SOURCE: Rossi, William. “Poetry and Progress: Thoreau, Lyell, and the Geological Principles of A Week.” American Literature 66, no. 2 (June 1994): 275‐93.

[In the following essay, Rossi demonstrates that much of Thoreau's view of science can be traced to Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology.]

Well‐known for its witty criticisms of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers's reflective sections as “digressions” from the boating narrative, James Russell Lowell's influential review quickly became the locus classicus for discussions of the book's apparent lack of coherence. “We come upon them like snags, jolting us headforemost out of our places as we are rowing placidly up stream or drifting down,” Lowell quipped. “We were bid to a river‐party, not to be preached at.” But a crucial feature of Lowell's evaluation which those who cite it never mention (irrelevant, as perhaps it has seemed, to any literary assessment) is the way Lowell frames his review with a long lament over the displacement of poetry and “Belief” by “Science”: “The fault of modern travellers is that they see nothing out of sight. They talk of eocene periods and tertiary formations, and tell us how the world looked to the plesiosaur. They take science (or nescience) with them, instead of that soul of generous trust their elders had. … Even Deity is subjected to chemic tests. We must have exact knowledge, a cabinet stuck full of facts pressed, dried, or preserved in spirits, instead of a large, vague world our fathers had. Our modern Eden is a hortus siccus.” By then associating Thoreau's writing with premodern travel narratives written before “Science” disintegrated and disenchanted the world, Lowell presents A Week as corrective: “Since we cannot have back the old class of voyagers, the next best thing we can do is send poets out a‐travelling. … Mr. Thoreau is clearly the man we want. He is both wise man and poet.”¹

Lowell perceives correctly that Thoreau is as concerned as he is with poetry's place in a time of science. But Lowell's dependence on the persona of moralistically antiscientific poet blinds him to numerous features of A Week that indicate a very different strategy and position toward science. Among others, these include the narrator's insistent stance in the present (despite his historical excursions) and his identification of “poetry,” in the broad Romantic sense, with a narrative epistemology the Royal Society itself had sanctioned, one that by the mid‐nineteenth century, as Lowell attests, was well inscribed in the genre of exploration narrative.² “We can never safely exceed the actual facts in our narratives,” Thoreau's narrator comments in “Thursday”: “Of pure invention, such as some suppose, there is no instance. … A true account of the actual is the rarest poetry” (325). In “Sunday” he even anticipates complaints of narrative nonprogression such as Lowell's by invoking Newtonian natural law as his model (102‐03), and throughout A Week his representations of nature accurately reproduce contemporary scientific theory and descriptions.³ Like those very “modern travellers” Lowell deplores, then, the narrator of A Week does indeed “take science with him.” His ways of doing so, moreover, reveal a surprising confidence in the method of science to afford a universal and (as Thoreau says elsewhere) “unprejudiced” perspective, even while betraying an anxiety much like Lowell's about the relationship of modern poetry to science.⁴

After the commercial failure of A Week in 1849, Thoreau's writing would, of course, become increasingly infused with scientific naturalism, a development clearly traceable in the transformation of his journal around 1850 as he adopted the field note‐taking methods of a working naturalist, in the dramatic revision his Walden manuscript underwent, and finally in the later Journal and natural history work upon which the new ecocriticism has begun to focus so fruitfully.⁵ This new interest in Thoreau as environmental writer promises a much‐needed revaluing of his scientific practice and a better approach to the old question of the relation between Thoreau's science and his writing, a question that vexed Thoreau as much as it has his critics. Yet the very clarity in which Thoreau appears in ecocriticism as a proto‐ecologist presciently tuned in to the present crisis tends to obscure the source of that vexation: Thoreau's deep ambivalence about the increasingly scientific character of his writing, or what Nina Baym too sweepingly termed his “anti‐scientific bias.”⁶ Before this recent critical turn, most of Thoreau's twentieth‐century commentators, including Baym, resolved the problem of Thoreau and science in a different way, by interpreting his ambivalence as a mark of literary professionalism. Wittingly or unwittingly, these critics followed Lowell in accepting and perpetuating a sharp disjunction between science and Thoreau's writing. As Robert Sattelmeyer has aptly characterized the situation, “until quite recently” the “custom” has been “to derogate Thoreau's abilities as a scientist, as though his unfitness in this field were a necessary precondition to taking him seriously as an artist.”⁷ And while Sattelmeyer refers to practices of reading what is usually called Thoreau's “mature” work of the 1850s and early 1860s, the same customary predefinition of the field, separating imaginative from factual, literary from scientific writing has informed analyses of his earlier work.⁸

Thoreau's ambivalence cannot be understood or the relation between his writing and science adequately assessed without first taking into account how deeply his representations of nature were colored by contemporary scientific theory and his stances toward nature both informed and provoked by its methodology. By focusing on Thoreau's appropriation of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, the present essay attempts to ground the question of Thoreau's ambivalence in an early instance of his actual contact with professional science. My purpose, however, is not so much to demonstrate Lyell's influence as to explore, within the natural theological discourse these two writers shared, the significance of this appropriative act by a “poet” of nature and science in the broad Emersonian sense, one who found himself writing in a culture whose representations of nature, knowledge, and “progress” were coming to be defined and dominated by a newly professional natural science. While Thoreau is generally believed only to have taken up science seriously after the commercial failure of A Week in 1849, this essay suggests the necessity of revising the standard view by showing how science was both centrally important and problematic for him virtually from the beginning. More particularly, reading the book with this sharp (not to say narrow) focus, yet within the broader context of scientific natural theology, yields a surprising glimpse into Thoreau's cultural aims and the subsurface metaphoric principles that inform his first book.

During Thoreau's day the discourse of natural theology formed a “common intellectual context” not only for public discussion of science but also for its practice. So far, this context has been explored primarily by historians of science.⁹ But as an important medium of exchange for public and professional discussion of issues relating to science, natural theology offered discursive resources aplenty for midcentury writers concerned with the implications of such questions as the limits and definition of natural law and the progressive character of the geological record, issues which were debated as much, and often as explicitly, in cultural as in technical terms. Indeed, because natural theology played both a regulative and a constitutive role in mid‐nineteenth‐century science, the discourse of natural theology is not often easily distinguishable from “scientific” discourse.¹⁰ Moreover, for those outside the increasingly formidable pale of professional science, access was also enabled by the claim that scientific method was available to nonscientists as well, a key feature of the rhetoric of “the advancement of science” by which, as Richard Yeo has suggested, Anglo‐American science was promoted during this emergent period of its professionalization.¹¹ In taking science with him in A Week, then, no less than in training himself as a naturalist and making his own contributions in the years following, Thoreau was not quite taking an untrodden path, even if that path would soon lead to a gate marked “No Admittance.” The movement across professions‐in‐formation thus created by these intellectual and cultural conditions was as crucial to the form Thoreau's environmental writing took as it must also have seemed to the very viability of his double career as writer and naturalist.

