams they found there. And at last they arrived together on a grassy plateau, strewn with clumps of huckleberry and raspberry bushes, in time to see the moon rising in this tremendous silence--two little souls, serious, lost in wonder, half frightened at finding themselves so high above the rest of their fellow-townsmen. And the dawn, the notes of the birds before the dawn on these heights, the great waves of the slopes below rise out of the shadows as if they were at sea--on what a ship!--as the camp-fire pales and the day breaks and the landscape unrolls in all its unreality: old Massachusetts, the whole of it, bathed in the sunrise, at their feet, spreading its panorama before them in the summer morning! The air of the heights intoxicates them; it has a quality that is unknown to dwellers on the plain. It is not so much that it acts upon your lungs: its rarity has a strange power of exalting the spirit. Henry revels in it and feels at home on the shoulder of the mountain. If he did not live in Concord he would be a mountaineer.

And the charm of the mountains persists. Sometimes he goes still further west, as far as Greylock or Saddle-back Mountain, to pay a visit to Their Majesties. And then--wonder of wonders--the mountains he has always seen towards the sunset rise, in a spirit of contradiction, to the east! Is he a new man who, without realizing it, has taken a trip round the world?... Before beginning his climb he stops in this mountain valley at the next to the last house. It would be fun to spend a week in that house if they would take him in. The mistress is a young woman who continues to arrange her hair while she talks to him in the friendliest way, without any fuss, thank heaven; she is dark and her eyes are full of fire and she questions him with as much familiarity as if they had been children together. She makes him think of his cousin in Bangor. And they really are cousins in a way. She has taken him for one of those daredevil students who often come on trips to the mountain. On the top he finds bits of newspapers they have left about; it is strange to read a stray sheet of some old paper alone on the summit of a mountain by the light of a camp-fire. What wears the best at this altitude is the advertisements and the market prices, for there is a bit of real poetry mixed with them, though the advertisers are quite unaware of it (fortunately); as for the rest, editorials, news, jokes, reviews, heaven save us! And then, after a cold night that he has passed without a blanket, the day dawns over an ocean of fog that covers the three adjoining States as if it were a dream-country rolling off into infinity.... It is the earth that has become unreal, and you are planted there as if you were the centre of this tremendous glory that rises with the sun.... And you descend Tabor again, a little drunk with this vision and no longer in the least cold in spite of the night passed without a blanket.

In the other direction from the land of the sunset lies the sea, quite close--another magnet. The peaks are silent and contemplative, but the sea stirs and rustles like a forest of gigantic pines, lulling its old anguish. On an island in the middle of the ocean you might contrive to have a rich existence if you could ever forget Concord. Or in one of those villages about Cape Ann. The whole Atlantic coast and all the width of the continent lie at the ends of the roads that set out from the village square.

Yes, to go off for two, three, four days, according to the occasion and the plumpness of your purse, to leave Main Street and the church-tower and the sidewalks of the grey little town behind you and attempt an unexplored world ... that’s the thing, Henry ... the real holidays of life. You must have them complete. The first thought of most poor souls on such occasions is to take the train or the stage. They are poor souls indeed. When you are rich you have the means to travel on foot. Henry has no intention of surrendering to a machine or animal the pleasure of treading the road and devouring it for him; this traveller likes the taste of it far too much to leave it to a mere auxiliary. It is a part of the adventure. When a vagabond journeys on foot, the earth invites him to her table and lets him roam all over her domain; those other people are mere stupid tourists who follow where their baggage leads them. Before they set out, the latter are sure to worry about where they will find a lodging; why do they leave home if they begin a journey with the thought of lodgings?

Henry starts off with a pack on his back. It’s a marvel, this knapsack. See if you can find one like it in the shops! The traveller has manufactured it to suit himself. It is waterproof and has compartments; a notebook, the map of the country, his old music-book for pressing flowers, his change of linen are in no danger of being injured. If he is going some distance he carries a little bundle in his hand. It is a package tied up in a handkerchief or a piece of brown paper. He recommends this to you as preferable to any sort of handbag, first because it is lighter and swings more merrily in your fist, and secondly because it causes less trouble. Don’t forget the inevitable accessory of any expedition, a good stout umbrella. A raincoat or an oilskin might be more becoming, but they keep you too warm and they are unwholesome, while under an umbrella you are always exposed to the air and you have only to shut it up when the shower is over. And then you have the rare pleasure of hearing the rain patter on your roof, while you are perfectly sheltered yourself; you are a householder on your own threshold, and you take it easy listening to the rain dripping from the eaves. When you are tired of carrying the umbrella in your hand, you can carry it on your shoulder and even hang your bundle on it, or any other prize you pick up--a bird or a bit of sea-weed. People may laugh at you. Let them. They will never have so much fun in all their lives.

