Sages of Concord #60: Thoreau's Wilderness Legacy

"(Robert) Frost was on record praising “Walden” as one of his favorite books because it was miraculously “a tale of adventure,” a “declaration of independence” and a “gospel of wisdom” all rolled into one. When Walden Pond came up, however, Frost confessed to Udall that he never visited the Concord sanctuary for fear of heartbreak. “I couldn’t bear to go,” he said. Instead, Frost found the spirit of Thoreau alive in his beloved Green Mountains of Vermont."https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/07/books/review/douglas-brinkley-thoreaus-wilderness-legacy-walden-pond.html

The Two Guides by Winslow Homer

On April 23, 1851, Henry David Thoreau spoke at the Concord Lyceum about the interrelationship of God, man and nature. It was the opening salvo of the modern American conservation movement. Equating sauntering with absolute freedom, Thoreau, whose “Walden” would be published three years later, ended his oration with eight words that in coming decades helped save the Maine woods, Cape Cod, Yosemite and other treasured American landscapes: “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” The sentiment became popularized when The Atlantic published Thoreau’s essay “Walking” in May 1862, with the line as the centerpiece, a month after his death.

This July 12 will be Thoreau’s 200th birthday. Lovers of his back-to-nature musings will flock to the shores of Walden Pond to celebrate his literary greatness. I’ll be one of them. But our pilgrimages to honor Thoreau shouldn’t be confined to wood-fringed Concord. Thoreau, toward the end of his life, famously called for townships to have “a park, or rather a primitive forest, of 500 or a thousand acres, where a stick should never be cut for fuel, a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation.” A full 14 years before Congress established Yellowstone National Park (America’s first) in 1872, Thoreau, courtesy of this visionary preservationist offering, helped inspire our magnificent National Parks system. The true largess of Thoreau, then, can perhaps best be discovered by experiencing one of the outdoor temples that his “in wildness” declaration helped protect.

Most Americans know Thoreau from reading “Walden,” with its simple assertion, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.” But it’s the “in wildness” epigram that’s near scripture for environmentalists rallying against hyper-industrialization and climate change. Just as Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” nourished the likes of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., his kinetic “in wildness” precept has electrified the literary imaginations of Barry Lopez, T. C. Boyle, Terry Tempest Williams, Bill McKibben, Wendell Berry, David Quammen, Edward Hoagland, Carl Hiaasen, Rick Bass, Gary Snyder, Louise Erdrich and other wilderness warriors safeguarding our cherished public lands.

The environmental activist John Muir, who worshiped Thoreau — particularly the passage in “The Maine Woods” (1864) that called for “national preserves” — acknowledged that the Concord sage spurred his Yosemite protection advocacy. Often borrowing from his literary hero’s dictum, Muir harnessed Thoreau’s statement to promote his drive to save California wilderness from ruin. “Civilization,” Muir wrote, “needs pure wildness.”

Theodore Roosevelt, who saved over 234 million acres of wild America as president from 1901 to 1909, was so taken with “The Maine Woods” and “Walking” that as a Harvard undergraduate he climbed Mount Katahdin to follow in Thoreau’s footsteps. Around 2000, a modern-day Thoreauvian, Roxanne Quimby, co-founder of Burt’s Bees, started buying up the Maine acreage her literary hero often tramped. Once Quimby acquired Thoreau’s North Woods stamping grounds she donated 87,563 acres to the Interior Department. In August 2016, President Obama, on the eve of the National Park Service centennial, established Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument from her holdings. (Sadly, the Trump administration is now reviewing opening it to timber harvesting and hunting. )

Rose Kennedy, the mother of the 35th president, spent much of her childhood in Concord, and she treasured both the book “Walden” and the pond. When her husband, Joseph Kennedy, bought a home in Hyannis Port in 1928, she read Thoreau’s less well-known “Cape Cod” (1865) and was awe-struck. Thoreau had first hiked the Outer Cape’s shoreline in 1849 and began composing reflections for public lectures. Young Jack Kennedy, influenced by his mother, adopted Thoreau’s elevated notion of Cape Cod as being where “a man can stand” and “put all of America behind him” as his own.