To appreciate how Thoreau availed himself of Lyell, it is necessary first to see how Lyell's presentation of both his theory and methodology participates in this discourse of natural theology as well as in the rhetoric of scientific “advancement.” For economy's sake, the next section will do this by focusing on two key passages from the first volume of Principles, an analysis of which will serve both to document Thoreau's appropriation and provide a basis for the intertextual reading of A Week that will follow. That reading will then take up more precisely how, by means of the rich ambiguity in natural theological discourse concerning the relation between humanity and nature, Thoreau negotiates a place for poetry within the rhetoric of scientific advance or “progress.”

In the 1830s, when Charles Lyell published his Principles of Geology, the notion of progress was vigorously contested in virtually all the contexts in which the term was employed, whether social, moral, political, or scientific.¹² For Lyell, writing within the natural theological assumption that a connection of some kind existed between humanity and nature, the idea of progress posed particularly acute rhetorical problems.¹³ As a brilliant, thirty‐three‐year old geologist, an officer of the London Geological Society, and a “prominent member of the scientific intelligentsia in London,” Lyell wanted to establish geology as a professional scientific discipline parallel with astronomy, in the early nineteenth century the most dazzlingly successful of the sciences.¹⁴ In order to do so he needed to demonstrate that his own methodology and theory of geological change represented advances over those currently in practice as well as over earlier ones. On the other hand, as a geological theorist Lyell sought to disable the widespread progressionist interpretation of the geological record, along with the theory of organic progression proposed by Lamarck, by arguing that no evidence exists to support the theory that geological or biological change is directional or progressive.¹⁵

Lyell accomplished this theoretical imperative—labeled “uniformitarian” by William Whewell in a review of the first volume of Principles of Geology—by arguing that the rate of geological and biological change is “uniform” both in the sense that it is regularly ongoing, rather than discontinuous, and extremely gradual.¹⁶ To have achieved its present appearance and composition, the landscape “could only have been formed by slow and insensible degrees in a great lapse of ages,” in Lyell's frequent phrase.¹⁷ At the same time, the overall order of that change has been nonprogressive, even cyclical, or in modern terms, steady state. As Thoreau characterizes it in A Week, “Go where we will, we discover infinite change in particulars only, not in generals” (124).

This steady state system of nature is represented and analyzed in Principles on a Newtonian model of the continuous and simultaneous interaction of two “great agents of change”: the “aqueous causes” (running water in the form of “Rivers, Torrents, Springs, Currents, and Tides”) and the “igneous causes” (that is, volcanic and seismic activity). As in Newtonian physics, these two types of “causes” are conceived as “antagonist forces,” both in themselves and, separately, in relation to one another. In themselves, both types of causes function in dynamic interaction as “instruments of decay as well as of reproduction,” of destruction and restoration. Among the aqueous causes, for instance, the force of running water is both “destructive” in eroding and carrying away soil and “reproductive” or “restorative” in depositing silt and organic matter so as eventually to form deltas and islands. And the same reciprocal action and balance is represented among the igneous causes in the elevation and subsidence of land. Viewed together, from a loftier perspective, the two types of “causes” or “agents” are regarded more simply as separate “forces,” working slowly and simultaneously in a global drama of geological transformation (1:167).¹⁸

This same model, used to analyze changes in the inorganic world, Lyell also employs to refute Lamarck, creating the vision of “uniform” gradual change in the organic world that would prove so formative for Darwin's thinking. Throughout, he builds a global representation in more senses than one. Moving back and forth in space—comparing geological events and evidence from different regions of the planet—as well as in time, Lyell constructs his manifold “facts” as players in a grand earthly “theatre of reiterated change” in which “slow but never ending fluctuations” continue over “a great lapse of ages” yet maintain a system of resilient balance and stability, or “uniformity” (1:80, 94).

Along the way, he often invidiously contrasts his elevated perspective with the comparatively local view he believes has led earlier natural philosophers (and, by implication, many contemporary geologists) into muddled thinking, insufficiently distanced as they were from the natural catastrophes they sought to explain. Although earthquakes and volcanoes, caused “by the elevating and depressing power[s] … acting in the interior of the earth” are “so often the source of death and terror to the inhabitants of the globe—visiting, in succession, every zone, and filling the earth with monuments of ruin and disorder,” a more elevated, rational perspective enables one to see how these are, “nevertheless, the agents of a conservative principle above all others essential to the stability of the system” (1:480). Lyell's implicit rationalist critique of local perspective has gone unremarked. But as a rhetorical strategy it serves crucially to link his opposition to theories of discontinuous change (Whewell's “catastrophism”) with the belief that these theories are tainted by the “prejudices” of dogmatic theology. Yet Lyell's own theorizing is not as free from theological influence (though of a less obvious sort) as his self‐portrayal as secular hero of geology has led so many historians and readers of scientific textbooks to believe. Together with that of scientific colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic, Lyell's theorizing was embedded in a discourse of Newtonian natural theology.¹⁹ Two examples, both important for locating Thoreau in this context, will illustrate how natural theology plays a constitutive role in Lyell's theory and will suggest the subtle and slippery relations between humanity and nature implied in this discourse.

In a section treating “the destroying and transporting power of running water” as evidenced in the Mississippi River Valley, Lyell builds in great detail a picture of “the constant destruction of the soil and transportation of matter to lower levels” occasioned by the river's flooding and “frequent fluctuations” in course. While this flooding wreaks great devastation and causes “fatal accidents” to river vessels and everything else in the way, such annual rampages are also productive. For not only do they “yield” a “never‐failing supply of drift wood” but they also supply a fertile soil now “densely clothed with noble forests.” As a result, “the region … is almost unrivaled in its power of supporting animal, … vegetable,” and now human life.

Innumerable herds of wild deer and bisons feed on the luxuriant pastures of the plains. The jaguar, the wolf, and the fox, are amongst the beasts of prey. The waters teem with alligators and tortoises, and their surface is covered with millions of migratory water‐fowl, which perform their annual voyage between the Canadian lakes and the shores of the Mexican gulf. The power of man begins to be sensibly felt, and the wilderness to be replaced by towns, orchards, and gardens. The gilded steam‐boat, like a moving city, now stems the current with a steady pace—now shoots rapidly down the descending stream through the solitudes of the forests and prairies. Already does the flourishing population of the great valley exceed that of the [original] thirteen United States.

