It should never be forgotten that seven years separated the actual experience at Walden Pond and the publication of Walden. As many critics have contended, those seven years witnessed Thoreau's loss of the intense inspiration and the ecstasy in nature that characterized his youth. In 1854, Thoreau was looking backward to his years of spiritual fulfillment before his highly subjective idealism had begun to wane. And he is hopefully looking forward to regaining it.
In short, Walden is a kind of wish book. With the "I" voice of Walden, Thoreau fabricates an ideal alter-ego, a wish-fulfillment figure, a character who is able to say the things about himself that Thoreau would like to be able to claim. In his youth, Thoreau felt a terrific sense of inspiration and wholeness whenever he was in the presence of nature. He believed that he had empirically proven the tenet of Emersonian idealism that the divine may be experienced through the medium of nature. In fact, Thoreau was so excited, so exhilarated by his sensual and spiritual experience of nature that he seriously entertained the idea that nature is actually God. He went past Emerson, who declared that nature is the symbol of the spiritual, and proposed that it is more than a mere symbol. In A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau's idealism surpassed Emerson's when he wrote:
May we not see God? Are we to be put off and amused in this life, as it were with mere allegory? Is not Nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol merely?
Statements such as this caused Reverend George Ripley to denounce Thoreau's "pantheism." Nature fulfilled him to such a degree that he had to celebrate it as divine; so great was the physical and spiritual harmony between him and nature that he felt he was experiencing divinity. And it was to this state that he wanted to return in 1854. Hence, at the climax of the narrator's quest for harmony with nature in the "Spring" chapter, we find the "I" voice experiencing nature's expression of the divine. The ecstasy that the "I" voice brags of in this chapter is the ecstasy that Thoreau longs for. The spiritual rebirth that the narrator achieves in Walden is the goal toward which Thoreau was attempting to design his life in 1854.
