The Invention of Nature (38 page)

Where the first volume had looked at the external world, the second focused on an inner world – on the impressions that the external world ‘produces on the feelings’, as Humboldt explained. In homage to his old friend Goethe, who had died in 1832, and to their early friendship in Jena when the older poet had equipped him with ‘new organs’ through which to view the natural world, Humboldt underlined the importance of the senses in Cosmos. The eye, Humboldt wrote, was the organ of ‘Weltanschauung’, the organ through which we view the world but also through which we interpret, understand and define it. At a time when imagination had been firmly excluded from the sciences, Humboldt insisted that nature couldn’t be understood in any other way. One look at the heavens, Humboldt said, was all it took: the brilliant stars ‘delight the senses and inspire the mind’, yet at the same time they move along a path of mathematical precision.

The first two volumes of Cosmos proved so popular that within four years three competing English editions had been published. There was ‘sheer madness about Cosmos in England’, Humboldt reported to his German publisher, and a ‘war’ was raging between the various translators. By 1849, some 40,000 English copies had been sold, and that didn’t even include the many thousands more that had been distributed in the United States.5

Until this point, few Americans had read Humboldt’s previous works, but Cosmos changed that, establishing him as a household name across the North American continent. Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the first to obtain a copy. ‘The wonderful Humboldt,’ he wrote in his journal, ‘with his extended centre & expanded wings, marches like an army, gathering all things as he goes.’ No one, Emerson said, knew more about nature than Humboldt. Another American writer who loved Humboldt’s work was Edgar Allan Poe, whose last major work – the 130-page prose poem Eureka, published in 1848 – was dedicated to Humboldt and was a direct response to Cosmos. Eureka was Poe’s attempt to survey the universe – including all things ‘spiritual and material’ – echoing Humboldt’s approach of including the external and the internal world. The universe, Poe wrote, was ‘the most sublime of poems’. Equally inspired, Walt Whitman wrote his celebrated poetry collection, Leaves of Grass, with a copy of Cosmos on his desk. Whitman even composed a poem called ‘Kosmos’ and proclaimed himself ‘a kosmos’ in his famous poem ‘Song of Myself’.

Humboldt’s Cosmos shaped two generations of American scientists, artists, writers and poets – and, maybe most importantly, Cosmos was also responsible for the maturing of one of America’s most influential nature writers: Henry David Thoreau.

1 The British polymath William Whewell coined the term ‘scientist’ in his review of Mary Somerville’s book On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences in the Quarterly Review in 1834.

2 Later that year, in September 1842, Charles and Emma Darwin moved to Down House in Kent.

3 Humboldt never had a chance to read the Origin of Species because he died before its publication in November 1859. But he did comment on another book – Richard Chambers’s anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844). Not propped up by scientific evidence like Darwin’s Origin of Species, Vestiges nonetheless included similarly incendiary statements about evolution and the transmutation of species. Humboldt, it was rumoured in scientific circles in Britain in late 1845, ‘supports in almost every particular its theories’.

4 Shocked by what it believed to be a blasphemous book, following the publication of Cosmos, a German church used its own newspaper to denounce Humboldt as having made ‘a pact with the devil’.

5 Humboldt did not earn any income from these translations as there was no copyright legislation in place. Only after 1849, when new laws were introduced, did Humboldt make some money from the volumes that were published after that date.

19

Poetry, Science and Nature

Henry David Thoreau and Humboldt

IN SEPTEMBER 1847 Henry David Thoreau left his cabin at Walden Pond to move back home to the nearby town of Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau was thirty years old, and for the previous two years, two months and two days he had lived in a small hut in the woods. He had done so, he said, because he ‘wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life’.

