In this essay, we discuss Thoreau’s revisions to the chapter titled “Higher Laws” in Walden as published in 1854. For evidence, we draw on the manuscript of Walden in the Huntington Library, HM 924.

We focus in particular on the digitized manuscript images in the gallery below, which are all part of the first draft of the book. Clicking on any of these images will open it in a zoomable viewer.

Throughout the essay, we display excerpts from the manuscript images. Clicking on an excerpt will open a larger view of it. Clicking on the associated thumbnail in the right margin will open a zoomable image of the entire manuscript page, making it possible to see the excerpt in context and explore the page.

Here’s an example.

Detail: Top of HM 924, 1:191. “133” in Thoreau’s hand. View item page

HM 924 Volume 1, p. 191

Readers interested in searching the entirety of HM 924 should consult our Manuscript Search Tool on the Digital Thoreau website.

The manuscript of Walden passed through a number of hands before it came to the Huntington in 1918. Thoreau admirer Franklin Benjamin Sanborn had access to it in the early 20th century and marked it up in preparation for issuing his own two-volume edition of Walden (Boston: The Bibliophile Society, 1909). On the manuscript pages discussed in this essay, page numbers in the left, right, and top left margins, and the notations “Much rewritten” and “(Much rewritten)” in the top margins of two pages, are in Sanborn’s hand.

Page numbers in the upper right corner of recto pages are Thoreau’s. Surviving leaves of the “Economy” portion of the first draft bear a mostly continuous run of odd numbers between “3” and “51”; the last recto is numbered “137.” In the rest of the first draft, leaves bear Thoreau’s odd numbers between “1” and “235,” with more frequent gaps in the sequence; a few pages have two numbers, suggesting that Thoreau rearranged leaves within his manuscript during the drafting process. Discontinuities in Thoreau’s numbering, together with gaps in the text, constitute evidence that some leaves are missing from the first draft.

In Walden, the chapter “Higher Laws” offers not one vision of health, but two. “The other day I picked up the lower jaw of a hog, with white and sound teeth and tusks,” writes Thoreau, “which suggested that there was an animal health and vigor distinct from the spiritual.”Henry D. Thoreau, Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton UP, 1971), p. 219.

In humans, Thoreau suggests, these two kinds of health do not live in peaceful co-existence.

We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled; like the worms which, even in life and health, occupy our bodies. Possibly we may withdraw from it, but never change its nature. I fear that it may enjoy a certain health of its own; that we may be well, yet not pure.

Just a few chapters back, in “Solitude,” Thoreau’s view of health seemed less divided. “What is the pill which will keep us well, serene, contented?” he asked there, answering “Not my or thy great-grandfather’s, but our great-grandmother Nature’s universal, vegetable, botanic medicines, by which she has kept herself young always, outlived so many old Parrs in her day, and fed her health with their decaying fatness.” And he continued: “For my panacea, instead of one of those quack vials of a mixture dipped from Acheron and the Dead Sea, which come out of those long shallow black-schooner looking wagons which we sometimes see made to carry bottles, let me have a draught of undiluted morning air.”Walden, p. 138.

When we get to “Higher Laws,” Nature is no longer an unequivocal source of health, a panacea merely, but something more complicated, even a potential obstacle to health—human health, at least. In the later chapter Thoreau has, in the words of Robert Milder, “worked round to what is probably the most startling sentence in Walden: ‘Nature is hard to be overcome, but she must be overcome.’”Robert Milder, Reimagining Thoreau (Cambridge UP, 1995), p. 132.

We do not propose to explain how on earth Thoreau works round to such a stunning prescription. But we do propose to follow how he gets there on paper. For the two visions of health offered in “Higher Laws” are not only a long way, logically, from the vision offered in “Solitude” but also a considerable distance from the material in Thoreau’s first draft of Walden out of which “Higher Laws” developed. Following Thoreau’s revisions to this material, we believe, is bound to reinforce the impression that the two visions of “Higher Laws” represent not an evolution in Thoreau’s thinking but an eruption of conflicting views and conflicted feelings that, within the covers of Walden at least, are never satisfactorily reconciled.

