183 Suttle: Charles F. Suttle of Alexandria, Virginia, was Burns’s master. He had traveled to Boston, had Burns arrested, and took him back to Virginia.
184 citizen of Massachusetts from being kidnapped: the “citizen” being Burns. Abolitionists described the remanding of slaves as kidnapping.
184 rob Mexico: The United States acquired a great deal of land, including all of California, as a result of the Mexican War (1846-1848). See Section IV of the Introduction.
184 the 19th of April, 1775: date of the Battles of Lexington and Concord; the beginning of the American Revolution.
184 the 12th of April, 1851: date that the fugitive slave Sims was sent from Boston back to Georgia.
185 Edward G. God: a stab at Boston’s fugitive-slave commissioner, Edward G. Loring.
185 Webster: Daniel Webster (1782-1852), who had supported the compromise of 1850, including the Fugitive Slave Law.
185 the dirt-bug and its ball: a dung beetle, such as the American Phanaeus vindex, that makes a ball of dung to bury with its egg.
186 Boxboro: a small Massachusetts town northwest of Concord.
188 Liberator and Commonwealth: The Liberator was William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist journal; the Commonwealth was a Free-Soil paper dedicated to keeping slavery out of the western territories.
188 time-serving: obsequiously complying with the humors of men in power.
188 Mitchell’s Citizen; Boston Post, Mail, Journal, Advertiser, Courier, and Times; Boston Herald: contemporary newspapers, mostly from Boston. The Citizen, published in New York by John Mitchel (1815-1875), addressed itself to the Irish and supported slavery.
188 groggery: a tavern.
189 Do what you will … with my wife and children: an ironic reference to a famous speech by the Unitarian minister Orville Dewey (1794-1882), in which he had announced that he would prefer to see his brother, his son, even himself enslaved than to sacrifice the Union.
189 expediency: a key term in William Paley’s Principles of Mural and Political Philosophy, a standard text that Thoreau read in college. See the note on Paley for page 128 of “Civil Disobedience.”
190 Mammon: the god or personification of riches and worldliness. Luke 16:13: “No servant can serve two masters … . You cannot serve God and mammon.”
190 Seventh Day: Quaker term for Sunday. The earlier version of this, in Thoreau’s journal for June 16, 1854, reads: “Your countrymen … steadily worship mammon—and on the seventh day curse God with a tintamarre from one end of the Union to the other.”
190 tintamar: a confused noise; an uproar.
192 scoriæ: plural of “scoria”: dross; cinder; slag.
192 villa: Andrew Jackson Downing’s 1841 book, A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, initiated a mid-nineteenth-century fad in the building of villas. The term meant not a large country house but a simple woodland or lakeside cottage, such as Thoreau built at Walden Pond.
192 Court street: site of the state courthouse where Burns was imprisoned.
193 white water-lily: Burns was sent back to Virginia on June 2, 1854; Thoreau spoke on July 4. His journal for June 16 includes this entry: “Nymphœa odorata. Again I scent the white water-lily, and a season I had waited for is arrived.”
193 Nymphœa Douglasii: an invented variant on the scientific name of the water lily. Thoreau’s target is either Stephen Douglas (1813-1861), Democratic senator from Illinois, or Frederick Douglass (1817-1895), the abolitionist and former slave, whose slave narrative had been published in 1845. Senator Douglas was instrumental in passing the Compromise of 1850, a package of bills that included the Fugitive Slave Law. He also presented the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Later, in the 1858 presidential campaign, he famously debated Abraham Lincoln.
Frederick Douglass was a compromiser to some abolitionists, because he was willing to work with the Constitution, reading it for its promise of freedom, not for its acceptance of slavery.
In the first printing of Thoreau’s essay, published by William Lloyd Garrison in The Liberator, the phrase reads “Nymphœa Douglassii,” making Douglass the target. This makes some sense, because both Thoreau and Garrison questioned the authority of the Constitution (at the July 4 antislavery rally where Thoreau first read the essay, Garrison had read out the pro-slavery clauses in the Constitution, and then burned the document).
The first book publication of the essay, in A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers (1866), also prints the phrase as “Nymphœa Douglasii.”