Coinciding with the Kennedys’ move to Cape Cod was the publication of Henry Beston’s book “The Outermost House” (1928). Beston spent a solitary year on the Outer Cape, journaling about the migrations of shore and seabirds, the headlong waves, the glories of sand dunes, the pageantry of the stars. Born in 1888 to an upper-middle-class Catholic clan in Quincy, Mass., Beston was encouraged at an early age by his parents to explore the Cape. As an Atlantic Monthly correspondent, a farmer of herbs, a rustic wanderer and a writer of children’s books, Beston fell in love with the primitive grandeur of the New England seaside. When he turned 38, he purchased 50 acres of dunes near the town of Eastham on the outermost beach of Cape Cod. His small Fo’castle residence — a locally built home with 10 windows offering unobstructed views of the Atlantic — offered Beston the kind of Walden-like solitude he craved. The National Park Service of the 1950s adopted “The Outermost House” and “Cape Cod” as justifications for establishing a 44,000-acre national seashore of secluded beaches and mysterious bogs in coastal Massachusetts. Likewise, Senator John Kennedy, inspired by Thoreau and Beston, introduced legislation in 1959 to establish Cape Cod National Seashore.

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Just as Muir’s book “Our National Parks” had helped save the High Sierras of California, “Cape Cod” served as an important catalyst for protecting what Thoreau called “the bared and bended arm of Massachusetts.” In a 1959 New York Times article titled “Walking in Thoreau’s Footsteps on Cape Cod,” Caroline Bates enthusiastically embraced the national seashore effort. “The adventurer in search of wild America,” she wrote, “visits this coast for the same reason that Thoreau did.” As president, in 1961, Kennedy pushed a Cape Cod N.S. bill through Congress. (The Trump administration, in an unprecedented act, has suspended the local commission that regulates Cape Cod N.S. in possible preparation for gutting environmental protections there.)

Thoreau became the all-seasons environmental guru of the Long Sixties (1960–74). After Rachel Carson learned she had breast cancer, she adopted a sentence from “Walden,” which she always kept at her bedside, to spur on her writing of “Silent Spring”: “If thou art a writer, write as if thy time were short, for it is indeed short at the longest.” Howard Zahniser of the Wilderness Society used the “in wildness” quote on his nonprofit’s stationery. David Brower of the Sierra Club published a book titled “In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World” with excerpts from Thoreau’s nature writings accompanied by the landscape photography of Eliot Porter. “To me, it seems that much of what Henry David Thoreau wrote more than a century ago was less timely in his day than it is on ours,” Brower offered in the introduction.

Thoreau’s first book, “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” (1849), was an inspiration for Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” (1957). The following year, in his novel “The Dharma Bums,” Kerouac called for a “rucksack revolution” of young people searching for Thoreauvian enlightenment in wildness. Thoreau’s Concord, Kerouac insisted after visiting Walden, was best experienced in “blue aquamarine in October red sereness.”

The last time our country rolled out the red carpet for Thoreau was in 1962, the year “Silent Spring” was published and the 100th anniversary of his death. Kennedy’s secretary of the interior, Stewart Udall, sponsored a remembrance held at Dumbarton Oaks in Georgetown. The Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas and Robert Frost spoke about Thoreau’s enduring greatness. When Udall squired Frost around the arboretum-like grounds that afternoon, they discussed how Thoreau animated the Yosemite campaign (through Muir) and Cape Cod (through Beston). Frost was on record praising “Walden” as one of his favorite books because it was miraculously “a tale of adventure,” a “declaration of independence” and a “gospel of wisdom” all rolled into one. When Walden Pond came up, however, Frost confessed to Udall that he never visited the Concord sanctuary for fear of heartbreak. “I couldn’t bear to go,” he said. Instead, Frost found the spirit of Thoreau alive in his beloved Green Mountains of Vermont.

So this summer, if, like Frost, you’re looking for Thoreauvian inspiration but feel hemmed in by Concord or intimidated by tourists at Walden, I recommend sojourning to Yosemite or Cape Cod or Katahdin or along one of America’s stupendous rivers. Or, for that matter, your local “township” park. Because Thoreau insisted on the preservation of wildness, we have millions of acres of public lands to explore — and the sanctity of Cape Cod and Katahdin to defend from profiteers and bandits.

