Lakes of light: modes of representation in Walden.

Peck, H. Daniel

"The Ponds" chapter of Walden, more than halfway through the book, presents our first extended and particularized view of the Walden landscape. In this essay, the author considers modes of representation in this pivotal chapter, which has traditionally been seen as the "mythic" or "mystical" center of Walden. Here it is viewed instead as a chapter seeking equilibrium as much as ecstasy, in which "description" rather than Transcendental symbolism makes itself felt as the dominant, and stabilizing, modality. In this view, various kinds of description, in their interaction, create the engine of the chapter's development, and ultimately lead to a sense of plurality, aggregation, and inclusiveness appropriate to the chapter's commitment to "the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature."

**********

In Rural Hours (1850), a work of bioregional literature published in the United States four years before Walden, Susan Fenimore Cooper took note of a significant change in American artistic and intellectual culture: "Some foundation for the change [a shift from abstraction to particularity] may doubtless be found in the fact, that all descriptive writing, on natural objects, is now much less vague and general than it was formerly; it has become very much more definite and accurate within the last half century." "[P]eople," she adds, "had grown tired of mere vapid, conventional repetitions, they felt the want of something more positive, more real." (1)

We know that Thoreau read at least part of Rural Hours while he was writing Walden (2) and, whether or not it directly influenced him, this passage unmistakably anticipates certain aspects of his book. Furthermore, its sentiments are in accord with some contemporary understandings of Walden, which have emphasized its relation to natural history. These understandings--influenced by the new ecocriticism--have, to some extent, supplanted older mythic and poetic readings of the work. (3) In this view, Walden's particularity contrasts with the abstracted nature that characterizes much of nineteenth-century American antebellum literature. It thus appears as an antidote to the philosophical idealism of the age, including the transcendental symbolism of Thoreau's mentor Emerson. A focus on Walden's concreteness is certainly not misdirected, and indeed has sharpened our sense of the very real nature of nature in this work.

But there is a problem here. Defining exactly what constitutes Walden's particularity is made complicated by the fact that we have to wait more than 170 pages for an extended description of the actual landscape of the Pond. This description occurs in "The Ponds," a chapter that is often regarded as the book's structural center but which in fact falls somewhat past the book's midpoint. Readers interested in description, as such, may wonder why they have had to wait so long for it.

By making this observation, I do not mean to suggest that Walden, prior to "The Ponds" chapter, is lacking in concrete descriptions of nature. At every stage of the book's development, we find a mixture of fact and truth, to employ Thoreau's own terms. (4) Even a predominantly ideological chapter like "Economy" has its share of descriptive moments. Yet it is striking to consider how little we learn about the landscape of Walden and its neighborhood prior to "The Ponds."

That Thoreau is aware of this deferral is consistent with what we know about the composition of the book. Very little of "The Ponds" was written during his two-year stay (1845-47) at Walden. In fact, most of the chapter appears to have been composed during and after 1852, in the final two years of the book's eight-year composition. At one point in the chapter, Thoreau, in an unusual gesture, locates the precise moment of his writing--"now, in the summer of '52." (5) Some parts of "The Ponds" were written even later than 1852--deep into the final phases of composition. (6) That so much of this chapter was composed late suggests that Thoreau withheld the view that it affords, in some sense, even from himself, and that he was able to offer such a view only when the passage of time had enabled his revisioning and remembrance of the Walden experience.

Another way to think about this deferred description is that Walden began primarily as a work of social reform in which depictions of landscape were at the service of the larger argument, in something of the way that landscape serves as background and allegory in religious painting of the Middle Ages. Such depictions are necessarily partial (as, for example, in Thoreau's descriptions of the environment of his hut in "Economy"), and insofar as landscape figures as an important mode of representation during the first half of Walden, it figures largely in an intermittent and strategic way. But just as landscape, during the Renaissance, emerged to fill the canvas and became a center of meaning in its own right, it emerges halfway through Walden--in a kind of Renaissance moment--to fill the pages of this pivotal chapter.