(1:183‐84)

That the antagonist forces of destruction and restoration have cooperated to produce natural harmony and balance is plentifully evident in this “flourishing,” almost Edenic scene. Indeed, Lyell authorizes such a reading by contrasting this picture with that of “many geologists” who “read in such phenomena the proof of chaotic disorder, and reiterated catastrophes, instead of indications of a surface as habitable as the most delicious and fertile districts now tenanted by man” (1:184). Rather than the model of Calvinist unpredictability and intervention that he detects in readings of “chaotic disorder and reiterated catastrophes,” Lyell (not coincidentally a Unitarian) envisions a “system” in which the “rules followed by the Author of Nature” are rational ones (1:150). Thus the landlord who “appointed” this habitation “to be our residence” is inscribed in the dynamic stability or “uniformity” of natural laws whose operation the legitimately scientific geologist discloses (1:162).

Within the discourse of this Newtonian natural theology, however, humanity is not always as secure and beneficently sponsored as appears in this scene. In supposedly overturning the argument from design Darwin is often said to have put humanity back into nature. But in ways not often recognized humanity is already conceived to be within nature according to scientific natural theology, a placement which also renders problematic any claims for scientific “advance.” In this discourse “nature” can figure in multiple and sometimes contradictory ways: not simply, that is, as some external force in the “physical sphere” set in opposition to “man,” “consciousness,” or the “moral sphere” (to use the standard nineteenth‐century distinctions), but no less as an agency in which humans may share or as a moral terrain which humanity struggles to possess and to cultivate.

The rich ambiguity of this relation as figured in the “laws” Lyell describes can be seen in a fascinating chapter accurately characterized by one historian as the “most horribly convoluted” in the book.²⁰ Here, while refuting the theory of organic progression, Lyell works to assimilate evidence of the comparatively recent “introduction of man” into his own nonprogressive system. The question of whether the “introduction” of humankind was “one step in a progressive system, by which, as some suppose, the organic world advanced slowly, from a more simple to a more perfect state” (1:160) was an urgent one for Lyell. Not only were the materialist implications of Lamarckian transmutation troubling, but such an extraordinary event as the creation of humanity and the apparently tremendous modifying effect of human influence on nature must also “weaken our confidence in the uniformity of the course of nature” (1:159) and therefore in the rational basis of Lyell's uniformitarian theory.

In rebuttal Lyell emphasizes that as an agent in the physical world, the influence of humans is, after all, much less than has been imagined. The mistake, as usual, is put down to local perspective. Misled “by our knowledge of the wide distinction between the instincts of animals and the reasoning power of man, … [w]e often … form an exaggerated estimate of the extent of our power in extirpating some of the inferior animals, and causing others to multiply” (1:163). The effects of the domestication of plants and animals, that is, may seem far‐reaching to us. But as a “system,” Lyell argues, nature is much more hardy and stable, resisting radical change of any sort. Nor are the “moral” implications of this physical “fact” or “law” of nature's resistance to domestication lost on Lyell or irrelevant to his scientific argument. Within the discourse of scientific natural theology, this resistance is read as implying an important truth (and an endlessly fertile one for Thoreau's imagination) about humankind's place in the “system.”

The deviation [in the uniformity of nature thus] permitted [by the creation of humankind] would also appear to be as slight as was consistent with the accomplishment of the new moral ends proposed [in that creation], and to be in a great degree temporary in its nature, so that, whenever the power of the new agent was withheld, even for a brief period, a relapse would take place to the ancient state of things; the domesticated animal, for example, recovering in a few generations its wild instinct, and the garden‐flower and fruit‐tree reverting to the likeness of the parent stock.

(1:165)

An expression of the same uniformitarian balance and order theorized in the physical world, “moral” progress—in broad nineteenth‐century usage suggesting anything from social reform to “the advancement of knowledge” to what American transcendentalists called “self‐culture”—is represented here as both enabled and constrained by the “system.” Strikingly, the problem for the farmer or breeder of reversion to type is, as it were, already a metaphor for the human or spiritual tendency to “relapse … to the ancient state of things.” Indeed, as part of the “system” reversion and relapse are virtually indistinguishable. In any case, it is clear that while “the moral ends proposed” in humankind's creation require that cultural progress be possible and necessary, they also render it extremely difficult—as arduous and gradual a matter as rowing against the current.

If cultural progress is so difficult, even illusory, in a uniformitarian steady state system, and if humankind is (as Emerson liked to say) part and parcel of nature, how can scientific “advancement” occur? Heroically, of course. As the stance embodied, or rather disembodied, in Lyell's elevated narrative perspective suggests, the limitations built into humankind's placement as inhabitant of nature do not apply to human knowledge of the “system” if that knowledge is founded upon “fixed principles.” Here again the figure of Newton is crucial, the title of whose famous Principia Lyell deliberately echoes. As in his theory of geological change, so in his methodological argument, Lyell is self‐consciously Newtonian; as much as any other rhetorical feature it is the aura and authority of Newton that enables Lyell to achieve his dual objectives of legitimating geology and establishing his own hypothesis in the same founding act and principle.²¹

The methodological and rhetorical implications of Lyell's narrative perspective emerge clearly when, standing upon the same principles Newton “labored to give to astronomy,” Lyell confronts what he calls the most radical “prejudice” against the possibility of geology as science: the fact “that our position as [land‐based] observers is essentially unfavorable, when we endeavor to estimate the magnitude of changes now in progress” (1:69, 87). Geology may now rise above this formidable “natural disadvantage,” Lyell argues, by relying for evidence on “fossil remains.” For these function not only as objective “facts” from which geological changes may be inferred “with certainty” but also as “instruments” or lenses through which the expert may read the book of nature and gaze objectively upon the past (1:3, 79, 89‐90). Not surprisingly, then, what promises in Principles finally to render the moral superiority of “man” as knower virtually invulnerable to “relapse” and the “natural disadvantage” of local perspective is modern science, and particularly the method and “fixed principles” upon which astronomy and now geology are said to be founded. This Enlightenment vision, implicit from the book's opening historical survey of “the progress of geology,” rises powerfully in Lyell's recapitulation of the theoretical principles he has established:

Thus, although we are mere sojourners on the surface of the planet, chained to a mere point in space, enduring but for a moment of time, the human mind [i.e., scientific inquiry] is not only enabled to number worlds beyond the unassisted ken of mortal eye, but to trace the events of indefinite ages before the creation of our race, and is not even withheld from penetrating into the dark secrets of the ocean, or the interior of the solid globe; free like the spirit which the poet [Virgil] described as animating the universe.

                                                                                                              … ire per omnes
Terrasque, tractusque maris, coelumque profundum.

(1:166)

As a working naturalist and environmental writer in the 1850s and early 1860s, Thoreau continued to share this vision to an important extent, espousing both the “unprejudiced” perspective conferred by scientific method and the uniformitarian system beheld by means of it. That A Week exhibits a similar combination of theoretical and methodological uniformitarianism indicates not only the early impact of Lyell on Thoreau's imagination but also how, in the 1840s, Thoreau shared his contemporaries' enthusiasm for the “advancement of science” with fewer reservations than he would later, after becoming a naturalist himself. At the same time, as narrative and as argument, A Week already registers a well‐formed dissent from that enthusiasm and a desire, figuratively, to sink it.

