Henry Thoreau as Remembered by a Young Friend (File 4 of 5)

Edward Waldo Emerson

[PAGE 061] the village, where he was always welcome at table or fireside.
            [074] The mighty indictment that he was not honest in his experiment, for he did not live exclusively on his own meal and rice, but often accepted one of his mother’s pies, or chanced in at a friend’s at supper-time, seems too frivolous to notice, but since it is so often made, I will say that Henry Thoreau, while he could have lived uncomplainingly where an Esquimau could, on tripe de roche lichen and blubber, if need were (for never was man less the slave of appetite and luxury), was not a prig, nor a man of so small pattern as to be tied to a rule-of-thumb in diet, and ungraciously thrust back on his loving mother her gift. Nor was there the slightest reason that he should forego his long-established habit of appearing from time to time at nightfall, a welcome guest at the fireside of [PAGE 062] friends. He came for friendship, not for food. “I was never so effectually deterred from frequenting a man’s house by any kind of Cerberus whatever,” he says, “as by the parade one made about dining me, which I took to be a very polite and roundabout hint never to trouble him so again.” And, fully to satisfy cavil, it is certain that he overpaid his keep in mere handiwork, which he convinced all friends that it was a favour to him to allow him to do for them (such as burning out chimneys, setting stoves, door-knobs, or shutters to right), to make no mention of higher service.
            [075] He was not a professing philanthropist, though steadily friendly to his kind as he met them. His eminent, but unappreciative, critic, Lowell, said severely, among other charges, “Did his plan of life seem selfish—he condemned doing good as [PAGE 063] one of the weakest of superstitions.” Here is Thoreau’s word seventy-five years ago. Possibly it may commend itself to some good people who have large experience of the results of alms-giving: “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.”
            [076] I cannot quite omit the discussion of his refusal to pay his poll-tax when the slave power had forced on the country a war of invasion of Mexico, and his consequent imprisonment in Concord jail. Ordinarily a good citizen, he held then that good government had sunk so low that his time to exercise the reserve right of revolution had come. He made no noise, but quietly said to the State, [PAGE 064] through its official, “No, I wash my hands of you, and won’t contribute my mite to your wrong-doing.” What if nine tenths of the money were well spent; he felt it was the only chance of protest a citizen had thus to show his disapproval of the low public measures of the day. It was the act of a poet rather than a logician—symbolic—but read his paper on “Civil Disobedience,” and, whatever one thinks of the conclusion, one must respect the man. I must not fail to record the pleasant circumstance that the tax collector, good Sam Staples, also constable and jailor, before arresting him said, “I’ll pay your tax, Henry, if you’re hard up,” not understanding, as he found by Henry’s refusal, and, later, by Mr. Alcott’s, that “‘T was nothin’ but principle.” He always liked and respected Thoreau, but when he told me the story, he added, “I would n’t have done it for old man [PAGE 065] Alcott.” He knew a good fellow and surveyor, but did not prize a Platonist.⁰⁰¹
            [077] His short imprisonment was a slight enough matter to Thoreau. He mentions his night spent there in “Walden,” in an entertaining line or two. An incident, not there told, I learned from a friend. He was kept awake by a man in the cell below ejaculating, “What is life?” and, “So this is life!” with a painful monotony. At last, willing to get whatever treasure of truth this sonorous earthen vessel might hold, Thoreau put his head to the iron window-bars and asked suddenly, “Well, What is life, then?” but got no other reward than the sleep of the just, which his fellow-martyr did not further molest.
            [078] After dark, some person, unrecognized by Staples’s little daughter, who went to the door, left with the child some money “to pay Mr. Thoreau’s tax.” Her father [PAGE 066] came home too late to hear of it, but in the morning gladly sent Thoreau away.⁰⁰²
            [079] To the criticism, Why did he allow his tax to be paid? the simple answer is, He could n’t help it, and did not know who did it. Why, then, did he go out of jail? Because they would not keep him there.⁰⁰³
            [080] But in a few more years the Slavery question began to darken the day. Many good men woke in the morning to find themselves sick at heart because we were becoming a slave country. The aggressive tone of the South increased, and with it the subserviency of a large class of Northern business men and manufacturers of cotton cloth, who feared to offend the planters. John Randolph’s hot words in the debate over the Missouri Compromise were recalled as too nearly true: “We do not govern the people of the North by our black slaves, but by their own white slaves. We know what we [PAGE 067] are doing. We have conquered you once, and we can and will conquer you again.” The idolized Webster turned recreant and countenanced a law punishing with imprisonment and heavy fine any person who should shelter, hide, or help any alleged black fugitive. Of this law our honoured Judge Hoar said in Court from the bench, “If I were giving my private opinion I might say, that statute seems to me to evince a more deliberate and settled disregard of all principles of constitutional liberty than any other enactment that has ever come under my notice.”⁰⁰⁴
            [081] This question of Slavery came to Thoreau’s cabin door. He did not seek it. He solved it as every true man must when the moment comes to choose whether he will obey the law, or do right. He sheltered the slave and helped and guided him, and others, later, on their [PAGE 068] way towards the North Star and the rights of a man.
            [082] After Stevenson had published in his “Men and Books” his views of Thoreau, whom, of course, he had never seen,¹ saying, that in his whole works there is no trace of pity, Mr. Alexander H. Japp contributed this true story of the effective tenderness of the man. It was told by Moncure D. Conway, the brave young Virginian preacher, who had left his home and forgone his inheritance of slaves for conscience’ sake. He lived for a time in Concord, near the Thoreaus, when a hunted slave came to the village by night to the home of that family.