It may also be true that, up to this point in his unconventional book, Thoreau has resisted extended landscape description because such description, at least the kind that Susan Fenimore Cooper calls "vapid" and "conventional," embodied for his generation so many prior understandings. In a work written, in part, to "wake my neighbors up" (84), landscape might just put them to sleep, by speaking directly to their expectations and inviting their most predictable responses. One of the implicit challenges that Thoreau faced in writing "The Ponds" was to refigure landscape description in such a way as to deepen it to the level of his reformist and utopian purposes.

Thoreau's awareness of all these matters seems clear from the way he begins this chapter. The brief prefatory section concludes with one of Walden's most famous passages, the one describing an experience of "midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight" (174):

 It was very queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts
 had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to
 feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link
 you to Nature again. It seemed as if I might next cast my line
 upward into the air, as well as downward into this element which
 was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it were with
 one hook. (175)

In its supreme verticality, this image of fishing the heavens and the depths gets as close as Thoreau ever does in Walden to high Romantic symbolism, and the passage reads rather more like the ending of a chapter than a preface to one. Yet, immediately following this passage, and a break on the page, Thoreau moves in a very different direction, one that is less high than "low," less symbolic than descriptive, and less vertical than horizontal--which is to say, representational and analogical. (7) Here, then, is the passage that follows:

 The scenery of Walden is on a humble scale, and, though very
 beautiful, does not approach to grandeur, nor can it much concern
 one who has not long frequented it or lived by its shore; yet this
 pond is so remarkable for its depth and purity as to merit a
 particular description. (175)

This "particular description," the passage makes clear, is the unfinished business of Walden. Up to this point Thoreau has given us only glimpses of the Pond, and now he is going to present a view of it that is both more comprehensive and more particularized than anything rendered earlier. At the beginning of the passage, the word "scenery," with its associations of panorama and pictorialism, suggests the larger view, and the phrase that closes the passage promises an empirical and focused examination. Both of these views will be rendered in this chapter, which is, all at once, one of the most site-specific and most lyrical chapters in Walden. The ways in which it combines these qualities are dependent upon Thoreau's manipulation of descriptive modes. And the fact that this is so substantial a chapter--the second longest, after "Economy"--suggests its importance and its pivotal place in the development of the book.

When Thoreau says that he is now going to provide "a particular description," I think we should take him at his word, and accept that this chapter is going to be very much about description and the activity of describing--that description is the category of thought into which Thoreau is now taking us. And if we are also going to be lifted into the realm of the lyrical or even the miraculous, it will be description that gets us there.

Thoreau's stated intention in "The Ponds" is to examine Walden for its specific features--its dimensions and size, its varying responses to climate ("Walden is blue at one time and green at another" [176]), its geography and ecology. But equally important is an unstated intention--to consider Walden in the particular, that is, as a thing in itself-- a singular phenomenological entity. Walden's singularity is dramatized by a geological parable in which we learn that it has "no visible inlet nor outlet"; while the Concord River may once have flowed through it, now the Pond is "reserved and austere, like a hermit in the woods" (194), its remarkable purity thus preserved through isolation.

This is the Walden that stands alone, defined as a thing unto itself by its distinctive qualities. It is self-referring, and, so long as we are working in this descriptive frame of reference, the other ponds can be understood to point up Walden's special status. Flint's Pond, unfortunately named, is the largest of the neighboring ponds, yet, unlike Walden, it is "shallow, and not remarkably pure" (194). Fair Haven Pond is merely a widening of the Concord River, which is to say that it is not, like Walden, a "little world" (130) unto itself; it is not integral. Goose Pond, "of small extent" (197), is barely mentioned, its omission to be understood as a function of its inferiority to Walden. Pictorially, this Walden that stands alone is the "foreground" whose only "background" is the surrounding forest. In such a bipolar landscape, Walden establishes its singular status by distinguishing itself, through comparison and contrast, from the neighboring ponds, and by standing forth from its visual contexts. Bordered, highlighted, by its "stony shore" (197), it resonates as "a gem" (179) of the forest.

