“Not if I had a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths,
An iron voice, could I describe all the forms
And reckon up all the names of these wild apples.”
THE LAST GLEANING
By the middle of November the wild apples have lost some of their brilliancy, and have chiefly fallen. A great part are decayed on the ground, and the sound ones are more palatable than before. The note of the chickadee sounds now more distinct, as you wander amid the old trees, and the autumnal dandelion is half closed and tearful. But still, if you are a skillful gleaner, you may get many a pocketful even of grafted fruit, long after apples are supposed to be gone out-of-doors. I know a Blue Pearmain tree, growing within the edge of a swamp, almost as good as wild. You would not suppose that there was any fruit left there, on the first survey, but you must look according to system. Those which lie exposed are quite brown and rotten now, or perchance a few still show one blooming cheek here and there amid the wet leaves. Nevertheless, with experienced eyes, I explore amid the bare alders and the huckleberry bushes and the withered sedge, and in the crevices of the rocks, which are full of leaves, and pry under the fallen and decaying ferns, which, with apple and alder leaves, thickly strew the ground. For I know that they lie concealed, fallen into hollows long since and covered up by the leaves of the tree itself,—a proper kind of packing. From these lurking-places, anywhere within the circumference of the tree, I draw forth the fruit, all wet and glossy, maybe nibbled by rabbits and hollowed out by crickets, and perhaps with a leaf or two cemented to it (as Curzon an old manuscript from a monastery’s mouldy cellar), but still with a rich bloom on it, and at least as ripe and well-kept, if not better than those in barrels, more crisp and lively than they. If these resources fail to yield anything, I have learned to look between the bases of the suckers which spring thickly from some horizontal limb, for now and then one lodges there, or in the very midst of an alder-clump, where they are covered by leaves, safe from cows which may have smelled them out. If I am sharp-set, for I do not refuse the Blue Pearmain, I fill my pockets on each side; and as I retrace my steps in the frosty eve, being perhaps four or five miles from home, I eat one first from this side, and then from that, to keep my balance.
I learn from Topsell’s Gesner, whose authority appears to be Albertus, that the following is the way in which the hedgehog collects and carries home his apples. He says,—“His meat is apples, worms, or grapes: when he findeth apples or grapes on the earth, he rolleth himself upon them, until he have filled all his prickles, and then carrieth them home to his den, never bearing above one in his mouth; and if it fortune that one of them fall off by the way, he likewise shaketh off all the residue, and walloweth upon them afresh, until they be all settled upon his back again. So, forth he goeth, making a noise like a cart-wheel; and if he have any young ones in his nest, they pull off his load wherewithal he is loaded, eating thereof what they please, and laying up the residue for the time to come.”
THE “FROZEN-THAWED” APPLE
Toward the end of November, though some of the sound ones are yet more mellow and perhaps more edible, they have generally, like the leaves, lost their beauty, and are beginning to freeze. It is finger-cold, and prudent farmers get in their barreled apples, and bring you the apples and cider which they have engaged; for it is time to put them into the cellar. Perhaps a few on the ground show their red cheeks above the early snow, and occasionally some even preserve their color and soundness under the snow throughout the winter. But generally at the beginning of the winter they freeze hard, and soon, though undecayed, acquire the color of a baked apple.
Before the end of December, generally, they experience their first thawing. Those which a month ago were sour, crabbed, and quite unpalatable to the civilized taste, such at least as were frozen while sound, let a warmer sun come to thaw them,—for they are extremely sensitive to its rays,—are found to be filled with a rich, sweet cider, better than any bottled cider that I know of, and with which I am better acquainted than with wine. All apples are good in this state, and your jaws are the ciderpress. Others, which have more substance, are a sweet and luscious food,—in my opinion of more worth than the pineapples which are imported from the West Indies. Those which lately even I tasted only to repent of it,—for I am semicivilized,—which the farmer willingly left on the tree, I am now glad to find have the property of hanging on like the leaves of the young oaks. It is a way to keep cider sweet without boiling. Let the frost come to freeze them first, solid as stones, and then the rain or a warm winter day to thaw them, and they will seem to have borrowed a flavor from heaven through the medium of the air in which they hang. Or perchance you find, when you get home, that those which rattled in your pocket have thawed, and the ice is turned to cider. But after the third or fourth freezing and thawing they will not be found so good.
What are the imported half-ripe fruits of the torrid south, to this fruit matured by the cold of the frigid north? These are those crabbed apples with which I cheated my companion, and kept a smooth face that I might tempt him to eat. Now we both greedily fill our pockets with them,—bending to drink the cup and save our lappets from the overflowing juice,—and grow more social with their wine. Was there one that hung so high and sheltered by the tangled branches that our sticks could not dislodge it?
It is a fruit never carried to market, that I am aware of,—quite distinct from the apple of the markets, as from dried apple and cider,—and it is not every winter that produces it in perfection.