Later editions print the phrase as “Nymphœa Douglasii,” which to my mind makes more sense, because Stephen Douglas’s willingness to compromise was the issue of the day.
LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE
A version of this essay was first given as a lecture in December 1854. Thoreau delivered it (under various titles, typically “What Shall It Profit a Man?”) seven or eight more times over the next six years. It was finally published with the present title as one of the group of essays Thoreau prepared just before his death, appearing posthumously in The Atlantic Monthly, October 1863.
197 superficies: outer surfaces.
197 go to law for my meat: press me for my substance (the metaphoric “meat” here being that of a nut or a shellfish).
198 making a minute: writing a note.
198 bank-wall: a retaining wall to control erosion.
199 Dexter: Timothy Dexter (1747-1806), a rich merchant and self-proclaimed “Lord” from Newburyport, Massachusetts, was a study in pretentiousness and eccentricity.
199 Chancery: a Court of Chancery, which settled matters of debt or equity.
199 pipe of wine: a cask; a wine measure of about one hundred gallons. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the poet laureate annually received a cask of wine from the king.
200 cord-wood: A.cord of firewood is 128 cubic feet, usually stacked 4 feet by 4 feet by 8 feet.
200 tunnel a mountain: In 1848 a firm was hired—for two million dollars—to tunnel through Hoosac Mountain in northeastern Massachusetts. Supposed to take five years, the project lasted eleven and cost fourteen million dollars.
201 mess of pottage: In Genesis 25:32-34, Esau sells his birthright to Jacob for “bread and pottage of lentils.”
201 “Greatness doth not”: from a fable found in The Htpds of Vshn-Srm. See the note for page 59 of “Paradise (To Be) Regained.”
202 rush to California: Gold was discovered in central California in January 1848, and the gold rush began the following spring.
202 Mahomet: See the note for page 173 of “Walking.”
202 upon a tree: an allusion to Judas Iscariot’s suicide after his betrayal of Jesus, Matthew 27:5.
203 muck-rake: allusion to John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress in which a man “that could look no way but downward” thus fails to see an offer to trade his muck rake for a celestial crown.
203 Howitt: William Howitt (1792-1879), English poet and travel writer. In October 1855 Thoreau read his book Land, Labor, and Gold; or, Two Years in Victoria; with Visits to Sydney and Van Diemen’s Land, 2 vols. (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1855). Thoreau’s citations below are from vol. 1, p. 21.
203 Australian gold-diggings: The Australian gold rush began in New South Wales in 1851. Ballarat and Bendigo are cities in southeastern Australia founded during the gold rush.
204 cradles: troughs on rockers in which gold-bearing dirt is shaken in water to separate and collect the gold.
204 toms: stationary troughs for washing gold from gravel.
205 Isthmus of Darien: the Isthmus of Panama. The New-York Daily Tribune, September 29, 1859, reported the story Thoreau comments on in this paragraph.
205 New Granada: old name of Colombia.
205 guacas: tombs or funeral mounds.
205 Boca del Toro: an inlet on the east coast of Panama.
205 Burker: one who murders by suffocation in order to sell the body for dissection. The word derives from a notorious criminal, William
Burke (1792-1829), who was executed for this crime in Edinburgh.
205 illuminati: enlightened ones.
206 Kane: Elisha Kent Kane (1820-1857), American physician and explorer who joined an expedition to the Arctic, 1850-1851, that went in search of Sir John Franklin (1786-1847). Franklin, also an Arctic explorer, had last been heard from in the summer of 1845; the remains of his expedition were not found until 1859. The Masons (or Freemasons) are an international fraternal order.
206 D. D.s: Doctors of Divinity; ministers.
207 Kossuth: Lajos Kossuth (1802-1894), Hungarian patriot who tried unsuccessfully to establish an independent Hungarian republic in the late 1840s. He traveled and lectured in the United States, 1851-1852, stopping in Concord on May 11, 1852. Emerson introduced him on that occasion, so when Thoreau says that speeches for Kossuth expressed a “want of thought,” he is sparring with his friend.