Yet, for all of Walden's distinctiveness, Thoreau, we recall, begins his description of it with a qualification: "The scenery of Walden is on a humble scale, and, though very beautiful, does not approach to grandeur." This distinction between grandeur and beauty implicitly calls attention to the European sublime (Byron's Alps, for example), as set against New England's more "humble," yet somehow more "beautiful," landscapes. From another perspective, Thoreau's employment of the terms "beautiful" and "grandeur" responds to the landscape aesthetics that he had inherited from English thinkers like William Gilpin, whose works he was actively reading in these final years of Walden's composition. From them he learned to see landscape as scenery, and he depends upon their aesthetic categories.

Thoreau's relation to such categories, however, is complex. While his observations show his acceptance of terms such as beauty and grandeur, not to mention "scenery," they also reveal his restlessness with them. In his Journal, on August 6, 1852 (during one of Walden's most formative periods), Thoreau had written as follows: "I wish he [Gilpin] would look at scenery sometimes not with the eye of an artist. It is all side screens & fore screens--and near distances--& broken grounds with him." (8) That is, Gilpin's is but a surface view of nature, and the qualities that most concern Thoreau in Walden, "depth and purity," are those that can be ascertained only through lived experience--sentiently, and through close observation. They are literally below the surface, and would not be immediately evident to someone taking the panoramic, distanced view, or the view required to produce a sense of grandeur.

European landscape aesthetics had been built upon the panoramic view, and Walden's "humble scale" thus implicitly becomes a characteristic distinguishing it as a certain kind of American landscape, and, more particularly, as Nina Baym has shown, a quintessentially New England (as opposed to Hudson River Valley) landscape. (9) In a related way, Thoreau's observation about Walden's "humble scale" reinforces the value he places on familiarization and inhabitation. Only through "frequent[ing]" the pond and living "by its shore"--experiences that depend on time and memory rather than upon the shock of the sublime--do its remarkable purity and beauty stand forth.

Thus, even as Thoreau uses "scenery" as his embracing term for landscape description, he sets out in this chapter implicitly to undermine the term's European lineage. Quickly, as the chapter proceeds, he identifies what he means by scenery. In the sentence following Thoreau's promise of a "particular description," he begins to make good on it, telling us for the first time the Pond's dimensions: "half a mile long and a mile and three quarters in circumference, and contain[ing] about sixty-one and a half acres" (175). This is the beginning of one important strain of natural description in the chapter. It includes a report on the seasonal variation of Walden's temperature ("[on] the sixth of March, 1846, the thermometer having been up to 65[degrees] or 70[degrees]" [183]), another on the "rise and fall of Walden at long intervals" (181), an inventory of its fish ("at least three different kinds" of pickerel [184]) and animals (frogs, tortoises, minks, mud turtles), as well as birds (kingfishers, gulls, and "one annual loon" [185]).

In Thoreau's Journal, empirical observations of this kind often continue uninterrupted for pages at a time, but here in Walden they appear briefly and intermittently, moving in and out of other, varying modes of representation. As we have seen, these modes include the scenic or pictorial: a description of "the beautifully scolloped southern shore" is followed by a celebration of reflected water as "the best foreground" for a forest "setting" (185). Another mode might be called the extravagantly metaphorical: the pond famously imaged as "earth's eye" (186), and the shoreline trees figured as "the lips of the lake on which no beard grows" (181). Still another would be that of legendary association--the identification of certain objects like the "old log canoe" (190) and the mysterious tree tipped wrong-end-upward in the depths of the Pond--that evoke and elaborate Walden's deeper natural history. And there are, as well, allegorical elements in these descriptions; for example, in describing the "regularly paved" (182) appearance of the shoreline, Thoreau calls upon a village fable of an ancient upheaval caused by an Indian tribe's indiscretion, and of a squaw named Walden from whom, it is said, the Pond took its name.

