Yet it admires audacity, independence, originality, and, after the event, applauds nothing so much as a violation of its own maxims. Even those who never dream of doing anything that they have not seen some one else do before them are attracted by the sight of a man who consults his own mind; who may surprise you at any moment with a new idea; for whom to-day’s thought is as good as yesterday’s, and his own thought as credible as one found in a book.

Here, in part, is the secret of Thoreau’s perennial attractiveness. He is so much his own man; and there is so much in him, as the common expression has it. Nobody can tell what he will say next. There is no placing him in a niche and expecting him to stay there. The label put on him to-day will need revision to-morrow. He is so reasonable in many respects, and yet so inconsistent, and so different from the rest of us!

He changed little. From first to last, for aught that appears, he held the same philosophy. He had no awakening, no conversion. His career, inward and outward, was straight as a furrow. The principle of his life was simplicity,—simplicity and economy. But his simplicity was more of a riddle than another man’s complexity.

To begin with, he was a person of strong common sense, handy and practical to the last degree; a capital man to have in the house, as housekeepers say. If something was to be done, he was the one to do it. And it was sure to be done well. When he drove a nail, it would hold. He had an unshakable belief in the everlasting relation of cause and effect,—a kind of sanity not half so general as is commonly assumed; he never dreamed of getting something for nothing. Yet he was a transcendentalist, and though he was an expert surveyor, an excellent gardener, a skillful pencil-maker, and many things beside, he was supposed by his neighbors to deal mostly in moonshine.

In industry, as in frugality, he was a thoroughbred New Englander. Few men in Concord wasted fewer hours. He knew an Irishman, he says, who rose at half past four in the morning, milked twenty-eight cows, and so on to the end of the chapter. “Thus he keeps his virtue in him,” says Thoreau, “if he does not add to it; and he regards me as a gentleman able to assist him; but if I ever get to be a gentleman, it will be by working after my fashion harder than he does.” To his mind a man was bound to be doing something, if it were only marking time in a treadmill. Yet the man who preached thus, and practiced accordingly, was given to spending half of every day wandering about the fields, or rowing on the river.

A naturalist railing against science; an idealist with all the “faculty” of a whittling Yankee; a free-thinking Puritan; a Stoic who sucked sweetness out of all his sensations; a paradox from beginning to end: such was the author of “Walden;” and the world, which is itself a paradox without knowing it, will not soon be done with puzzling itself about him.

Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, July 12, 1817. His grandfather, John Thoreau, came from the island of Jersey to America in 1773. He married in Boston, in 1781, a Miss Jane Burns, a Scotchwoman, and in 1800 went to live in Concord. His son, John Thoreau, Junior, married Miss Cynthia Dunbar, also a Scotchwoman,—a New England clergyman’s daughter,—and by her had four children, two sons and two daughters, the third of whom, and the second son, was Henry David. A year or so after Henry’s birth the family moved to Chelmsford, Massachusetts, and later to Boston; but in 1823 they returned to Concord, and there Henry lived till his death, in 1862. Of mixed blood, largely French and Scotch, the author of “Walden” felt himself, nevertheless, a pure New Englander,—a Concord man, native and proper to the soil,—and pronounced his name accordingly, as if it had been the adjective “thorough.”

The American history of the family extends over little more than a century: from 1773, when John Thoreau, Senior, arrived in Boston, to 1881, when Maria Thoreau, the last of his children, died in Bangor, Maine, having outlived all the younger bearers of the name.*

John Thoreau, the elder, we are told, carried on a successful business in Boston, on Long Wharf. His son was bred to the same occupation, but having failed in it, resorted to pencil-making,—an industry already established in Concord,—at which he prospered well enough to leave his family with a “competency” at his death. So Maria Thoreau informed Mr. Sanborn in 1878; but it is probable that the word “competency” is to be taken in some pretty modest sense.

The few anecdotes of Henry Thoreau’s boyhood that have come down to us show him to have been already of a self-respecting and rather stoical turn of mind; not choosing to go to heaven, since he could not take his sled with him, and when falsely accused of theft, answering once for all with a simple denial. It was like the Thoreau of a later time, certainly, to tell the truth and then shut his lips.

The temperaments of the boy’s father and mother were strongly contrasted.