Thoreau in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

From “Thoreau” (1889)

[143] UT From “Thoreau” (1889) Octavius Brooks Frothingham Octavius Brooks Frothingham (1822–1895) was a Unitarian minister and an author with nearly twenty books about the Transcendentalist movement to his credit, in addition to biographies or memoirs on William Henry Channing , George Ripley, and Theodore Parker. As his theology and antislavery sentiments grew increasingly radical, he moved often—serving as a minister in Salem, Massachusetts, in New Jersey, and in New York. In 1867, Frothingham became the first president of the National Free Religious Association. Although he barely mentions Thoreau in his important work, Transcendentalism in New England (1876), this sketch provides an appreciative overview, published in a popular reference work, of Thoreau’s increasing importance as a literary figure toward the end of the nineteenth century. cities he disliked; civilization he did not believe in. Nature was his passion , and the wilder it was the more he loved it. He was a fine scholar, especially in Greek, translated two of the tragedies of Aeschylus, was intimate with the Greek anthology, and knew Pindar, Simonides, and all the great lyric poets. In English poetry he preferred Milton to Shakespeare, and was more familiar with the writers of the 17th century than with modern men. He was no mean poet himself; in fact, he possessed the essential quality of the poet—a soaring imagination. He possessed an eye and an ear for beauty, and had he been gifted with the power of musical expression, would have been distinguished. No complete collection of his pieces has ever been made or could be, but fragments are exquisite. Emerson said that his poem on “Smoke” surpassed any by Simonides. That Thoreau was a man of aspiration, a pure idealist, reverent, spiritual, is plain from his intimacy with Bronson Alcott and Emerson. . . . His religion was that of the transcendentalists. The element of negation in it was large, and in his case conspicuous and acrid. . . . His doctrine was that of individualism. Therein he differed from Emerson, who was sympathetic and began at the divine end. Thoreau began with the ground and reasoned up. He saw beauty in thoreau in his own time [144] ashes. . . . He aimed at becoming elemental and spontaneous. He wrote hymns to the night quite in the pagan fashion. His very aptitudes brought him in contact with the earth. His aspect suggested a faun, one who was in the secret of the wilderness. . . . He built a hut on the shore of Walden pond in 1845, and lived there, with occasional absences, about two years and a half. He built on Emerson’s land, though he had wished to build elsewhere. The house had no lock to the door, no curtain to the window. It belonged to nature as much as to man, and to all men as much as to any one. When Thoreau left it, it was bought by a Scotch gardener, who carried it off a little way and used it as a cottage. Then a farmer bought it, moved it still farther away, and converted it into a tool-house. A pile of stones marks the site of Thoreau’s hut. He went into the woods, not because he wished to avoid his fellow-men, as a misanthrope, but because he wanted to confront Nature, to deal with her at first hand, to lead his own life, to meet primitive conditions ; and having done this, he abandoned the enterprise, recommending no one to try it who had not “a pretty good supply of internal sunshine.” . . . At Walden he labored, studied, meditated, edited his first book, the “Week,” and gauged his genius. He redeemed and consecrated the spot. The refusal to pay taxes, and his consequent imprisonment, were due to a more specific cause—namely, his dissent from the theory of human government and from the practice of the American state, which supported slavery. He stood simply and plainly on the rights and duty of the individual. The act was heroic as he performed it, and, when read by the light of his philosophy , was consistent. Thoreau was anything but sour, surly, or morose. He could sing, and even dance, on occasion. He was sweet with children; fond of kittens; a sunbeam at home; the best of brothers, gentle, patient, helpful. Those he loved he gave his heart to, and if they were few it was perhaps because his affections were not as expansive as they were deep. But he showed little emotion, having learned, like the Indian, to control his...