One of the most important modes of representation in "The Ponds" is the lyrical: "I have spent many an hour, when I was younger, floating over [Walden's] surface as the zephyr willed, having paddled my boat to the middle, and lying on my back across the seats, in a summer forenoon, dreaming awake" (191). Yet, interestingly, this passage describes the past, not the present. It is Thoreau's "younger" (191) self who is being characterized here, and this is the Walden of his youth--the one that, in an earlier chapter, he had called "that fabulous landscape of my infant dreams" (156). The diminished present weighs heavily on this reverie, which quickly gives way to loss, and the effect is to transform the lyrical into the elegiac: "But since I left those shores the woodchoppers have still further laid them waste.... How can you expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down." What follows is virtually a litany of loss: "Now the trunks of trees on the bottom, and the old log canoe, and the dark surrounding woods, are gone" (192).

What is most interesting about this passage, however, is how quickly Thoreau recovers himself. Immediately following his enumeration of Walden's losses we find this: "Nevertheless, of all the characters I have known, perhaps Walden wears best, and best preserves its purity" (192). "Nevertheless" is a verbal gesture of a distinctively pastoral kind. Rather than directly engaging the realities it displaces, it deflects them, turns them aslant. Its purpose is to smooth the temporarily ruffled surface of the pond, and to restore the idyll that has been interrupted. (10)

Thus, in the course of two pages we have moved from the lyrical to the elegiac to the pastoral, never once losing our balance. We keep our balance, in part, because these modes of representation do not compete with one another, but exist in a relation of relative equality, one receding as another becomes (temporarily) dominant. Sometimes, Thoreau overtly manages their transitions: "I have a faint recollection," he says, "of a little fish some five inches long, with silvery sides and a greenish back, somewhat dace-like in its character, which I mention here chiefly to link my facts to fable" (184).

All of these modes are interwoven in such a way as to provide the engine of the chapter's development. It might be said that the shifts of descriptive modality in "The Ponds" serve the same developmental function in this chapter as argumentation does in "Economy." These varying modes of landscape description, and the variance that characterizes them, have both a modulating and a moderating effect, and they work toward--in Thoreau's phrase--"the equilibrium of the whole lake" (187); they work to stabilize his presentation.

The OED gives four or five meanings for "description," but they boil down to two: 1) representation of a generally pictorial kind, and 2) delineation, as in the activity of mapping. Interestingly, Thoreau holds this chapter centrally within the range of the first meaning, and, for the most part, defers delineation to a later chapter called "The Pond in Winter." There, rather than here, he provides a map of Walden, and it is in that later, more "scientific" chapter as well that Thoreau demonstrates through measurement that, contrary to local legend, Walden is not bottomless. (11)

This apportionment of different modes of description to these two chapters has the effect of reserving for "The Ponds" an essentially pictorial, or "aesthetic," quality; it broadens or dilates pictorial space, and in doing so emphasizes the idea of landscape as such. The chapter essentially creates the landscape of Walden, and the landscape thus created transcends the mere "scenery" that Thoreau attributed to English aestheticians such as Gilpin. In this way "The Ponds" chapter maintains its equilibrium through its commitment to a certain balanced register of description, description itself being generally a stabilizing and grounding mode of literary activity. The chapter is partly about keeping one's balance, and dramatizes this process.

Scholarship and criticism surrounding Walden, however, have traditionally not seen "The Ponds" this way. Charles Anderson's 1968 reading of Walden as a long lyric poem was especially influential in this regard. Anderson understood "The Ponds" chapter as the place where Thoreau, now making explicit his Emersonian legacy, fully identifies Walden as "a symbol of his transcendent self." (12) Commentators from later decades, including textual scholars with an agenda very different from Anderson's, have followed in line, seeing "The Ponds" as "the book's symbolic center," or, with a related emphasis, as "the central mystical chapter" of Walden. (13) A still more recent account understands "The Ponds" as "the mythological fulcrum of a new rhetoric of ascent." (14) In such interpretations, the mythical and mystical aspects of Walden, as they surface in "The Ponds," owe to Thoreau's reimmersion in Romantic thought--especially the writings of Coleridge--during the late 1840s and early 1850s. (15)