The era of the Wild Apple will soon be past. It is a fruit which will probably become extinct in New England. You may still wander through old orchards of native fruit of great extent, which for the most part went to the cider-mill, now all gone to decay. I have heard of an orchard in a distant town, on the side of a hill, where the apples rolled down and lay four feet deep against a wall on the lower side, and this the owner cut down for fear they should be made into cider. Since the temperance reform and the general introduction of grafted fruit, no native apple trees, such as I see everywhere in deserted pastures, and where the woods have grown up around them, are set out. I fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples. Ah, poor man, there are many pleasures which he will not know! Notwithstanding the prevalence of the Baldwin and the Porter, I doubt if so extensive orchards are set out today in my town as there were a century ago, when those vast straggling cider-orchards were planted, when men both ate and drank apples, when the pomace-heap was the only nursery, and trees cost nothing but the trouble of setting them out. Men could afford then to stick a tree by every wall-side and let it take its chance. I see nobody planting trees to-day in such out of the way places, along the lonely roads and lanes, and at the bottom of dells in the wood. Now that they have grafted trees, and pay a price for them, they collect them into a plat by their houses, and fence them in,—and the end of it all will be that we shall be compelled to look for our apples in a barrel.
This is “The word of the Lord that came to Joel the son of Pethuel.
“Hear this, ye old men, and give ear, all ye inhabitants of the land! Hath this been in your days, or even in the days of your fathers? …
“That which the palmerworm hath left hath the locust eaten; and that which the locust hath left hath the cankerworm eaten; and that which the cankerworm hath left hath the caterpillar eaten.
“Awake, ye drunkards, and weep; and howl, all ye drinkers of wine, because of the new wine; for it is cut off from your mouth.
“For a nation is come up upon my land, strong, and without number, whose teeth are the teeth of a lion, and he hath the cheek teeth of a great lion.
“He hath laid my vine waste, and barked my fig tree: he hath made it clean bare, and cast it away; the branches thereof are made white … .
“Be ye ashamed, O ye husbandmen; howl, O ye vinedressers … .
“The vine is dried up, and the fig tree languisheth; the pomegranate tree,
the palm tree also, and the apple tree, even all the trees of the field, are withered: because joy is withered away from the sons of men.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This collection began as a result of a Thoreau seminar I taught at Kenyon College in which my students and I struggled with the odd fact that there was, in the late 1990s, no easily available edition of Thoreau’s essays. To the degree that this volume solves that problem I am first of all indebted to those students, especially to the many who, as I was putting the book together, helped me learn what details in Thoreau need annotation for modern readers. Two students, Burke Hilsabeck and Abbi Russal, also signed on as research assistants to help me outside the classroom; several of their discoveries are preserved here.
Once I got going, I discovered that Bradley P. Dean, then working at the Thoreau Institute in Lincoln, Massachusetts, had done considerable work toward a similar collection. Rather than duplicate my efforts, Brad kindly decided to concentrate his energies on an edition of Thoreau’s “Indian Notebooks” and to share with me the work he had done on the essays. I am deeply grateful for that collaboration; Brad helped me fill in many gaps and saved me from many errors.
Robert D. Richardson’s intellectual biography of Thoreau and Stephen B. Oates’s biography of John Brown were key sources throughout my project. Larry Rosenwald clarified many of the obscurities in “Civil Disobedience” and led me into the scholarship. Albert Von Frank’s The Trials of Anthony Burns was an immense help in illuminating the background of “Slavery in Massachusetts,” and Dr. Von Frank himself cordially responded to a draft of my notes on that essay.
I’m grateful to the Henry Luce Foundation, which supported my position at Kenyon College for many years, and to the MacDowell Colony where I spent a happy month writing the early drafts of the introduction.
I am indebted as well to Jeffrey Cramer, the librarian at the Thoreau Institute, and to Leslie Wilson, the curator of special collections at the Concord Free Public Library. The classicist Danielle Freedman helped me check some of Thoreau’s Greek and Latin sources. Both Brian Donahue and David Foster took a crack at a few of Thoreau’s more obscure remarks about New England farming. J. Parker Huber and Joseph Moldenhauer each solved some puzzles pertaining to “Ktaadn.” Larry Rosenwald, Taylor Stoehr, Sacvan Bercovitch, Larry Buell, and Ethan Nosowsky read drafts of my introduction, and the final version benefits greatly from their comments. Once that version was done, Patsy Vigderman told me just what I needed to hear.
A NOTE ON THE SELECTION
An industry sprang up around Thoreau’s essays shortly after he died in 1862, and it continues to this day. He himself set it in motion: when he knew he was dying, he converted some of his lyceum lectures into essays for posthumous publication. These had not been published during his lifetime because, as lectures, they were his bread and butter, or perhaps only his bread, for Thoreau never made much money lecturing, nor did he lecture widely (one scholar estimates that over a twenty-three-year career Thoreau earned an annual twenty-seven dollars for public speaking). Thoreau first delivered “Life without Principle” in 1854, and then repeated it many times over the years; “Walking” began in 1851 and was delivered at least eight times; “Autumnal Tints” he gave three times in 1859 and once the next year. These three, and the later “Wild Apples,” he readied for publication in the last year of his life, and they subsequently appeared in The Atlantic Monthly between 1862 and 1863.
