Excursions (1863)

AUTHOR: Thoreau, Henry David

KEYWORDS: food, animals, nature, Transcendentalism

Thoreau, Henry David. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
 

SUMMARY (Bryn Skibo, edited Deborah Madsen):

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Biographical Sketch” is the eulogy that Emerson presented at Thoreau's funeral in 1862. In this piece, Emerson highlights Thoreau's non-conformity, including in matters of diet and temperance: “He was a protestant à l’outrance, and few lives contain so many renunciations. He was bred to no profession; he never married; he lived alone; he never went to church; he never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the State; he ate no flesh; he drank no wine; he never knew the use of tobacco; and, though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor guns” (9).

The remaining essays display Thoreau’s own unique style of writing about nature, animals, and plants as individuals. In "Natural History of Massachusetts," for instance, he narrates following a fox: “I am curious to know what has determined its graceful curvatures, and how surely they were coincident with the fluctuations of some mind. I know which way a mind wended, what horizon it faced, by the setting of these tracks…” (54). Upon befriending a minnow, he writes: “I am the wiser in respect for all fortunes, for knowing that there is a minnow in the brook. Methinks I have need even of his sympathy, and to be his fellow in a degree” (56). And speaking of local reptiles: “It appears that we have eight kinds of tortoises, twelve snakes … one lizard, for our neighbors” (62). On “friendships” in symbiotic natural relationships: “I am struck with the pleasing friendships and unanimities of nature, as when the lichen on the trees takes the form of their leaves” (63-64).

Last updated on March 8th, 2024

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