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

“Henry D. Thoreau: A Disquisition” (1879)

[113] UT “Henry D. Thoreau: A Disquisition” (1879) Prescott Keyes Prescott Keyes (1858–1943) was the son of Concord lawyer John Shepard Keyes and Martha Prescott Keyes. He graduated from Harvard in 1879 and returned to Concord, where in 1881 he married Alice Reynolds, and became a lawyer, district judge, bank president, head of an insurance company, and a trustee of the Concord Free Public Library. Although never delivered, this “Disquisition” on Thoreau was to have been part of Keyes’s Harvard commencement program. As Walter Harding has noted, it is especially appealing as a contrasting study with his father’s typically scornful views of Henry Thoreau, whom the senior Keyes belittled as a “queer mixture of sense & nonsense he got off in his Emersonian style,” “the poet naturalist without much claim to either title” (Harding, “John Shepard Keyes,” 3). Prescott Keyes could not have disagreed more. david henry thoreau was born in Concord in 1817. His father was a leadpencil maker and he himself worked at that trade until he was sent to Harvard at the age of 17. While in college he gained but little from his instructors or their text-books; he spent his time rummaging about in the dusty corners of the College library. After graduating in 1837 he had to decide to what he should devote his life; which of the many paths that lay opening out before him he should choose. He turned aside from the accustomed paths and chose the by-path of a simple, sincere life, devoted to literature, to the study of Nature, to the development of what he felt to be highest and best in his own character—in short, to the art of living well. He refused to allow his life to be frittered away by detail, or its cares and labors to prevent his plucking its finer fruits. Most men are attracted to society; Thoreau to solitude, to Nature. Most men work in organized bodies; Thoreau did his life-work alone. Individuality is the key-note of his whole career. He foresaw that he might be subjected to ridicule and that he would lose much in a worldly point of view, but believing in the great principle that a thoreau in his own time [114] man should do that work in life for which he has an earnest enthusiasm, and feeling his own enthusiasm and deep love for Nature, he decided that his life ought to be spent with his mistress and not toiling and moiling in the busy world. After teaching school for a year or two and making some more leadpencils , he slowly drifted into the occupation of surveying the farms about Concord. This furnished him an honest, independent, though meagre support ; it brought him into close contact with the farmers whose characters he studied with interest; “it led him continually into new and secluded grounds, and helped his studies of Nature,” for while he surveyed the land for the farmer, he surveyed the landscape for himself. His endless walks made up a great part of his life. Thoreau really understood the art of taking walks—of “sauntering through the woods and over the hills & fields.” He left the world with its cares far behind him and walked, a free man, through the realm of Nature. He made himself thoroughly familiar with every nook and corner of the country round about his native village. He knew every animal and its habits, every plant from the mighty oak to the tiny moss that grows at its foot. The partridge had shown him her nest and the squirrel where the chestnuts and acorns lay hidden for the winter. He had seen the sun set and seen it rise again from the top of all the hills. He had rowed upon the river, by night and by day, from its source to its mouth, had bathed in its waters and slept on its banks. To give a wider range to these rambles he went several times to Cape Cod, the Maine Woods and the White Mountains. But as even these excursions did not satisfy his longing to live close to Nature, he built himself a hut on the shore of Walden Pond in Concord. Here he lived for two years— years which he counted as better worth living than any others of his whole life. His sojourn at Walden was no affectation, nor was it a sour shutting himself out from his fellow-men. It was a deep draught...