1 (p. 7) Chinese and Sandwich Islanders: Thoreau is referring to Hawaiians, who, along with other Asian and Pacific peoples, were popular subjects of travelogues and works of fiction; these include Herman Melville’s novels Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), both of which appeared around the time Thoreau lived at Walden.

2 (p. 8) The twelve labors of Hercules.... They have no friend Iolas to burn with a hot iron the root of the hydra’s head, but as soon as one head is crushed, two spring up: Hercules is a hero of classical mythology who, as penance for accidentally killing his family, performed twelve labors, the second of which was to slay the many-headed Hydra; as Hercules chopped off each head, his nephew Iolaus seared the hydra’s neck with a brand so that two heads would not grow back.

3 (p. 9) It is said that Deucalion and Pyrrha created men by throwing stones over their heads behind them: In Greek mythology, Deucalion and Pyrrha were the only mortals who survived Zeus’s great flood. To repopulate the earth, they were instructed to throw stones behind them; the stones Pyrrha threw became women, and the stones Deucalion threw became men. The Latin verse that follows is from Metamorphoses (1:414-415), by the Roman poet Ovid (43 - 17), and the translation is from Sir Walter Ralegh’s History of the World (1614).

4 (p. 12) According to Evelyn, “the wise Solomon ... the Roman prætors ... to that neighbor”: Thoreau quotes here from Sylva, or A Discourse of Forest-Trees, by John Evelyn (1620-1706), an English diarist and writer on gardening and other horticultural topics. Solomon was a wise Hebrew king; praetors were Roman judicial administrators.

5 (p. 12) “be not afflicted, my child, for who shall assign to thee what thou hast left undone?”: Thoreau is quoting from the Vishnu Purana, a sacred Hindu collection of stories about creation. This is the first of many references in Walden to classical sacred, moral, and political Asian texts, which Thoreau read widely in available English and French translations; most of the references were inserted late in Thoreau’s composition of Walden.

6 (p. 14) Darwin, the naturalist, says of the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, ... “to be streaming with perspiration at undergoing such a roasting”: The English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1882) is best known for his 1859 work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Here, Thoreau quotes from Darwin’s earlier book, first published in America as Voyage of a Naturalist Around the World in 1846, a popular account of his travels, largely in South America. Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of South America, was one of the most remote and, for Darwin, exotic places he visited during his journeys.

7 (p. 17) I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail: Though this passage is much discussed, no consensus has emerged on the precise significance of Thoreau’s apparent symbolism. Whatever the hound, horse, and turtle-dove represent, the author conveys a sense of his deep attachment to the elusive mysteries of the natural world.

8 (p. 18) trying to hear what was in the wind: Here Thoreau characteristically invokes a cliché, only to suggest that there is something more to be heard in the literal wind than the usual trivial chatter or gossip. Thoreau frequently reanimates clichés, proverbs, and other common phrasings in this way.

9 (p. 18) that, manna-wise, would dissolve again in the sun: According to the Bible (Exodus 16), the Israelites received manna as food from God during their forty years of wandering in the wilderness; gathered in specified amounts each morning (except on the Sabbath), the manna would dissolve in the heat of the sun.

10 (p. 20) there is the untold fate of La Perouse: Jean-François de Galaup (1741-c.1788), known as Comte de La Pérouse, was a French explorer who disappeared during his last expedition to the Pacific.

11 (p. 20) Hanno and the Phœnicians: Hanno was a Carthaginian navigator (fifth-century) who explored the western coast of Africa; the Phoenicians, from the eastern Mediterranean (in modern Syria and Lebanon), were among the most accomplished seafaring merchants of the ancient world.

12 (p. 32) By the blushes of Aurora and the music of Memnon, what should be man’s morning work in this world?: In Greek mythology, Aurora is goddess of the dawn and mother of Memnon, the Ethiopian king who was slain by Achilles; the colossus of Memnon, at Thebes, was said to emit a musical note each dawn, as if to greet Aurora’s light.

13 (p. 38) removal of the gods of Troy: As related by the Roman poet Virgil (70-19) in the Aeneid, after the defeat of the Trojans by the combined Greek armies, the Trojan hero Aeneas led a contingent—along with the household gods, or idols—to modern Italy.

