Askov American., 1943-12-09

mentS.
One of our earliest naturalist
authors and poets was Henry David
Thoreau. He was fascinated by grow
ing things, feeling that he could not
learn enough about their ways.
Thoreau was born in 1917 and died
comparatively young in 1862 A great
part of his life was spent out-of-
doors. He lived, unmarried, a kind
of care-free, independent life, that
in a day laborer would be called
shiftless. He was unwilling to work
for money unless he needed it at
once. He was quite able to turn an
honest penny when he needed it, but
as he lived very simply his needs
were few, so he worked only at in
tervals.
The more industrious townsfolk
were quite shocked to find that he
spent long days talking with his
neighbors, studying animal and plant
life, occasionally leaving the village
for trips to Canada, the Maine woods,
Cape Cod, Connecticut - and a few
times on business to New York. Yet
he was not as irregular as he was
reputed to be. For several years he
and his brother, John, conducted a
very successful school in Concord,
which was given up with the failure
of Johns health. He had a hand in
the family business of pencil-making
and preparing black lead for electro
typing throughout his life.
One of his best friends was Ralph
Waldo Emerson. The records of the
two mems ramblings are many. Emer-
son wrote Of him:
''1t was pleasure and a privilege
to walk with him. He knew the
country like fox or bird, and
passed through it as freely by paths
of his own. He knew every track in
the snow or on the ground, and what
creature had this path before him. :.
On the day I speak of he looked for
the menyanthes, detected it across
the wide pool, and on examination of
its florets, decided it had been in
flower five days"
Thoreau's most we'll known work
walden" is, generally speaking, an
account of his two years residence by
the lakeside, yet it is also a criticism
of the ordinary routine of life. In it
he writes:
81 went to the woods because 1
wished to live deliberately, to front
only the essential facts of life, and
see if 1 could not learn what it had
to teach, and not, when I come to
die, discover that 1 had not lived -. :.
l wanted to live deep and suck out
all the marrow of life, to live so
sturdily and Spartan-like as to put
to rout all that was not life, to cut
broad swath and shave close, to
drive life into corner and reduce
it to its lowest terms, and if it proved
to be mean, why, then, to get the
whole and genuine meanness of it,
and publish its meanness to the
world; or if it were sublime, to know
it by experience, and be able to give
a true account of it in my next ex-
curSion."
The poet in him continually brought
him back to the beauty in what he
saw. He did not philosophize about
creation as Emerson. The facts about
it meant so much more to him. He
simply held the beauties of nature
up to view such as this from the
pond in Winter:
Standing on the snow-covered
plain, as if in pasture amid the
hills, I cut my way first through a
foot of snow, and then a foot of ice,
and open a window under my feet,
where, kneeling to drink, I look
down into the quiet parlor of fishes,
pervaded by softened light rs
through window of ground glass,
with its bright sanded floor the same
as in summer; there a perennial
waveless serenity reigns as in the
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