What the Falling Leaves Taught Thoreau
· The Atlantic
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Published in the October 1862 issue of The Atlantic, Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Autumnal Tints” arrived in a season of death. The Civil War was well into its second year, and copies of the magazine began reaching readers shortly after the Battle of Antietam, on September 17, a day with the grim distinction of being the single bloodiest of the conflict. Thoreau himself was already gone, having died four months earlier, a casualty not of war but of tuberculosis.
Thoreau’s essay makes no connection between the fall and the conditions of fighting, as the poet John Greenleaf Whittier did in “The Battle Autumn of 1862,” in the same issue. Instead, Thoreau’s work is a written version of what he’d initially imagined as a visual book—one in which he would compile the leaves of all the trees around him and follow their progression through the colors, from green to brown. (The magazine included a simple engraving of a scarlet-oak leaf that he had rendered.) He had first drafted “Autumnal Tints” as a lecture in the 1850s, before the war’s start, and delivered a version of it in what would be the final public talk of his life. The event was far from a resounding success—a local newspaper deemed it “dull, commonplace and unsatisfactory”—and making the trip to Waterbury, Connecticut, in the bitter cold of December 1860 had worsened an illness from which Thoreau would never recover. The revised copy that appeared in The Atlantic gave the story new and enduring life.
“If I were to live, I should have much to report on Natural History generally,” Thoreau wrote in a March 1862 letter, a few months before his death. As it was, weak and barely able to breathe, he could do little more than adapt some of his lectures into essays for The Atlantic with the help of his sister Sophia. The enterprise marked a reconciliation with the magazine. In 1858, the first installment of his “Chesuncook” essay had appeared in the June issue, minus one beloved sentence about a fallen pine tree: “It is as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still.” He was incensed when he found the line unceremoniously axed from the printed copy. “Is this the avowed character of the Atlantic Monthly?” he demanded in a letter to the editor, James Russell Lowell. “I should like an early reply.” No reply, early or late, was forthcoming. Making matters worse, neither was Thoreau’s payment, which he’d already deemed lower than what he deserved. It took two additional letters to secure the $198 he was due.
The arrival of James T. Fields as The Atlantic’s editor in 1861 cleared the way for new contributions from Thoreau. Fields had first printed Walden seven years earlier at his publishing house, and he suggested another collaboration. Thoreau agreed, on much more favorable financial terms than most of the magazine’s other contributors, and on the condition that “no sentiment or sentence be altered or omitted without my consent.”
As Thoreau prepared the manuscripts for Fields, he confessed to a friend an inclination to expunge some of the humor from his writing, noting that “I cannot bear the levity I find.” But much levity does remain in “Autumnal Tints.” It is, on the whole, a joyous celebration of the season, and an invitation to “wild delight.” Through his observations, he divined that “man’s spirits should rise as high as Nature’s,—should hang out their flag, and the routine of his life be interrupted by an analogous expression of joy and hilarity.” As he worked through a catalog of trees and plants, he contrasted his own careful appreciation of the natural world around him (“The expression of this grass haunted me for a week”) with the bustle of his neighbors amid the busy occupations of the harvest. Stopping to take in the brilliant hues of the elms lining the Concord Common, he wondered “if there is any answering ripeness in the lives of the men who live beneath them.”
Death, however, is never far from “Autumnal Tints.” Keenly aware of his own imminent demise as he revised this manuscript for publication, Thoreau saw his mortality everywhere in the season. Walking on dead leaves in the forest, he imagined the setting as a grand and consecrated cemetery. “They that soared so loftily,” Thoreau wrote of the leaves, “how contentedly they return to dust again, and are laid low, resigned to lie and decay at the foot of the tree, and afford nourishment to new generations of their kind, as well as to flutter on high! They teach us how to die.” Thoreau, still seeking joy on the verge of his own death, had learned the lesson well.