14 (p. 40) I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, ... as if it were a revelation to him: This is probably a reference to Horatio Greenough (1805-1852), neoclassical sculptor and author of an influential proto-functionalist work on architecture, The Travels, Observations, and Experience of a Yankee Stonecutter (1852).

15 (p. 44) while he is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably: Adam Smith (1723-1790), David Ricardo (1772-1823), and Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832) were economists instrumental in the early theorization of capitalism.

16 (p. 46) The whole lot... was sold the preceding season for eight dollars and eight cents an acre: The property had been purchased by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), New England’s most eminent and influential literary and intellectual figure. Emerson allowed Thoreau to build his cabin on the property; Thoreau later lived for an extended period with Emerson and his family.

17 (p. 58) to keep the flocks of Admetus: In Greek mythology, Apollo, god of Light and Truth, tended the flocks of King Admetus of Pharae during his nine-year banishment from Olympus, the home of the gods.

18 (p. 66) The Pretensions of Poverty: The title is Thoreau’s. The poem—with modernized spelling and punctuation—is from Coelum Britannicum, a masque (a short dramatic entertainment) by the English poet Thomas Carew (1595?-1640?).

1 (p. 68) “I am monarch of all I survey, / My right there is none to dispute”: From “Verses Supposed to Be Written by Alexander Selkirk,” by the popular English poet William Cowper (1731-1800); the Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk (1676-1721) was the model for Daniel Defoe’s hero Robinson Crusoe. Thoreau italicizes “survey” to highlight his own frequent work as a surveyor in the region around Walden Pond.

2 (p. 69) As I have said, I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up: Thoreau is alluding to “Dejection: An Ode,” by the widely influential English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834); he uses this quote as an epigraph on the title page of the first edition of Walden (1854). Chanticleer is the conventional name of the personified rooster in medieval animal fables, such as Chaucer’s “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale.”

3 (p. 70) The Harivansa says, “An abode without birds is like a meat without seasoning”: The Harivansa, or Harivamsa (c. fifth century), is a Hindu epic poem featuring the genealogy and exploits of Krishna (or Hari); Thoreau read the Harivansa in an 1828 French translation by S. A. Langlois.

4 (p. 72) behind the constellation of Cassiopeia’s Chair... near to the Pleiades or the Hyades, to Aldebaran or Altair: These are astronomical references: Cassiopeia’s Chair is a constellation; the Pleiades and Hyades are star clusters in the constellation Taurus; and Aldebaran and Altair are among the brightest stars in the sky, the former one of the Hyades, the latter in the constellation Aquila.

5 (p. 73) characters were engraven on the bathing tub of king Tching-thang to this effect: “Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again”: Thoreau is quoting from The Great Learning, attributed to the Chinese philosopher Confucius (fifth century); Ezra Pound (1885-1972) later cited the same passage in his Canto LIII, making King Tching-thang’s motto the basis of his often-cited Modernist dictum “Make it new.”

6 (p. 73) It was Homer’s requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings: The Iliad and the Odyssey, epic poems attributed to the Greek poet Homer (tenth century ?), are about, respectively, the “wrath of Achilles” (during the siege of Troy) and the wanderings of Odysseus; Thoreau invokes these classical precedents to suggest the epic dimension of ordinary life at Walden Pond.

7 (p. 74) it is the chief end of man here to “glorify God and enjoy him forever”: This is a reference to the first question (“What is the chief end of man?”) from the Westminster Shorter Catechism (1647), which was included in a popular eighteenth-century reading primer titled The New England Primer.

8 (p. 75) Our life is like a German Confederacy... with its boundary forever fluctuating: The German states were only loosely aligned from 1815 to 1867, when they were unified under Prince Otto von Bismarck.

9 (p. 79) sail by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses: In classical mythology, Ulysses (the Roman name for the Greek Odysseus) had his sailors bind him to his ship’s mast so that he could hear the Sirens’ enchanting song without being destroyed by it.

1 (p. 87) Or shall I hear the name of Plato and never read his... Dialogues, which contain what was immortal in him: The ancient Greek philosopher Plato (c.428-348 ), a disciple of Socrates, wrote his philosophical works in the form of dialogues between a master philosopher and his disciples.

1 (p. 96) who stood up for half an hour in the front line at Buena Vista: Buena Vista, near Monterrey, Mexico, is the site of an 1847 battle of the Mexican War that secured victory for the United States forces over Mexico; Thoreau staunchly opposed this war.