Douglas Brinkley is professor of history at Rice University and the author of “Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 9, 2017, on Page BR12 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Thoreau and the Legacy of Wilderness. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

Sages of Concord #59: A SLACKER AND A HYPOCRITE?

" . . .for all his nature loving, he also loved tools and machines and gadgets. Carpenter, house painter, boatwright, arborist—he truly was as close to self-sufficient as anyone could be in 19th century America. He was Concord’s handyman—the ideal handyman in what might be considered America’s ideal town, since Thoreau’s clients for home repair and gardening included Emerson, Hawthorne, and the Alcotts."

http://www.thedailybeast.com/was-thoreau-just-a-slacker-and-a-hypocrite

Sages of Concord #58 Opening Address at Thoreau Bicentennial

Wen Stephenson’s opening address at Thoreau Bicentennial

By Wen Stephenson

Adapted from Wen Stephenson’s opening address at the Thoreau Bicentennial  gathering in Concord, MA, on July 12, 2017—Thoreau’s 200th birthday—and from his Beacon Press book, What We’re Fighting for Now Is Each Other: Dispatches From the Front Lines of Climate Justice.

There’s a popular image of Henry David Thoreau as an apolitical hermit, a recluse, aloof and detached, even misanthropic, a crank indulging his private fantasy in his cabin in the woods. This has always been a caricature; his active involvement in the Underground Railroad and resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act put the lie to it. We know that he helped multiple fugitives on their way to Canada, guarding over them in his family’s house—the Thoreau family were committed abolitionists, especially his mother and sisters—even escorting them onto the trains, which entailed no small personal risk. And of course, we know that he wrote and spoke forcefully and without compromise against slavery and for human freedom.

But in the fall of 1859, Thoreau’s principles would be put even further to the test. When the news arrived in Concord, in October 1859, of John Brown’s deadly raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, reactions were sharply divided. The whole country was in an uproar. Even Brown’s erstwhile supporters quickly distanced themselves. Most of his co-conspirators—many with close ties to Concord—went into hiding, several fleeing to Canada. The atmosphere was not just tense but dangerous for anyone voicing solidarity with Brown.

Into this picture steps forty-two-year-old Henry Thoreau. He was incensed by what he saw as the timid and hypocritical reactions of his neighbors, and of the press, and let it be known that he would speak in support of Brown at Concord’s First Church on October 30. Thoreau rang the town bell himself to announce the speech because Concord’s selectmen had refused. The address he gave was “A Plea for Captain John Brown.”

It was Thoreau’s most radical moment. He was the first in Concord, and among the first and most prominent in the country, to come to Brown’s defense. Within days he would repeat the speech to large audiences in Worcester and Boston—where he stood in at the last moment for Frederick Douglass, who had been chased into Canada by federal marshals despite having played no part in the Harpers Ferry raid.

The speech itself is stunning. What Thoreau was saying in his “Plea” for Brown was the same thing he’d said a decade earlier in “Civil Disobedience”—“action from principle…is essentially revolutionary”—only now in far stronger terms, and this time with real skin in the game. What was once a kind of philosophical exercise was now in deadly earnest: Brown’s raid and certain execution—and the risk of publicly aligning oneself with him—made Thoreau’s night in jail look like child’s play.

On December 2, Brown was hanged in Virginia. The next day, Thoreau himself would become an accomplice to the escape of a desperate Harpers Ferry conspirator, Francis Jackson Merriam, personally taking him out of Concord by wagon to the train in Acton. Thoreau didn’t know Merriam’s identity (he was told only to call him “Lockwood”), but he surely knew what he was doing and the risk he was taking—that this was a wanted man, with a price on his head.

.   .   .

On July 4, 1854, with Walden in final page proofs, Thoreau mounted a platform at Harmony Grove in Framingham—alongside William Lloyd Garrison, Sojourner Truth, and other prominent abolitionists—and addressed a fiery antislavery rally (literally fiery: Garrison lit copies of the Fugitive Slave Act and US Constitution on fire). His speech, called “Slavery in Massachusetts,” is merciless, indicting the commonwealth for the moral complacency and hypocrisy of its participation in human bondage, sending escaped slaves, free human beings, back into slavery. It was enough to shake even Thoreau’s sense of nature’s harmony:

I walk toward one of our ponds, but what signifies the beauty of nature when men are base?…Who can be serene in a country where both the rulers and the ruled are without principle? The remembrance of my country spoils my walk.