The clever fellow has thought of everything, down to the sewing-case for mending rips and fastening on buttons that fall off. These accursed leather shoestrings are always undone and cause endless bother in walking; they really abuse their right to relaxation. Henry and William have often exchanged their views on this grave subject, a theme worthy of philosophers at least who despise the fiddle-faddle of learning. One day Henry finds the knot-that-will-not-come-undone and triumphs. If everyone applied himself to solving such problems, the world would soon stand on a different basis. But above all, do not forget to take along some old newspapers. You will find them providential. If you don’t already know to how many uses old newspapers can be put, on a journey or at home, try some experiments. You are leaving your shanty for a week or two or for six months and you are afraid that during this time your kettle will rust. Wrap it up in a newspaper and go your way in peace. Or you want to give your copper basin a good scouring; take a wad of newspaper and polish it up as it should be. Your face will smile at you in the mirror you have brightened so easily. And what a comfort a few old newspapers are on your trip, if you have taken them along: they serve as wrappers, as a tablecloth, as a plate, as a means of starting the fire, or as a light, warm chest-protector if it turns cold. And there are still so many fools in the world who believe that newspapers are made to be read, to inform you about accidents and politics. Among the humble truths that might shed a little light on their existence, this is not the least important: in spending your two cents you are making a golden investment if, instead of unfolding the sheet, you place it carefully on a pile of old papers for the approaching day when it will reveal its true use.

The question of provisions also demands a good bit of attention and experience. Henry has weighed this for a long time. He has been armed with certitudes ever since he first took the road. For drinking on a journey nothing equals good strong tea. Because you have seen so many old souls busy over teapots, brewing and stewing, don’t imagine that tea is an old woman’s beverage. A grave mistake. Winter or summer, it is a powerful and subtle tonic. For solid food, carry with you a good loaf of heavy cake. If it is made by your mother it will be A-number-1. You will thank me for this advice. Add a little cornmeal, enough to make some gruel, a small bag of rice, some salt. With a spoon, a tin quart-measure, and, if you like, a saucepan--not to mention the matches and the knife that a walker must always have--you are the master of circumstance. No longer any need to knock at a door, when the fresh air of the road has given you an appetite, except for the pleasure of a chat or to add a glass of milk to your usual fare if you want to bring back your childhood. You are both the inn and the traveller.

These arrangements are very important for the success of the trip. As for your clothes, they should be durable and old, preferably brown or tan--the colour of the earth. They will show the dust and the mud less, and you will not offend the landscape as the figure of a townsman in the country does with his funereal black. In heaven’s name, avoid the “tourist’s” get-up. You must slip through the countryside like an old family friend, not like an intruder. One more recommendation. A straw hat is one of those creations in which the inventive genius of man triumphs. Light and as solid as flexible armour, it places between the burning sun and your poor skull just the right amount of space for you to be able to speak of the _good_ sun.... Suppose a shower, a downpour, surprises you on a day when you have left your umbrella behind. If it does not last too long the wide rim of your head-covering will shelter you. If the straw is a little warped after this bath, well, it has seen plenty of others. It will soon get back its proper shape; your oval, square or pointed skull takes care of that gratis. And this invention, you know, costs only a few cents. If some accident befalls it, if it has not been fastened firmly with your handkerchief knotted under your chin, and a gust of wind blows it into the water or some ditch, well, good-bye, old friend.... I shall regret you because my head breathed its warmest thoughts through you, but I shall find another like you for a mere song at the first shop I reach.

If you travel with this modest outfit, you must not expect to be treated as a rich gentleman travelling for his pleasure. That humiliation will certainly be spared you. Nor must you be too surprised if, along the road, you are taken for a pedlar by the women on the doorsteps or the labourers in the fields. That’s natural enough, and it will even please you, for nothing could be more creditable. They may ask you if you are able to mend an umbrella (why an umbrella in your hand in this radiant sunlight?) or if you are not a tinker. Or a clock-setter. Or one of those casual labourers who work by the day in the hay-making season. You will certainly not be offended by anything of this kind; indeed you will be flattered, for it will show you that they don’t take you for a fool. This is a compliment you don’t often receive from your own fellow-townsmen. At home they are not particularly struck by your ability, but out in the world your ten fingers are in constant request. Even if some theft has been committed in the neighbourhood as you are passing through with a friend and they look at you suspiciously and the constable discreetly walks along with you, you are not indignant at the inquisition. How could the police, with their infallible noses, fail to suspect two mischievous-looking young fellows, roaming about the roads without any apparent purpose, instead of the traveller who puts up at the best hotel and orders his dinner in a lofty voice? You and your companion must be the criminals, or good-bye to the constable and the constable’s nose.

