John Muir, the nature-worshipping American who actually walked the walk a generation later, mocked Thoreau as a poseur pretending to “see forests in orchards and patches of huckleberry brush” a “mere saunter” from Concord. Indeed, when Thoreau left Walden Pond to spend a couple of weeks in the true wilderness of northern Maine, he was horrified—“grim and wild,” “vast, Titanic, inhuman Nature.” After eight hundred days living deep and sucking out all the marrow of existence, he returned to town, helping run his father’s pencil-making business, living for the rest of his life at his parents’ big
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