[Walled-in Pond]

Cameron (1956) cites a reference, in the Concord Yeoman’s Gazette for August 21, 1830, to Walden as “Wall’d in,” so T obviously did not coin this pun. It is said in England that the word […]

[some English locality – Saffron Walden]

According to a note in his own copy of W, T got this name from Evelyn’s diary, but the Concord Minot family, which was related to T by marriage, originally came from […]

[of the gods have elapsed]

According to Albanese (327), the Hindus equate 360 human years to one “year of the Gods”: “In the Rig Veda, Vishnu was only a minor sun deity, but later, merging his identity with […]

[a gentleman farmer]

Sanborn (1909, II, 205) says T identifies this farmer as Mr. Tudor.

[New England Farmer]

The New England Farmer was an agricultural journal published at Quincy Hall in Boston. There was a New England Cultivator and a Boston Cultivator, both published in Boston.

[MEANWHILE my beans]

In his Journal for June 3, 1851, T identifies them as a variety of bush bean known as “Phaseolus vulgaris”; later in this chapter he identifies them as “common small white bush beans.” His […]

[Thus it appears]

Van Doren (81) feels that this final paragraph of the chapter shows the direct influence of Sir Thomas Browne in its style.

[first page of the almanac]

T was probably again thinking of the Old Farmer’s Almanac, which featured these illustrations on the front cover.

[quarter of a mile off]

The Goose Ponds just east of Walden.

[Yankee overseers, came from Cambridge]

About fifteen miles east of Concord on the Fitchburg Railroad.

[hundred men of Hyperborean extraction]

According to Greek legend, a people who lived in a land of plenty and perpetual sunshine beyond the north wind. T may have read of them in Diodorus (2.47).

[summer drink in the next]

“But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven” (Matthew 6:20).

[at work here in 46-7]

Frederic Tudor, the “ice-king” of the nineteenth century New England ice industry, and his former partner, Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth, engaged in a trade war in the mid-1840s. Rather than be […]

[mountainous circumstances, an Achillean shore]

Achilles was born in Thessaly, according to tradition. T is probably referring to a rugged, mountainous shore.

[A factory owner]

Probably Calvin Damon, who in 1834 had established a factory in West Concord that prospered for many years.

[a town of that name]

Reading, Massachusetts, north of Boston.

[repeating our a b abs]

This is the first part of a mnemonic device once used in country schools to teach children the alphabet.

[Circulating Library entitled Little Reading]

Little Reading (New York, 1827) (Gross, 1988).

[to scale heaven at last]

An allusion to the building of the Tower of Babel.

[eloquence in the forum]

T was not always a successful lecturer, and after a failure was wont to deride the value of the lecture platform.