Henry Thoreau as Remembered by a Young Friend (File 1 of 5)

Edward Waldo Emerson

[PAGE v] PREFACE

            [001] I can remember Mr. Thoreau as early as I can remember anybody, excepting my parents, my sisters, and my nurse. He had the run of our house, and on two occasions was man of the house during my father’s long absences. He was to us children the best kind of an older brother. He soon became the guide and companion of our early expeditions afield, and, later, the advisor of our first camping trips. I watched with him one of the last days of his life, when I was about seventeen years old.
            [002] Twenty-seven years ago I was moved to write a lecture, now taking form in this book, because I was troubled at the want of knowledge and understanding, both in Concord and among his readers at large, not only of his character, but of [PAGE vi] the events of his life,—which he did not tell to everybody,—and by the false impressions given by accredited writers who really knew him hardly at all. Mr. Lowell’s essay on Thoreau is by no means worthy of the subject, and has unhappily prejudiced many persons against him.
            [003] When I undertook to defend my friend, I saw that I must at once improve my advantage of being acquainted, as a country doctor, with many persons who would never put pen to a line, but knew much about him—humble persons whom the literary men would never find out, like those who helped in the pencil mill, or in a survey, or families whom he came to know well and value in his walking over every square rod of Concord, or one of the brave and humane managers of the Underground Railroad, of which Thoreau was an operative. Also I had the good fortune to meet or correspond [PAGE vii] with six of the pupils of Thoreau and his brother John, all of whom bore witness to the very remarkable and interesting character of the teachers and their school.
            [004] Indeed, a half-century in advance of his time was Thoreau’s attitude in many matters, as the change in thought and life in New England fifty years after his death shows. Of course, the people of that day went to temperance picnics, went fishing and huckleberrying and picked flowers, and enjoyed outdoors to that extent, and a very few took walks in the woods; but Thoreau, by the charm of his writings, led many young people to wood walks and river journeys, without gun or rod, but for the joy of out-of-doors in all the seasons in their splendor. A whole literature of this kind has sprung up since his day, unquestionably inspired by him. Nature study is in all the schools. The interesting and original methods of [PAGE viii] teaching during the last thirty years recall those of the brothers; and where is corporal punishment?
            [005] As to the pencil business. I wish to show his dutiful and respectful attitude toward his family, and the important part he bore in improving their lead-pencil business and putting it for the time beyond competition in this country, giving them a good maintenance; although “his life was too valuable to him to put into lead-pencils.” Suppose he had done so?
            [006] I wish to show that Thoreau, though brusque on occasions, was refined, courteous, kind and humane; that he had a religion and lived up to it.
            “If you build castles in the air,” he said, “that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

Edward Waldo Emerson
Concord May 1917

[PAGE xii] AN instinct, perhaps inherited, prompts me to introduce my subject with a text.
A Greek author, centuries ago, left these words behind, but not his name:
            “You ask of the gods health and a beautiful old age ; but your tables are opposed to it ; they fetter the hands of Zeus.”
I shall use yet another text ; Wordsworth’s lines:

“Yet was Rob Roy as wise as brave—
Forgive me if that phrase be strong—
A poet worthy of Rob Roy
Must scorn a timid song.”

[PAGE 001] HENRY DAVID THOREAU

            [001] In childhood I had a friend,—not a house friend, domestic, stuffy in association; nor yet herdsman, or horseman, or farmer, or slave of bench, or shop, or office; nor of letters, nor art, nor society; but a free, friendly, youthful-seeming man, who wandered in from unknown woods or fields without knocking,—

