“As we shoved away from this rocky coast, before
sunrise, the smaller bittern, the genius of the shore, was moping along its
edge, or stood probing the mud for its food, with ever an eye on us, though so
demurely at work, or else he ran along over the wet stones like a wrecker in
his storm-coat, looking out for wrecks of snails and cockles. Now away he goes,
with a limping flight, uncertain where he will alight, until a rod of clear
sand amid the alders invites his feet; and now our steady approach compels him
to seek a new retreat. It is a bird of the oldest Thalesian school, and no
doubt believes in the priority of water to the other elements; the relic of a
twilight antediluvian age which yet inhabits these bright American waters with
us Yankees. There is something venerable in this melancholy and contemplative
race of birds, which may have trodden the earth while it was yet in a slimy and
imperfect state. Perchance their tracks, too, are still visible on the
stones.''—Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
(1849)
Henry David Thoreau spent 10 years writing about a boat
trip he took with his beloved brother John from Concord, Mass., to Concord,
N.H.—yet, when he was done with it, all he had left were mixed reviews and
sales so poor that publisher James Munroe and Company of Boston eventually
forced him to take back 700 copies of the original 1,000. It also drove a wedge
between the author and friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom Thoreau believed hadn’t
done enough to promote the title. Even in the eyes of posterity, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers—published
on this day in 1849—has been neglected in favor of Walden and another tract published this same year, Civil Disobedience.
It deserves better. Pick up any page and you’ll find
something of interest: the lush, lyrical natural descriptions, so precise, for
which Thoreau is famous, such as the one quoted above; snatches from his own
poetry; literary criticism (including of Chaucer); local history; and passages
that ring out with epigrammatic force. ("If there is nothing new on the earth,
still the traveler always has a resource in the skies. They are constantly
turning a new page to view….Every man’s daylight firmament answers in his mind
to the brightness of the vision in his starriest hour.”)
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