Thoreau had built the shingled cabin with his own hands. Ten by fifteen feet, the small building had a window on each side and a fireplace with a small stove to heat the room. He had a bed, a small wooden desk and three chairs. When he sat on his doorstep he could see the gently rippling surface of the pond shimmering in the sun. The pond was ‘earth’s eye’, Thoreau said, which when it froze in winter ‘closes its eyelids’. It was a walk of just under two miles around the shoreline. The steep embankment was crowned with large white pines greened by their long tufts of needles, as well as hickories and oaks – like ‘slender eyelashes which fringe it’. In spring delicate flowers carpeted the forest floor and in May blueberries paraded their dangling bell-shaped blooms. Goldenrod brought their bright yellows to the summer and sumachs added their reds to the autumn. In winter, when snow muffled sound, Thoreau followed the tracks of rabbits and birds. In autumn, he rustled piles of fallen leaves with his feet to make as much noise as possible while singing loudly in the forest. He watched, he listened and he walked. He meandered through the gentle countryside around Walden Pond and became a discoverer, naming places as an explorer might: Mount Misery, Thrush Alley, Blue Heron Rock and so on.

Thoreau would turn these two years in his cabin into one of the most famous pieces of American nature writing: Walden, which he published in 1854, some seven years after his return to Concord. Thoreau found it difficult to write the book, and it only became Walden as we know it today when he discovered a new world in Humboldt’s Cosmos. Humboldt’s view of nature gave Thoreau the confidence to weave together science and poetry. ‘Facts collected by a poet are set down at last as winged seeds of truth,’ Thoreau later wrote. Walden was Thoreau’s answer to Cosmos.

Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond (Illustration Credit 19.1)

Thoreau was born in July 1817. His father was a tradesman and pencil maker, but struggled to make a living. Home was Concord, a bustling town of about 2,000 inhabitants, some fifteen miles west of Boston. Thoreau had been a shy boy who preferred to be alone. When his classmates played boisterous games, he would stand by the side with his eyes on the ground, always searching for a leaf or an insect. He was not popular because he never joined in and they called him the ‘fine scholar with a big nose’. Climbing trees like a squirrel, he felt most comfortable outdoors.

Aged sixteen Thoreau enrolled at Harvard University, only a little more than ten miles to the south-east of Concord. Here he studied Greek, Latin and modern languages including German as well as taking courses in maths, history and philosophy. He used the library intensely and particularly enjoyed travel accounts, dreaming himself away to distant countries.

After his graduation, in 1837, Thoreau returned to Concord where he worked briefly as a teacher as well as occasionally helping his father in the family pencil-making business. It was in Concord that Thoreau met the writer and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson who had moved there three years previously. Fourteen years his senior, Emerson encouraged Thoreau to write, as well as opening his well-stocked library to him.1 It was on Emerson’s land at Walden Pond that Thoreau built his little cabin. At that time Thoreau was grieving for his only brother, John, who had died in his arms after a tetanus infection. Thoreau had been so traumatized by John’s sudden death that he had even developed a ‘sympathetic’ form of the disease, experiencing similar symptoms such as lockjaw and muscle spasms. He felt like ‘a withered leaf’ – miserable, useless and so desolate that a friend had advised: ‘build yourself a hut, & there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no other alternative, no other hope for you.’

Nature helped Thoreau. A fading flower was no reason to mourn, he told Emerson, nor were thick layers of mouldering autumn leaves on the forest floor because in the following year all would spring back into life. Death was part of nature’s cycle and thus a sign of its health and vigour. ‘There can be no really black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature,’ Thoreau said as he tried to make sense of the world around and within him by being in nature.

The America that Thoreau called home had changed a great deal since Humboldt had met Thomas Jefferson in Washington, DC, in the summer of 1804. In the intervening years, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had crossed the continent from St Louis to the Pacific coast and had returned from their expedition with reports of rich and vast lands which proved alluring prospects for the expanding nation. Four decades later, in 1846, the United States gained large parts of the Oregon Territory from the British, including the present-day states of Washington, Oregon and Idaho as well as parts of Montana and Wyoming. By then the country was embroiled in a war with Mexico after the annexation of slave-holding Texas. When the war concluded with a sweeping victory for the United States, just as Thoreau had moved out of his cabin, Mexico ceded a vast territory that included the future states of California, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and most of Arizona as well as parts of Wyoming, Oklahoma, Kansas and Colorado. Under President James K. Polk the country had expanded by more than a million square miles between 1845 and 1848, increasing by a third and for the first time extending across the whole continent. Gold was first found in California in January 1848, and the following year 40,000 people set out to make their fortunes in the West.