“Between the night and day
When the fairy king has power,”—

as the ballad says, passed by the elders’ doors, but straightway sought out the children, brightened up the wood-fire forthwith; and it seemed as if it were the effect of a wholesome brave north wind, more than of the armful of “cat-sticks” which he would bring in from the yard. His type was Northern,—strong fea- [PAGE 002] tures, light brown hair, an open-air complexion with suggestion of a seafaring race; the mouth pleasant and flexible when he spoke, aquiline nose, deep-set but very wide-open eyes of clear blue grey, sincere, but capable of a twinkle, and again of austerity, but not of softness. Those eyes could not be made to rest on what was unworthy, saw much and keenly (but yet in certain worthy directions hardly at all), and did not fear the face of clay. A figure short and narrow, but thick; a carriage assuring of sturdy strength and endurance. When he walked to get over the ground one thought of a tireless machine, seeing his long, direct, uniform pace; but his body was active and well balanced, and his step could be light, as of one who could leap or dance or skate well at will.
            [002] His dress was strong and plain. He was not one of those little men who try [PAGE 003] to become great by exuvial methods of length of hair or beard, or broad collars, or conspicuous coat.
            [003] This youthful, cheery figure was a familiar one in our house, and when he, like the “Pied Piper of Hamelin,” sounded his note in the hall, the children must needs come and hug his knees, and he struggled with them, nothing loath, to the fireplace, sat down and told stories, sometimes of the strange adventures of his childhood, or more often of squirrels, muskrats, hawks, he had seen that day, the Monitor-and-Merrimac duel of mud-turtles in the river, or the great Homeric battle of the red and black ants. Then he would make our pencils and knives disappear, and redeem them presently from our ears and noses; and last, would bring down the heavy copper warming-pan from the oblivion of the garret and unweariedly shake it over the [PAGE 004] blaze till reverberations arose within, and then opening it, let a white-blossoming explosion of popcorn fall over the little people on the rug.
            [004] Later, this magician appeared often in house or garden and always to charm.
            [005] Another tells of a picture that abides with her of this figure standing at the door of a friend, with one foot on the great stone step, surrounded by eager listeners, for he had just been seeing the doings, and hearing the songs, not of dull and busy workers,—great stupid humans,—but of those they above all desired to know about, the strange and shy dwellers in the deep woods and along the rivers.
            [006] Surely a True Thomas of Ercildoune returned from his stay in Faërie with its queen’s gift of a “tongue that shall never lie.”
            [007] And yet another tells how, though this [PAGE 005] being sometimes looked uncouth to her, like a “‘long-shore-man,”—she could never quite forgive the sin that his garments sat strangely on him,—when he told his tale to the ring of children it was, as it were, a defence, for he seemed abashed by them. Perhaps as the years came on him he began to feel with the sad Vaughan concerning childhood—

“I cannot reach it, and my striving eye⁰⁰¹
Dazzles at it, as at Eternity”;

and his hope was with him to keep

            “ that innocence alive,
The white designs that children drive.”

And it was this respect for unspoiled nature in the creatures of the wood that was his passport to go into their dwelling-places and report to the children that were like enough to them to care to hear.
            [008] This youth, who could pipe and sing himself, made for children pipes of all sorts, of grass, of leaf-stalk of squash [PAGE 006] and pumpkin, handsome but fragrant flageolets of onion tops, but chiefly of the golden willow-shoot, when the rising sap in spring loosens the bark. As the children grew older, he led them to choice huckleberry hills, swamps where the great high-bush blueberries grew, guided to the land of the chestnut and barberry, and more than all, opened that land of enchantment into which, among dark hemlocks, blood-red maples, and yellowing birches, we floated in his boat, and freighted it with leaves and blue gentians and fragrant grapes from the festooning vines.
            [009] A little later, he opened another romantic door to boys full of Robin Hood; made us know for ourselves that nothing was truer than

“’T is merry! ’t is merry in the good green wood
When mavis and merle are singing!”—