Then in November 1863 the Atlantic printed something called “Night and Moonlight,” unsigned, though clearly from Thoreau’s hand (parts of it coming directly from his journal). Thoreau had in fact given a lecture on the topic once, shortly after Walden was published, but as far as anyone knows, he never repeated it and certainly never turned it into an essay. All he left was a stack of notes, which his sister Sophia probably assembled as an essay and sold to the Atlantic. In 1927 someone at Houghton Mifflin with access to the journal manuscripts found “a sheaf of notes” on moonlight and published them as a little book. The Moon.
These are typical of the ways in which essays that Thoreau never wrote have become essays by Thoreau. They are also a betrayal of Thoreau’s method of composition. In one journal entry he writes: “I would rather write books than lectures. That is fine, this coarse.” As the “Reading” chapter of Walden makes clear, Thoreau did not think a lecture was an essay:
[T]here is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read. The one is commonly transitory, a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. The other is the maturity and experience of that; if that is our mother tongue, this is our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak.
Thoreau’s own method of traveling this familial landscape was to begin taking notes by pencil in a little notebook as he walked, then to transcribe and expand these notes in his journal, then from the journal to assemble topics on a theme, then to offer these as lectures, and finally to revise the lectures into essays or books for publication. That is how Walden was made (parts of it being spoken as lectures long before the book appeared), and with Walden the written version went through seven drafts before Thoreau was ready to publish. As he once said in a letter to Emerson, “In writing, conversation should be folded many times thick.” Walden was folded seven times.
The industry that has been producing essays by Thoreau that Thoreau never wrote operates by traveling backward across the territory of his method until something is found that never made it to reserved and select expression. Thus we have an essay called “Love” culled from a letter Thoreau wrote to a friend, an essay on Sir Walter Raleigh published in 1905 from notes for an 1843 lecture, an essay called “Huckleberries” made from lecture notes and published in 1970, and in one of the early posthumous volumes an essay called “Prayers,” which later scholars have decided was written by Emerson, though it is adorned with poems by Thoreau. More recently we have the book-length Faith in a Seed (“the first publication of Thoreau’s last manuscript”) and Wild Fruits (“Thoreau’s rediscovered last manuscript”), and there will be more to follow.
All this is to the good. We are lucky to have Thoreau’s notes on moonlight, his reflections on huckleberries, and especially all his late work in botany, as we are lucky to have his journals. But in selecting “Thoreau’s essays,” I have felt obliged to honor his own method and pass over things that he did not himself prepare for publication. Each of the thirteen pieces gathered here was either printed during his lifetime or edited by him for publication in the last year of his life. That said, I should add that a number of essays that Thoreau published, or prepared for publication, are not included here. Some are not accomplished enough to include (“The Service,” for example, which was rejected by The Dial and not printed until 1902), many are occasional, and a few made their way into longer books (remarks on Homer, for example, that appeared in The Dial but were then included in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers). Texts of all these may be found in Early Essays and Miscellanies and the other volumes of the Princeton University Press series, The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau.
The thirteen essays in this collection are presented in the approximate order of their composition rather than thematically. As I mentioned earlier, ever since Thoreau died it has been the custom to separate his natural history (“excursions”) from his politics (“reform papers”), but doing so obscures the ways in which these two are constantly entwined. What he calls Nature is, after all, the constant “outside” to the “inside” of public life, and each invariably shadows the other. The first essay here is a review of books about the flora and fauna of Massachusetts, but we find Thoreau unable to address himself to his topic without clearing his throat by dismissing politics. “Slavery in Massachusetts” would seem to be a fully political essay, but it ends with an invocation of the white water lily, w
hose bloom is proof that purity can be extracted from “slime and muck.” In a journal entry on the meaning of “wild” Thoreau noted that “a wild man is a willed man,” one “who does what he wills,” and that, therefore, “the Almighty is wild above all” because he wills—all of which points to the ways in which an “excursion” like “Walking” is inexorably connected to “reform papers” like the essays on that most willful of men, John Brown.
I have taken the texts from two sources. Princeton University Press has been issuing carefully edited versions of all of Thoreau’s work, and, with two exceptions, where Princeton has printed a rectified text, I have used it. I am grateful to Princeton for permission to reprint the following: “Ktaadn,” “Slavery in Massachusetts,” “Life without Principle,” “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” and “The Last Days of John Brown.”
Two of the essays that have appeared in the Princeton series present special cases. First, “Paradise (To Be) Regained” was originally printed in the United States Magazine, and Democratic Review, November 1843. After Thoreau died, a shorter and in many ways better-made version of the essay appeared in a volume called A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers (1866). Similarly, “Civil Disobedience” was printed first in 1849 (under the title “Resistance to Civil Government”) and again—slightly revised and with the title changed—after Thoreau’s death. Absent any clear indication of an author’s intent, it is the Princeton policy to publish the earlier version of a work, and the editors therefore reproduce the first version in each of these cases. It seems most likely to me, however, that Thoreau himself edited the later versions, so they are the ones I have chosen. For their texts, and for all the other essays collected here, the versions I reproduce appear in the “Walden Edition” of The Writings of Henry David Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906).