REFERENCES.

William Ellery Channing's Thoreau: The Poet Naturalist. ("A rhap

sody rather than a biography.")

Frank B. Sanborn's Henry D. Thoreau.

Henry A. Page's Thoreau: His Life and Aims.

Familiar Letters of Henry D. Thoreau. (Edited by F. B. Sanborn.) Ralph W. Emerson's Memoir of Thoreau. (Published as Preface to Thoreau's Excursions, and in The Literary World, March 26, 1881.) Emerson's poem, Woodnotes.

T. W. Higginson's Short Studies of American Authors.

James R. Lowell's Essay on Thoreau in My Study Windows. ("The subtlest of Lowell's minor reviews." - STEDMAN.)

John Burroughs's Indoor Studies.

M. D. Conway's Emerson (chap. xxv.).

Henry A. Beers's Initial Studies in American Letters. (Pp. 110-114.) Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography.

Duyckinck's Cyclopædia of American Literature. Vol. II.

Hawthorne and Lemmon's American Literature.

George B. Bartlett's Concord Guide Book. (Pp. 72-75.)

Theodore Wolfe's Literary Shrines.

Extracts from Thoreau's writings may be found in

Stedman-Hutchinson's Library of American Literature. Vol. VII. Beers's Century of American Literature.

F. H. Underwood's American Authors.

Masterpieces of American Literature.

The Atlantic Monthly. August, 1862. September, 1863 (Article by

Louisa Alcott).

The North American Review. October, 1863. October, 1865.

The Century Magazine. July, 1882 (Article by John Burroughs).

The New England Magazine. December, 1890 ("Emerson and his Friends." Illustrated).

Harper's Magazine. August, 1894 (Howells's "My First Visit to New England").

Scribner's Magazine. March, 1895 ("Thoreau's Poems of Nature").

OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE.

July 12, 1817.

May 6, 1862.

His writings, prose and verse, are his best biography.

Birthplace.

Concord, Mass.

("To him, Concord was the centre of the universe, and he seriously contemplated annexing the rest of the planet to Concord.")

House, on the Virginia road, still standing.

For view, see Margaret Sidney's Old Concord: Her Highways

and Byways.

"Thoreau was the best topographer of his birthplace."

He never left Concord except for a lecturing tour or a pedestrian excursion.

Grandfather.

A Frenchman, who married in Boston a woman of Scotch birth. Thoreau's speech bore a slight French accent, and his pronunciation of the letter "r" was always peculiar.

Early Home.

One of simplicity and poverty.

A gathering-place for the early Abolitionists, and a refuge for fugitive slaves.

Education.

School life in Concord and Boston.

At Harvard. Degree in 1837. (He refused his diploma, con-
sidering it not worth five dollars.)

Made possible by the special efforts of his family and aunts.
Independent. Made no friends. Roomed in Hollis Hall.

A lifelong student of the classic literatures.

Acquaintance with Emerson, fourteen years his senior.

The most valuable and intimate of his acquaintances.
Dated from his college days.

Emerson wrote a letter of recommendation for him as teacher. At one time Thoreau was an inmate of Emerson's household. An unconscious disciple of the Concord seer.

Begins to Lecture. 1838.

Various Occupations.

Manufactured lead pencils (he stopped doing so when he had made a perfect one).

Taught in the Concord Academy. Tutored in the family of Emerson's brother at Staten Island. Surveyed land for Concord farmers.

Builds his "Hermitage" (1845), on land belonging to Emerson, by the shore of Walden Pond, "God's Drop," "a gem of

the first water that Concord wears in her coronet."

View. Selected Proofs, Century Co., No. 46. Duyckinck, Vol. II., p. 602.

"Who liv'st all alone,

Close to the bone,

And where life is sweetest,

Constantly eatest."

The Old Marlborough Road.

Erected by Himself at the cost of less than thirty dollars.

