The Invention of Nature

19

Poetry, Science and Nature

Henry David Thoreau and Humboldt

IN SEPTEMBER 1847 Henry David Thoreau left his cabin at Walden Pond to move back home to the nearby town of Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau was thirty years old, and for the previous two years, two months and two days he had lived in a small hut in the woods. He had done so, he said, because he ‘wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life’.

Thoreau had built the shingled cabin with his own hands. Ten by fifteen feet, the small building had a window on each side and a fireplace with a small stove to heat the room. He had a bed, a small wooden desk and three chairs. When he sat on his doorstep he could see the gently rippling surface of the pond shimmering in the sun. The pond was ‘earth’s eye’, Thoreau said, which when it froze in winter ‘closes its eyelids’. It was a walk of just under two miles around the shoreline. The steep embankment was crowned with large white pines greened by their long tufts of needles, as well as hickories and oaks – like ‘slender eyelashes which fringe it’. In spring delicate flowers carpeted the forest floor and in May blueberries paraded their dangling bell-shaped blooms. Goldenrod brought their bright yellows to the summer and sumachs added their reds to the autumn. In winter, when snow muffled sound, Thoreau followed the tracks of rabbits and birds. In autumn, he rustled piles of fallen leaves with his feet to make as much noise as possible while singing loudly in the forest. He watched, he listened and he walked. He meandered through the gentle countryside around Walden Pond and became a discoverer, naming places as an explorer might: Mount Misery, Thrush Alley, Blue Heron Rock and so on.

Thoreau would turn these two years in his cabin into one of the most famous pieces of American nature writing: Walden, which he published in 1854, some seven years after his return to Concord. Thoreau found it difficult to write the book, and it only became Walden as we know it today when he discovered a new world in Humboldt’s Cosmos. Humboldt’s view of nature gave Thoreau the confidence to weave together science and poetry. ‘Facts collected by a poet are set down at last as winged seeds of truth,’ Thoreau later wrote. Walden was Thoreau’s answer to Cosmos.

Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond (Illustration Credit 19.1)

Thoreau was born in July 1817. His father was a tradesman and pencil maker, but struggled to make a living. Home was Concord, a bustling town of about 2,000 inhabitants, some fifteen miles west of Boston. Thoreau had been a shy boy who preferred to be alone. When his classmates played boisterous games, he would stand by the side with his eyes on the ground, always searching for a leaf or an insect. He was not popular because he never joined in and they called him the ‘fine scholar with a big nose’. Climbing trees like a squirrel, he felt most comfortable outdoors.

Aged sixteen Thoreau enrolled at Harvard University, only a little more than ten miles to the south-east of Concord. Here he studied Greek, Latin and modern languages including German as well as taking courses in maths, history and philosophy. He used the library intensely and particularly enjoyed travel accounts, dreaming himself away to distant countries.

After his graduation, in 1837, Thoreau returned to Concord where he worked briefly as a teacher as well as occasionally helping his father in the family pencil-making business. It was in Concord that Thoreau met the writer and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson who had moved there three years previously. Fourteen years his senior, Emerson encouraged Thoreau to write, as well as opening his well-stocked library to him.¹ It was on Emerson’s land at Walden Pond that Thoreau built his little cabin. At that time Thoreau was grieving for his only brother, John, who had died in his arms after a tetanus infection. Thoreau had been so traumatized by John’s sudden death that he had even developed a ‘sympathetic’ form of the disease, experiencing similar symptoms such as lockjaw and muscle spasms. He felt like ‘a withered leaf’ – miserable, useless and so desolate that a friend had advised: ‘build yourself a hut, & there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no other alternative, no other hope for you.’

Nature helped Thoreau. A fading flower was no reason to mourn, he told Emerson, nor were thick layers of mouldering autumn leaves on the forest floor because in the following year all would spring back into life. Death was part of nature’s cycle and thus a sign of its health and vigour. ‘There can be no really black melan-choly to him who lives in the midst of nature,’ Thoreau said as he tried to make sense of the world around and within him by being in nature.