Without denying that "The Ponds" reflects this influence, I think that such readings move to the level of the mythic faster and more decisively than Thoreau himself does. (16) Still, as we saw in the midnight fishing passage, there are moments in "The Ponds" that unmistakably evoke the Transcendental or symbolic mode, and another one occurs prominently as the climax of the chapter's first major movement. This is the passage in which Thoreau recognizes Walden as "the same woodland lake that I discovered so many years ago," and, looking into its waters, its "face," finds "that it is visited by the same reflection; and I can almost say, Walden, is it you?" (193).

The reflection of this landscape "unchanged" (193) since Thoreau's childhood--the Romantic myth of childhood imagination is powerfully at work here--prompts in him a profound moment of address and recognition. And surely this "face" is also Thoreau's own. Looking into these waters, he has, for a moment, found himself. Such a reading of this passage is consistent with the familiar Transcendental trope of reflection as the sign and medium of Reason. What Thoreau glimpses in this moment is not his inadequate temporal personality (the Coleridgean Understanding) but the unchanging ideal and eternal self reflected through time and nature. (17)

In this moment Thoreau can "almost" say, "Walden, is it you?", but not quite. One might understand this reservation as a form of modesty or humility; Thoreau knows he can never attain the purity of Walden. But there is, I believe, another reason for his hesitation. For Walden to become "you" in this sense would make it into me; it would involve the collapse, in Emersonian terms, of the NOT ME into the ME, and in the end this was not a viable position for Thoreau. (18) If it were, the chapter would end right here, with this moment of near epiphany. And the various modes of description that Thoreau had deployed up this point could be understood, retrospectively, as contributing to this key moment of recognition (re-cognition), which transcends all the chapter's earlier rendered landscape views. Here would be the picture of all pictures, that of the human soul.

But the chapter does not end here. It pauses and moves on. It may be that this moment of "almost saying" is as far as Thoreau can go in representing Walden as a thing unto itself, a form of representation that I would argue is implicitly related to transcendental symbolism. Interestingly, the two paragraphs that immediately follow Thoreau's powerful question, "Walden, is it you?", work to intensify our sense of Walden's uniqueness. This is where we learn that it "has no visible inlet nor outlet"; though "in some other geologic period" it may; Thoreau speculates, have been connected to the Concord River (the river of time, of temporality), it now stands isolated, "like a hermit in the woods." "God forbid," he writes, that some "digging" should erode this privileged isolation and the purity it guarantees. Needless to say, Walden the hermit symbolizes Thoreau the hermit; its purity is the condition he seeks to attain for himself through isolation from the human community. Like the Pond as described in this chapter's famous pun, he is "Walled-in" (183).

But in the end neither Walden nor Thoreau can go it alone. In another context, I have written about certain underground currents in Walden, particularly in the haunting subchapter "Former Inhabitants," that express the writer's acknowledgment of his necessary connection to the human world, to his neighbors living and dead. (19) Walden too needs neighbors. It cannot, all by itself, carry the range of meanings and values that Thoreau needs it to carry, and, in the final movement of the chapter he turns--more authentically than before--to a description of the other ponds in the neighborhood. In short, he turns away from defining Walden as a thing unto itself, and turns instead to defining Walden in its relations. The chapter, we should remember, is titled "The Ponds," not "The Pond."