207 Kossuth hat: As Bradley Dean has explained, this was a black felt hat with the left side of the brim fastened to the crown and ornamented with a feather. John Nicholas Genin (1819-1878) owned a hat store in New York City in 1852 and had a warehouse full of dusty old black felt hats that he had been unable to sell. After modifying these hats to look similar to the hat Kossuth wore, Genin slipped aboard Kossuth’s ship soon after it arrived in New York and distributed several of these hats to Kossuth’s followers. When Kossuth and his cohorts were paraded through the city, “the arbiters of high fashion decreed that these ‘Kossuth hats’ were ‘all the go,’” and a fad was born that eventually generated an estimated half-million dollars.
207 serve two masters: Luke 16:13: “No servant can serve two masters … . You cannot serve God and mammon.”
207 sporules: spores.
207 thallus: young shoot or twig; a plant body not yet differentiated into stem, root, or leaf.
208 live and move: Acts 17:28.
208 Tartars, Huns: invading peoples, the Tartars being Turkic and Mongolian peoples who entered eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, and the Huns being nomads who invaded Europe in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D.
208 “I look down”: from “Carric, a Poem,” in Patrick Macgregor, The Genuine Remains of Ossian, Literally Translated (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1841), p. 160. Thoreau silently drops four lines. “Lodin” in the Ossian poems is sometimes identified with the Norse god Odin. In James Macpherson’s eighteenth-century edition of the Ossian material, the poem is titled “Carric-Thura,” and Lodin is called Loda. See the note for “Gentle breeze,” page 173 of “Walking.”
208 lumber: to burden uselessly; to encumber.
208 hypæthral: open to the sky.
209 sanctum sanctorum: See the note for page 165 of “Walking.”
209 coggy: fitted with cogs, as a machine.
209 Parnassian: of Mount Parnassus, home of the Muses.
209 macadamized: paved. John McAdam (1756-1836) invented a way to make a road by putting down layers of broken stone topped with stone dust.
210 asphaltum: asphalt.
210 fane: a temple, church, holy place.
210 Pompeii: ancient Italian city southeast of Naples, destroyed by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. The ruins were discovered in 1748.
210 “ne quid res-PRIVATA”: from Marcus Tullius Cicero, Orations (Boston, 1831), “Oratio pro Milone,” lines 26-70. Cicero actually writes respublica, which Thoreau changes to ‘res-PRIVATA’.” The Latin res publica means the public thing.
211 quarter troops: The paragraph recalls the Declaration of Independence, whose list of complaints against King George includes his “imposing Taxes on us without our Consent” and “quartering large Bodies of Armed Troops among us.”
211 Jonathans: colloquial name for Americans.
211 Irish question: the question of Irish independence from Great Britain, and of relations between Catholics and Protestants, these perennial problems having been exacerbated by the potato famine of the 1840s and the economic changes brought on by the Industrial Revolution.
211 natures are subdued: Shakespeare, Sonnet 111, lines 6-7: “My nature is subdu’ d / To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.”
211 knee-buckles: breeches fastened at the knee with a small buckle. Small-clothes are close-fitting breeches fastened at the knee, but with buttons instead of a buckle. Both were fashionable during the late eighteenth century.
211 cabinet of curiosities: a display of rare and odd items.
211 Decker: Thomas Dekker (1570?-1632?), English dramatist. The remark about Christ comes from a play, The Honest Whore, by Dekker and Thomas Middleton (1570?-1627), act I, scene 13, line 777.
211 Transalpine: situated beyond the Alps, especially from Rome.
211 Numas, Lycurguses, and Solons: legendary lawgivers of the ancient world, Numa Pompilius in seventh-century Rome, Lycurgus in ninth-century Sparta, and Solon in sixth-century Athens.
212 vessel: On July 19, 1850, the ship Elizabeth, carrying Margaret Fuller-Ossoli, her husband, and their infant child from Leghorn (Livorno), Italy, wrecked off Fire Island, New York. Thoreau traveled to the scene from Concord in hopes of retrieving the Ossolis’ bodies and effects, though he came home with little more than a button from one of their coats, scavengers having picked the beaches clean in the five days it took Thoreau to arrive.