2 (p. 96) like bowlders of the Sierra Nevada: The Sierra Nevada is a mountain range in eastern California; bowlders is an early spelling of “boulders.”

3 (p. 97) As the Orientals say, “A cur’s tail may be warmed, and pressed, and bound round with ligatures, ... still it will retain its natural form”: Thoreau is quoting from The Heetopades of Veeshnoo-Sarma, translated in 1787 by Charles Wilkins; the Hitopadesa is a collection of didactic animal fables written in Sanskrit.

4 (p. 100) Their dismal scream is truly Ben Jonsonian: Ben Jonson (1572-1637) was a Renaissance English playwright and poet; Thoreau may be referring to a line from Jonson’s poem The Masque of Queenes: “We give thee a shout: Hoo!” (2:317-318).

5 (p. 102) till he became unspeakably healthy, wealthy, and wise: This is an allusion to a maxim coined by the American statesman, scientist, and philosopher Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790): “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”

1 (p. 106) “Mourning untimely consumes the sad; /... Beautiful daughter of Toscar”: Thoreau is quoting from “Croma,” a poem attributed to the third-century Gaelic bard Ossian. Invented by the eighteenth-century Scottish poet James MacPherson on the basis of some fragments of early heroic tales, Ossian’s poetry enjoyed an immense popularity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, even after MacPherson’s hoax was exposed. Thoreau quotes from The Genuine Remains of Ossian (1841, with an introduction by Patrick MacGregor).

2 (p. 109) the girls in a factory,—never alone, hardly in their dreams: New England’s textile mills frequently employed women; in Lowell, Massachusetts, which was a major textile center, they slept in dormitories, hence were “hardly alone” even in their dreams.

3 (p. 110) I have occasional visits in the long winter evenings ... from an old settler and original proprietor: Thoreau is probably alluding to a mythical figure, possibly Pan, the Greek god of pastures and woodlands; similarly, the “elderly dame” he mentions later in the paragraph could be the Great Mother (Mother Nature).

4 (p. 110) who keeps himself more secret than ever did Goffe or Whalley: Edward Whalley (d.1675?) signed the death warrant of King Charles I of England, who was beheaded in 1649, and later fled to New England with his son-in-law William Goffe.

5 (p. 111) a mixture dipped from Acheron and the Dead Sea: Acheron is an underworld river of Greek mythology; the Dead Sea, a salt lake on the border between modern Israel and Jordan, is associated with biblical history.

6 (p. 111) I am no worshipper of Hygeia, ... but rather of Hebe: In Greek mythology Hygeia is the goddess of health and Hebe, the daughter of Zeus and Hera (known as Juno to the Romans), is the goddess of youth; both goddesses represent good health and well-being.

1 (p. 114) Winslow ... went with a companion on a visit of ceremony to Massassoit: Edward Winslow (1595-1655) was an English founder of Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts; Massassoit (d.1661) was a chief of the Native American Wampanoag tribe near Plymouth who befriended the colonists. Later in the paragraph, Thoreau quotes from Winslow’s English Plantation at Plymouth (1622).

2 (p. 115) Who should come to my lodge this morning but a true Homeric or Paphlagonian man,—... a Canadian, a wood-chopper: Paphlagonia was an ancient country in northern Asia Minor that was heavily forested and mountainous; Thoreau is describing Alek Therien, a Canadian woodchopper whom he very much admired.

3 (p. 122) the village was literally a com-munity, a league for mutual defence: Thoreau provides—perhaps jokingly—a false etymology here: “Community” is derived from the Latin communis (common), which does not have the suggestion of defense implicit in another, unrelated Latin verb munire (to fortify), the source of the English word munition.

4 (p. 123) “Welcome Englishmen! welcome, Englishmen!”: According to legend, upon their arrival at Plymouth the Pilgrims were greeted thus by Samoset, the Native American chief of the Pemaquid tribe.

1 (p. 124) They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antæus: In Greek mythology, Antaeus is a giant whose strength was renewed when he touched the earth, a distinct advantage in the wrestling matches to which he challenged strangers; Hercules defeated him by holding him in the air and strangling him.

2 (p. 128) according to Virgil’s advice: Best remembered today as the author of the epic poem Aeneid, the Roman poet Virgil also composed a series of poems about farming, the Georgics.

