Followed by the Lark
The imagined interior life of renowned American naturalist Henry David Thoreau blossoms in this lyrical exploration of his world from childhood to his death at the age of forty-four. Humphreys, a Canadian writer, relies on Thoreau’s letters, diaries, and journals to inspire this fictional patchwork of memories and scenes that begin with a five-year-old Henry seeing Walden Pond for the first time: “Walden was the first pond he’d ever known, so it might as well have been the wild ocean.” Humphreys conjures up imaginary yet revealing conversations among Thoreau’s eclectic friends, not least of which is the great American literary mind of his time, Ralph Waldo Emerson. The major highlights of Thoreau’s short life are all here: the publication of his major books Walden and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, with Thoreau noting in his journal about the former’s publication alongside the fact that “the elderberries had ripened and the climbing bittersweet was yellowing,” the two events no more important than the other “in Henry’s universe.” But there were tragedies and sorrows for Thoreau, as well: the death of his beloved siblings, Helen and John, and the fruitless search for fellow Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller’s body, after she was shipwrecked off Fire Island in July 1850. Mitigating the peaks and valleys of his personal life is the ever-present natural world that holds him in thrall—its animals, plants, and rocks—which he obsessively collects, measures, observes, and sketches.
This slim volume is a fast read, but its masterful prose entices the reader to slow down and appreciate the “return of the bluebird” in the spring. Humphreys pays a tender tribute to Thoreau, but also to the wonders of the natural world that he loved so much.