As we look back upon Thoreau's moment of symbolic recognition--"Walden, is it you?"--from this subsequent perspective, it appears as just that, a moment, a gesture toward the symbolic mode, followed by a return to what now can be seen as the predominantly descriptive mode of the chapter. Earlier, in a hydrologic context, Thoreau had spoken of how the other ponds "sympathize with Walden" (181). Now, in the closing paragraph of the chapter, he dramatizes this sympathetic relation by foregrounding what he calls his "Lakes of Light" (199), a phrase that refers to Walden and White Pond as co-equal landscapes of desire. The thing to notice about this passage from the closing paragraph of "The Ponds" is its insistent plurality, its conjunctive emphasis, its repetition of the pronoun "they":

 White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of
 the earth, Lakes of Light. If they were permanently
 congealed, and small enough to be clutched, they would,
 perchance, be carried off by slaves, like precious stones, to
 adorn the heads of emperors; but, being liquid, and ample,
 and secured to us and our successors forever, we disregard
 them, and run after the diamond of Kohinoor. They are too
 pure to have a market value; they contain no muck. How
 much more beautiful than our lives, how much more
 transparent than our characters, are they! (199)

While Thoreau had earlier referred to White Pond as Walden's "lesser twin" (197), making a curious, unexplained distinction between white Pond's attractiveness and Walden's beauty, he never indicates what is "lesser" about it. The key aspect of White Pond, in relation to Walden, is the fact that it is a twin. That is, the chapter gains the lyric intensity of its closing moments not through transcendence, but through the process of twinning, or what we might call aggregation: Lakes of Light. Essentially, Thoreau doubles the real, rather than pointing beyond it, as the means by which he valorizes Walden, and the experience that it represents for him.

This method of aggregation is appropriate to what, in the chapter's penultimate sentence, Thoreau calls "the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature" (200). This luxuriant beauty is a very different kind of beauty from that of Gilpin' s "scenery," on the one hand, and from the beauty of the Coleridgean Ideal, on the other. Thoreau has chosen another, middle way, which we might call Wordsworthian: "This is my lake country," he exclaims; "These, with Concord River, are my water privileges" (197). This "country," this assemblage, of lakes, which now interestingly embraces a river as well, is a spacious and comprehensive geography that radiates its reflected light back and forth across its elements rather than to a world beyond. On this point let us allow Thoreau the last word, which is indeed the closing sentence of "The Ponds": "Talk of heaven! ye disgrace earth" (200).

Vassar College

Notes

Acknowledgment: This essay is excerpted from a longer version prepared for Midwest Studies in Philosophy, volume 28, "The American Philosophers," scheduled for publication by Blackwell in August 2004, and appears here with the permission of that journal. The longer version, titled "Thoreau's Lakes of Light: Modes of Representation and the Enactment of Philosophy in Walden," includes a discussion of philosophical approaches to Thoreau, with special emphasis on Stanley Cavell's The Senses of Walden.

(1) Susan Fenimore Cooper, Rural Hours, ed. Rochelle Johnson and Daniel Patterson (1850; U of Georgia P, 1998), 208.

(2) In a journal entry of October 8, 1852, Thoreau mentions reading a newspaper report about a fisherman catching a loon eighty feet below the surface of Seneca Lake in New York State, and comments, "Miss Cooper had said the same," as indeed she does on the first page of the opening section of Rural Hours (4). For the relevant journal entry, see Journal 5: 1852-1853, The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, ed. Patrick F. O'Connell (Princeton UP, 1997), 368. I am indebted to Robert Sattelmeyer, author of Thoreau "s Reading: A Study in Intellectual History with Bibliographical Catalogue (Princeton UP, 1988), for alerting me to this passage. For a comparison of Walden and Rural Hours around environmental issues, see Rochelle Johnson, "Walden, Rural Hours, and the Dilemma of Representation," in Thoreau's Sense of Place." Essays in American Environmental Writing, ed. Richard J. Schneider (U of Iowa P, 2000), 179-93.

(3) The most comprehensive ecocritical study of Thoreau is Lawrence Buell's The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Harvard UP, 1995).

(4) An early instance of this distinction, central to Walden, appears in Thoreau's essay "The Natural History of Massachusetts," where he writes, "Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth," in Excursions and Poems, vol. 5 of The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1906), 130. The essay first appeared in The Dial, vol. 3 (July 1842).

(5) Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton UP, 1971), 174. All subsequent citations of Walden are from this edition, and follow quotations in parentheses.