            “When I went [there] next morning, I found them all in a state of excitement by reason of the arrival of a fugitive negro from the South, who had come fainting to their door about daybreak and thrown himself upon their mercy. [PAGE 069] Thoreau took me in to see the poor wretch, whom I found to be a man with whose face, as that of a slave from the South, I was familiar. The negro was much terrified at seeing me, supposing I was one of his pursuers. Having quieted his fears by the assurance that I, too, but in a different sense, was a refugee from the bondage he was escaping, and at the same time being able to attest the negro’s genuineness, I sat and watched the singularly tender and lowly devotion of the scholar to the slave. He must be fed, his swollen feet bathed, and he must think of nothing but rest: again and again this coolest and calmest of men drew near to the trembling negro, and soothed him and bade him feel at home, and have no fear that any power should again wrong him. Thoreau could not walk with me that day, as had been agreed, but must mount guard over the fugitive, for slave- [PAGE 070] hunters were not extinct in those days, and so I went away, after a while, much impressed by many little traits that I had seen as they appeared in this emergency.”
            [083] Thoreau by no means neglected all civic duties. The low moral tone of his country stirred him, so that again and again he left the quiet, consoling woods and meadows to speak in Concord and elsewhere for freedom of person, of thought, and of conscience. He gave the countenance of his presence and speech to the meetings for the relief and self-protection against murder and outrage of the Free State settlers in Kansas, and contributed money. He admired John Brown, the sturdy farmer with whom he had talked on his visits to Concord, as a liberator of men, and one who dared to defend the settlers’ rights. But, later, when two successive administrations [PAGE 071] ignored the outrages, and steadily favoured the party which were committing them, Thoreau, hopeless of any good coming of the United States Government, thoroughly sympathized with a man who had courage to break its bonds in the cause of natural right. In the first days of the Harper’s Ferry raid, when Brown’s friends and backers, hitherto, were in doubt as to their attitude in this crisis, Thoreau, taking counsel of none, announced that he should speak in the church vestry, on John Brown, to whoever came. It was as if he spoke for his own brother, so deeply stirred was he, so searching and brave his speech. Agree or disagree,—all were moved. “Such a man as it takes ages to make, and ages to understand; ... sent to be a redeemer of those in captivity;—and the only use to which you can put him is to hang him at the end of a rope!”
            [084] [PAGE 072] For Thoreau prized moral courage. He once wrote: “Nothing is so much to be feared as fear. The sin that God hates is fear: he thinks Atheism innocent in comparison.”⁰⁰⁵
            [085] Thoreau was a good talker, but a certain enjoyment in taking the other side for the joy of intellectual fencing, and a pleasure of startling his companions by a paradoxical statement of his highly original way of looking at things, sometimes, were baffling to his friends. His ancestry on his mother’s side, the Dunbars, was Scotch, and he had the national instinct of disputation, pugnacity, love of paradoxical statement. This fatal tendency to parry and hit with the tongue, as his ancestors no doubt did with cudgel or broadsword, for no object but the fun of intellectual fence, as such, was a temperamental fault standing in the way of relations that would otherwise have been [PAGE 073] perfect with his friends. One could sometimes only think of his Uncle Charles Dunbar, once well known in the neighbourhood for his friendly desire to “burst” his acquaintances in wrestling. Thoreau held this trait in check with women and children, and with humble people who were no match for him. With them he was simple, gentle, friendly, and amusing;⁰⁰⁶ and all testify his desire to share all the pleasant things he learned in his excursions. But to a conceited gentleman from the city, or a dogmatic or patronizing clergyman or editor, he would, as Emerson said, appear as a “gendarme, good to knock down cockneys with and go on his way smiling.” His friend Channing says: “Though nothing was less to his mind than chopped logic, he was ready to accommodate those who differed from him with his opinion and never too much convinced by opposition.”
            [086] [PAGE 074] He could afford to be a philosopher, for he was first a good common man. It takes good iron to receive a fine polish. His simple, direct speech and look and bearing were such that no plain, common man would put him down in his books as a fool, or visionary, or helpless, as the scholar, writer, or reformer would often be regarded by him. Much of Alcibiades’s description of Socrates in Plato’s “Symposium” would apply to Thoreau. He loved to talk with all kinds and conditions of men if they had no hypocrisy or pretence about them, and though high in his standard of virtue, and most severe with himself, could be charitable to the failings of humble fellow-men.⁰⁰⁷ His interest in the Indian was partly one of natural history, and the human interest was because of the genuineness of the Indian’s knowledge and his freedom from cant.
            [087] [PAGE 075] There was then a genus of man (now nearly extinct) well known along the Musketaquid, amphibious, weather-beaten, solitary, who though they had homes, and even kin in some remote little farmhouse, where at odd times they hoed corn and beans, yet spent the best of their lives floating in a flat skiff, which they mainly poled along the banks, and silent, consoled by Nature and by rum, passed their best days getting fish from the river, which in the end absorbed them, even as the beautiful Hylas was taken down, sleeping, by the nymphs to the dreamy ooze; and thus what was fitting happened, and the fishes had their turn. I cannot forego giving what some will recognize as a true picture of them by another hand:⁰⁰⁸

