4.0
October, or Autumnal Tints
ByPublisher Description
“A gorgeous edition” (Boston Globe) of Thoreau’s classic work, enhanced with an illuminating essay and beautiful watercolors.
Originally delivered as a lecture shortly before the writer’s own death, Henry David Thoreau’s classic “Autumnal Tints” is an ode to autumn not as the season of death and decay, but of ripeness, fullness, and maturity. It is perhaps the best piece ever written on the subject of the fall color of the changing leaves. Thoreau hoped one day to turn it into an illustrated book called “October, or Autumnal Tints.”Thoreau’s astute meditations are framed by a biographical essay by acclaimed scholar Robert D. Richardson that delves into the events and relationships influencing Thoreau’s philosophy. Sensuous watercolors by Lincoln Perry bring to life the fall colors described so ecstatically by Thoreau, allowing longtime Thoreau fans and leaf-peepers alike to feel as though they are walking among the falling leaves alongside one of our best observers of the natural world.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesOctober, or Autumnal Tints Reviews
4.0
“Do yourselves a favour and wait for a moody day in autumn, when the leaves have turned and the skies threaten rain, put on your coat and some headphones, and walk through the trees listening to Autumnal Tints.
That’s what I did, and it was perfect. It also rained which was even more perfect.
I truly do yearn for the picturesque at all cost, and oh boy did this short listen do it for me. I love autumn and I loved listening to this, to the descriptions of the leaves, the colours of the season, and the grandeur of nature. Love.
‘Whenever I walk these afternoons, the purple-fingered grass also stands like a guide board, and points my thoughts to more poetic paths than they have lately travelled’”
About Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau spent almost his entire life in the village of Concord, Massachusetts, where he was born in 1817. After graduating from Harvard College in 1837, he developed a deep friendship with the writer and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, the foremost figure in the Transcendentalist movement. Emerson’s emphasis on the cultivation of intuition and experience as keys to personal and social enlightenment profoundly influenced Thoreau. In 1845, Thoreau built a small cabin on a parcel of land Emerson owned near Walden Pond, where he lived for most of two years, seeking a new relationship to nature, society, and his own self. His experiences there are the raw material of his masterpiece, Walden, or Life in the Woods. Although he was first and last a writer and outdoorsman, Thoreau worked as a surveyor and handyman and was an active abolitionist and opponent of war and imperialism. He died in 1862 of tuberculosis.
Other books by Henry David Thoreau
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