We are not the first to cover this ground. In his 1995 book Reimagining Thoreau, Milder, just quoted, makes extensive use of Ronald Clapper’s 1967 PhD dissertation, The Development of “Walden”: A Genetic Text, in an effort to understand various aspects of Walden by tracing Thoreau’s revisions across the work’s seven extant draft versions contained in HM 924, the manuscript of Walden at the Huntington Library.Ronald E. Clapper, The Development of “Walden”: A Genetic Text (PhD diss., UCLA, 1967). Milder writes at length about Thoreau’s revisions to “Higher Laws” in particular. He notes that most of the material that would become “Higher Laws” enters Walden beginning in the fourth or “D” draft, following the period from 1849 to 1852 in which Thoreau, who had completed his first draft while living at the pond, pulled back from consistently active work on the manuscript. Whereas the germ of “Higher Laws” in Thoreau’s “A” draft of 1846–1847 is, in Milder’s words, “unequivocally triumphant,” the published chapter of 1854, having passed through Thoreau’s subsequent drafts, is “tortuous” and even “schizophrenic” in its logic, enacting a “dramatic self-deconstruction.”Milder, pp. 132, 134. It is only from D forward, Milder shows, that Thoreau pursues the line of thought in “Higher Laws” that centers notions of purity and chastity, betraying an awkward discomfort with his own animal urges—sexual urges in particular, Milder maintains, reading the chapter’s emphasis on diet as a metaphor thinly veiled to us, if not to its author. Milder seeks an explanation for these changes in Thoreau’s personal struggles of 1852–1853, as documented in the Journal, and in what evidence we have of Thoreau’s attitudes towards human sexuality, such as the essay he enclosed in his September 1852 letter to H.G.O. Blake, published in the Princeton Edition volume Early Essays and Miscellanies as “Chastity & Sensuality.”

Our interest at present is not to assess Milder’s reading of Thoreau’s motivations, conscious or otherwise, for revising “Higher Laws” but simply to show the evidence of revision in the manuscript itself, so that readers can reach their own conclusions, at least with respect to where and how Thoreau shaped his material. That said, we do agree with Milder’s broad conclusion that the “Higher Laws” material in A reads very differently in its original context and its context from D forward; and as we move through this portion of the manuscript, we will explain why.

We have one other interest as well. Thoreau’s revisions to “Higher Laws” represent an excellent case study in the value of consulting the digitized manuscript of Walden itself, rather than relying entirely on attempts to model Thoreau’s revisions such as Clapper’s 1967 dissertation or our own digital re-casting of the dissertation, Walden: A Fluid-Text Edition. As valuable as such models can be for re-constructing the phases of the manuscript’s conceptual development, being models, they are unavoidably imperfect. For all that they reveal, they occasionally conceal. In the present case, they are limited by a methodology that arranges Thoreau’s material across all seven drafts by the order of that material in the published Walden. As a result, passages that lie cheek by jowl at some places in the manuscript end up separated from one another in the model.We discuss this issue at length, with examples from “Higher Laws,” in a blog post on the Digital Thoreau website, Representing Re-ordering.

With all this in mind, let us turn now to the manuscript.

We focus here on manuscript pages that belong to the “A” draft of Walden. These pages contain material that in the published Walden lands variously in “The Village,” “The Ponds,” “Higher Laws,” and “Baker Farm.” It is important to know that there are no chapter divisions in Thoreau’s first draft of Walden; the stretch of writing on these pages represents a more or less continuous whole that, across subsequent drafts, comes to be broken up and distributed into the chapters that finally organize the published work. “More or less” continuous because some pages in this sequence are missing.

The table below indicates the sequence of material in A, labeled by the ultimate location of the material in the published Walden of 1854.

Where material in A on the manuscript pages in question lands in the published “Walden.” In A, the text on these pages is a continuous sequence in the order shown here, except for several missing leaves. There are no chapter divisions in A. Paragraph numbering here follows that of “Walden: A Fluid-Text Edition.”

The first page of “Higher Laws”-related material in A contains words that would find their ultimate home in paragraph 1 of “The Village.” The words follow naturally from the preceding pages, in which material destined for “The Village,” paragraph 1, together with some material destined for “Economy,” paragraph 90, succeeds material destined for “The Bean-Field.” “After reading & writing or working in my field in the forenoon,” writes Thoreau, a few pages before the beginning of the “Higher Laws” material, “I usually bathed again in the pond swimming across one of its coves for a stint, and smoothed out the last wrinkle of thought or shook the dust of labor from my feet & clothes, and for the afternoon was as free as the bird that has built its nest and reared its brood.”Most quotations from the manuscript in this essay represent Thoreau’s text as revised on the manuscript surface. Except as noted, no attempt is made to represent text rejected in the process of revision.