“Among the blue-flowered pickerel-weed
In grey old skiff that nestles low
Half hid in shining arrow-leaves,
The fisher sits,—nor heeds the show.
[PAGE 076] His rounded back, all weather-stained,
Has caught the air of wave-worn rocks,
And sun and wind have bleached and tanned
To one dun hue, hat, face, and locks.
And Nature’s calm so settled there
The fishes never know their danger
And playful take his careless bait—
Bait they would ne’er accept from stranger.
The blue eyes only are shrewd and living,
But of soft reflections and fair things seen
To you and me no hint they are giving—
Of Sunsets’ splendor, or meadows green,
Never they prate of the cardinal’s flame,
The lilies’ freshness, and sunrise flush,
The solemn night, or the morning star,
The violets white and the wild rose flush.
Is it all a picture? Or does he ponder
The year’s fair pageant he knows so well?
Or had it reached his heart, I wonder?
He and the rushes will never tell.”

            “The least erected spirit that fell
From Heaven, for even in Heaven his looks and thoughts
Were always downward bent, admiring more
The riches of Heaven’s pavement, trodden gold,
Than aught divine or holy else enjoyed
In vision beatific.”

Not so Henry Thoreau. As he walked the village street sometimes it happened that his towns-folk were hurt or annoyed that his eyes were far away and he did not stop “to pass the time of day.” There was no affectation or unkindness here. The real man was then in the elm-arch high aloft,—

[PAGE 090] “The beautiful hanging gardens that rocked in the morning wind
And sheltered a dream of Faerie and a life so timid and kind,
The shady choir of the bluebird and the racecourse of squirrels gay.”