And yet, there in the final moments of the speech, he finds some reassurance:

But it chanced the other day that I scented a white water-lily, and a season I had waited for had arrived.…What confirmation of our hopes is in the fragrance of this flower! I shall not so soon despair of the world for it, notwithstanding slavery, and the cowardice and want of principle of Northern men. It suggests what kind of laws have prevailed the longest and widest, and still prevail, and that the time may come when man’s deeds will smell as sweet. Such is the odor which the plant emits. If Nature can compound this fragrance still annually, I shall believe her still young and full of vigor, her integrity and genius unimpaired, and that there is virtue even in man, too, who is fitted to perceive and love it. It reminds me that Nature has been partner to no Missouri Compromise. I scent no compromise in the fragrance of the water-lily.

Sorry, but the person who wrote and spoke those words was not “pond scum,” he was not a misanthrope, regardless of what anyone at The New Yorker  magazine may say. Like all of us, he had his flaws—and yes, he could be annoying as hell. But no misanthrope speaks and acts—indeed, risks his own neck—on behalf of his fellow human beings in the way Henry Thoreau did.

“The remembrance of my country spoils my walk.”

You see, I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that the remembrance of his country merely spoiled Thoreau’s walk. I think the remembrance of his country revealed the walk’s true purpose. I believe his solitary and profoundly moral, even spiritual awakening in nature led him back to society and to a radical political engagement on behalf of other people—his neighbors, whether follow citizens of Concord or the fugitives who took refuge in Walden’s woods. Because for Henry Thoreau, to live in harmony with nature is to act in solidarity with our fellow human beings.

About the author 

Wen Stephenson, an independent journalist and activist, writes for The Nationand is the author of What We’re Fighting for Now Is Each Other: Dispatches From the Front Lines of Climate Justice. Follow him on Twitter at @wenstephenson.

Posted at 09:16 AM in Activism, Environment and Conservation, Walden, Wen Stephenson, What We're Fighting For Now Is Each Other | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sages of Concord #57: A Fourth of July Rally

https://www.masshist.org/database/431

from Massachusetts Historical Society: 

Broadside advertising a Fourth of July rally sponsored by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1854. Noted abolitionists including William Lloyd Garrison, Sojourner Truth, and Henry David Thoreau addressed the crowd. In a dramatic climax, Garrison burned copies of the Fugitive Slave Law and the United States Constitution.

A sweltering day in July

"And let all the people say, Amen!" exclaimed William Lloyd Garrison. The hundreds of abolitionists assembled at Harmony Grove, a splendid picnicking area in Framingham, about sixteen miles outside of Boston, roared back "Amen!" again and again. More than the extreme heat of July, as one unsympathetic Boston newspaper shrugged, had excited the passion of the crowd. For the Commonwealth's abolitionist community, July 4, 1854 would be a day to recognize the nation's greatest sin and to mourn the death of freedom.

Kindling for the fire

At the end of May, after furious national debate, Congress turned the Kansas-Nebraska act into law, thus permitting western settlers to legally establish slavery in the territories. The legislation, in effect, repealed the Compromise of 1820 and opened the continent, perhaps even the North, to slavery. Northerners who previously had rejected the abolitionists' dire warnings began to see the expansive and explosive power of slave owners and their allies in the North. With the nation burning red hot over enforcement of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, the Kansas-Nebraska Law created a raging blast furnace of hate and fear. Free Soil and Liberty party members, political abolitionists of varying stripes, and "Conscience" Whigs forged a coalition, soon labeled the Republican party, that dedicated itself to halting the spread of slavery.

