Formation, from "The Ponds" (Walden, 1854) While living in Walden Woods for two years beginning in 1845,
Henry David Thoreau contemplated Walden Pond's features. In "The Ponds" section of
Walden, published in 1854, Thoreau extols the water's physical properties. He details its unparalleled water quality; its clarity, color, and temperature; its unique animal life (aquatic, bird, and mammal); its rock formations and bed; and especially, its mirror-like surface properties. Thoreau contemplates the source of the pristine water body in the woods. He observes that it had no visible inlet or outlet, and considers the possibility of an unidentified spring at the bottom. Noting the
kettle landform's ramparts and resilient shore, he concludes that a unique, natural geologic event formed the site, while recognizing local myths: Some have been puzzled to tell how the shore became so regularly paved. My townsmen have all heard the tradition -- the oldest people tell me that they heard it in their youth -- that anciently the Indians were holding a
pow-wow upon a hill here, which rose as high into the heavens as the pond now sinks deep into the earth, and they used much profanity, as the story goes, though this vice is one of which the Indians were never guilty, and while they were thus engaged the hill shook and suddenly sank, and only one old squaw, named Walden, escaped, and from her the pond was named. It has been conjectured that when the hill shook these stones rolled down its side and became the present shore. It is very certain, at any rate, that once there was no pond here, and now there is one; and this Indian fable does not in any respect conflict with the account of that ancient settler whom I have mentioned, who remembers so well when he first came here with his divining-rod, saw a thin vapor rising from the sward, and the hazel pointed steadily downward, and he concluded to dig a well here. As for the stones, many still think that they are hardly to be accounted for by the action of the waves on these hills; but I observe that the surrounding hills are remarkably full of the same kind of stones, so that they have been obliged to pile them up in walls on both sides of the railroad cut nearest the pond; and, moreover, there are most stones where the shore is most abrupt; so that, unfortunately, it is no longer a mystery to me. I detect the paver. If the name was not derived from that of some English locality --
Saffron Walden, for instance -- one might suppose that it was called originally
Walled-in Pond.
Romanticism, from "The Ponds" (Walden, 1854) Also in "The Ponds," Thoreau describes incorporeal experiences around the water, both experiences related to him by others and his own. Thoreau, who was well read and a
transcendentalist, and therefore presumably intimately familiar with
Romanticism, relates the stories in a way that could be argued to interpret or reveal the pond as the locale of the
Grail Legend in the Americas. In the following passage, Walden Pond's vanishing treasure chest echoes the protagonist's fleeting encounter with the grail in
Wolfram von Eschenbach's German romance
Parzival, and the pond's canoe is reminiscent of the boat in
A Fairy Tale. (
Goethe, who was a Classicist, not a Romanticist, positively viewed
Parzival.) Thoreau wrote: ==Activities and amenities==