The America that Thoreau called home had changed a great deal since Humboldt had met Thomas Jefferson in Washington, DC, in the summer of 1804. In the intervening years, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had crossed the continent from St Louis to the Pacific coast and had returned from their expedition with reports of rich and vast lands which proved alluring prospects for the expanding nation. Four decades later, in 1846, the United States gained large parts of the Oregon Territory from the British, including the present-day states of Washington, Oregon and Idaho as well as parts of Montana and Wyoming. By then the country was embroiled in a war with Mexico after the annexation of slave-holding Texas. When the war concluded with a sweeping victory for the United States, just as Thoreau had moved out of his cabin, Mexico ceded a vast territory that included the future states of California, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and most of Arizona as well as parts of Wyoming, Oklahoma, Kansas and Colorado. Under President James K. Polk the country had expanded by more than a million square miles between 1845 and 1848, increasing by a third and for the first time extending across the whole continent. Gold was first found in California in January 1848, and the following year 40,000 people set out to make their fortunes in the West.

Meanwhile America had advanced technologically. The Erie Canal had been completed in 1825 and five years later the first section of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad had opened. In April 1838 the Great Western, the first transatlantic steamship, arrived in New York from England and during the winter of 1847, as Thoreau returned to Concord, the Capitol in Washington, DC, was lit with gas for the first time.

Concord, Massachusetts (Illustration Credit 19.2)

Boston was still an important harbour and Thoreau’s hometown Concord just to the west was growing in tandem. Concord had a cotton mill, a shoe and a lead pipe manufactory as well as several warehouses and banks. Each week forty stagecoaches passed through the town which was also the seat of the county government. Wagons loaded with goods from Boston drove along Main Street towards the market towns in New Hampshire and Vermont.

Farming had long turned the wilderness here into open fields, pastures and meadows. It was impossible to walk through Concord’s woods, Thoreau noted in his journal, without hearing the sound of axes. New England’s landscape had changed so dramatically over the previous two centuries that few ancient trees remained. The forest had been cleared first for agriculture and fuel, and had then been devoured by locomotives with the advent of the railway. In Concord the railway had arrived in 1844, its tracks skirting the western edge of Walden Pond where Thoreau had often walked beside them. Wild nature was receding and humans were increasingly removed from it.

Life at Walden Pond suited Thoreau, for there he could lose himself in a book or stare at a flower for hours without noticing what else was happening around him. He had long praised the pleasures of a simple life. ‘Simplify, simplify’, he would later write in Walden. To be a philosopher, he said, is to live ‘a life of simplicity’. He was content on his own, and didn’t care about social pleasantries, women or money. His appearance mirrored this attitude. His clothes were ill-fitting, his trousers too short and his shoes unpolished. Thoreau had a ruddy complexion, a large nose, a straggly beard and expressive blue eyes. One friend said that he ‘imitates porcupines successfully’, and others described him as cantankerous and ‘pugnacious’. Some said that Thoreau had ‘courteous manners’ – although a little ‘uncouth and somewhat rustic’– while many thought him entertaining and funny. But even his friend and Concord neighbour, the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, described Thoreau as ‘an intolerable bore’ who made him feel ashamed for having money, or a house, or writing a book that people will read. Thoreau certainly was eccentric, but also refreshing ‘like ice-water in the dog days to the parched citizens’, another friend said.

All agreed that Thoreau was a man more at ease with nature and words than he was with people. One exception was his joy in the company of children. Emerson’s son, Edward, remembered fondly how Thoreau always had time for them, telling stories about a ‘duel’ of two mud-turtles in the river or magically making pencils disappear and reappear. When the village children visited him at his cabin at Walden Pond, Thoreau took them on long walks through the woods. When he whistled strange sounds, one by one animals would appear – the woodchuck peeped out from the underbrush, squirrels ran towards him and birds settled on his shoulder.

Nature, Hawthorne said, ‘seems to adopt him as her especial child’, for animals and plants communicated with him. There was a bond that no one could explain. Mice would run across Thoreau’s arms, crows would perch on him, snakes coiled around his legs and he always found even the most hidden first blossoms of spring. Nature spoke to him, and Thoreau to it. When he planted a field of beans, he asked, ‘What shall I learn of beans or beans of me?’ The joy of his daily life was ‘a little star-dust caught’, he said, or a ‘segment of a rainbow which I have clutched’.

Henry David Thoreau (Illustration Credit 19.3)

During his time at Walden Pond, Thoreau watched nature closely. He bathed in the morning and then sat in the sun. He walked through the woods or quietly crouched in a clearing, waiting for the animals to parade themselves for him. He observed the weather and called himself a ‘self-appointed inspector of snow storms and rain storms’. In summer he took his boat out and played the flute while drifting on the water, and in winter he sprawled out flat on the frozen surface of the pond, pressing his face against the ice to study the bottom ‘like a picture behind a glass’. At night he listened to the tree branches rubbing against the shingles of his cabin’s roof, and in the morning to the birds that serenaded him. He was ‘a wood-nymph’, as one friend said, ‘a sylvan soul’.