Like other educated laypersons laying claim to the promised accessibility of science, Thoreau apparently felt free to apply Lyell's “uniformity” as both theory and method, asserting in “Monday” (in a nice précis first drafted in 1840 while reading Principles)²² that “[a]s in geology, so in social institutions, we may discover the causes of all past change in the present invariable order of society. The greatest appreciable physical revolutions are the work of the light‐footed air, the stealthy‐paced water, and the subterranean fire. … We are independent of the change we detect” (128). Similarly, his narrator anticipates complaints of narrative discontinuity in works like A Week—that they are “irregular and have no flow”—by invoking Newtonian dynamics and the elevated vision of science. The reader of such books should not expect “to float downstream for the whole voyage.” For “the flow that is in these books” also resists intelligibility: “we must expect to feel it rise from the page like an exhalation and wash away our critical brains like burr millstones.” As for irregularity, “even the mountain peaks in the horizon are, to the eye of science, parts of one range” (102‐03). Such remarks imply that science as a means and mode of true vision will rather self‐consciously inform the book's narrative perspective. And so it does.

As H. Daniel Peck has argued recently, the river perspective in A Week serves to distinguish the narrator “in his role as observer.” And insofar as observation is the basis and primary metaphor of Baconian science, we may say that the narrative perspective is designed not only, as Peck shows, to “enhance observation” per se, but particularly to foreground observation as a primary means of authoritative knowledge.²³ In large measure the river perspective is associated in the book with what the narrator identifies as “a more free and abstracted vision” (48) such as Lyell affirms of science in its capacity to escape the “natural disadvantages” of “our peculiar position as inhabitants of the land” (Principles, 1:89, 87). As in Lyell's rhetorical flight quoted above, the vision that such a scientific prospect opens up is a universal one, outside or above the influences of “prejudice” and the forces of change and history into which it inquires.

Thus in the well‐known critique of institutional Christianity in “Sunday,” the narrator singles out “the god … commonly worshipped in civilized countries,” who, he asserts, “is not at all divine … but [rather] … the overwhelming authority and respectability of mankind combined” (65). But the target of the critique as a whole is much wider: the constriction of dogmatic “schemes” on free inquiry grounded in empiricism. Against such cultural “frameworks” the narrator aligns himself with the “universal” perspective associated with a newly professionalized science, one now distanced from the explicit natural theology of the Bridgewater Treatises of the 1830s.²⁴ “It is remarkable,” he comments sarcastically, “that almost all speakers and writers feel it to be incumbent on them, sooner or later, to prove or to acknowledge the personality of God. Some Earl of Bridgewater, thinking it better late than never, has provided for it in his will. It is a sad mistake. … There is more religion in men's science than there is science in their religion” (77‐78). If this position echoes Lyell's polemic against the contamination of science by theology, it is not surprising that geology in particular provides the narrator with the corrective vision and authority for denouncing such “very unimportant and unsubstantial things and relations … as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and the like.” For “in all my wanderings, I never came across the least vestige of authority for these things. They have not left so distinct a trace as the delicate flower of a remote geological period on the coal in my grate.” “Examine your authority,” he enjoins his readers. “Your scheme must be the frame‐work of the universe” (70). In the light of constructivist analyses of science and poststructuralist accounts of language, this last phrase may read now like a delicious oxymoron that imbues the entire project with an unintended irony. But by methodically maintaining this fiction of an absolute perspective outside of history, Thoreau constructs a narrative perspective from which to view not only nature but also New England history, ancient Western and Eastern scripture, and contemporary society within a Newtonian‐Lyellian “framework” of balanced forces.²⁵

Although Thoreau has long been celebrated as a keen observer of nature, his representations of it are not merely the product of naive objective observation. Rather, it is through this “frame‐work,” as scientifically understood and locally experienced, that nature is represented in A Week as the scene of true observation and the source of true metaphor, both a never‐failing source of sensuous delight and a local microcosm of the global “system” (12). Frederick Garber has observed that “Concord River,” the opening chapter that prefaces the week‐long narrative, also “works out the mode in which the book asks to be read.”²⁶ That this mode is in important respects Newtonian is suggested by the way the natural history and dynamics of the river is epitomized here in a recurrent phenomenon that will function as the narrative's most basic fact and inexhaustible figure: the periodic flooding of Concord and Sudbury meadows caused by the “spring freshets.” As in Lyell's reading of the Mississippi River Valley ecosystem, for the narrator the destruction caused by the freshets is far from the natural catastrophe it seems. If the periodically flooded meadows are rendered useless for agricultural purposes, that loss is more than balanced by the exhilarating and abundant natural life this seasonal flooding makes possible: “ducks by the hundred, all uneasy in the surf … just ready to rise, and now going off with a clatter … straight for Labrador, … gulls wheeling overhead, muskrats swimming for dear life, wet and cold, … cranberries tossed on the waves, their little red skiffs beating about among the alders,” the “alders, and birches, and oaks, and maples full of glee and sap”—altogether “such a healthy natural tumult,” he says, “as proves the last day is not yet at hand” (7). While this last crack sets the narrator on a plane equivalent to the rational natural philosopher, it also serves to distinguish his vision of “the system,” and of his place within it, from what seems the irrationality of many of his white contemporaries and their ancestors: local farmers anxious for their hay as well as the colonial planters of Concord who had tried without success to control these flood waters “with an hundred pound charge” (6, 10‐11).

In the narrative proper as in this opening chapter, the landscape through which the brothers voyage is represented as the product and scene of a balance of forces in which human beings either participate (wittingly or unwittingly) or ineffectually resist. Typically, in contrast to the native inhabitants whom they have displaced, the English colonists and their descendants are presented as most “pathetic” (55) in their unconsciousness of the extent to which they and all their works are ultimately subject to natural law.²⁷ Indeed, the evidence of the power of natural forces gradually to overwhelm human monuments and subvert human desires is everywhere pictured in the landscape, from nature's anticipated repossession (over “the lapse of ages”) of the landscape surrounding the Middlesex canal to the brother's suspicion, while “rowing homeward,” that “Nature would … make use of us even without our knowledge, as when we help to scatter her seeds in our walks, and carry burrs and cockles on our clothes from field to field” (62, 388‐89).