He stopped once on the street and made me hear, clear, but far above, the red-eyed vireo’s note and, rarely coming, that of his little white-eyed cousin. I had not known—I venture to say few persons know—that the little olive-brown bird whom we associate with her delicate nest hanging between two twigs in the woods, is one of the commonest singers on our main street in July, even as Thoreau wrote:—

“Upon the lofty elm-tree sprays,
The Vireo rings the changes meet,
During these trivial summer days,
Striving to lift our thoughts above the street.”

Many a boy and girl owed to him the opening of the gate of this almost fairy knowledge, and thereafter pleasant [PAGE 091] voices, unnoted of others, spoke to him, like the sudden understanding of the eagle’s voices to Sigurd in the Saga.
            [108] He was more than Naturalist. He said of Nature, “She must not be looked at directly, but askance, or by flashes: like the head of the Gorgon Medusa, she turns the men of Science to stone.” But the walls of Troy are said to have builded themselves of stone obedient to immortal music, and though those walls be crumbled, they endure in the song of the blind harper.
            [109] In the ages called dark, and what we think of as rude times, one wanderer was sure of welcome,—wherever he went was free of market and inn, of camp and castle and palace; he who could tell in song or story of the gods and the darker powers; the saints, the helping heroes, and gracious beauty. These men by their magic made hard life seem sweet, and [PAGE 092] bloody death desirable, and raised in each the hope that even the short thread of life spun out to him by grudging Fate might yet gleam in the glorious tapestry of story.

And the men and maids for one moment knew
That the song was truer than what was true.

            [110] Our hero was a born story-teller, and of the Norseman type in many ways, a right Saga-man and Scald like them, telling of woods and waters and the dwarfkin that peopled them—and ever he knew what he saw for a symbol, and looked through it for a truth. “Even the facts of science,” said he, “may dust the mind by their dryness, unless they are in a sense effaced by the dews of fresh and living truth.”
            [111] When one asked Aristotle, why we like to spend much time with handsome people? “That is a blind man’s ques- [PAGE 093] tion,” was the wise man’s answer; and Thoreau, looking at beautiful Mother Nature, might have given the same answer to a townsman anxious lest he stay in the fields too long for the good of pencil-making. How Thoreau felt when alone with Nature may be gathered from his words about her, “At once our Destiny and Abode, our Maker and our Life.”
            [112] The humour, the raciness, and the flavour of the moor and the greenwood that is in the Robin Hood ballads he loved, was in his speech. In his books, particularly “Walden,” the contentious tone may linger unpleasantly in the reader’s ears and memory, but remember, Thoreau, in his day, was administering wholesome, if bitter, medicine. Yet when he at last lays by his wholesome but fatiguing buffeting North-wind method, there comes winning sunshine; [PAGE 094] and the enchanting haze of a poet’s thought brings out the true beauty in the commonest things.
            [113] Some of his verses are little better than doggerel, but others, hardly yet received, will, I think, remain when many who passed current as American poets, in his lifetime, are forgotten. Less artificial than much of the old classic English verse with which he became familiar in his youth, some of its best qualities are to be remarked in his poems. Those which remain—he destroyed many—were scattered in his writings, but have been brought together in a small volume by Mr. Sanborn. He did not often reach perfect rhythmical expression, but one cannot read far in his prose without coming on the thought and words of a true poet. Walden called out these by her colour, her purity, her reflections, her ice, her children.
            [114] [PAGE 095] One morning, when she had put on her white armour against the winter, he goes down for his morning draught, axe in hand. “I cut my way first through a foot of snow, and then a foot of ice, and open a window under my feet where, kneeling to drink, I look down into the quiet parlour of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light, as through a window of ground glass with its bright sanded floor the same as in summer; there a perennial waveless serenity reigns as in the amber twilight sky, corresponding to the cool and even temperament of the inhabitants. Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
            “Ah, the pickerel of Walden! when I see them lying on the ice, I am always surprised by their rare beauty, as if they were fabulous fishes, they are so foreign to the streets, even to the woods, foreign as Arabia to our Concord life. They pos- 

