Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881)/Introductory
INTRODUCTORY.
Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, July 12, 1817, and died there May 6, 1862. Most of his life was spent in that town, and most of the localities referred to in this volume are to be found there. His Journal, from which the following selections were made, was bequeathed to me by his sister Sophia, who died October 7, 1876, at Bangor, Maine. Before it came into my possession I had been in the habit of borrowing volumes of it from time to time, and thus continuing an intercourse with its author which I had enjoyed, through occasional visits and correspondence, for many years before his death, and which I regard as perhaps the highest privilege of my life.
In reading the Journal for my own satisfaction, I had sometimes been wont to attend each day to what had been written on the same day of the month in some other year; desiring thus to be led to notice, in my walks, the phenomena which Thoreau noticed, so to be brought nearer to the writer by observing the same sights, sounds, etc., and if possible have my love of nature quickened by him. This habit suggested the arrangement of dates in the following pages, viz., the bringing together of passages under the same day of the month in different years. In this way I hoped to make an interesting picture of the progress of the seasons, of Thoreau's year. It was evidently painted with a most genuine love, and often apparently in the oj)en air, in the very presence of the phenomena described, so that the written page brings the mind of the reader, as writing seldom does, into closest contact with nature, making him see its sights, hear its sounds, and feel its very breath upon his cheek.
Thoreau seems deliberately to have chosen nature rather than man for his companion, though he knew well the higher value of man, as appears from such passages as the following: "The blue sky is a distant reflection of the azure serenity that looks out from under a human brow." "To attain to a true relation to one human creature is enough to make a year memorable." And somewhere he says in substance," What is the singing of birds or any natural sound compared with the voice of one we love?" Friendship was one of his favorite themes, and no one has written with a finer appreciation of it. Still, in ordinary society, he found it so difficult to reach essential humanity through the civilized and conventional, that he turned to nature, who was ever ready to meet his highest mood. From the haunts of business and the common intercourse of men he went into the woods and fields as from a solitary desert into society. He might have said with another,—he did virtually say,—"If we go solitary to streams and mountains, it is to meet man there where he is more than ever man."
But while I have sought in these selections to represent the progressive life of nature, I have also been careful to give Thoreau's thoughts, because though his personality is in a striking degree single, he being ever the same man in his conversation, letters, books, and the details of his life, though his observation is imbedded in his philosophy ("how to observe is how to behave," etc.), yet" if any distinction may be made, his thoughts or philosophy seem to me incomparably the more interesting and important. He declined from the first to live for the common prizes of society, for wealth or even what is called a competence, for professional, social, political, or even literary success; and this not from a want of ambition or a purpose, but from an ambition far higher than the ordinary, which fully possessed him,—an ambition to obey his purest instincts, to follow implicitly the finest intimations of his genius, to secure thus the fullest and freest life of which he was capable. He chose to lay emphasis on his relations to nature and the universe rather than on those he bore to the ant-hill of society, not to be merely another wheel in the social machine. He felt that the present is only one among the possible forms of civilization, and so preferred not to commit himself to it. Herein lies the secret of that love of the wild which was so prominent a trait in his character.
It is evident that the main object of society now is to provide for our material wants, and still more and more luxuriously for them, while the higher wants of our nature are made secondary, put off for some Sunday service and future leisure. A great lesson of Thoreau's life is that all this must be reversed, that whatever relates to the supply of inferior wants must be simplified, in order that the higher life may be enriched, though he desired no servile imitation of his own methods, for perhaps the highest lesson of all to be learnt from him is that the only way of salvation lies in the strictest fidelity to one's own genius.
A late English reviewer, who shows in many respects a very just appreciation of Thoreau, charges him with doing little beyond writing a few books, as if that might not be a great thing; but a life so steadily directed from the first toward the highest ends, gaining as the fruits of its fidelity such a harvest of sanity, strength, and tranquillity, and that wealth of thought which has been well called "the only conceivable prosperity," accompanied, too, as it naturally was, with the earnest and effective desire to communicate itself to others,—such a life is the worthiest deed a man can perform, the purest benefit he can confer upon his fellows, compared with which all special acts of service or philanthropy are trivial.