Ten feet by fifteen; garret, closet, door, and window; no lock or curtain.

"There is some of the same fitness in a man's building his own house that there is in a bird's building her own nest."

Spent for food about twenty-seven cents a week.

Lived here for two years, in order to read, write, and study nature. Abandoned the life when his object was accomplished. Did not recommend any one to try the same experience unless he had " a good supply of internal sunshine."

"I am no more lonely than Walden Pond itself. What company has that, I pray? And yet it has not the blue devils, but blue angels in it, in the azure tint of its waters." Kept a calendar of the flowers of the neighborhood (knew the day of blossoming for each one).

Many and various Visitors sought him out in this retreat.

Here Ellery Channing and Thoreau practised “the art of taking walks."

Site is marked by a cairn of stones, which every pilgrim to the spot makes higher by his contribution from the shore of the pond. For view, see Margaret Sidney's Old Concord, and The New England Magazine, November, 1893, p. 300. The furniture of the hut and other Thoreau relics may be seen in the "Antiquarian House," Concord.

Publishes

A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers. 1849. "A collection of essays tied together by a slight thread of travel." - BURROUGHS.

It abounds in excellent quotations, particularly from the minor

Elizabethan poets.

Publishes Walden; or, Life in the Woods. ("A sermon on economy.") 1854.

"The only book printed in America, to my thinking, that bears

an annual perusal." HIGGINSON.

"Few authors since Shakespeare have been less anxious to print their works."

"Capital reading, but very wicked and heathenish."— WHIT

TIER.

"Like many reformers, he carried his views to an extreme." "In no other book can one come so close to Nature's heart. We hear in it the weird cry of the loons over the water; we watch the frolics of the squirrels; we observe the thousand phenomena of the wonderful little lake; we listen to the forest sounds by day and by night; we study the tell-tale snow; we watch, with bated breath, a battle to the death between two armies of ants. For minute and loving descriptions of the woods and fields, Walden has had no rival." - F. L. PATTEE.

"If every quiet country town in New England had a son who, with a lore like Selborne's and an eye like Buffon's, had watched and studied its landscape and history, and then published the result, as Thoreau has done, in a book as redolent of genuine and perceptive sympathy with nature as a clover-field of honey, New England would seem as poetic and beautiful as Greece." G. W. CURTIS.

Persons referred to in the book.

See Wolfe's Literary Shrines, pp. 72, 73.

Death from Consumption.

Buried in Sleepy Hollow, Concord.

Character and Temperament.

"Hypæthral."

"Like his native air in winter, - clear, frosty, inexpressibly

pure and bracing." Stoical, sturdily independent, a consistent believer in individualism. "His affections were

more deep than expansive."

"His religion was that of Transcendentalism, and his spirit that of other-worldliness."

Self-centred. -"May I love and reverence myself above all

the gods that man ever invented." ("This egotism of his is a Stylites pillar, after all, a seclusion which keeps him in the public eye.' ” — Lowell.) Renunciatory. "He was bred to no profession; he never married (his celibacy was due to the fact that he surrendered his love in favor of his brother); he lived alone; he never went to church; he never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the State (was imprisoned for doing so); he ate no flesh, he drank no wine, he never knew the use of tobacco; and, though a naturalist, he used neither a trap nor gun.". EMERSON.

"Thoreau seemed to me a man who had experienced Nature as other men are said to have experienced religion." - E. P. WHIPPLE.

Appearance.

Average height; spare build; sloping shoulders, long arms; large hands and feet. "His aspect suggested a faun, one who was in the secrets of the wilderness."

Features marked. - Roman nose, large overhanging brows, deep-set, expressive blue eyes, prominent lips.

Abundant dark-brown hair. Plain in dress.

Resembled Emerson in features, expression, and tones of voice.
A woodcut of his face may be found in Harper's Magazine,
August, 1894, p. 448, and in the Cyclopædia of American
Biography.