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NOTES

        001 Page 65, note 1. Allusion has been made to the time when Staples became Emerson’s next neighbour and on the survey it appeared that the partition ditch was well over on the land of the latter. The matter being generously settled, Thoreau came into the house and sat down to rest in the study. He said: “I like Sam Staples; he has no hypocrisy about him. He has just been telling me how he came to Concord, nineteen years old, after a hard-worked boyhood, [PAGE 137] looking for a job. He had just a ninepence [they were then in use], and he went over to the tavern and spent half of it for rum, and he says it started him right, and in good spirits.” The youth’s steady advance from then to the day of his death ought not to make a good Sunday-School book. First, he was hostler, soon promoted to bar-keeper and clerk, then married the only daughter of the innkeeper; was chosen constable. Concord was then a shiretown and as judges, lawyers, jurymen, and witnesses had all made pleasant acquaintance with him in his honest dispensing of spirituous comforts, he was appointed jailor, and was a most able, humane and intelligent one, also tax-collector. Mr. Emerson had performed his marriage ceremony, and, as Alcott and John S. Dwight happened to be with him, they were present as witnesses in the “old Middlesex” parlor. Staples, later, confounded Dwight with the Englishman Wright (of the Fruitlands colony), so, in his old age, telling me the story, added, “I had both of ‘em in my jail soon after.” His steady friendship for Thoreau, his first prisoner for conscience’ sake, and his distinctly unsympathetic relation with Dr. Alcott whom, with entire kindness, he spoke of as “a regular dude,” have been told.
        A few years later he was chosen Representative in the General Court, and twice reëlected, serving sensibly and well on the Committees [PAGE 138] on Prisons and on Accounts. When the Court and jail were moved to Lowell, Staples became an auctioneer, real estate man, and farmer, but will be remembered perhaps chiefly as a kindly neighbour, advisor of unpractical people of all degrees in our village family, especially of widows and lone women. He called almost every one by their first names and it was not taken amiss. He was a genial member of the Social Circle. Once at one of their evening gatherings, the late Judge Keyes spoke of the interesting composition of the Club,—two ministers, three judges, one lawyer, one doctor, and so on through the list, ending “and one gentleman.” Immediately the chorus “Who’s that, Judge?” rose, for we all were sure we were otherwise accounted for. “Why, Sam there. He’s our one retired gentleman,” said the judge. When, a few years later, in the winter of 1894–95, we lost Judge Hoar, Rev. Mr. Reynolds, and Mr. Staples, we felt as if a tripod upholding Concord’s high standards and kindly, simple life had fallen. [Back to text]
        002 Page 66, note 1. The late George Bradford Bartlett remembered Thoreau’s coming often to his father, good Doctor Bartlett’s house. He did so the night after his release from prison. George felt as if he were seeing a Siberian exile, or John Bunyan.
        He said that Henry often did carpentry jobs, etc., for his father. The Doctor furnished a [PAGE 139] fence for poor Mrs. O’Brien, opposite the New Burying-ground, and Thoreau made it, with George’s boyish help. He used to visit Thoreau at Walden and remembers how the house was arranged. He recalls his pausing to hear songs of distant birds, telling what bird it was, and whether male or female, that sung or chirped; also calling attention to insect sounds, and his inferring the insect’s state of mind. He recalled the sudden increase of Thoreau’s library by his receiving upwards of four hundred volumes of the Week back from the publishers, and Mr. Emerson’s saying, “The day will come when this will be famous as Gilbert White’s Notes of Selborne,” was more than fulfilled. Mr. Bartlett also told me that, in Pennsylvania, he had met a student, a Russian Jew, who was eager to see him, as a man who had known Thoreau. This man said that, in his early youth, in Russia, he had read one of Thoreau’s books, and it had determined him to become a free man and helped him through the toil and danger required. His desire was to translate Thoreau’s works into Russian. [Back to text]
        003 Page 66, note 2. Thoreau had earlier objected to a man’s deliberately putting himself into an attitude of opposition to the laws of society, or of the land, but rather felt it his duty to “maintain himself, in whatever attitude he find himself through obedience to the laws of his being, which will never be one of [PAGE 140] opposition to a just government, if he should chance to meet with such.” Now, every sense of the man rebelled at the official attitude of his country with regard to human slavery. [Back to text]