In case you don’t care to sleep out under the stars, ask for a bed in some house along the way. It is so much cosier. You will make the acquaintance of some very good souls. Under their roof, as your wet boots are drying before the fire, you will feel that you are in the very heart of the country. And you will not have to refuse the hotel boy the tip he has failed to deserve, the wretch, because he has polished your famous boots instead of greasing them with a rind of pork.

So, no matter where you go, the world responds to your expectations. It likes to be approached on its own level, and it is for you, the man with the knapsack, that it keeps its finest stories. Finally, you will spend less money than if you stayed at home.

Henry finds the highway tedious, for it is the road of trade and traffic. He has not buckled on his haversack to perform a military march. On the highway the gravel crunches under your feet, the dust gets between your teeth. If his itinerary obliges him to take the road, he at least walks on the bank, stopping from time to time to listen to what the wind has to say on the wires. What’s the latest news? As a rule he follows the paths, taking short-cuts across fields, jumping over hedges, clambering up the little hills without slackening his pace. He has a good wind. Once he has made up his mind to reach a point he has marked on his map, all the obstacles in the world, natural and artificial, can get in his way: he makes straight for his object, scaling every one. Obstacles are made to be leapt over--a much quicker way than going round them. He never loses his sense of direction in the woods. He is a walker who can count more years of experience than Christianity can count centuries. A pagan of a walker.

This time the man with the old umbrella is going off alone. To set out in company would certainly be to multiply by two or three the pleasure of the adventure. But where can he find them, the rare birds that share his tastes? He knows one or two perhaps, scarcely three. Most of his friends are simply not to be thought of as travelling companions. People who wear black clothes and are impeccably correct to the very soles of their feet, people who are charming in their own houses but whom you can’t imagine eating a bowl of gruel before a camp-fire. They would make you conspicuous on the road. You can’t go and ask them to travel like a common tramp, with an old umbrella and a bundle. And besides, you who are an indefatigable walker and as abstemious as a camel would soon leave your companion behind. Half-way along the road you would hear him complaining back there that his boot hurt him or that he was melting with perspiration. He would have to belong to a special type, a Henry number 2 or a brother John.... Or a William. But William does not dare to start out this time; he is afraid of what might befall him with such an intrepid companion when it is no longer a question of a mere afternoon’s ramble to Nine Acre Corner.

Some friends have sent Henry an invitation to lecture over yonder; it is a chance for a little trip. If he sometimes has to be urged a bit, it is only for the stupidest of reasons. When he goes to see some of his friends or appears in public, he has to dress up more or less (a remnant of respect for the conventions, you know).... His old togs, frayed by all the thickets of the wilderness, have such a beautiful patina and they are so well moulded to all his movements and so easy at the arm-holes that it is heart-breaking to be obliged to give them up and harness himself in a frock-coat in which he feels as cramped as a best man dressing up for his cousin’s wedding. The mere thought of it almost spoils his pleasure in advance. He would like to be his everyday self, not this promenader in his Sunday best.

But Henry is ready for any sacrifice. He is going to take the train for Worcester and pay his friend Harrison Blake a visit. The latter is an old Harvard man like himself whom he met through Emerson when he was living at Walden. A little too full of starch, this good man--Henry would like to pinch him now and then to see if he has blood in his veins--but a firm and faithful friend. They write to each other regularly. Henry is a little bored by the correspondence, and he would be very happy if he could make this excellent Blake, who absolutely insists upon regarding him as a sage and a great philosopher, understand how seriously mistaken he is. No, my friend, you are quite wrong; I am a very ordinary soul and very much at a loss how to reply to you, for to me two words exchanged with a carter mean more than all the moral counsels in the world. You insist on asking me for all sorts of spiritual directions, and I am as threadbare in philosophical matters as I am in the matter of clothes. You are throwing your respect away, dear fellow. It is very hard for a pagan, an artist and a savage to make himself intelligible to a churchman, for he is a churchman, this good, faithful Blake. It is a safe bet that in fifty years he would never understand. To appease this keen spiritual hunger, the great “philosopher,” in his letters--after ten years of correspondence they are invariably addressed to “Mr. Blake”--copies out for him whole pages from his Journal, carefully selected from those that are the most “moral.” Their correspondence and their relations always keep this grave tone. Henry feels the frock-coat that cramps him at the arm-holes. But Mr. Blake is certainly the most loyal of friends.