3 (p. 128) I felt proud to know that the liberties of Massachusetts and of our fatherland were in such safe keeping: Here and throughout this section Thoreau alludes to the Mexican War (1846-1848), which he firmly opposed, in a sarcastic tone.

4 (p. 128) I was determined to know beans: This is possibly a play on the popular expression “You don’t know beans,” on record as early as 1833.

5 (p. 129) A long war, not with cranes, but with weeds, those Trojans ... Many a lusty crest-waving Hector, that towered a whole foot above his crowding comrades, fell before my weapon and rolled in the dust: The passage utilizes mock-epic references to describe Thoreau’s daily battle with invasive weeds: According to Greek legend, a race of pygmies fought bloody battles with migrating cranes to protect their crops (in book 3 of the Iliad Homer compares the attacking Trojans to a flock of shrieking cranes); Hector was a Trojan hero brutally killed by Achilles.

6 (p. 130) had perchance, as Sir Kenelm Digby thinks likely, attracted “vital spirits” from the air: Evelyn adopted the phrase “vital spirits” from the English courtier, philosopher, and scientist Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-1665).

7 (p. 130) patrem familias vendacem, non emacem esse oportet: Meaning “The head of the family should be the one who sells, not be the one who buys” (Latin), from De agri cultura, by the Roman statesman Cato (234-149).

8 (p. 132) He sacrifices not to Ceres and the Terrestrial Jove, but to the infernal Plutus rather: In Roman mythology, Ceres is the ancient corn-goddess (known to the Greeks as Demeter) and Jove is another name for Jupiter, the chief god (Zeus to the Greeks); “infernal Plutus” is a reference not only to the Greek god of wealth but to Pluto, the god of the underworld (Hades to the Greeks).

9 (p. 132) according to Varro the old Romans “called the same earth Mother and Ceres, and thought that they who cultivated it... were left of the race of King Saturn.”: Marcus Terentius Varro (116-27) was an eminent Roman scholar and author of seventy-four known works, including Rerum Rusticarum, also sometimes known as De re rustica, quoted here. In Roman mythology, Saturn is the god of agriculture (known to the Greeks as Cronus).

10 (p. 133) in Latin spica, obsoletely speca, from spe, hope: Thoreau’s playful etymology hinges on his claim that speca (from spe, meaning “hope”) is the obsolete form of spica, and hence that hope is at the root of all agriculture.

1 (p. 135) and the few straggling inhabitants in the outskirts ... paid a very slight ground or window tax: Window tax, collected from 1696 to 1851 (when it was replaced by House Duty), was scaled according to the number of windows in a house; in order to avoid paying the tax, many built houses with few windows, or sealed existing windows.

2 (p. 138) The Pope’s Homers: The English poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744) translated Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey into English.

1 (p. 139) he belonged to the ancient sect of Cœnobites: Here is a Thoreauvian pun: The Cenobites were a sixteenth-century monastic religious community, but Thoreau is playing primarily on the sound “see-no-bites,” in reference to his unlucky fishing companion.

2 (p. 142) as the limbs are magnified and distorted withal, produces a monstrous effect, making fit studies for a Michael Angelo: The Italian Renaissance sculptor, painter, and architect Michelangelo (1475-1564) frequently portrayed human figures that appeared to be under intense physical strain.

3 (p. 149) this piscine murder will out: The phrase “murder will out” was used at least as early as the late fourteenth century, as, for example, in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” (“mordre wol out”), from The Canterbury Tales, by English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1342-1400).

4 (p. 153) Where is the country’s champion, the Moore of Moore Hall, to meet him at the Deep Cut and thrust an avenging lance between the ribs of the bloated pest?: Moore is the dragon-slaying hero of Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, by English poet Thomas Percy (1729—1811); the Deep Cut, referred to again in “Spring” (see pages 238—240), is a railroad embankment cut into a hillside between Walden Pond and Concord.

5 (p. 154) One proposes that it be called “God’s Drop”: Emerson calls another pond “the Drop or God’s Pond” in a journal entry dated April 9, 1840.

6 (p. 155) What right had the unclean and stupid farmer ... to give his name to it?: Thoreau’s harsh comments on Flint may have been shaped in part by Flint’s refusal to let him build his cabin on the shores of Flints’ Pond.

