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'I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness.' In this essay Henry David Thoreau praises the art of walking, of 'sauntering', a word…
'I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness.' In this essay Henry David Thoreau praises the art of walking, of 'sauntering', a word he playfully traces to pilgrims bound for the Holy Land, for hours each day through woods and fields without any purpose, and argues that true freedom and health, for individuals and for a nation, depend on contact with the wild. It contains the famous line 'in Wildness is the preservation of the World'.
Context and significance
Thoreau delivered the essay as a lecture several times, and it was published in 1862, a month after his death; it became a founding text of the American conservation movement. Read Thoreau's Walden and Civil Disobedience.
About the author
Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was born in Concord, Massachusetts, studied at Harvard and worked in his family's pencil business, as a surveyor and as a handyman in Emerson's house. From 1845 to 1847 he lived alone in a cabin by Walden Pond, the experience behind Walden.
In 1846 he spent a night in jail for refusing to pay a tax that supported slavery and the war with Mexico, and his essay Civil Disobedience, born from that night, inspired Gandhi and Martin Luther King. He died of tuberculosis at forty-four, leaving journals that fill thousands of pages of observations of nature.