The same month, state and federal authorities in Boston, Massachusetts, seized Anthony Burns as a fugitive slave. After an interracial abolitionist rescue effort failed to free Burns, authorities surrounded the courthouse holding him with an iron chain and rings of police, cavalry, and several artillery companies. Judge Edward G. Loring declared Burns an escaped slave and ordered him returned to his owner in Virginia. Hundreds of U.S. military bayonets, at a cost of $100,000, insured Burns's safe conduct through the streets of Boston to the city wharf and then to reenslavement. Loring's disgraceful order, according to Garrison, had converted a man into a thing, the Declaration of Independence into a lie, "the Golden Rule [into] an absurdity, and Jesus of Nazareth [into] an imposter."

At the rally in Framingham, a spark ignites

To mark the dark days of 1854, the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society called for a rally on July 4 amid the bucolic oaks of Framingham's Grove. The Society conducted July 4 ceremonies at the same spot at Harmony Grove between 1846 and 1865, but this one would be particularly memorable. Organizers had formed a small amphitheater before a stage decorated with two white flags bearing the names of Kansas and Nebraska and banners proclaiming "Virginia" and "Redeem Massachusetts." Above, hung an inverted U.S. flag draped with black crepe. Just before the speakers took to the platform, the irrepressible William C. Nell hurriedly placed a portrait of Garrison between the two state's banners, symbolically breaking the chains binding Massachusetts to Virginia.

The rally began with a prayer and a hymn. Then Garrison launched into one of the most controversial performances of his career. "To-day, we are called to celebrate the seventy-eighth anniversary of American Independence. In what spirit?" he asked, "with what purpose? to what end?" The Declaration of Independence had declared "that all men are created equal ... It is not a declaration of equality of property, bodily strength or beauty, intellectually or moral development, industrial or inventive powers, but equality of RIGHTS--not of one race, but of all races."

Since the early 1830s, Garrisonian antislavery advocates had adopted the message of black abolitionists in denouncing the sin of slavery and of racial prejudice. In words familiar to his audience, Garrison repeated the decades-old warnings that freedom did not exist in the South; who there, he declared, could "avow his belief in the inalienable rights of man, irrespective of complexional caste?" The church in the South, a frequent target of abolitionists, lay outside of Christendom, and was nothing but a "cage of unclean birds, and the synagogue of Satan." Garrison ventured into new territory with his warning that slavery had strengthened--not weakened--since he had begun his antislavery career. Slavery and its minions jeopardized freedom everywhere and its advocates, he warned, intended to tighten their grasp over the Caribbean, expand into Central and South America, and even extend the cursed institution into the Pacific. Freedom was disappearing. What could there be to celebrate on July 4? he asked.

Garrison then produced a copy of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law and put a match to it. Amid cries of "Amen" the hated document burned to a cinder. Then he produced copies of Judge Edward G. Loring's decision to send Anthony Burns back to slavery and Judge Benjamin R. Curtis's comments to the U.S. grand jury considering charges of constructive treason against those who had participated in the failed attempt to free Burns. As Martin Luther had burned copies of canon law and the papal bull excommunicating him from the Catholic Church for heresy, Garrison consigned each to the flames. Holding up a copy of the U.S. Constitution, he branded it as "the source and parent of all the other atrocities--'a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell.'" As the nation's founding document burned to ashes, he cried out: "So perish all compromises with tyranny!"

The public reacts

Most of the audience roared its approval but some hissed and groused. Later, many of the state's daily newspapers condemned Garrison's actions. Charles Remond, the great African American abolitionist from Salem, immediately leapt from his seat to defend his good friend. Garrison had acted, Remond announced to the multitudes, in the name of three million slaves. Moncure Daniel Conway, a student at the Harvard Divinity School, mounted the stage and confessed that he was from Virginia and knew his fellow Southerners well. On the subject of slavery, their minds were "diseased," perfectly "insane." He was astonished to have been born in a place where "white men owned slaves" and now, because of what had happened to Anthony Burns, he lived in a place where "white men were slaves."

After the rally broke for a long and well-deserved lunch, Sojourner Truth addressed the throng, warning that God "would yet execute his judgments upon the white people for their oppression and cruelty." Wendell Phillips, Lucy Stone, John Pierpont, Stephen S. Foster, and others added their voices to Garrison's. At about 3:30 p.m., Henry David Thoreau mounted the speaker's platform. With Walden fresh in the bookstores and the Burns affair eating at his conscience, Thoreau uttered his disgust for those in Massachusetts who willingly aided slavery. In an address that would later be published as "Slavery in Massachusetts," Thoreau advised the gathering that the "Law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free."

