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July 3, 2026
from "Spring"
in Walden
by Henry David Thoreau
“The night hawk...was not lonely but made all the earth lonely beneath it.”
—Henry David Thoreau
We’re back, after a hiatus in which we built the mosaic you see above which will serve as our logo for the rest of the year. This week, on July 4, we celebrate twelve years of The Humble Essayist, the 250th birthday of the nation, and the 182nd anniversary of Thoreau’s experiment in deliberate living on Walden Pond.
As usual, we choose a paragraph by Thoreau to celebrate, this time from “Spring” in Walden, and turn once again to the book Three Roads Back by Robert D. Richardson for our commentary. The Paragraph of the Week illustrates Thoreau’s awe and humility in the presence of one of the glories of nature, and Richardson uses that to discuss the selflessness required for human beings to understand their place in the scheme of things.
[Note: Richardson’s paragraph has been lightly edited to fit our two-paragraph format.]​
The Paragraph of the Week
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On the 29th of April, as I was fishing from the bank of the river near the Nine-Acre-Corner bridge, standing on the quaking grass and willow roots, where the muskrats lurk, I heard a singular rattling sound, somewhat like that of the sticks which boys play with their fingers, when, looking up, I observed a very slight and graceful hawk, like a night-hawk, alternately soaring like a ripple and tumbling a rod or two over and over, showing the underside of its wings, which gleamed like a satin ribbon in the sun, or like the pearly inside of a shell.... It was the most ethereal flight I had ever witnessed. It did not simply flutter like a butterfly, nor soar like the larger hawks, but it sported with proud reliance in the fields of air; mounting again and again with its strange chuckle, it repeated its free and beautiful fall, turning over and over like a kite, and then recovering from its lofty tumbling, as if it had never set its foot on terra firma. It appeared to have no companion in the universe,—sporting there alone,—and to need none but the morning and the ether with which it played. It was not lonely but made all the earth lonely beneath it.
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—Henry David Thoreau
Commentary
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This way of seeing is one kind of negative capability, negative in the sense of negating the self. It is an imaginative projection or empathic identification with the "other"—in this case, other beings in nature. This way of seeing is one of the best things Thoreau has for us, and it will be a steady presence in his writing from the "Natural History of Massachusetts" right up through Walden. What makes this scene work is the long, detailed, and completely believable description of the hawk from the point of view of the man on the riverbank, followed by the single breathtaking sentence that leaps up to see the earth from the hawk's point of view. For a moment, man is not the lord of creation; the hawk is.
—Robert D. Richardson
The Visible Speaking
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Check out Kathryn Winograd’s new blog of words and photos called The Visible Speaking here. Read our feature on her book by the same name here.
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Announcements
The Beloved Republic Recognized
by the PEN Award Series
The Beloved Republic has been selected for the Longlist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
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PEN International is a worldwide association of writers, founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere. The association has autonomous International PEN centres in more than 100 countries.
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Other goals include emphasizing the role of literature in the development of mutual understanding and world culture; fighting for freedom of expression, and acting as a powerful voice on behalf of writers harassed, imprisoned and sometimes killed for their views.
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See the trailers below to learn more about the book.
The Beloved Republic by Steven Harvey
Available at Bookstores and Online
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See more at the author's website and check out our video trailers here.
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The Humble Essayist Press
Closes Book Publication Arm
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The Humble Essayist Press has always needed to stay humble in its ambitions, and with the publication of our final book, Time's Passage by Robert Root, the passage of time has brought the book publication arm of the Humble Essayist Press to an end. Its editors have set off on other composing and editing projects with much appreciation and admiration for the texts that THE Press was allowed to bring into the world. We hope those books continue to have readers and to those authors we urge, “Write on.” Thanks so much for giving us what you did.
All of the press's publications are still available. You can find them here. The Humble Essayist will still carry on and continue to feature the Paragraph of the Week.