7 (p. 156) Let our lakes receive as true names at least as the Icarian Sea, where “still the shore” a “brave attempt resounds”: In Greek mythology, Icarus, using wings made of wax and feathers, flew too near the sun and, when the wax melted, fell into what would from then on be known as the Icarian Sea; the quote is from Icarus, by Scottish poet William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585-1649).

8 (p. 157) to make sand-paper with: Thoreau’s family manufactured pencils, graphite, and sandpaper.

9 (p. 158) the diamond of Kohinoor: This famous diamond dates back to at least 1304; it measured 186 carats when it was presented to Queen Victoria in 1850.

1 (p. 178) Pilpay & Co.: Pilpay was the mistakenly reputed author of the Hitopadesa, a collection of Sanskrit animal fables; Pilpay & Co. refers to all writers of fables.

2 (p. 181) For numbers and for carnage it was an Austerlitz or Dresden. Concord Fight!... “Fire! For God’s sake fire!”—and thousands shared the fate of Davis and Hosmer: Austerlitz (now Slavkov u Brna, of the Czech Republic) and Dresden, Germany, were sites of major battles in the Napoleonic wars (1803-1815). “Concord Fight” alludes to the battles of Lexington and Concord, fought on April 19, 1775, which began the American Revolution. “Fire! For God’s sake fire!” is a legendary cry associated with that battle, in which only two Americans—Davis and Hosmer—died.

3 (pp. 182-183) “‘This action was fought in the pontificate of Eugenius the Fourth....’ A similar engagement between great and small ants is recorded by Olaus Magnus.... This event happened previous to the expulsion of the tyrant Christiern the Second from Sweden”: Eugenius the Fourth was the pope from 1431 to 1447; Olaus Magnus (1490-1557) was a Swedish ecclesiastic and historian; Christian II (1481-1559), king of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, was dethroned and imprisoned in 1532.

4 (p. 183) The battle which I witnessed took place in the presidency of Polk, five years before the passage of Webster’s Fugitive-Slave Bill: James K. Polk (1795-1849) was the eleventh president of the United States (1845-1849); Daniel Webster (1782-1852), then a United States senator from Massachusetts, famously supported (but did not introduce) the Fugitive Slave Act, which was included in the Compromise of 1850.

1 (p. 188) Ah, many a tale their color told!: Thoreau is paraphrasing a line from “Those Evening Bells” (“How many a tale their music tells”), by Irish poet Thomas Moore (1779-1852); according to Thoreau’s friend, the poet Ellery Channing, this was “one of Henry’s favorite poems.”

2 (p. 189) As my bricks had been in a chimney before, though I did not read the name of Nebuchadnezzar on them: Nebuchadnezzar II was a king of Babylon (605-562) and father of King Belshazzar, whose doom was foretold by mysterious writing on the palace walls (see the Bible, Daniel 5).

3 (p. 197) Goody Blake and Harry Gill: In a 1798 poem of this title by the English poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Harry Gill suffers eternal cold after refusing to allow Goody Blake to collect firewood on his property.

4 (pp. 199-200) “Never, bright flame, may be denied to me /... And with us by the unequal light of the old wood fire talked”: Thoreau is quoting from “The Wood-Fire,” by American poet Ellen Sturgis Hooper (1812-1848); the poem was published in the first issue of the Transcendentalist journal The Dial, founded by Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1840.

1 (p. 203) had just lost myself over Davenant’s Gondibert: The English poet, dramatist, and author Sir William Davenant (1606-1668), began Gondibert, an Heroick Poem (1651) while in exile in Paris and completed it while imprisoned, first in Cowes castle, on the Isle of Wight, then in the Tower, in London.

2 (p. 203) Chalmers’ collection of English poetry: Scottish journalist and biographer Alexander Chalmers (1759-1834) edited the popular The Works of the English Poets from Chaucer to Cowper (1810) in twenty-one volumes.

3 (p. 211) An Old Mortality: Old Mortality, the protagonist of an 1816 novel of that name by the Scottish author Sir Walter Scott, cleans and repairs aging gravestones.