At the close of the meeting, Garrison resumed his place beneath the banners and flags. When he had begun agitating against the institution of slavery more than twenty years earlier, nearly everyone believed that the institution of slavery would not survive a close scrutiny of the nation's founding documents. Abolitionists assumed that the Founding Fathers had intended to put slavery on the road to extinction. Even the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society had appended copies of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence to their pamphlets, believing that if anyone actually read those sacred words slavery would have to end. But when James Madison's notes from the Constitutional Convention were published in the early 1840s, the truth proved shocking. Many abolitionists who had believed in an antislavery interpretation of the Constitution discovered that the Fathers had traded union and white liberty for black slavery. No longer could Garrison and his allies believe in the Union, much less see the Constitution as inherently antislavery. It was, they sadly discovered, a wicked document, the true underpinning for the institution of slavery. "The only remedy in our case," Garrison exclaimed at the close of the July 4 ceremonies, "is A DISSOLUTION OF THE UNION."

Suggestions for further reading

Finkleman, Paul. "Garrison's Constitution: The Covenant with Death and How it was Made." Prologue: A Quarterly Publication of the National Archives and Records Administration (Winter 2000): 231-245.

Garrison, Wendell Phillips and Francis Jackson Garrison. William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879: The Story of his Life Told by his Children, Vol. 3, 1841-1860. New York: Century Co., 1889.

The Liberator, vol. 24, nos. 27-29 (July 7, 14, 21, 1854). These issues contain descriptions of the rally and excerpts of the speeches given.

Mayer, Henry. All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998.

Merrill, Walter M. Against Wind and Tide: A Biography of William Lloyd Garrison. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963.

Perry, Lewis. Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God in Antislavery Thought. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973. For more information on the Anthony Burns affair, see our February 2002, "From our cabinet" feature. For detailed information about Thoreau's speech at Harmony Grove see the website of the Walden Woods Project.

Sages of Concord #56: A Wild & Disobedient Life

http://radioopensource.org/a-wild-disobedient-life-henry-david-thoreau-at-200-pt-1/

N. C. Wyeth

A Wild & Disobedient Life

Henry David Thoreau, on his 200th birthday, is an American immortal who got there the hard way – against the grain of his town and his times.  By now he’s the heroic non-conformist who modeled his brief life on religious convictions: that every human being has an original relation with divine spirit, and that on earth a man must become a majority of one.  So he made a dissenting record living apart, and walking the woods more like a Native American, he felt, than a Yankee.  Never to church, never married, never voted and didn’t pay his taxes.  He talked to the trees as almost-people, and he caressed the fish in his stream like almost-children. Manly and able “but rarely tender,” he won Emerson’s obituary praise that flatters us, too: “no truer American existed,” Emerson said, than Henry Thoreau.  The prophet of Concord is our subject this hour on Open Source. 

Open Source

Sages Of Concord #55: The Glory of Friendship

Winslow Homer: Snap The Whip

The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, not the kindly smile, not the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when you discover that someone else believes in you and is willing to trust you with a friendship."
                                                                                                  RW Emerson

Sages of Concord #54: That Devilish Iron Horse

MaxPixelLocomotiveComposition

The Boiling spring is turned into a tank for the Iron Horse to drink at, and the Walden Woods have been cut and dried for his fodder. That devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending whinner (sic) is heard throughout the town, has defiled the Boiling Spring with his feet and drunk it up, and browsed off all the wood around the pond. . . He robs the country babies of milk, with the breath of his nostrils polluting the air. That Trojan horse, with a thousand men in his belly, insidiously introduced by mercenary Greeks. With the scream of a hawk he beats the bush for men, the man-harrier, and carries them to his infernal home by thousands for his progeny. Where is the country's champion, the Moore of Moore Hall, to meet him at the Deep Cut and throw a victorious and avenging lance against this bloated pest?

from the Journal of HD Thoreau, June 17, 1853