But not only is human activity in the landscape seen to be subject to natural law—to freshet and lapse—but so, equally, is the interior or “moral” sphere. The same assumption that informs the discourse of scientific natural theology authorizes the figural implications of “law” in A Week. Just as in Principles natural law encompasses the “moral” and “physical” nature of human inhabitants, so in A Week the “same law” encompasses both nature and consciousness.²⁸ Readings of uniformitarian law in the “moral” sphere therefore parallel and mingle with the narrator's observations of natural law operating in the landscape. Not surprisingly, and especially on the question of reform, the narrator's readings of “interior” law exhibit the same tension we saw in Lyell's attempt to reconcile a nonprogressive natural system with a human culture conceived to be in important respects part of that system. “There is, indeed,” the narrator comments in “Monday,” “a tide in the affairs of men, as the poet says, and yet as things flow they circulate, and the ebb always balances the flow. Go where we will we discover infinite change in particulars only, not in generals. When I go into a museum, and see the mummies wrapped in their linen bandages, I see that the lives of men began to need reform as long ago as when they walked the earth” (124). On the one hand, in this perspective moral slippage is not a catastrophic mark of human degeneration but rather an expression of uniform natural law—of ebb and flow, lapse and recovery—in human experience: “Every generation makes the discovery that its divine vigor has been dissipated, and each sense and faculty misapplied and debauched” (382). But on the other, if “every generation makes the discovery that its divine vigor has been dissipated,” then moral nonprogression would seem to be an inescapable fact of nature.

Examples such as these could be multiplied. But those I have described are sufficient to indicate how pervasively the Newtonian‐Lyellian “framework” and the figure of “antagonist forces” inform the narrative perspective and its natural representations, and how fully, in his appropriation of uniformitarian theory and method, Thoreau defers to scientific authority as affording a universal knowledge of nature and society. At the same time, of course, the very desire to identify poetry with science betrays no small anxiety about the character and cultural status of “poetic” knowledge in relation to scientific. Indeed, this very act of aligning poetry with science serves to displace scientific authority in a way that permits the explorer‐narrator, as both student of science and keen moral observer, to read authoritatively the lawful processes that shape interior and exterior landscapes. On the basis of the accessibility of scientific method and in the face of the perceived trivialization of poetic knowledge, he thereby asserts a claim of expertise parallel and complementary to that of professional science. More important, this move authorizes his conflation of literary and scientific discourse, myth and fact. If, in spite of appearances and “common sense,” the moral and physical spheres of creation are one—as scientific and nonscientific exponents of natural theology hoped to demonstrate²⁹—then the slow soil‐transporting Concord River can be described in the same sentence as “a huge volume of matter” and the “sluggish artery of the Concord meadows”; or, even better, as a natural “pulse” in the landscape that exerts a constant lure or “natural impulse” for humankind who live on its banks (11, 12).³⁰ If, in other words, mind as well as nature is subject to natural law, then “a true account of the actual” as represented by natural science, far from disintegrating nature (as Lowell feared), may be “the rarest poetry” (325) and metaphor the best means of representing “law.” In this way the poet is enabled to present himself not so much as imaginatively transmuting the language of objective “fact” into a separate “poetic” (and only subjective) language, as truly making and discovering a language that denies, with “nature,” such a “common sense” dichotomy and the cultural divisions of labor and knowledge founded upon it.

As narrative, however, A Week attempts to effect a more radical displacement, one which would redefine the dominant cultural representation of knowledge by undermining even its own elevated narrative perspective and thus redefine, as well, the Enlightenment vision of cultural progress with which science was (and mostly still is) associated. Tellingly, this process of undermining is not only conceived as a consequence of Newtonian‐Lyellian natural law, the necessary erosion of the subject; it is also identified as a means of embodying knowledge, of incorporating science, through “poetry.” Deliberately extending Wordsworth's famous definition of poetry in “Sunday,” the narrator even accords it a sort of empirical priority in relation to science. For poetry, according to the narrator, “is the simplest relation of phenomena, and describes the commonest sensations with more truth than science does, and the latter at a distance slowly mimics its style and methods. The poet sings how the blood flows in his veins … [H]is song is a vital function like breathing, and an integral result like weight. It is not the overflowing of life, but its subsidence rather, and is drawn from under the feet of the poet” (91).

Wordsworth, of course, had encouraged his readers to see him as a poet of science, “singing a song which all human beings join with him,” and had defined poetry also as “the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge,” including and especially scientific knowledge. But whereas Wordsworth had placed the poet “at the side” of the “Man of Science,” ready to “lend his divine spirit,” forty years later Thoreau needs to claim more than sidekick status for poetry.³¹ Revising what he takes to be the English poet's geological metaphor of “spontaneous overflow,” Thoreau appropriates the erosive force (subsidence) of Lyell's two “igneous causes.” In doing so the new American writer not only assumes Wordsworth's place—advancing poetry to keep pace with the “advancement of science”—but he also identifies this law with the poetic character of the narrative itself, revealing that character as integral to his desire “not only to be spiritualized, but naturalized, on the soil of earth” (379). Because the figure of subsidence is a figure of “lapse,” this identification lends additional significance to the poet‐explorer's willing submersion in the river of time at the end of “Concord River.” There, as his last act before the narrative of the voyage begins, he stands “on the banks of the Concord, watching the lapse of the current, an emblem of all progress, following the same law with the system, with time, and all that is made,” and resolves “at last … to launch myself on its bosom, and float whither it would bear me” (12‐13).

I want to return to the paradox of how the “lapse of the current” can figure as “an emblem of all progress.” But first it is important to underscore how, in contrast to that of professional science, the narrative “flow”—and intermittently the narrative voice—registers a disbelief in the desirability, even the possibility (given the uniformity of natural law) of ever for long escaping what Lyell characterized as “our natural disadvantages” to knowing. Whereas for Lyell the tendency to “relapse to the ancient state of things” signifies a natural impediment to intellectual and moral progress that only legitimate science may transcend, appropriately enough in “Sunday” the narrator defines precisely this tendency as a principle of health: “There is in my nature a singular yearning toward all wildness. I know of no redeeming qualities in myself but a sincere love for some things, and when I am reproved I fall back on to this ground” (54).³² In his faith in science he shares Lyell's assumption that we are enabled to know natural change and to discover “the permanence of universal laws” (292) because “we are independent of the change we detect.” But those moments of discovery inevitably lapse, a condition to which the narrative returns again and again, exposing it in the most mundane and apparently common sense experiences, as in this reflection in “Friday” on the problem of being in place:

[P]erhaps no man is quite familiar with the horizon as seen from the hill nearest to his house, and can recall its outline distinctly when in the valley. We do not commonly know, beyond a short distance, which way the hills range which take in our houses and farms in their sweep. As if our birth had at first sundered things, and we had been thrust up through into nature like a wedge, and not till the wound heals and the scar disappears, do we begin to discover where we are, and that nature is one and continuous every where.

(349)

The possibility of knowing truly and knowing better where we live is always present. We occupy an identifiable position in the landscape, the hills do range in a particular direction, taking in our houses and farms in their sweep. The “landscape,” as he puts it further on, “is indeed something real, and solid, and sincere, and I have not put my foot through it yet” (350). The difficulty lies in part in a perpetual failure of memory, in “recall[ing]” the outline of the near horizon “distinctly when in the valley.” Significantly, birth is imaged here in terms of the seismic process of mountain building, the same gradual elevation of land by which “the hills” that formed this horizon emerged into existence; so is the discovery of Lyell's primary principle, that “nature is one and continuous every where,” identified with a similarly gradual and intermittent process of knowingly emerging, with effort, into an awareness of how and where one is placed. But does the wound ever heal and the scar disappear? Is progress made? More than in Principles this question continually troubles the surface of A Week.