        004 Page 67, note 1. But the judge, as in duty bound, explained to the Jury that this law had been regularly enacted by Congress, approved by the President, and held to be valid by the Supreme Court; hence, that all citizens were in practice legally bound to obey it. He admitted that even a Republic might pass a wicked law. “If a statute is passed which any citizen, examining his duty by the best light which God has given him, … believes to be wicked, and which, acting under the law of God, he thinks he ought to disobey, unquestionably he ought to disobey that statute, because he ought to ‘obey God rather than man.’… But, gentlemen, a man whose private conscience leads him to disobey a law recognized by the community must take the consequences of that disobedience. It is a matter solely between him and his Maker…. It will not do for the public authorities to recognize his private opinion as a justification of his acts.”
Emerson said, in public, at this period: “The Union is at an end so soon as an immoral law is enacted, and he who writes a crime into the statute-book digs under the foundations of the Capitol, to plant there a powder magazine, and lays a train.”
[PAGE 141] Page 68, note 1. Mr. Henry S. Salt, who, in 1890, published in London his excellent and appreciative book on Thoreau, tells how in the same essay Stevenson summed up his character by the phrase “a skulker “but had to admit later—unhappily only in a preface—that he had quite misread Thoreau through lack of sufficient knowledge of his life. [Back to text]
        005 Page 72, note 1. Thoreau once said: “A thought would destroy, like the jet of a blowpipe, most persons.” [Back to text]
        006 Page 73, note 1. A lady who, from her youth upward, was constantly meeting Thoreau at the homes of two of his friends where she also often stayed, and who also was in friendly relation with his mother and sister, says: “When others say of Henry Thoreau that he took no interest except in his selfish concerns, that he was a mere hermit, that he was strange, indolent, had no occupation, immediately it comes to me that that is all wrong. It seems as if he had so much affection, was cordial with his kind, that is, when they were of his kind, where there were points of contact.
        “He took great pleasure in learning from Nature and he wished to divide what he learned with others, and to help let them see with his eyes, that is, show them how to see.”
        Thoreau wrote in his journal: “It is always a recommendation to me to know that a man has ever been poor, has been regularly born [PAGE 142] into this world; knows the language…. I require to be assured of certain philosophers that they have once been bare-footed, have eaten a crust because they had nothing better.” [Back to text]
        007 Page 74, note 1. Thoreau, living by Walden wrote: “In a pleasant spring morning all men’s sins are forgiven. Such a day is a truce to vice. While such a sun holds out to burn, the vilest sinner may return. Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbours. You may have known your neighbour yesterday for a thief, a drunkard, or a sensualist, and merely pitied or despised him, and despaired of the world; but the sun shines bright and warm this spring morning, recreating the world, and you meet him at some serene work, and see how his exhausted and debauched veins expand with still joy and bless the new day, feel the spring influence with the innocence of infancy, and all his faults are forgotten. There is not only an atmosphere of goodwill about him, but even a savour of holiness groping for expression, blindly and ineffectually perhaps, like a new-born instinct, and for a short hour the south hill-side echoes to no vulgar jest. You see some innocent fair shoots preparing to burst from his gnarled rind and try another year’s life, tender and fresh as the youngest plant. Even he has entered into the joy of his lord. Why the jailor does not leave [PAGE 143] open his prison doors,—why the judge does not dismiss his case,—why the preacher does not dismiss his congregation. It is because they do not obey the hint that God gives them, nor accept the pardon that he freely offers to all.” [Back to text]
        008 Page 75, note 1. The “River Fisherman” was written by Mrs. Edith Emerson Forbes. [Back to text]
