ABSTRACT
Henry David Thoreau’s interest in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is best understood as part of a deeper fascination with German literature shared among all New England Transcendentalists. His most serious and sustained engagement with Germany comes through Goethe. Thoreau’s dual focus on empirical observation and sympathetic immersion in “A Natural History of Massachusetts” is of a piece with his belief in the unity and lawfulness of the universe. Thoreau breathlessly extends his observation to encompass the entire natural world. Leaves are like “coral and the plumage of birds.” The “melting frost on the window” resembles “waving grain,” “towering palms and wide-spread banyans,” and “arctic pines stiff frozen”. Thoreau’s description owes much to Goethe’s notion of the primordial plant as sketched in The Metamorphosis of Plants and the Italian Journey. Throughout the Italian Journey, Goethe describes himself as an open-eyed traveler.
