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FROM THE ROUSE CRAYON PORTRAIT MADE IN 1834.
NOW IN THE CONCORD PUBLIC LIBRARY
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
FROM THE WALDEN EDITION OF THOREAU'S WRITINGS.
BY COURTESY OF HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

The grandfather of America's first renowned native-born naturalist emigrated from the Island of Jersey before the American Revolution. In Boston he married a Scotchwoman. His son John also married a lady of Scotch descent, and engaged in the industry of pencil-making in Concord, Massachusetts. There Henry Thoreau was born in the month of July, 1817. His mother, a staunch, keen, observant woman "with a great love of nature," used to take her children into the woods and show them the wonders and beauties of wild life. Even as a small boy Henry had opinions and expressed them with independence, he was honest—"straight as a furrow"—sensible, good-tempered and industrious.

The Thoreau family made willing sacrifices so that Henry, the second son, could enter Harvard when he was sixteen. When he was graduated he taught for awhile in Concord and on Staten Island, but found the occupation uncongenial, and soon took to less scholarly ways of making a living. Nimbly he turned from one trade to another. He did surveying, or built a neighbor's fence, planted a garden, or worked with his father in the pencil shop. He was thorough and efficient in all that he did, but, whatever the means of livelihood, he pursued it with the single purpose of securing just enough money to support his frugal needs while he went off on woodland excursions, communing, studying, writing. Simple thrifty neighbors regarded Thoreau as a visionary and reproached him for his lack of the practical virtues that they held in esteem. They called him lazy. Thoreau (he pronounced it "thorough"), however, was not wasting time. He kept a daily journal, from which several characteristic and delightfully refreshing volumes were later compiled.

When still a young man, Thoreau resolved to seek a retreat in the woods where he could live undisturbed in his enjoyment of the "indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature." Emerson, a close friend in whose house he had lived for a time, granted him the use of some land near Walden Pond, about a mile and a half from Concord. Thoreau cleared the woodland site himself and erected a small shelter, at whose "raising" a number of notable literary men were present. Beginning with the summer of 1845, this philosopher with the "thin, penetrating, big-nosed face," the deep-set eyes and spare, long-limbed figure, this naturalist who used neither trap nor gun, lived in his hut, remaining for about two years. He planted enough ground to give him food, and often received his friends, who sincerely loved him for his unique qualities of mind and soul.

At Walden Thoreau compiled and wrote two of his best-known books—"A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" and "Walden, or Life in the Woods." The latter has gone into many editions in several languages.

Thoreau avowed, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life." So he lived, a happy stoic, beside his little lake. "A lake," said he, "is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is the earth's eye, looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.... It is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding Nature continually repairs; no storms, no dust, can dim its surface ever fresh, ... swept by the sun's hazy brush." In the solitude of his days the lake-dweller found himself "no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a bumble-bee. I am no more lonely than the mill brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or the first spider in a new house." He describes with affection "the old settler and original proprietor who is reported to have dug Walden Pond, and stoned it, and fringed it with pine woods"; and that "elderly dame" who lived in his neighborhood, "invisible to most persons, in whose odorous herb garden I love to stroll some times, gathering samples and listening to her fables; for she has a genius of unequaled fertility. Her memory runs back farther than mythology, and she can tell me the original of every fable, and on what fact everyone is founded, for the incidents occurred when she was young. A ruddy and lusty old dame, who delights in all weathers and seasons, and is likely to outlive all her children yet."

Thoreau's vigorous, contented years came to a close in 1862, when he was only forty-five. He sleeps in the burying-ground of his well-loved Concord, from which he rarely strayed far during his lifetime. Said his friend, William Ellery Channing, "His love of wildness was real. This child of an old civilization, this Norman boy with the blue eyes and brown hair, held the Indian's creed, and believed in the essential worth and integrity of plant and animal. This was a religion; to us mythical. So far a recluse as never to seek popular ends, he was yet gifted with the ability and courage to be a captain of men. Heroism he possessed in its highest sense,—the will to use his means to his ends, and these the best."

FROM THE JOHN MUIR MEMORIAL NUMBER OF THE SIERRA CLUB BULLETIN
JOHN MUIR
W.F. DASSONVILLE, PHOTOGRAPHER

In John Muir's own story of his boyhood and youth he declares, "When I was a boy in Scotland I was fond of everything that was wild, and all my life I've been growing fonder and fonder of wild places and wild creatures." Muir was born at Dunbar, on the stormy coast of Scotland, April 21, 1838. From his grandfather he learned his letters, before he was three years old, with the aid of shop signs. His was an adventurous boyhood, punctuated by riotous school fights, hunts for skylark's nests and fox holes, scrambles among the crags of Dunbar Castle, games of running, jumping and wrestling, and repeated chastisements by a father who believed in the efficacy of the rod, and used it to emphasize his disapproval of "shore and field wanderings." A grammar-school reader gave the Scotch lad his first knowledge of the birds and trees of America. Eagerly he read descriptions of the fish hawk and the bald eagle by Alexander Wilson, the Scotch naturalist, and Audubon's wonderful story of the passenger pigeon.

When John Muir was eleven years old he crossed the Atlantic in a sailing-vessel with his father, a sister and a brother. In Wisconsin the father set about preparing a home for the wife and children waiting in Scotland. The future "patriarch of the mountains" spent joyous hours exploring pastures new—looking for songbirds' nests, game haunts and wildflower gardens. At night, when the household slept, he would creep out of bed, though weary after long hours of labor in the fields, and read his treasured books, or work on his inventions. For a few months he worked as assistant to an inventor in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. Longing to resume the education interrupted when he was eleven years old, the youth returned to Madison, where, despite almost insurmountable handicaps, he was able to take a four-year course in the new State University. In vacation time he worked