Henry David Thoreau Essays

The mind at work here is restless and unhurried at once. A commonplace winter frost becomes a whole crystalline botany, a philosophy grown without leaving the doorstep. A boat glides at night with fire at its prow, lighting the river bottom to reveal fish asleep in every posture. In Maine, a canoe backs through the alders and two moose stare out like giant startled rabbits. Thoreau reads Chaucer as the humane father of English poetry, sets Ossian's stark verse beside Homer's, and follows the apple-tree across centuries down to one wild specimen thriving unnoticed on a cliff, its history known perhaps only to a chickadee.

Then the register sharpens. Refusing the poll-tax, Thoreau spends a night in jail and finds the stone walls have mistaken his body for the whole of him — his thoughts pass through them, and he comes to pity the institution rather than fear it. There is indignation here, against slavery and an unjust war, and a wry humor running alongside it. "That government is best which governs least," he writes; elsewhere, "Read not the Times. Read the Eternities."

Scent can carry an argument that rhetoric cannot. A single white water-lily rising pure from the muck might restore a fragile hope. What the collection asks of a reader, and rewards, is attention: these pages spend themselves proving that "in Wildness is the preservation of the world," one observed thing at a time.