What the Falling Leaves Taught Thoreau

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic ’s archives to contextualize the present.

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Published in the October 1862 issue of The Atlantic , Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Autumnal Tints” arrived in a season of death.

The Civil War was well into its second year, and copies of the magazine began reaching readers shortly after the Battle of Antietam, on September 17, a day with the grim distinction of being the single bloodiest of the conflict.

Thoreau himself was already gone, having died four months earlier, a casualty not of war but of tuberculosis.

Thoreau’s essay makes no connection between the fall and the conditions of fighting, as the poet John Greenleaf Whittier did in “ The Battle Autumn of 1862 ,” in the same issue.

Instead, Thoreau’s work is a written version of what he’d initially imagined as a visual book—one in which he would compile the leaves of all the trees around him and follow their progression through the colors, from green to brown. (The magazine included a simple engraving of a scarlet-oak leaf that he had rendered.) He had first drafted “Autumnal Tints” as a lecture in the 1850s, before the war’s start, and delivered a version of it in what would be the final public talk of his life.

The event was far from a resounding success—a local newspaper deemed it “dull, commonplace and unsatisfactory”—and making the trip to Waterbury, Connecticut, in the bitter cold of December 1860 had worsened an illness from which Thoreau would never recover.

The revised copy that appeared in The Atlantic gave the story new and enduring life.

“If I were to live, I should have much to report on Natural History generally,” Thoreau wrote in a March 1862 letter, a few months before his death.

As it was, weak and barely able to breathe, he could do little more than adapt some of his lectures into essays for The Atlantic with the help of his sister Sophia.

The enterprise marked a reconciliation with the magazine.

In 1858, the first installment of his “Chesuncook” essay had appeared in the June issue, minus one beloved sentence about a fallen pine tree: “It is as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still.” He was incensed when he found the line unceremoniously axed from the printed copy.

“Is this the avowed character of the Atlantic Monthly?” he demanded in a letter to the editor, James Russell Lowell.