He continues, “Every day or two – I strolled to the village to hear some of the gossip which is incessantly going on here.” In an effort to withstand the “terrible standing invitation” to call at every one of the houses in the village, where company was expected, he either walked on boldly or sang praises to the gods like Orpheus, who drowned out the voices “of the Sirens”—as we read on the first line of our first page—“and kept out of danger.’“Page numbers in left or right margin of MS most likely added by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn.

Detail: Top of HM 924, 1:191. “133” in Thoreau’s hand. View item page

HM 924 Volume 1, p. 191

“Sometimes I bolted suddenly & nobody could tell my whereabouts,” he continues in a new paragraph. Occasionally he permitted himself to enter one of the houses and be entertained with news until he “was let out through the rear avenues, and so escaped to the woods again.”

“Sometimes having had a surfeit of human society & gossip – and worn out all my village friends – I rambled still further westward than I habitually dwell,” begins the next paragraph, which in the published Walden becomes the first part of the first paragraph of “The Ponds.”

Detail: Middle of HM 924, 1:191.

“Sometimes, after my hoeing was done for the day,” begins the next paragraph, the initial words of which appear on the last line of our first page, “I joined some impatient companion who had been fishing since morning on the pond.” The word “Sometimes” is canceled, however, and replaced by “Or else.” “Or else” becomes “Occasionally” in the published Walden, and this paragraph becomes the second one of “The Ponds.”

Detail: Bottom of HM 924, 1:191.

“Occasionally after staying in a villagers parlor till the family had all retired – I have returned to the woods,” begins the next paragraph in A, with “Occasionally” canceled and replaced by “Sometimes.” The rest of this page and almost all of the next contains material that would become paragraph 4 of “The Ponds.” However, just above the beginning of the paragraph, Thoreau has inserted, in pencil, “In warm evenings &c–v”, a cross-reference to material written vertically in the left margin of the subsequent page, material that he has clearly decided should precede the paragraph about staying in a village parlor and indeed becomes paragraph 3 of “The Ponds.”

Detail: Middle of HM 924, 1:192. View item page

HM 924 Volume 1, p. 192

An interesting feature of these paragraphs is that their “habitual aspect”—the grammatical term for constructions indicating repeated action, marked here by adverbials such as “sometimes,” “occasionally,” “every day or two, and “in warm evenings”—makes them highly portable. While at Walden Thoreau did many things repeatedly, almost any one of which could be assimilated to almost any one of the themes providing structure to his later division of the text into chapters. His tinkering with these adverbial constructions to ensure variety suggests that he recognizes how heavily he leans on them.

But this series of habitual constructions in A also has a thematic valence of its own. The line of thought that runs through them is this: Whatever I was doing, especially if I had been to the village, but even if I had been hoeing beans, I was eager to get back to the woods or the water—that is, we might say, to the wild.

If he went to the water, Thoreau reports, he might join “some impatient companion who had been fishing since morning on the pond,” or, in “warm evenings,” sit alone in his boat, playing the flute, charming the perch hovering around him, or, in “private hours” which were “very memorable & valuable” to him, spend “the hours of midnight fishing . . . on the pond by moonlight – serenaded by owls and the barking of foxes.” In what becomes paragraph 4 of “The Ponds,” he tells us that “It was very queer–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 hardly more dense.”

In A, it is immediately following this last description that we get the first material that would ultimately, much revised, appear in “Higher Laws.” “The main inducement to fish was that it introduced me to the night and detained me there,” Thoreau writes, beginning a new paragraph. These are the last lines on the page, and they are canceled. At the top of the next page, we read,

Fishermen and hunters see nature at an advantage which the philosopher never enjoys. They go through the fields with freedom and abandonment – not formally, and see nature as it were without looking at her, in a deshabille, as members of her family –

Detail: Top of HM 924, 1:194 View item page

HM 924 Volume 1, p. 194

Thoreau cancels these lines, too, re-working them several pages later, following material that he would eventually apportion to “The Ponds” and “Baker Farm.” What is important to note, however, is that he enters the “Higher Laws” material through a contrast between fishermen and hunters on the one hand, and philosophers on the other; that this contrast immediately follows his parable of being brought back to earth from his wandering dreams, and re-linked to Nature, by the jerk of a fish on his line; and that this description of the fisher/hunter relationship to nature, with its emphasis on freedom and abandonment, is continuous with the rhetoric of bolting and escaping from environments of culture (the village) and cultivation (the bean-field) to spaces where he is free to ramble and commune with owls and foxes.