Thoreau is in fact as anxious as Lyell to claim in the face of a uniformitarian steady state universe that “there are secret articles in our treaties with the gods … which the historian can never know,” and to affirm on this basis with Tennyson (whose “Locksley Hall” he quotes in “Monday”), “Yet I doubt not thro' the ages one increasing purpose runs, / And the thoughts of men are widen'd with the process of the Suns” (124). But as he is skeptical in Walden of official claims for American technological and cultural progress, so despite (or perhaps because of) his faith in science as a mode of knowing, in A Week he dissents pointedly from the widely promoted notion of progress as attributable chiefly to “the advancement of science”: “Much is said about the progress of science in these centuries. I should say that the useful results of science had accumulated, but that there had been no accumulation of knowledge, strictly speaking, for posterity; for knowledge is to be acquired only by a corresponding experience. How can we know what we are told merely? Each man can interpret another's experience only by his own” (364‐65). This apparent dismissal of science is, on the contrary, a testament to the strictness with which he accepts its method or perhaps uses it in this struggle over the cultural representation of knowledge. “Strictly speaking,” the knowledge he earlier calls “embodied wisdom” (125) accumulates not by some calculus of abstract results, but only in and as those results are immersed in individual experience: “We read that Newton discovered the law of gravitation, but how many who have heard of his famous discovery have recognized the same truth that he did? It may be not one” (365). The point of his critique is not science per se, of course, but the Enlightenment notion of the accumulation of disembodied knowledge with which Lyell and many other promoters and practitioners associated science. If natural law governs both moral and physical spheres, then the knower—the “mind” maintained traditionally and now institutionally above “nature”—must be subject to that law. If institutional science had adopted an elevated stance, then modern poetry as inhabited science, acknowledging its limitations along with the sources of its power, would conceive of knowledge, too, as both the subject and the cumulative product of the forces of natural law.

Every reader will agree with Lawrence Buell that if A Week is “the most ambitious book the [Transcendentalist] movement produced,” it is also “a very hard book to hold in one's mind.”³³ Indeed, despite the lyricism and beauty of individual sections, the journey as a whole is arduous going for rowers, narrator, and readers alike. But, at least within the Newtonian‐Lyellian framework, the submergence of the reader in a process of alternating descriptive and reflective modes, of fluctuating intellectual states and moods, is not an obstacle to narrative completion but the heart of (in David Suchoff's phrase) its “positive discontinuity.”³⁴ Because the narrative of A Week is informed by a conception of intellectual or “moral” progress in which “as things flow they circulate, and the ebb always balances the flow,” the process of knowing as embodied in the narrative is necessarily cyclical, yet also progressive, if discontinuously and incrementally so. This is why moments of recovery in A Week are brief, subtle, and often ironically double‐edged, even while the narrative nonetheless intimates that “there is something even in the lapse of time by which time recovers itself” (351).

Moreover, where Thoreau's narrator dissents from the institutional aspirations of professional science as disembodied knowledge is also precisely where the “rare poetry” that results from “a true account of the actual” is “rare” in another, more powerful sense, one that befits a writer for whom “good books” are those that “even make us dangerous to existing institutions” (96). For while this exploration narrative assiduously imitates what Lyell calls “the natural order of inquiry,” in which the naturalist “cautiously proceeds in [his] investigation from the known to the unknown” (1:160), ultimately A Week represents that order as far more radically “natural” than any institution could sustain. If “we would appreciate the flow that is in these books, we must expect to feel it rise from the page like an exhalation, and wash away our critical brains like burr millstones, flowing to higher levels above and behind ourselves” (103). The narrative principles of A Week, that is, are conceived and are discovered (in both senses of the word) as laws which are never fully grasped nor disclosed because the position of the reader, like that of the observer=narrator, is as subject to erosion as any other feature of the landscape. Yet if the “centrality” (349) of this position is perforce unstable, it is also miraculously—that is to say, naturally—subject to restoration. It may even be productive, just as “the constant abrasion and decay of our lives makes the soil of our future growth” (352).

No wonder, then, that A Week has struck so many readers as a string of cyclical variations on a theme or even as downright nonprogressionist, a pleasant enough stream but littered with snags. For in its representation of the process of knowing as discontinuously progressive and perpetually incomplete, the narrative attempts to render dynamic natural law even in the lapses to which it subjects its readers. It is finally in that very lapse—within the “chasm between knowledge and ignorance which the arches of science can never span” (98)—that Thoreau artfully locates at once the “rarest poetry” and a role for poetry in the advancement of culture. In this way does A Week embody the modern poet's “song” as “a vital function like breathing and an integral result like weight,” not “the overflowing of life but its subsidence rather, … drawn from under the feet of the poet” (91).

Notes

1. James Russell Lowell, review of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, by Henry David Thoreau, Massachusetts Quarterly Review 3 (December 1849): 47, 40, 41, 43‐44. For a recent analysis of A Week's reception and commercial failure that takes into account Thoreau's “efforts to forge a link between the visions of a prophet and the polite narrative of a genteel traveller” as well as “the cumbersome and often obscure machinery of the marketplace” (241), see Steven Fink, Prophet in the Marketplace: Thoreau's Development as a Professional Writer (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1992), 241‐53.

2. The “alliance” of travel narrative with the new philosophy promulgated by the Royal Society is described by Michael McKeon in The Origins of the English Novel, 1600‐1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987), 65‐131. Thoreau's narrator explicitly invokes the narrative epistemology associated with the reportorial character of the exploration narrative when he praises Goethe's attempt at impartiality as among his “chief excellencies as a writer.” Goethe “was satisfied with giving an exact description of things as they appeared to him, and their effect upon him.” Henry D. Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, ed. Carl F. Hovde, William L. Howarth, and Elizabeth Hall Witherell (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980), 326. Subsequent citations are to this edition and will appear parenthetically in the text.

3. Although this essay focuses on Thoreau's evocation of Newtonian‐Lyellian natural law and use of natural theological discourse, A Week is full of metaphors and allusions to recent scientific advances and controversies, implying a readership both knowledgeable and interested in current scientific matters. This rich allusive texture substantiates the narrator's self‐characterization of the modern “poet” as one who “uses the results of science and philosophy, and generalizes their widest deductions” (363).

4. The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen, 14 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), 13:168.