Meanwhile America had advanced technologically. The Erie Canal had been completed in 1825 and five years later the first section of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad had opened. In April 1838 the Great Western, the first transatlantic steamship, arrived in New York from England and during the winter of 1847, as Thoreau returned to Concord, the Capitol in Washington, DC, was lit with gas for the first time.

Concord, Massachusetts (Illustration Credit 19.2)

Boston was still an important harbour and Thoreau’s hometown Concord just to the west was growing in tandem. Concord had a cotton mill, a shoe and a lead pipe manufactory as well as several warehouses and banks. Each week forty stagecoaches passed through the town which was also the seat of the county government. Wagons loaded with goods from Boston drove along Main Street towards the market towns in New Hampshire and Vermont.

Farming had long turned the wilderness here into open fields, pastures and meadows. It was impossible to walk through Concord’s woods, Thoreau noted in his journal, without hearing the sound of axes. New England’s landscape had changed so dramatically over the previous two centuries that few ancient trees remained. The forest had been cleared first for agriculture and fuel, and had then been devoured by locomotives with the advent of the railway. In Concord the railway had arrived in 1844, its tracks skirting the western edge of Walden Pond where Thoreau had often walked beside them. Wild nature was receding and humans were increasingly removed from it.

Life at Walden Pond suited Thoreau, for there he could lose himself in a book or stare at a flower for hours without noticing what else was happening around him. He had long praised the pleasures of a simple life. ‘Simplify, simplify’, he would later write in Walden. To be a philosopher, he said, is to live ‘a life of simplicity’. He was content on his own, and didn’t care about social pleasantries, women or money. His appearance mirrored this attitude. His clothes were ill-fitting, his trousers too short and his shoes unpolished. Thoreau had a ruddy complexion, a large nose, a straggly beard and expressive blue eyes. One friend said that he ‘imitates porcupines successfully’, and others described him as cantankerous and ‘pugnacious’. Some said that Thoreau had ‘courteous manners’ – although a little ‘uncouth and somewhat rustic’– while many thought him entertaining and funny. But even his friend and Concord neighbour, the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, described Thoreau as ‘an intolerable bore’ who made him feel ashamed for having money, or a house, or writing a book that people will read. Thoreau certainly was eccentric, but also refreshing ‘like ice-water in the dog days to the parched citizens’, another friend said.

All agreed that Thoreau was a man more at ease with nature and words than he was with people. One exception was his joy in the company of children. Emerson’s son, Edward, remembered fondly how Thoreau always had time for them, telling stories about a ‘duel’ of two mud-turtles in the river or magically making pencils disappear and reappear. When the village children visited him at his cabin at Walden Pond, Thoreau took them on long walks through the woods. When he whistled strange sounds, one by one animals would appear – the woodchuck peeped out from the underbrush, squirrels ran towards him and birds settled on his shoulder.

Nature, Hawthorne said, ‘seems to adopt him as her especial child’, for animals and plants communicated with him. There was a bond that no one could explain. Mice would run across Thoreau’s arms, crows would perch on him, snakes coiled around his legs and he always found even the most hidden first blossoms of spring. Nature spoke to him, and Thoreau to it. When he planted a field of beans, he asked, ‘What shall I learn of beans or beans of me?’ The joy of his daily life was ‘a little star-dust caught’, he said, or a ‘segment of a rainbow which I have clutched’.

Henry David Thoreau (Illustration Credit 19.3)

During his time at Walden Pond, Thoreau watched nature closely. He bathed in the morning and then sat in the sun. He walked through the woods or quietly crouched in a clearing, waiting for the animals to parade themselves for him. He observed the weather and called himself a ‘self-appointed inspector of snow storms and rain storms’. In summer he took his boat out and played the flute while drifting on the water, and in winter he sprawled out flat on the frozen surface of the pond, pressing his face against the ice to study the bottom ‘like a picture behind a glass’. At night he listened to the tree branches rubbing against the shingles of his cabin’s roof, and in the morning to the birds that serenaded him. He was ‘a wood-nymph’, as one friend said, ‘a sylvan soul’.