1 (p. 214) What do you mean by alarming the citadel at this time of night consecrated to me?: Thoreau is alluding to the popular legend of the sacred geese, guardians of the Roman citadel, whose cackling fortuitously awoke the Romans, enabling them to resist the Gauls’ attack on Rome in 390

2 (p. 217) nor following pack pursuing their Actæon: In Greek mythology, Actaeon is a hunter who was transformed into a stag and subsequently chased by his own hounds.

3 (p. 220) It is remarkable that a single mouse should thus be allowed a whole pine tree for its dinner, ... but perhaps it is necessary in order to thin these trees, which are wont to grow up densely: Thinking from within an emerging ecological frame of reference, Thoreau speculates here that the seemingly disproportionate destruction caused by the mice may well serve to keep the forest within optimal limits of density.

4 (p. 220) Lepus, levipes, light-foot, some think: Levipes is indeed formed from Latin roots for “light-foot” (levis, “light”; pes, “foot”); its relationship to Lepus, the scientific genus for hares, is at best questionable.

1 (p. 230) men of Hyperborean extraction: In classical mythology, the Hyperboreans were a legendary race that lived beyond the North Wind in a land of perpetual sunshine; Thoreau may be confusing or conflating Hyperborea with Hibernia, the Roman name for Ireland.

2 (p. 232) I was reminded of the fable of the lark and the reapers, or the parable of the sower: The fable of the lark and the reapers refers to a fable by French poet Jean de La Fontaine (1621-1695) entitled “The Lark and Her Young Ones,” which Thoreau read in Old Ballads (1840), compiled by English critic John Payne Collier (1789-1883). The parable of the sower is from the Bible, Matthew 13:3-23.

3 (p. 233) the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes the periplus of Hanno, and, floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which Alexander only heard the names: Thoreau associates Walden with famous mythological and geographical locations here: Atlantis was believed by the Greeks to be a vanished island originally located west of the Straits of Gibraltar, where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic; Hesperides was the fabled garden in the western end of the world where nymphs (also known as the Hesperides) tended Hera’s golden apples (Hercules had to retrieve the golden apples as his eleventh labor); the Periplus of Hanno is a tenth-century account of the Carthaginian navigator Hanno’s exploratory voyage along the western coast of Africa in 480 ; Ternate and Tidore are islands in modern Indonesia, important in the spice trade and mentioned by Milton in Paradise Lost; Alexander is Alexander III, known as Alexander the Great (336-323 ), king of Macedonia.

1 (p. 240) What Champollion will decipher this hieroglyphic for us: Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832) was a French historian and linguist who deciphered the Rosetta Stone, thereby cracking the code of Egyptian hieroglyphics.

2 (p. 244) the coming in of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization of the Golden Age: In Greek mythology, the Golden Age was the earliest period of history, marked by peace, happiness, innocence, and abundance. The ancient Greeks held that the universe (Cosmos, also meaning order and harmony) was created out of Chaos.

3 (p. 244) Nabathæan kingdom: The kingdom of Nabataea, which thrived from 312 to 105, was located in present-day Jordan and the Negev in southern Israel; its capital city was Petra. The Nabataens were nomadic traders.

1 (p. 251) Be rather the Mungo Park, the Lewis and Clarke and Frobisher, of your own streams and oceans: Mungo Park (1771-1806) was a Scottish explorer who traveled up the Niger River to explore the interior of Africa, where he was eventually killed by natives; Americans Meriwether Lewis (1774-1809) and William Clark (1770-1838) led the expedition via the Missouri and Columbia rivers to explore newly acquired territories (of the Louisiana Purchase) and find a northwest route to the Pacific Ocean; English mariner Sir Martin Frobisher (1535?-1594) also conducted several voyages in pursuit of the Northwest Passage.

2 (p. 251) “Erret, et extremos alter scrutetur Iberos....” l ... the outlandish Australians. / I have more of God, they more of the road: From “The Old Man of Verona,” by the Latin poet Claudian (370?-404?); Thoreau’s “outlandish Australians” are actually Iberians (from the Iberian Peninsula, hence Spanish and Portuguese) in the original.

3 (p. 252) It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar: Zanzibar is an island off the eastern coast of Africa. Thoreau reports in his journal entry for August 23, 1853, that he read about the cats of Zanzibar in the naturalist Charles Pickering’s The Races of Man; and their Geographical Distribution (1848).