For all his enjoyment of solitude, Thoreau did not live like a hermit in his cabin. He often went to the village to have meals with his family at his parents’ house or with the Emersons. He delivered lectures at the Concord Lyceum and received visitors at Walden Pond. In August 1846 the Concord anti-slavery society held their annual meeting on the doorsteps of Thoreau’s cabin and he went on an excursion to Maine. But he also wrote. During his two years at Walden Pond, Thoreau filled two thick notebooks, one with his experiences in the woods (the notes that would become the first version of Walden) and another containing a draft of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, a book about a boat trip he had taken with his much missed brother some years earlier.

When he moved out of his cabin and returned to Concord, he tried and repeatedly failed to find a publisher for A Week. No one was interested in a manuscript that was part nature description, and part memoir. In the end, one publisher agreed to print and distribute it at Thoreau’s own expense. It was a resounding commercial failure. No one wanted to buy the book and many of the reviews were scathing, with one, for example, accusing Thoreau of copying Emerson badly. Only a few admired it, declaring it a book that was ‘purely American’.

The enterprise left Thoreau several hundred dollars in debt and with many unsold copies of A Week. He now owned a library of 900 books, he quipped, ‘over seven hundred of which I wrote myself’. The unsuccessful publication also provoked friction between Thoreau and Emerson. Thoreau felt let down by his old mentor who had praised A Week despite not liking it. ‘While my friend was my friend he flattered me, and I never heard the truth from him, but when he became my enemy he shot it to me on a poisoned arrow,’ Thoreau wrote in his journal. It probably didn’t help their friendship either that Thoreau had developed a crush on Emerson’s wife, Lydian.

Today Thoreau is one of the most widely read and beloved American writers – during his lifetime, though, his friends and family worried about his lack of ambition. Emerson called him the ‘only man of leisure’ in Concord and one who was ‘insignificant here in town’, while Thoreau’s aunt believed that her nephew should be doing something better ‘than walking off every now and then’. Thoreau never cared much what others thought. Instead, he was struggling with his Walden manuscript, finding it hard to finish. ‘What are these pines & these birds about? What is this pond a-doing?’ he wrote in his journal, concluding that ‘I must know a little more.’

Thoreau was still trying to make sense of nature. He continued to march through the countryside, straight as a pine, as his friends said, and with long strides. He also began to work as a surveyor, which brought him a small income and allowed him to spend even more time outside. Counting his steps, Emerson said, Thoreau could measure distances more precisely than others could with the surveyor’s instruments of rod and chain. He collected specimens for the botanists and zoologists at Harvard University. He measured the depth of streams and ponds, took temperatures and pressed plants. In spring Thoreau recorded the arrival of birds and in winter he counted the frozen bubbles that were captured in the icy lid of the pond. Instead of ‘calling on some scholar’, he often hiked several miles through the woods for his ‘appointments’ with the plants. Thoreau was groping towards an understanding of what these pines and birds really meant.

Thoreau, like Emerson, was searching for the unity of nature but in the end they would choose different avenues. Thoreau would follow Humboldt in his belief that the ‘whole’ could only be comprehended by understanding the connections, correlations and details. Emerson on the other hand believed that this unity could not be discovered through rational thought alone but also by intuition or through some kind of revelation from God. Like the Romantics in England such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the German Idealists such as Friedrich Schelling, Emerson and his fellow Transcendentalists in America were reacting against scientific methods that were associated with deductive reasoning and empirical research. To examine nature like that, Emerson said, tended to ‘cloud the sight’. Instead, man had to find spiritual truth in nature. Scientists were only materialists whose ‘spirit is matter reduced to extreme thinness’, he wrote.

The Transcendentalists had been inspired by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant and his explanation of man’s understanding of the world. Kant had talked of a class of ideas or knowledge, Emerson explained, ‘which did not come from experience’. With this Kant had turned against the empiricists such as the British philosopher John Locke, who in the late seventeenth century had said that all knowledge was based on the experience of the senses. Emerson and his fellow Transcendentalists now insisted that man had the capacity ‘of knowing truth intuitively’. For them facts and nature’s appearance were like a curtain that needed to be drawn to discover the divine law behind it. Thoreau, however, was finding it increasingly difficult to weave his fascination with scientific facts into this worldview, because for him everything in nature had a meaning in itself. Here was a Transcendentalist who was searching for those grand ideas of unity by counting the petals of a bloom or the tree rings of a felled trunk.

