It had been an easy life that I enjoyed during the early times. Life was not complex. I came from a respected family, was fortunate to receive a good education, and had the benefits of good friends of intelligence.
As a young man, I aspired to become a minister. I achieved that goal, however, in very little time I determined it was not the life for me. My philosophies were not readily acceptable to the clergy. When I left the ministry, I embarked on a trip to England where I had longed to go to meet with men of literature. In my youthful mind, I believed this young country of America had no literary masters.
In years to come, I would know men such as Carlyle, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Dickens who became friends. I was privileged to dine with Tennyson, exchange ideas with Macaulay, admire the inventiveness of George Stephenson, and the mind of Thackeray.
As I grew older and wiser, I admired and respected my countrymen: Bronson; Alcott; Henry James: Margaret Fuller; Nathaniel Hawthorne, and my dearest friend, Henry David Thoreau, the young man I had taken into my home to assist me in my attempt at farming.
How grand and yet simple were his stories. His oneness with nature embellished all that he said and did. I recall helping him attain a scholarship to Harvard, and the joy I felt when he returned, still imbued with his love of nature, unimpressed by the classical education.
What can I say of my life? That I enjoyed the company of all people? I was equally at home with the laborer as with the socially elite. I wrote my thoughts and feelings and people invited me to speak them in public lectures. I was an admirer of the Plato philosophy and a member of the Transcendentalist Society*. My joy was exchanging ideas with anyone who cared to listen.
To be a poet of worth was my greatest aspiration, unfortunately, it was not to be. My rhyme and verse were acceptable but not of great literary value.
As a farmer, I also failed. Hawthorne once wrote that my idea of farming was to lean on a hoe while Thoreau leaned upon a rake and Alcott sat on the fence. It is somewhat true. We greatly enjoyed discourse over workhorse.
My thoughts and philosophies were not new. They had been the filtration of wisdom from earlier times. I embraced the thoughts and beliefs of masters before me and reconciled them with my own intuitive spirit. In my essay, "Fate", I wrote:
“No one can read the history of astronomy
without perceiving that Copernicus, Newton,
Laplace. are not new men or a new kind of men,
but that Thales, Anaximenes, Hipparchus,
Pythagoras, OEnipodes, had anticipated them;”
Did Socrates and Plato come before Immanuel Kant? And before Moses, Confucius, and Pythagoras? When people today speak of New Thought, compare it to ancient wisdom and you will find that nothing new exists under the sun that has not been envisioned by another.
How do I appraise myself as a writer? In my essay on beauty I stated:
"It is proof of high culture to say, the greatest matters in the simplest way," or
“To clothe the fiery thought,
In simple words succeeds,
For still the craft of genius is
To mask a king in weeds.”
I believe that we could learn much from the laborers who work close to nature. Watch a man build a bridge, see a woman tend her garden, observe the tin maker crafting his wares, and you see nature in her finest hours.
If we are true to our nature, open our minds to the voice of the universal spirit, allow the will of fate to guide our actions, break no law of nature, then we have lived to the fullest measure of our being. To that end, I hope I achieved a modicum of success.
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*Transcendentalists believed that society and its institutions—particularly organized religion and political parties—ultimately corrupted the purity of the individual. They had faith that people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent. It is only from such real individuals that true community could be formed.
© 2012 M.Bradley McCauley:
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