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

Edward Waldo Emerson

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[PAGE 096] sess a quite dazzling and transcendent beauty which separates them by a wide interval from the cadaverous cod and haddock whose fame is trumpeted in our streets.001 They are not green like the pines, nor gray like the stones, nor blue like the sky; but they have, to my eyes, if possible, yet rarer colours, like flowers and precious stones, as if they were the pearls, the animal nuclei or crystals of the Walden water. They, of course, are Walden all over and all through; are themselves small Waldens in the animal kingdom, Waldenses. It is surprising that they are caught here,—that in this deep and capacious spring, far beneath the rattling teams and chaises and tinkling sleighs that travel the Walden road, this great gold and emerald fish swims. I never chanced to see its kind in any market; it would be the cynosure of all eyes there. Easily, with a few convulsive [PAGE 097] quirks, they give up their watery ghosts, like a mortal translated before his time to the thin air of heaven.”002
            [115] Hear the message of beauty that the telegraph-wire sung for Thoreau’s ears:—
            “As I went under the new telegraph wire, I heard it vibrating like a harp high overhead. It was as the sound of a far-off, glorious life, a supernal life which came down to us and vibrated the latticework of this life of ours,—an Æolian harp.... It seemed to me as if every pore of the wood was filled with music. As I put my ear to one of the posts, it laboured with the strains, as if every fibre was affected, and being seasoned or timed, rearranged according to a new and more harmonious law. Every swell and change and inflection of tone pervaded it, and seemed to proceed from the wood, the divine tree or wood, as if its very substance was transmuted.
[PAGE 098] “What a recipe for preserving wood, to fill its pores with music! How this wild tree from the forest, stripped of its bark and set up here, rejoices to transmit this music. The resounding wood,—how much the ancients would have made of it! To have had a harp on so great a scale, girdling the very earth, and played on by the winds of every latitude and longitude, and that harp were (so to speak) the manifest blessing of Heaven on a work of man’s.”