4 (p. 252) you may perhaps find some “Symmes’ Hole” by which to get at the inside at last: In 1818 John Cleves Symmes, an American captain in the War of 1812, proposed that within the earth there were four hollow, concentric, and habitable spheres, with openings at the poles.

5 (p. 252) and cause the Sphinx to dash her head against a stone: In Egyptian mythology, a sphinx is a monster with a lion’s body and human head. As adapted by the ancient Greeks, the Sphinx killed anyone who could not answer her riddle (What goes on four feet in the morning, on two at noon, and on three in the evening?). Oedipus eventually answered correctly (Man crawls as a baby, walks upright in the prime of life, and uses a staff in old age), after which the Sphinx killed herself by dashing her head against a stone.

6 (p. 253) extra-vagant: Thoreau breaks the word extravagance into its Latin root components for emphasis: extra, meaning “outside” or “beyond,” and vagance, from vagari, meaning “to wander.”

7 (p. 255) There was an artist in the city of Kouroo who was disposed to strive after perfection: Although this has the ring of something Thoreau would have read, no source has been found for the legend he describes in this passage, thus he probably invented it. Kooroo is a nation mentioned in the Hindu religious classic the Bhagavad-Gita.

8 (p. 258) till I am ready to leap from their court-yard like the Mameluke bey: The Mamluks, an Egyptian military caste, were massacred by the Egyptian ruler, or pasha, Muhammad ‘Ali in 1811; according to legend, one officer (bey) escaped by jumping from a wall to his horse.

9 (p. 258) a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse: The ancient Greeks believed there were nine patron goddesses of the arts, called muses; epic poets traditionally invoked the Muse at the start of their poems.

10 (p. 260) Every one has heard the story... of a strong and beautiful bug... hatched perchance by the heat of an urn: This was indeed a well-known tale in Thoreau’s day; it is also the source of an 1856 story by American writer Herman Melville entitled “The Apple-Tree Table.”

11 (p. 260) may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society’s most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!: A handsel is a gift or token of good luck marking the new year or any new initiative; for example, the first dollar bill received by a shop and thereafter pinned to the wall behind the cash register is a handsel. Aligned here with “trivial,” Thoreau would seem to mean anything that seems, at first, unpromising or otherwise insignificant.

1 (p. 263) Civil Disobedience: This essay was originally titled “Resistance to Civil Government.” The better-known title “Civil Disobedience” first appeared, with slight variations, in a posthumously published 1866 collection titled A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers.

2 (p. 265) “That government is best which governs least”: Continually misattributed to Thomas Jefferson, this statement actually first appeared as the masthead slogan of the Democratic Review (1837-1859). The slogan is attributed there to journalist and diplomat John L. O’Sullivan, best known for coining the phrase “manifest destiny.” Ralph Waldo Emerson had also written, in his 1844 essay “Politics,” “The less government we have, the better.”

3 (p. 269) Paley: William Paley (1743-1805) was an English theologian and philosopher best known for his work in natural theology; Thoreau quotes from his book The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785).

4 (p. 269) “A drab of state, a cloth-o‘-silver slut, / To have her train borne up, and her soul trail in the dirt”: Thoreau is quoting from the 1607 play The Revenger’s Tragedy (act 4, scene 4); the play was originally attributed to the English dramatist Cyril Tourneur (1575?—1626) but is now sometimes attributed to another English dramatist, Thomas Middleton (157?0-1627).

5 (p. 273) and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther: The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) argued that the sun was the center of earth’s solar system; his theory was opposed by Catholic theologians and eventually declared erroneous in 1616 by the Roman Catholic church. Martin Luther (1483-1546) was a German priest and theologian who sparked the Protestant Reformation; he was excommunicated by the Roman Catholic church.

6 (p. 275) my esteemed neighbor: Thoreau is referring to Samuel Hoar (1778-1856), a congressman from Concord who went to Charleston, South Carolina, to protest the jailing of free black sailors from Massachusetts upon their arriving in South Carolina. The legislature of South Carolina expelled Hoar from Charleston.

7 (p. 284) Webster never goes behind government, and so cannot speak with authority about it: Daniel Webster (1782-1852) was a renowned orator who served as a lawyer, congressman, senator, and secretary of state; Webster was considered by many in the North a leading champion of liberty until his 1850 “Seventh of March” speech, in which he defended the Fugitive Slave Act.