5. Recent studies detailing Thoreau's actual scientific interests and knowledge include William L. Howarth, The Book of Concord: Thoreau's Life as a Writer (New York: Viking, 1982); John Hildebidle, Thoreau, A Naturalist's Liberty (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983); Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1986) and “Thoreau and Science,” in American Literature and Science, ed. Robert J. Scholnick (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1992), 110‐27; and Robert Sattelmeyer, Thoreau's Reading: A Study in Intellectual History with Bibliographical Catalogue (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1988).

   On the transformation of the Journal, see Howarth, Book of Concord, 59‐92; and Journal 3: 1848‐1851, ed. Robert Sattelmeyer, Mark R. Patterson, and William Rossi (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1990), 478‐98. Thoreau's revisions of Walden are analyzed by Robert Sattelmeyer in “The Remaking of Walden,” in Writing the American Classics, ed. James Barbour and Tom Quirk (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1990), 53‐78, and by Stephen Adams and Donald Ross Jr. in Revising Mythologies: The Composition of Thoreau's Major Works (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1988).

   Important ecocritical considerations of Thoreau may be found in H. Daniel Peck, “Better Mythology: Perception and Emergence in Thoreau's Journal,” North Dakota Quarterly 59 (1991): 33‐44; Don Scheese, “Thoreau's Journal: The Creation of a Sacred Place,” in Mapping American Culture, ed. Wayne Franklin and Michael Steiner (Ames: Univ. of Iowa Press, 1992), 139‐51; and Scott Slovic, Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing: Henry Thoreau, Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez (Salt Lake City: Univ. of Utah Press, 1992).

6. Nina Baym, “Thoreau's View of Science,” Journal of the History of Ideas 26 (1965): 221.

7. Robert Sattelmeyer, “The Remaking of Walden,” 71.

8. With the exception of Joan Burbick's Thoreau's Alternative History: Changing Perspectives on Nature, Culture, and Language (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), critics have paid little attention to the authoritative presence of science in the book. Lawrence Buell's two chapters on A Week and the literary excursion in Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1973), still the most extensive and valuable readings of Thoreau's book, examine it as a Transcendentalist adaptation of the genre that “departed from the Unitarian line of travel writing … by stressing the importance of the individual mind over that of empirical fact” (196). Focusing on the self‐portrayal of the narrator's sensibility, Buell assumes that when he refers to “science” in A Week Thoreau means only “the sort of nature lore he purveys” in “Saturday” (212).

   My essay in some ways extends Burbick's analysis of A Week as an “uncivil history” that counters historians' progressive “stories of civilization and accepts the implications of geologic time” (1). But in addition to identifying the particular geological theory Thoreau evokes, I read A Week not simply as rejecting but also as attempting to maneuver within the progressive “story of civilization” told by both historians and geologists.

9. See Robert M. Young, “Natural Theology, Victorian Periodicals, and the Fragmentation of a Common Context” in his Darwin's Metaphor: Nature's Place in Victorian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), 126‐63. See also note 13 below.

10. For an excellent overview of the complex role of natural theology in nineteenth‐century natural science, see John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), 192‐225.

11. Richard R. Yeo, “Scientific Method and the Rhetoric of Science in Britain, 1830‐1917,” in The Politics and Rhetoric of Scientific Method: Historical Studies, ed. John A. Schuster and Richard R. Yeo (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1986), 272. According to Yeo, by 1870 the production of increasingly specialized knowledge and the consolidation of the scientific community removed the necessity of “stress[ing] the possibility of participation by amateurs or the lay public, and the pressure to indicate connections between science and other forms of culture was no longer so intensive” (272). Yeo's analysis of the rhetoric of science in Britain in these respects holds true for the American scene as well, although the process of professionalization got underway later here. See Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, The Formation of the American Scientific Community: The American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1848‐1860 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1976) and Robert V. Bruce, The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846‐1876 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1987).

12. On Victorian debates over progress, see Peter J. Bowler, The Invention of Progress: The Victorians and the Past (London: Basil Blackwell, 1989). Bowler finds that a tension between progressionist and cyclic views of development similar to that explored in the present essay “enlivened the whole range of Victorian historical studies,” human and natural (9).

13. Historians of science have considerably revised earlier understandings of natural theology, now emphasizing its importance as part of the discourse within which nineteenth‐century science was practiced, rather than portraying it as merely an extrascientific apologetics and obstacle to scientific progress. In addition to the work of Robert M. Young and John Brooke, cited above, see Dov Ospovat, The Development of Darwin's Theory: Natural History, Natural Theology, and Natural Selection, 1838‐1859 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981), and two of Richard Yeo's several relevant articles: “William Whewell, Natural Theology, and the Philosophy of Science in Mid‐Nineteenth‐Century Britain,” Annals of Science 36 (1979): 493‐516; and “William Whewell's Philosophy of Knowledge and Its Reception,” in William Whewell: A Composite Portrait, ed. Menachem Fisch and Simon Schaffer (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991), 175‐99.

14. Martin Rudwick, introduction to Principles of Geology, by Charles Lyell, 3 vols. (1830‐33; reprint, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990), 1:ix.

15. On Lyell's relation to this popular “directionalist synthesis” of geology and biology in the 1820s, see Rudwick, “Uniformity and Progression: Reflections on the Structure of Geological Theory in the Age of Lyell,” in Perspectives in the History of Science and Technology, ed. Duane H. D. Roller (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1971), 209‐27; Peter J. Bowler, Fossils and Progress: Paleontology and the Idea of Progressive Evolution in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Science History Publications, 1976), 67‐92; and Dov Ospovat, “Lyell's Theory of Climate,” Journal of the History of Biology 10 (1977): 317‐39.

16. William Whewell, “Lyell's Principles of Geology Volume 1,” British Critic 9 (1831): 180‐206. Whewell also coined the term “catastrophism” for Lyell's opponents' theory that changes in the earth had been intermittent and catastrophic. Rudwick argues that Whewell's labels have obscured the actual debate and “become a pair of polysyllabic millstones around the neck of the history of geology” (“Uniformity and Progression,” 210).

17. Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, Being an Inquiry into How Far the Former Changes of the Earth's Surface are Referable to Causes Now in Operation, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: James Kay Jr. & Brother, 1837), 1:93. According to Robert Sattelmeyer's Thoreau's Reading, Thoreau read the fifth London edition (1837). As this edition was not available to me, I use the first American, which was printed from the fifth edition plates. Citations refer to this edition; subsequent citations will appear parenthetically in the text.

18. “For the aqueous agents are incessantly labouring to reduce the inequalities of the earth's surface to a level; while the igneous are equally active in restoring the unevenness of the external crust, partly by heaping up new matter in certain localities, and partly by depressing one portion, and forcing out another, of the earth's envelope” (1:167).

19. On this tradition, see John Gascoigne, “From Bentley to the Victorians: The Rise and Fall of British Newtonian Natural Theology,” Science in Context 2 (1988): 219‐56.