Thoreau had begun to observe nature like a scientist. He measured and recorded, and his interest in this kind of detail became increasingly more urgent. Then, in autumn 1849, two years after he had left his cabin and just as the full extent of the failure of A Week became obvious, Thoreau made a decision that would change his life and give birth to Walden as we know it today. Thoreau completely reoriented his life with a new daily routine that required serious study every morning and evening, punctuated by a long afternoon walk. It was the moment when he took his first steps away from being just a poet who was fascinated by nature towards becoming one of America’s most important nature writers. Maybe it was the painful experience of publishing A Week, or his break with Emerson. Or maybe Thoreau had found the confidence to focus on what he adored. Whatever the reasons, everything changed.

This new regime marked the beginning of his scientific studies which included extensive daily journal writing. Every day, Thoreau would note what he had seen on his walks. These entries, which had previously been the odd fragment of observation but had mainly been draft passages for his essays and books, now became regular and chronological, documenting the seasons in Concord in all their intricacies. Instead of cutting up his journals to paste them into his literary manuscripts as he had done before, Thoreau left the new volumes intact. What had been random collections now became ‘Field Notes’.

Armed with his hat as a ‘botany box’ in which he kept plant specimens fresh during the long walks, a heavy music book as his plant press, a spyglass and his walking stick as a measuring tape, Thoreau now explored nature in all its detail. During his walks, he wrote notes on small scraps of paper which he then expanded in the evenings for his longer journal entries. His botanical observations became so meticulous that scientists still use them to examine the impact of the changing climate – by comparing the first flowering dates of wildflowers or the ‘leafing out’ dates of trees from Thoreau’s journals with those of today.

‘I omit the unusual – the hurricane and earthquakes – and describe the common,’ Thoreau wrote in his journal, ‘this is the true theme of poetry.’ As he meandered, measured and surveyed, Thoreau was moving away from Emerson’s grand and spiritual ideas of nature and instead observed the detailed variety that unfolded on his walks. This was also the moment when Thoreau first immersed himself in Humboldt’s writings – at the same time as he was turning against the influence of Emerson. ‘I feel ripe for something,’ Thoreau wrote in his journal. ‘It is seed time with me – I have lain fallow long enough.’

Thoreau read Humboldt’s most popular books: Cosmos, Views of Nature and Personal Narrative. Books on nature, Thoreau said, were ‘a sort of elixir’. As he read, he was always noting and scribbling. ‘His reading was done with a pen in his hand,’ one friend remarked. During these years, Humboldt’s name appeared regularly in Thoreau’s journals and notebooks, as well as in his published work. Thoreau noted ‘Humboldt says’ or ‘Humboldt has written’. One day, for example, when the sky had glowed in a particularly bright shade of blue, he felt the need to measure it precisely. ‘Where is my cyanometer?’ Thoreau called out. ‘Humboldt used it in his travels’ – referring to the instrument with which Humboldt had measured the blueness of the sky above Chimborazo. When Thoreau read in Personal Narrative that the roar of the rapids of the Orinoco was louder at night than by day, he noted the same phenomenon in his journal – only that the thunderous Orinoco was a gurgling brook in Concord. To Thoreau’s mind the hills that he had hiked in Peterborough in neighbouring New Hampshire were comparable to the Andes, while the Atlantic became a ‘large Walden Pond’. ‘Standing on the Concord cliffs,’ Thoreau wrote, he was ‘with Humboldt’.

What Humboldt had observed across the globe, Thoreau did at home. Everything was interwoven. When the ice-cutters came to the pond in winter in order to prepare and transport the ice to distant destinations, Thoreau thought of those who would consume it far away in the sweltering heat in Charleston or even in Bombay and Calcutta. They will ‘drink at my well’, he wrote, and the pure Walden water would be ‘mingled with the sacred waters of the Ganges’. There was no need to go on an expedition to distant countries. Why not travel at home? Thoreau noted in his journal – it didn’t matter how far one journeyed ‘but how much alive you are’. Be an explorer of ‘your own streams and oceans’, he advised, a Columbus of thoughts, and not one of trade or imperial ambitions.