[PAGE 007] told us how to camp and cook, and especially how, at still midnight, in the middle of Walden, to strike the boat with an oar,—and, in another minute, the hills around awoke, cried out, one after another with incredible and startling crash, so that the Lincoln Hill and Fairhaven, and even Conantum, took up the tale of the outrage done to their quiet sleep. He taught us also the decorum and manners of the wood, which gives no treasures or knowledge to the boisterous and careless; the humanity not to kill a harmless snake because it was ugly, or in revenge for a start; and that the most zealous collector of eggs must always leave the mother-bird most of her eggs, and not go too often to watch the nest.
            [010] He showed boys with short purses, but legs stout, if short, how to reach the nearer mountains,—Wachusett, then Monadnoc,—and live there in a bough- [PAGE 008] house, on berries and meal and beans, happy as the gods on Olympus, and like them, in the clouds and among the thunders.
            [011] He always came, after an expedition afar, to tell his adventures and wonders, and all his speech was simple and clean and high. Yet he was associated with humble offices also, for, like the friendly Troll in the tale, he deftly came to the rescue when any lock or hinge or stove needed the hand of a master.
            [012] I saw this man ever gravely and simply courteous, quietly and effectively helpful, sincere, always spoken of with affection and respect by my parents and other near friends;—knew him strongly but not noisily interested on the side of Freedom in the great struggle that then stirred the country.
            [013] When the red morning began to dawn in Kansas and at Harper’s Ferry, I saw [PAGE 009] him deeply moved, and though otherwise avoiding public meetings and organized civic action, come to the front and, moved to the core, speak among the foremost against oppression.
            [014] Fatal disease laid hold on him at this time and I saw him face his slow death with cheerful courage.
            [015] Then I went away from home, and began to read his books; but in the light of the man I knew. I met persons who asked questions about him, had heard strange rumours and made severe criticisms; then I read essays and satires, even by one whose gifts render such obtuseness well-nigh unpardonable,⁰⁰² in which he was held lightly or ridiculed—heard that he was pompous, rustic, conceited, that his thoughts were not original, that he strove to imitate another; that even his observations on natural history were of no value, and not even new.
            [016] [PAGE 010] Even in Concord among persons who had known him slightly at school or in the young society of his day, or had some acquaintance with him in village relations, I found that, while his manifest integrity commanded respect, he was regarded unsympathetically by many, and not only the purposes, but many of the events of his life were unknown. The indictments are numerous, but of varying importance:—When a school-teacher, he once flogged several pupils at school without just cause. Once some woodlots were burned through his carelessness. He carried a tree through the town while the folks came home from meeting. He, while living at Walden, actually often went out to tea, and carried pies home from his mother’s larder. He let others pay his taxes. He was lazy. He was selfish. He did not make money, as he might have done for himself and [PAGE 011] family by attending to his business. He did not believe in Government and was unpatriotic. He was irreligious.
            [017] What, then, was Thoreau?
            [018] The man of whom I speak was the friend of my childhood and early youth, and living and dead has helped me, and in no common way. It is a natural duty, then, to acknowledge thankfully this help and render homage to his memory, because his name and fame, his life and lesson, have become part of America’s property and are not merely the inheritance of the children who dwell by the Musketaquid.
            [019] Three of his friends have already written of him, yet I can add to their testimony, explain and illustrate some things more fully. Also I have gleaned in Concord homes and fields from others, now dead, who would never have written them, memories that might soon have [PAGE 012] faded away, and have done what I may to preserve them. To many persons he is but a name, or a character pictured by artists of varying skill, sometimes unsympathetic, if not unfriendly. Yet I will say alike to all, Let us fairly review the ground you perhaps deem well known, and see if with the light of the latter years, and the better perspective, you may not find values there, passed by as nought in earlier years.

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[PAGE 123] NOTES

        001 Page 5, note 1. Thoreau writes in his journal: “We linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they are half forgotten ere we acquire the faculty of expressing them.” [Back to text]
        002 Page 9, note 1. Lowell never had any but the slightest acquaintance with Thoreau. During his rustication in Concord he had probably been prejudiced by village criticism of Thoreau’s independent ways. Lowell also was distinctly a “society man” and would have been unsympathetic with this rustic oddity. In the Fable for Critics he ridicules Thoreau as an imitator. Years later, in his essay, he treats with a superior levity, through more than half of his pages, this brave and serious man. In two or three pages at the end he gives praise which should make all the previous criticism dust in the balance. Unhappily the neutral public will be prepossessed by the wit and have formed their opinions on the first portion. But Lowell’s Essay, like Stevenson’s, written on imperfect knowledge, remains, and has influenced many people. There is good reason to think that his opinion in later years changed. [Back to text]
        But Lowell must be credited with this high [PAGE 124] praise of Thoreau’s quality as a writer:  “With every exception there is no writing comparable with Thoreau’s in kind, that is comparable with it in degree where it is best. His range was narrow, but to be a master is to be a master. There are sentences of his as perfect as anything in the language, and thoughts as clearly crystallized; his metaphors and images are always fresh from the soil.”
        003 Page 14, note 1. The late Mr. Horace Hosmer, of Acton, a very interesting man, whose valuable reminiscences of the Thoreau brothers as teachers of the Academy will be given later, kindly sent me, in 1890, the following:—

Notes and jottings, impressions of Thoreau
Family, etc.,—for Edward W. Emerson
by Horace R. Hosmer