(6) For the composition of Walden, see J. Lyndon Shanley, The Making of Walden with the Text of the First Version (U of Chicago P, 1957); Steven Adams and Donald Ross Jr., Revising Mythologies: The Composition of Thoreau's Major Works (UP of Virginia, 1988); and Ronald E. Clapper, "The Development of Walden: A Genetic Text," Ph.D. dissertation in two volumes, University of California, Los Angeles, 1968.

(7) For the "horizontal" and associative vision of nature in Thoreau's Journal, see my Thoreau's Morning Work: Memory and Perception in "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, " the Journal, and "Walden" (Yale UP, 1990), especially chapter three.

(8) For the journal passage that contains Thoreau's comments on Gilpin, see 283-84 of the Princeton edition Journal 5, cited earlier in note 2. For Thoreau's equally dissatisfied response to the nature aesthetics of John Ruskin, see a journal entry of October 6, 1857, in which he reflects on his reading of Ruskin's Modern Painters: "I am disappointed in not finding it a more out-of-door book.... He does not describe Nature as Nature, but as Turner painted her, and though the work betrays that he has given a close attention to Nature, it appears to have been with an artist's and critic's design" (The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906], vol. 10, 69).

(9) Nina Baym, "English Nature, New York Nature, and Walden's New England Nature," in Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts, ed. Charles Capper and Conrad Edick Wright (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1999), 168-89.

(10) For an extended treatment of the pastoral dimension of this passage, see my essay, "The Crosscurrents of Walden's Pastoral," in New Essays on Walden, ed. Robert F. Sayre (Cambridge UP, 1992), 73-94.

(11) For an interesting discussion of Thoreau's measuring the depth of the Pond, and of measurement generally in his work, see Laura Dassow Walls, Seeing New Worlds." Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science (U of Wisconsin P, 1995), 109-12.

(12) Charles R. Anderson, The Magic Circle of Walden (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968), 225.

(13) Adams and Ross, pp. 183, 171.

(14) Robert Milder, Reimagining Thoreau (Cambridge UP, 1995), 121.

(15) Thoreau's reading of Coleridge's Aids to Reflection in the early 1840s must have powerfully reinforced for him the idea of nature as a transcendent symbol of spirit that he had encountered in Emerson's Nature in the 1830s. But the work by Coleridge that Thoreau seems to have read closest to the final phase of Walden's composition is Hints toward the Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life, which would have emphasized for him the importance of nature's particularity as well as its symbolic meanings. See Robert Sattelmeyer and Richard A. Hocks, "Thoreau and Coleridge's Theory of Life," in Studies in the American Renaissance, ed. Joel Myerson (UP of Virginia, 1985), 269-84; cf. William Rossi, "'The Limits of an Afternoon Walk': Coleridgean Polarity in Thoreau's 'Walking,'" ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 33 (2nd Quarter 1987): 94-109. Russell B. Goodman discusses the "Romantic empiricism" of Coleridge in his American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge UP, 1990), 20ff.

(16) An implicit corrective to such readings is an insightful essay by Barry Tharaud, "Being and Transcendence in Thoreau and Heidegger," Journal of American Culture and Literature, 1995-1996, 37-56. Focusing on "The Ponds" chapter of Walden, Tharaud writes, "While we often think of Thoreau's style as highly concentrated, convoluted, and metaphorical, it actually has a range of modulations that are appropriate to the mode of consciousness that it momentarily embodies" (38).

(17) I am indebted to William Rossi for helping me articulate the Coleridgean, symbolic meanings of reflection in this passage, and for alerting me to the following related passage in Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (Princeton UP, 1980): "We noticed that it required a separate intention of the eye, a more free and abstracted vision, to see the reflected trees and the sky, than to see the river bottom merely" (48).

(18) Emerson introduces the term "NOT ME" to signify everything outside the soul in his "Introduction" to Nature (1836): The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. l: Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, Introductions and Notes by Robert E. Spiller; text established by Alfred R. Fergusson (Harvard UP, 1971), 8.

(19) See Thoreau's Morning Work, chapter 6.