Thoreau maintained as constant a dialogue with the books he read as he did with himself – always asking, prodding, niggling and questioning. When he saw a crimson cloud hanging deep over the horizon on a crisp cold winter day, he berated a part of himself that ‘You tell me it is a mass of vapor which absorbs all rays’, and then that this explanation was not good enough ‘for this red vision excites me, stirs my blood’. He was a scientist who wanted to understand the formation of clouds, but equally a poet enraptured by those billowing red mountains of the heavens.

What kind of science was this, Thoreau asked, ‘which enriches the understanding, but robs the imagination’? This was what Humboldt had written about in Cosmos. Nature, Humboldt explained, had to be described with scientific accuracy but without being ‘deprived thereby of the vivifying breath of imagination’. Knowledge did not ‘chill the feelings’ because the senses and the intellect were connected. More than any other, Thoreau followed Humboldt’s belief in the ‘deeply-seated bond’ that united knowledge and poetry. Humboldt allowed Thoreau to weave together science and imagination, the particular and the whole, the factual with the wonderful.

Thoreau continued to search for this balance. Over the years, the struggle became less intense, but he remained worried. One evening, for example, when he had spent a day at a river, scribbling page after page of notes on botany and wildlife, he finished the entry with the sentence: ‘Every poet has trembled on the verge of science.’ But as he plunged into Humboldt’s writing, Thoreau slowly lost his fear. Cosmos taught him that the collection of individual observations created a portrait of nature as a whole, in which each detail was like a thread in the tapestry of the natural world. Just as Humboldt had found harmony in diversity, so too did Thoreau. Detail led to the unified whole or, as Thoreau put it, ‘a true account of the actual is the rarest poetry.’

The most graphic proof of this change came when Thoreau stopped using one journal for ‘poetry’ and another for ‘facts’. He no longer knew which was which. It had all become one and the same, because ‘the most interesting & beautiful facts are so much the more poetry,’ as Thoreau said. The book that became the expression of this was Walden.

When he had left his cabin at Walden Pond, in September 1847, Thoreau had returned with a first draft of Walden, and had then worked on several different versions. By mid-1849 he had put it aside and it took him three years to return to the manuscript – three years during which he became a serious naturalist, a meticulous record-keeper and an admirer of Humboldt’s books. In January 1852 Thoreau unpacked the manuscript once more and began to rewrite Walden completely.²

Over the next few years he doubled the book’s original length, filling it with the scientific observations he had made. With that Walden became a completely different book from the one he had set out to write. He was ready, he said, ‘I feel myself uncommonly prepared for some literary work.’ In noting every detail of the patterns and changes of the seasons, Thoreau developed a deep perception of nature’s cycles and interrelationships. Once he had realized that butterflies, flowers and birds reappeared every spring, everything else made sense. ‘The year is a circle,’ he wrote in April 1852. He began to compile long seasonal lists of leafing out and flowering times. No one else, Thoreau insisted, had observed these intricate differences as he had. His journal would become ‘a book of the seasons’, he wrote, mentioning Humboldt in the same entry.

In Walden’s early drafts Thoreau had concentrated on criticizing American culture and avarice, and what he saw as the increasing focus on money and urban life – using his life in the cabin as counterpart. Now, in the new version the passing of spring, summer, autumn and winter became his guiding light. ‘I enjoy the friendship of the seasons,’ he wrote in Walden. Thoreau began, as he said, to ‘look at Nature with new eyes’ – eyes that Humboldt had given him. He explored, collected, measured and connected just as Humboldt did. His methods and observations, Thoreau told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1853, were based on his admiration of Views of Nature, the book in which Humboldt had combined elegant prose and vivid descriptions with scientific analysis.

All the great passages of Walden have their origin in Thoreau’s journals. Here Thoreau jumped from one subject to the next, breathlessly engaging with nature, with earth as ‘living poetry’, with frogs that ‘snore in the river’ and with the joy of birdsong in spring. His journal was ‘the record of my love’ and of his ‘ecstasy’ – both poetry and science. Even Thoreau himself questioned if anything he would ever write would be better than his journal, comparing his words to flowers, wondering if they would look better assembled in a vase (his metaphor for a book) or in the meadow where he had found them (his journal). By now he was so proud of his exact knowledge of Concord’s nature that he became upset if anybody else was able to identify a plant that he didn’t recognize. ‘Henry Thoreau could hardly suppress his indignation,’ Emerson wrote one day to his brother, not without glee, ‘that I should bring him a berry he had not seen.’