212 bitters: medicines, usually alcoholic, used to sharpen appetite, stimulate digestion, expel intestinal worms, and so on. The oils of both juniper berries and bitter almonds were possible ingredients.
212 Herndon: William Lewis Herndon (1813-1857), American naval officer. In 1851-1852 he was one leader of a party sent to explore the Amazon and its Peruvian tributaries. He was a co-author of Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon (Washington, D.C.: R. Armstrong, 1853-1854); Thoreau quotes from vol. 1, p. 251. Herndon was from Virginia and suggests in his book that Southern planters might “remove their slaves to [Brazil, and] cultivate its lands.”
213 Po: the largest river in Italy.
213 Fort Independence: the army garrison in Boston Harbor.
213 infra-human: beneath the human.
213 into quarters: Thoreau refers to the proliferation of parties after the Compromise of 1850 began to undermine the old opposition between Whigs and Democrats.
214 life … a forgetting: allusion to William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” lines 59ff.
214 eupeptics: those with good digestion.
AUTUMNAL TINTS
This essay, begun in 1857, was first delivered as a lecture in February 1859. Thoreau would illustrate the talk with specimen autumn leaves mounted on white cardboard. When he sent a final text to The Atlantic Monthly, he gave instructions for them to print exactly the outline of a large scarlet oak leaf, as reproduced on page 216. The Atlantic Monthly eventually printed “Autumnal Tints” in October 1862, five months after Thoreau died.
217 Thomson: James Thomson (1700-1748), Scottish poet. Thoreau cites from The Seasons, “Autumn,” lines 948-52 and 1051.
217 “Imbrown”: embrown; that is, make brown or darken.
218 physiologist: William Carpenter (1813-1885), British naturalist. Thoreau paraphrases Carpenter’s remarks on the death of leaves. See Vegetable Physiology and Botany (London: Wm. S. Orr and Co., 1854), p. 199.
218 pellicle: skin.
218 “parenchyma”: Carpenter, Vegetable Physiology, p. 307. The parenchyma are the thin-walled cells forming the primary tissue of leaves.
219 brakes: ferns.
220 selvages: the edges of a fabric woven so that it will not fray. Thoreau uses the word more aptly in Walden: “The trees have ample room to expand on the water side, and each sends forth its most vigorous branch in that direction. There Nature has woven a natural selvage.”
220 timothy: a grass of the genus Phleum, in this case probably P. alpinum, widely cultivated for hay. The name derives from Timothy Hanson, an eighteenth-century American farmer who dispersed the seed.
220 culm: the stem of a grass or similar p
lant.
220 lacca, from lac, lake: Lake is a pigment made from vegetable matter. Poke is a source of red lake, thus its genus name.
221 pipes: See the note for page 199 of “Life without Principle.”
221 ensanguined: stained as if with blood.
221 andropogons: a large genus of grasses. The Greek roots mean “man + beard,” the male flowers having plumose beards. There are about twenty-five species in the United States, where they are also known as broom grasses or broom sedge.
222 upland haying: In Thoreau’s day, the ecologist David R. Foster writes, “the term ‘meadow’ had a specific and quite restricted meaning, referring to the grassy and uncultivated lowland areas bordering rivers and similar sites of low, moist vegetation. Fields on the uplands might consist of cultivated grains, scraggly pastures of chewed and matted grasses, thistles and shrubs, or ‘mowings’ covered with imported English grasses” (Thoreau’s Country, pp. 47-48).
222 horse-raking: A horse rake is a large, horse-drawn rake.
222 whetting of my scythe: an allusion to John Milton, “L’Allegro” (“the Mower whets his sithe”).
222 August … commencements: Nineteenth-century college commencements were held toward the end of August; Thoreau’s from Harvard, for example, was August 30, 1837.
222 guide-board: signpost.
223 congeners: others belonging to the same taxonomic genus.
225 rubric: both rubrum, the species name of the red maple, and “rubric” (meaning a name or title) share a Latin root (ruber, red), the latter because the titles of laws were once written in red.
225 Michaux: François Michaux, North American Sylva. See the note for page 94 of “Ktaadn.”