This continuity is lost when, beginning with the D draft, the “Higher Laws” material is separated from the material destined for “The Bean-Field” and “The Village.” Fishing and hunting will take on a somewhat different aspect once the “Higher Laws” material begins to shape up as its own chapter. Equally important, the continuity is difficult to discern in either Clapper’s dissertation or the fluid-text edition of Walden, where, as previously mentioned, material is displayed only where it landed in the published version.

Returning to A, we find, following the canceled sentences about “Fishermen and hunters,” material that would end up in paragraphs 5–8 of “The Ponds,” emphasizing, among other things, the purity and transparency of the water in Walden Pond. Leaves are missing between this material and what follows: material that would land in “Baker Farm” paragraphs 5, 6, and 8. Beginning at the bottom of one page, and continuing onto the next, Thoreau initially writes, before revising:

As I ran down the hill to the pond – with the rain-bow over my shoulder – and some slight tinkling sounds borne to my ear through the cleansed air – from I know not what quarter, I said to myself – Why not live always a rude and frontier life – full of adventures and hard work – learn much – travel much – though it be only through these woods & fields! – There is no other country than this – here is the field and the man. – The daily boundaries of life are expanded & dispersed and I see in what field I stand. Roam far and wide – grasp at life and conquer it. Learn much and live. You are really free – stay till late in the night – be unwise and daring.

Detail: Bottom of HM 924, 1:197 View item page

HM 924 Volume 1, p. 197

Detail: Top of HM 924, 1:198. “Much rewritten” added by F. B. Sanborn. View item page

HM 924 Volume 1, p. 198

A further revised version of these lines forms part of “Baker Farm,” paragraph 6 in the published Walden, where, lacking those final three sentences in A—”Roam far and wide,” etc.—it is somewhat muted by comparison.

The published version of these words in “Baker Farm” also contains a variation of material that Thoreau interlines in A, as can be seen in the first of the two images just above: “My haste to catch pickerel wading in retired meadows in sloughs and bogholes, in forlorn & savage places seemed for an instant trivial to me who had been sent to school & college,” Thoreau adds in ink, together with the word “But,” as a prelude to “As I ran down the hill . . .” The change, which rescues the activity of fishing from triviality by opposing formal education to the learning available in woods and fields, aligns with the comparison we saw earlier between what is visible to philosophers on one hand and fishermen and hunters on the other.

A little farther down on the page, Thoreau interlines, “My Genius said – grow wild according to thy nature, like these ferns and brakes which endeavor not to become English hay. Let the thunder rumble in thy own tongue – what if it brings ruins to farmers’ crops in season that is not its errand to thee.” A variant of these words, too, ends up in “Baker Farm,” paragraph 6.

Following another missing leaf, we are once again in material that would appear in “Higher Laws,” on a page Thoreau numbered 151. The material begins in the middle of a sentence belonging to paragraph 5. We’ll consider this sentence, which concerns fishing, in a moment. For now, it is enough to note that in A this material precedes material that would wind up in “Higher Laws,” paragraphs 1 and 3. Portions of what would become paragraphs 1 and 3 alternate with one another in this stretch of writing, only later to be re-sorted into the order we read in the published Walden. Again, this is not easy to discern in either Clapper’s dissertation or the fluid-text edition, where all paragraphs and paragraph segments appear in their published order.

Detail: Top of HM 924, 1:199. “(Much rewritten)” added by F. B. Sanborn. View item page

HM 924 Volume 1, p. 199

There is one more missing leaf in the sequence, after which we find material that would land in “Higher Laws,” paragraph 7. That is the full extent of “Higher Laws” material in A.

Detail: Top of HM 924, 1:201. Material from “Higher Laws” 7. View item page

HM 924 Volume 1, p. 201

The words of “Higher Laws” 1, 3, 5, and 7 in A are similar to those in the published Walden, but in part because they are ordered differently, they leave a significantly different impression.

