Henry David Thoreau: An American Landscape

As I try to do every time a family visit takes me upstate, I recently stopped at Dove & Hudson Old Books in Albany.

There I found a Thoreau volume I’d never seen before: Henry David Thoreau: An American Landscape, edited and illustrated by Robert L. Rothwell. It’s a lovingly chosen collection of writings on landscape from Thoreau’s Journal, and it gives a compelling picture of the woods, ponds, and marshlands of Concord as Thoreau observed them through the course of the year. (One sign that it was lovingly chosen is that there are several passages, including some on the art of writing, that really have nothing to do with landscape and are presumably here because Rothwell liked them.)

An American Landscape includes some of Thoreau’s best writing on trees, including the extraordinary entries from October 1858 on the fall foliage of Concord. And I was pleased that the book includes, and the introduction singles out, a complete version of the beautiful and melancholy passage that comes a little later that same year and begins like this: The November twilights just begun! It appeared like part of a panorama at which I sat spectator, a part with which I was perfectly familiar just coming into view, and I foresaw how it would look and roll along, and prepared to be pleased.

I was happy to find this book even though it knocked down a project of my own on Thoreau and landscape (not the first time I’ve discovered that someone else has acted on what I thought was my idea.)