20. Ospovat, “Lyell's Theory of Climate,” 332. An indispensible guide for following Lyell's argument, Ospovat's reading of Lyell's “convolutions” nevertheless differs from my own. Ospovat argues that Lyell preserves the position of humanity and the possibility of progress in his nonprogressionist system by insisting upon the distinction between the moral and the physical world, and thus by portraying “human history and the history of the natural world as utterly dissimilar, one progressive, one cyclical” (334‐35). In my view, what enables Lyell both to tolerate and to use such a contradiction is rather the slipperiness and ambiguity of “nature” and natural law as framed by natural theology.

21. In Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987), Stephen Jay Gould exposes Lyell's conflation of two kinds of “uniformity” (theoretical and methodological) by identifying four different senses in which Lyell uses this key term. He then concludes that by arguing that “all working scientists must embrace the methodological principles” of “uniformity” as equivalent to scientific reason itself, and that therefore the uniformitarian hypothesis “must be true as well,” Lyell pulled off “the neatest trick of rhetoric … in the entire history of science” (118‐20). My essay is much indebted to Gould's analysis. But I think, ultimately, Lyell's “trick” derives more from his use of Newton and the powerful Enlightenment rhetoric of the “advancement of knowledge” than it does from what Gould characterizes as the semantic sleight‐of‐hand of a gifted scientific writer.

22. Journal 1: 1837‐1844, ed. Elizabeth Hall Witherell, William L. Howarth, Robert Sattelmeyer, and Thomas Blanding (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981), 190‐91. For other extracts and metaphors drawn from Lyell, apparently while Thoreau was reading Principles for the first time, see Journal 1, 187‐98 passim.

    Although evident in the first draft of A Week, as reconstructed by Linck Johnson in Thoreau's Complex Weave: The Writing of “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1986), the scientific dimension of the book seems to have been enriched by revisions Thoreau made after 1846. According to Richardson, this was when he added “the theme of … the laws of nature, and that of the congruence between man's and nature's life” (Henry Thoreau, 155). Similarly, Adams and Ross argue that Thoreau's later revisions “move the Week closer toward a romantic aesthetic of gaps, fragments, and disruptive epiphanies,” epitomized by the “recurrent flood imagery” which, in my reading, operates to subvert the ideal of disembodied knowing associated with an Enlightenment rhetoric of science (Revising Mythologies 48, 93).

23. H. Daniel Peck, Thoreau's Morning Work: Memory and Perception in “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” the Journal, and “Walden” (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1990), 23. See also Steven Fink, who shows in “Variations on the Self: Thoreau's Personae in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” [ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 28 (1982): 24‐35] that the narrative voice in A Week is typically impersonal, objective, and representative in contrast to the individuated and personal voice of Walden. On the river, the narrator is “at once a literal traveler at a moment in time and a consciousness which transcends the particular” (29).

24. The Bridgewater Treatises consist of eight works commissioned in the 1830s by a legacy from the Earl of Bridgewater to demonstrate the “Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God in the Works of Creation.” According to Ospovat, in the mid‐1830s professional Anglo‐American naturalists abandoned this narrowly teleological type of explanation in favor of explaining nature in terms of a harmonious system of “secondary” laws, analogous to those disclosed by methods employed in the physical sciences. Despite the new professionals' hostility to Bridgewater teleology, however, “the laws, of whatever sort, that they substituted for particular explanations in terms of purpose were themselves thought to be purposeful. Each law was supposed to play its part in carrying out the creator's grand design” (The Development of Darwin's Theory, 30, 6).

25. In a cogent reading of “Sunday” in Transcendentalist Hermeneutics: Institutional Authority and the Higher Criticism of the Bible (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1991), Richard Grusin argues that for Thoreau mythic and poetic seeing constitute rather than obscure the perception of “higher truth” and therefore that Thoreau recognizes “the inseparability of prejudice from truth” (113). My own conclusion (that A Week works poetically to deny the separation upon which Enlightenment knowing is predicated) coincides with Grusin's; at the same time I think Thoreau's historical position and personal ambivalence are such that this view coexists uneasily with his enthusiasm for science as the objective discloser of “the framework of the universe” (A Week, 70).

26. Frederick Garber, Thoreau's Fable of Inscribing (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1991), 118.

27. In Lyell's cyclical and steady state system, metamorphosis is perpetual but fundamental change does not occur, a theoretical (and natural theological) tenet which serves the pastoral, elegiac purposes of Thoreau's book beautifully. As Johnson notes, Thoreau's “recognition of nature's restorative powers” assuages “his grief about the destruction of the wilderness, … the extinction of the Indian,” and “the loss of his brother” (Thoreau's Complex Weave, 135). Yet this theory also permits Thoreau to rationalize the extinction of those same aboriginal peoples, the loss of whose independent character and intimate knowledge he laments—as, in “Wednesday,” when the observation that the bones of dead Indians are now presided over by “the undying race of reed‐birds” leads to the reflection that those “mouldering elements” are “slowly preparing for another metamorphosis, to serve new masters, and what was the Indian's will ere long be the white man's sinew” (237).

28. In this respect, and in others outside the scope of this essay, A Week participates in the controversy then raging over Robert Chambers's anonymously authored Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), in which debate the ambiguous “moral” connection between nature and humanity served as a cultural battleground into the 1850s.

29. Yeo, “William Whewell, Natural Theology, and the Philosophy of Science,” 496‐97.

30. In Buell's reading of “Concord River,” the river puts on its symbolic character as the narrator's description imbues it with emblematic significance. The chapter “begins with fact and ends in myth” and thus “fulfills Thoreau's apparent literary objectives in the book as a whole: to immortalize the excursion by raising it, in all its detail, to the level of mythology” (209). Read within the discourse of scientific natural theology, however, it is difficult to say whether the river is at any time represented as “natural force” or “emblem,” “fact” or “myth.” For it is precisely this distinction that the “uniform” and “universal” character of natural law, encompassing landscape and consciousness, enables Thoreau to efface.

31. The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Henry Reed (Philadelphia: James Kay Jr. and Brother, 1837), 502. According to Sattelmeyer in Thoreau's Reading, this is the edition Thoreau owned. For a recent discussion of Thoreau's use of this edition in Walden, see Joseph J. Moldenhauer, “Walden and Wordsworth's Guide to the English Lake District,” Studies in the American Renaissance (1990): 261‐92.

32. In the years immediately following the publication of A Week, Thoreau would develop “the Wild” as a metaphysical, epistemological, and aesthetic category of central importance to his thought and writing, giving its most concentrated expression in the posthumously published essay “Walking.”

33. Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 207, 206.

34. David B. Suchoff, “‘A More Conscious Silence’: Friendship and Language in Thoreau's Week,” ELH 49 (1982): 685.

Research for this essay was undertaken with the help of an Oregon Humanities Center Fellowship. I am grateful to Richard Stein for helpful suggestions and comments.