Remember that the entire sequence of manuscript pages we have been examining, which contains no chapter divisions, begins with Thoreau escaping environments of either culture or cultivation into the wild, where his primary engagement with Nature is through the activity of fishing, prompting some reflection on both fishermen and hunters. It is in this last part of the sequence that Thoreau expresses some reservations about his own fishing, about consuming fish as food, and about diet generally. As we have seen, he notes, in what would become paragraph 5, that “always when I have done I feel that it would have been better if I had not fished,” words that survive verbatim in the published text. But whereas in the published paragraph 5 Thoreau next connects his fishing with an “instinct in me which belongs to the lower orders of creation,” confessing that “if I were to live in a wilderness I should again be tempted to become a fisher and hunter,” in A, he makes a very different connection, initially writing that fishing “tempts me continually because perhaps if I can anylize my motive it is a means of becoming acquainted with nature – not with fishes merely – but with the night and the water and the scenery – which I should not otherwise see under the same aspects.” Later, in pencil, he revises the material following “fishes merely,” replacing it with a new version of material we observed him canceling a few pages back, where he had written that fishermen and hunters see nature “in a deshabille, as members of her family.” The new version reads, “It introduces me to the night & to the wildest scenes & detains me there. The best way to become acquainted with any scenery is to follow some pursuit in it which harmonizes with it. Fishermen and hunters see nature at an advantage which the philosopher never enjoys. She is not afraid to exhibit herself to them.”

Detail: Middle of HM 924, 1:199. View item page

HM 924 Volume 1, p. 199

He next explains that “I love sometimes to take rank hold of life, and spend my day more as the animals do. The novelty and adventure that are in this pursuit recommend it to me. Whatever humanity I may conjure up against it is all factitious, & concerns my philosophy more than my actual feelings . . .” Readers will recognize these words, too, as belonging to the published Walden—where they precede, rather than follow, his reservations about fishing.

The difference in order is crucial. It reverses the logic. In the published Walden, that logic is, roughly: “I am drawn to fish, but in retrospect I regret it.” In A, it is, roughly, “I regret fishing, but I am continually tempted to do it because it gives me a different and fuller view of nature.” In general, moreover, the ordering in A presents a more continuous and therefore more robust justification of both fishing and hunting as ways of knowing rooted in an instinctual connection with the material world, unveiling realities not visible to a disembodied mind, not discoverable through philosophy or formal education—ways of knowing that expand the boundaries of life and affirm humanity’s family relation to the rest of the animal world, indeed to all of nature.

To be sure, in A we already find something of a struggle in progress between mind and body, the spiritual and the material, with diet serving as the arena of this contest. “What if we were to obey these fine dictates these divine suggestions which are addressed to the mind and not to the body which are certainly true – not to eat meat, not to buy or sell or barter &c.,” Thoreau pencils vertically in the margin of one page, posing a question that does not survive in so many words in the published chapter but prefigures both his penciled chapter title in the E and F drafts—“Animal Food”—and his final decision to name the chapter “Higher Laws.” Strikingly, in A Thoreau’s “genius” advises him in one passage to “grow wild . . . like these ferns and brakes,” yet admonishes him in another that to renounce animal food is to live “in conformity to higher principles.”

Detail: Left margin of HM 924, 1:201; image rotated 90 degrees. View item page

HM 924 Volume 1, p. 201

But if Thoreau’s first draft of “Higher Laws” does not unequivocally put body over mind, does not reverse the published chapter’s polarity of lower and higher, and already reveals a deep ambivalence as his genius pulls him in opposite directions, it convincingly expresses an idea that the published chapter announces yet seems, in so many ways, to undermine: “I love the wild not less than the good.” In fact, there is little if anything in the first draft to suggest that the wild is anything other than good, even if a different kind of good from the good we embrace by obeying the mind’s “fine dictates” regarding the consumption of animal food—or what Thoreau elsewhere calls, in both A and the published Walden, the “faintest assured objection which one healthy man feels.”For a discussion of Thoreau’s juxtaposition of “wild” and “good” here, in the Journal, and in Thoreau’s essay “Walking,” see Milder, p. 132.

As we began by noting, it is beyond the scope of this essay to explain why that one healthy man eventually decides to divide health itself in two, setting animal health and spiritual health in stark opposition, or to assess how well the double vision of the published “Higher Laws” holds up to scrutiny.

We hope, however, that the essay has shed some light on the material evidence that Thoreau’s “Higher Laws” of 1846–1847, and his published chapter of 1854, differ remarkably in spirit.