Sir Walter Raleigh (essay)

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Henry David Thoreau

Central topics Civil Disobedience Herald of Freedom Life Without Principle The Last Days of John Brown Paradise (to be) Regained A Plea for Captain John Brown Reform and the Reformers Remarks After the Hanging of John Brown The Service Sir Walter Raleigh Slavery in Massachusetts Thomas Carlyle and His Works Walden A Walk to Wachusett Wendell Phillips Before the Concord Lyceum The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau Thoreau Society Related topics Abolitionism · Anarchism Anarchism in the United States Civil disobedience Concord, Massachusetts Conscientious objection Direct action · Ecology Environmentalism History of tax resistance Individualist anarchism John Brown · Lyceum movement Nonviolent resistance Ralph Waldo Emerson Simple living · Tax resistance Tax resisters · Transcendentalism The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail Walden Pond
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Sir Walter Raleigh is an essay by Henry David Thoreau that has been reconstructed from notes he wrote for an 1843 lecture and drafts of an article he was preparing for The Dial.

It was first published in 1950, in a collection of Thoreau’s writings edited by Henry Aiken Metcalf. Another version, with significant differences, can be found in Henry D. Thoreau: Early Essays and Miscellanies, edited by Joseph J. Moldenhauer and Edwin Moser, with Alexander C. Kern.

Metcalf writes in his introduction that he knew of three drafts of this essay, and he drew on all three of them to construct the version he prepared. He hinted that there may have been an additional fourth draft that had yet to surface.

The notes to the Moldenhauer, Moser & Kern version say that Metcalf “misread the holograph at several points, omitted occasional words and phrases, ignored some pencil cancellations, and amplified Thoreau’s text with passages from the working manuscripts and from the Raleigh Works. None of these changes carry authority.”

[edit] Themes

The essay praises Sir Walter Raleigh as a flawed but heroic figure, who failed to use his heroic character to heroic ends. Thoreau concludes by begging America to produce such a hero:

We have considered a fair specimen of an Englishman in the sixteenth century; but it behooves us to be fairer specimens of American men in the nineteenth. The gods have given man no constant gift, but the power and liberty to act greatly. How many wait for health and warm weather to be heroic and noble! We are apt to think there is a kind of virtue which need not be heroic and brave — but in fact virtue is the deed of the bravest; and only the hardy souls venture upon it, for it deals in what we have no experience, and alone does the rude pioneer work of the world. In winter is its campaign, and it never goes into quarters. “Sit not down,” said Sir Thomas Browne, “in the popular seats and common level of virtues, but endeavor to make them heroical. Offer not only peace-offerings, but holocausts, unto God.”