New York.] "This is a singularly muddy town ; muddy, solitary, and silent. I saw Teufelsdröckh a few days since; he said a few words to me about you. Says he, That fellow Thoreau might be something, if he would only take a journey through the Everlasting No, thence for the North Pole. By G-,' said the old clothesbag, warming up, I should like to take that fellow out into the Everlasting No, and explode him like a bombshell; he would make a loud report; it would be fun to see him pick himself up. He needs the Blumine flower business; that would be his salvation. He is too dry, too composed, too chalky, too concrete. Does that execrable compound of sawdust and stagnation L. still prose about nothing? and that nutmeggrater of a Z. yet shriek about nothing? Does anybody still think of coming to Concord to live? I mean new people? If they do, let them beware of you philosophers." "

Of course, this imaginary Teufelsdröckh, like Carlyle's, was the satirical man in the writer himself, suggesting the humorous and contradictory side of things, and glancing at the coolness of Thoreau, which his friends sometimes found provoking. In his own person Channing adds:

"I should be pleased to hear from Kamchatka

occasionally; my last advices from the Polar Bear are getting stale. In addition to this I find that my corresponding members at Van Diemen's Land have wandered into limbo. I hear occasionally from the World; everything seems to be promising in that quarter; business is flourishing, and the people are in good spirits. I feel convinced that the Earth has less claims to our regard than formerly; these mild winters deserve severe censure. But I am well aware that the Earth will talk about the necessity of routine, taxes, etc. On the whole it is best not to complain without necessity."

It is well to read this shrewd humor, uttered in the opposite sense from Thoreau's paradoxical wit in his "Walden,” as an introduction or motto to that book. For Thoreau has been falsely judged from the wit and the paradox of "Walden,” as if he were a hater of men, or foolishly desired all mankind to retire to the woods. As Channing said, soon after his friend's death, —

"The fact that our author lived for a while alone in a shanty, near a pond, and named one of his books after the place where it stood, has led some to say he was a barbarian or a misanthrope. It was a writing-case; here in this wooden inkstand he wrote a good part of his

famous 'Walden,' and this solitary woodland pool was more to his Muse than all oceans of the planet, by the force of imagination. Some have fancied, because he moved to Walden, he left his family. He bivouacked there and really lived at home, where he went every day.”

This last is not literally true, for he was sometimes secluded in his hut for days together; but he remained as social at Walden as he had been while an inmate of Mr. Emerson's family in 1841-43, or again in 1847-48, after giving up his hermitage. He, in fact, as he says himself, —

"Went to the woods because he wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if he could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when he came to die, discover that he had not lived."

In another place he says he went to Walden to "transact some private business," and this he did to good purpose. He edited there his "Week," some portions of which had appeared in the "Dial” from 1840 to 1844, but which was not published as a volume until 1849, although he had made many attempts to issue it earlier. It was at Walden, also, that he wrote his essay

on Carlyle, which was first published in "Graham's Magazine," at Philadelphia, in 1847, through the good offices of Horace Greeley, of which we shall hear more in the next chapter.

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Thoreau's hermit life was not, then, merely a protest against the luxury and the restraints of society, nor yet an austere discipline such as monks and saints have imposed upon themselves for their souls' good. "My purpose in going to Walden. was not to live cheaply, nor to live dearly there, but to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles." He lived a life of labor and study in his hut. Emerson says, as soon as he had exhausted the advantages of that solitude, he abandoned it." He had edited his first book there; had satisfied himself that he was fit to be an author, and had passed his first examinations; then he graduated from that gymnasium as another young student might from the medical college or the polytechnic school. "I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there." His abandoned hut was then taken by a Scotch gardener, Hugh Whelan by name, who removed it

some rods away, to the midst of Thoreau's bean-field, and made it his cottage for a few years. Then it was bought by a farmer, who put it on wheels and carried it three miles northward, toward the entry of the Estabrook Farm on the old Carlisle road, where it stood till after Thoreau's death,a shelter for corn and beans, and a favorite haunt of squirrels and blue jays. The wood-cut representing the hermitage in the first edition of "Walden," is from a sketch made by Sophia Thoreau, and is more exact than that given in Page's "Life of Thoreau,” but in neither picture are the trees accurately drawn.

On the spot where Thoreau lived at Walden there is now a cairn of stones, yearly visited by hundreds, and growing in height as each friend of his muse adds a stone from the shore of the fair water he loved so well.

"Beat with thy paddle on the boat
Midway the lake, the wood repeats
The ordered blow; the echoing note
Is ended in thy ear; yet its retreats
Conceal Time's possibilities;
And in this Man the nature lies
Of woods so green,

And lakes so sheen,

And hermitages edged between.