        009 Page 76, note 1. Thoreau wrote in his journal: “There are poets of all kinds and degrees, little known to each other. The Lake School is not the only, or the principal one. They love various things; some love beauty, and some love rum. Some go to Rome,—and some go a-fishing, and are sent to the house of correction once a month. They keep up their fires by means unknown to me. I know not their comings and goings. I know them wild, and ready to risk all when their muse invites. I meet these gods of the river and woods with sparkling faces (like Apollo’s), late from the house of correction, it may be,—carrying whatever mystic and forbidden bottles or other vessels concealed; while the dull, regular priests are steering their parish rafts in a prose mood. What care I to see galleries full of representations of heathen gods, when I can see actual living ones by an infinitely superior artist?”
        He loved the River: “It is my own highway, the only wild and unfenced part of the world hereabouts.” But always he looked for something behind what he saw. At another time [PAGE 144] he writes: “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it, but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current glides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky whose bottom is pebbly with stars.” [Back to text]
        010 Page 86, note 1. In the year of Our Lord, 1852, the alleged manifestations of departed spirits reached Concord, through various humble “mediums.” Judge Hoar remarked, “If this be a treasure, verily we have it in earthen vessels.”
Thoreau writes to his sister, in Bangor: “Concord is just as idiotic as ever in relation to the spirits and their knockings. Most people here believe in a spiritual world which no respectable junk bottle, which had not met with a slip, would condescend to contain even a portion of for a moment,—whose atmosphere would extinguish a candle let down into it, like a well that wants airing; in spirits which the very bullfrogs in our meadows would blackball. Their evil genius is seeing how low it can degrade them. The hooting of owls, the croaking of frogs, is celestial wisdom in comparison. If I could be brought to believe in the things which they believe, I should make haste to get rid of my certificate of stock in this and the next world’s enterprises, and buy a share in the first Immediate Annihilation Company that offered. I would exchange my immortality for [PAGE 145] a glass of small beer this hot weather. Where are the heathen? Was there ever any superstition before? And yet I suppose there may he a vessel this very moment setting sail from the coast of Africa with a missionary on board! Consider the dawn and the sunrise,—the rainbow and the evening,—the words of Christ and the aspiration of all the saints! Hear music! see, smell, taste, feel, hear,—anything,—and then hear these idiots, inspired by the cracking of a restless board, humbly asking. ‘Please, Spirit, if you cannot answer by knocks, answer by tips of the table.’ ! ! ! ! ! ! !” [Back to text]
        011 Page 88, note 1. Through his neighbour Channing, Thoreau formed a friendship with the Ricketson family living near New Bedford, kindly people of high ideals, simple life, and lovers of Nature. The region about their home by the blue waters of Buzzard’s Bay and in its softer air made a pleasant change in Spring or Autumn, and Thoreau found himself much at home there. He was interested not only in the parents, but their boys, one of whom made, long after Thoreau’s death, the admirable bust of him of which I am permitted to use the photograph. He helped them in the alterations of their fishing boat and sailed with them. While Thoreau was visiting this family Mrs. Ricketson, playing on the piano, asked him if he cared for music and whether he sung. “Yes,” he answered, “I am fond of music, and [PAGE 146] when I am in the woods I sometimes sing.” She asked him to sing to the family. He answered, “Oh, I fear if I do I shall take the roof of the house off.” His hostess urged him, and sat down to play the accompaniment, and he sang his favorite “Tom Bowling” with spirit and feeling, giving the full sentiment of the verses.
        Alcott and George William Curtis were both visiting Mr. Ricketson, and interesting discourse had gone on at the dinner, Thoreau talking very well. After dinner, Alcott and Curtis went with Mr. Ricketson to his “Shanty” for serious talk, but the others went into the parlor to consult some bird book. Mrs. Ricketson, playing at her piano, struck into “The Campbells are Coming.” Thoreau put down his book and began to dance—a sylvan dance, as of a faun among rocks and bushes in a sort of labyrinthine fashion, now leaping over obstacles, then advancing with stately strides, returning in curves, then coming back in leaps. Alcott, coming in, stood thunderstruck to see “Thoreau acting his feelings in motion” as he called it. Alcott did not have that kind of feelings. [Back to text]