Thoreau’s new approach didn’t mean that his doubts disappeared completely. He continued to question himself. ‘I am dissipated by so many observations,’ he wrote in 1853. He feared that his knowledge was becoming too ‘detailed & scientific’ and that he might have exchanged sweeping prospects as wide as the heavens for the narrow views of the microscope. ‘With all your science can you tell how it is,’ he asked despairingly, ‘that light comes into the soul’ but he still finished this journal entry with detailed descriptions of blossoms, birdsongs, butterflies and the ripening of berries.

Instead of composing poems, he investigated nature – and these observations became his raw material for Walden. ‘Nature will be my language full of poetry,’ he said. In his journal, the tumbling crystal-clear water of a brook was ‘the pure blood of nature’ and then a few lines down, he queries the dialogue between himself and nature but concludes that ‘this close habit of observation – in Humboldt–Darwin & others. Is it to be kept up long – this science.’ Thoreau plaited science and poetry into one thick strand.

To make sense of it all, Thoreau searched for a unifying perspective. When he climbed a mountain, he saw the lichen on the rocks at his feet but also the trees far in the distance. Like Humboldt on Chimborazo, he perceived them in relation to each other and ‘thus reduced to a single picture’ – repeating the idea of the Naturgemälde. Or during a winter storm, one cold January morning, as the snowflakes swirled around him, Thoreau watched the delicate crystalline structures and compared them to the perfectly symmetrical petals of flowers. The same law, he said, that shaped the earth also shaped the snowflakes, pronouncing with emphasis, ‘Order. Kosmos.’

Humboldt had plucked the word Kosmos from ancient Greek where it meant order and beauty – but one that was created through the human eye. With this Humboldt brought together the external physical world with the internal world of the mind. Humboldt’s Cosmos was about the relationship between humankind and nature, and Thoreau placed himself firmly into this cosmos. At Walden Pond, he wrote, ‘I have a little world all to myself’ – his own sun, stars and moon. ‘Why should I feel lonely?’ he asked. ‘Is not our planet in the Milky Way?’ He was no more lonely than a flower or bumblebee in a meadow because like them he was part of nature. ‘Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?’ he asked in Walden.

One of Walden’s most famous passages encapsulates just how much Thoreau had changed since he had read Humboldt. For years, every spring, Thoreau had observed the thawing of the sandy railway embankments near Walden Pond. As the sun warmed the frozen ground and melted the ice, purple streams of sand would be released and seep out, lacing the embankment with the shapes of leaves: a sandy foliage that preceded the leafing out of the trees and the shrubs in spring.

In his original manuscript, written in the cabin at the pond, Thoreau had described this ‘blooming’ of the sand in an aside of less than 100 words. Now it stretched to more than 1,500 words and became one of the central passages in Walden. The sands, he wrote, displayed ‘the anticipation of the vegetable leaf’. It was the ‘prototype’, he said, just like Goethe’s urform. A phenomenon that had just been ‘unaccountably interesting and beautiful’ in the original manuscript now came to illustrate no less than what Thoreau called ‘the principle of all the operations of Nature’.

These few pages illustrate how Thoreau had matured. When he described the phenomenon on the last day of December 1851, just as he was reading Humboldt, it became a metaphor for the cosmos. The sun that warmed the banks was like the thoughts that warmed his blood, he said. Earth was not dead but ‘lives & grows’. And then, as he observed it again in spring 1854, just as he was finishing the final draft of Walden, he wrote in his journal that earth was ‘living poetry … not a fossil earth – but a living specimen’, words that he included almost verbatim in his final version of Walden. ‘Earth is all alive,’ he wrote, and nature ‘in full blast’. This was Humboldt’s nature, thumping with life. The coming of spring, Thoreau concluded, was ‘like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos’. It was life, nature and poetry all at the same time.

Walden was Thoreau’s mini-Cosmos of one particular place, an evocation of nature in which everything was connected, packed with details of animal habits, blooms and the thickness of ice on the pond. Objectivity or pure scientific enquiry did not exist, Thoreau wrote when he had finished Walden, because it was always twinned with subjectivity and the senses. ‘Facts fall from the poetic observer as ripe seeds,’ he noted. The foundation of all was observation.

‘I milk the sky & the earth,’ Thoreau said.

¹ Thoreau also lived with the Emersons for two years, earning his board by helping as a handyman around the house and garden while Emerson was away on his frequent lecture tours.

² Thoreau wrote seven drafts of Walden. The first was finished during his time at Walden Pond. He worked on drafts 2 and 3 from spring 1848 to mid-1849. He returned to the manuscript in January 1852 and worked on the next four drafts until spring 1854.