            [116] It seems well here to introduce some passages shedding light on the relations of four men who, between the years 1835 and 1845, met as dwellers in our village,—though only Thoreau was born there,—all scholars in different ways, who, afterwards, won some fame by their lives and books.
            [117] Two newly married young men came [PAGE 099] to our quiet town to find homes. The shy Hawthorne went to the Manse, temporarily unoccupied by the Ripley family, and the interesting though perverse genius, William Ellery Channing, with his fair young wife (Margaret Fuller’s sister), looking like a Madonna of Raphael’s, took a little house on the broad meadow just beyond Emerson’s.
            [118] Thoreau with friendly courtesy did the honours of the river and the wood to each man in turn, for he held with Emerson that Nature says “One to one, my dear.” Though Channing remained in Concord most of his life, Hawthorne at that time stayed but two years. Thoreau, while a homesick tutor in Staten Island, in a letter to Emerson thus shows that friendship with the new-comers had begun:—
            Dear Friends:—I was very glad to hear your voices from so far.... My thoughts revert to those dear hills and [PAGE 100] that RIVER which so fills up the world to its brim,—worthy to be named with Mincius and Alpheus,—still drinking its meadows while I am far away....
            “I am pleased to think of Channing as an inhabitant of the gray town. Seven cities contended for Homer dead. Tell him to remain at least long enough to establish Concord’s right and interest in him.... And Hawthorne, too, I remember as one with whom I sauntered, in old heroic times, along the banks of the Scamander, amid the ruins of chariots and heroes. Tell him not to desert, even after the tenth year. Others may say, ‘Are there not the cities of Asia?’ But what are they? Staying at home is the heavenly way.”
            [119] In these days when the classics are misprised, the old “humanities” so crowded out by the practical, it is good to observe how this sturdy villager’s life and his [PAGE 101] writing were enriched by his love of Homer, Æschylus, Simonides and Pindar.
            [120] Thoreau and Alcott always had friendly relations, though they were not drawn one to the other. Thoreau, with his hardy independence, was impatient of Alcott’s philosophic calm while failing to comfortably maintain his family. This invalidated his philosophy, of which Thoreau said he “hated a sum that did not prove.” These lean periods occurred when this good man could find no hearing for the spiritual mission, especially to the young, to which he felt himself called.
            [121] Thoreau helped Alcott build the really beautiful summer-house of knotted oak and twisted pine for Mr. Emerson while he was in Europe in 1847–48. He sawed deftly, and drove the nails straight for the philosopher. He was at that time [PAGE 102] living at the house as kindly protector and friend of Mrs. Emerson and the three young children, and attending to his absent friend’s affairs in house, garden, and wood-lot. He wrote to Emerson: “Alcott has heard that I laughed, and set the people laughing at his arbor, though I never laughed louder than when I was on the ridge-pole. But now I have not laughed for a long time, it is so serious. He is very grave to look at. But, not knowing all this, I strove innocently enough, the other day, to engage his attention to my mathematics. ‘Did you ever study geometry, the relation of straight lines to curves, the transition from the finite to the infinite? Fine things about it in Newton and Leibnitz.’ But he would hear none of it,—men of taste preferred the natural curve. Ah, he is a crooked stick himself. He is getting on now so many knots an hour.”
            [122] [PAGE 103] Emerson was a good intermediate, and valued both his friends. Four years later be wrote in his Journal:—
            “I am my own man more than most men, yet the loss of a few persons would be most impoverishing, a few persons who give flesh to what were else mere thoughts, and which now I am not at liberty to slight, or in any manner treat as fictions. It were too much to say that the Platonic world I might have learned to treat as cloud-land, had I not known Alcott, who is a native of that country; yet will I say that he makes it as solid as Massachusetts to me; and Thoreau gives me, in flesh and blood and pertinacious Saxon belief, my own ethics. He is far more real, and daily practically obeying them, than I, and fortifies my memory at all times with an affirmative experience which refuses to be set aside.”
            [123] To go back a little to their first ac- [PAGE 104] quaintance. In 1837, the boy of twenty, just graduated, and his writings, had been brought to Mrs. Emerson’s notice by Mr. Emerson’s sister, Mrs. Brown, who boarded with the Thoreaus. In that year, Mr. Emerson wrote: “My good Henry Thoreau made this else solitary afternoon sunny with his simplicity and clear perception. How comic is simplicity in this double-dealing, quacking world. Everything that boy says makes merry with society, though nothing can be graver than his meaning.”
            [124] Here is a pleasant record of friendship in a letter written to Carlyle in 1841: “One reader and friend of yours dwells now in my house, and, as I hope, for a twelvemonth to come,—­Henry Thoreau,—a poet whom you may one day be proud of,—a noble, manly youth, full of melodies and inventions. We work together day by day in my garden, and I [PAGE 105] grow well and strong.” The little garden which was being planted with fruit-trees and vegetables, with Mrs. Emerson’s tulips and roses from Plymouth at the upper end, needed more care and much more skill to plant and cultivate than the owner had; who, moreover, could only spare a few morning hours to the work. So Thoreau took it in charge for his friend. He dealt also with the chickens, defeating their raids on the garden by asking Mrs. Emerson to make some shoes of thin morocco to stop their scratching.
            [125] This friendly alliance was a success. Emerson wrote: “Though we pine for great men, we do not use them when they come. Here is a Damascus blade of a man, such as you may search through nature in vain to parallel, laid up on a shelf in our village to rust and ruin.”
            [126] Mr. Emerson was chafing at the waste of this youth in the pencil mill, and im- [PAGE 106] patient for his fruiting time, surely to come. And yet he did not quite see that Thoreau was steering a course true to his compass with happy result to his voyage, a course that would for him, Emerson, have been quite unfit. Thus, in 1848, he writes: “Henry Thoreau is like the wood-god who solicits the wandering poet, and draws him into ‘antres vast and desarts idle,’ and leaves him naked, plaiting vines and with twigs in his hand. Very seductive are the first steps from the town to the woods, but the end is want and madness.” The result was not so, and it must be remembered that Emerson recorded one mood or aspect at a time.
            [127] On a luckier day he writes: “Henry is a good substantial childe, not encumbered with himself. He has no troublesome memory, no wake, but lives extempore, and brings to-day a new proposition [PAGE 107] as radical and revolutionary as that of yesterday, but different. The only man of leisure in the town. He is a good Abbot Samson;003
and carries counsel in his breast. If I cannot show his performance much more manifest than that of the other grand promises, at least I can see that with his practical faculty, he has declined all the kingdoms of this world. Satan has no bribe for him.”
            [128] When Thoreau came, rather unwillingly, by invitation to dine with company, it often happened that he was in a captious mood, amusing himself by throwing paradoxes in the way of the smooth current of the conversation. It was like having Pan at a dinner party.004
Even when he “dropped in” to the study at the end of the afternoon, and had told the last news from the river or Fairhaven Hill, Mr. Emerson, at a later period, complained that Thoreau baulked [PAGE 108] his effort “to hold intercourse with his mind.” With all their honour for one another, and their Spartan affection, satisfactory talks then seem to have been rare. But a long afternoon’s ramble with Pan guiding to each sight, or sound, or fragrance, perhaps to be found only on that day, was dear privilege, and celebrated as such by Emerson in his journals.
            [129] But even Pan “took sides” when Liberty was in peril, the Greek tradition tells us,005
and so did his Concord followers. In the dark days of 1853 Mr. Emerson wrote: “I go for those who have received a retaining fee to this party of Freedom before they came into the world. I would trust Garrison, I would trust Henry Thoreau, that they would make no compromises.”
            [130] It is good to know that it has been recorded of Alcott, the benign idealist, [PAGE 109] that when the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson (later, a Colonel in the Northern Army), heading the rush on the United States Court House in Boston to rescue the fugitive slave, looked back for his following at the Court-room door, only the apostolic philosopher was there, cane in hand.
            [131] But Thoreau had qualities which the Platonist lacked. Emerson, writing of Mother-wit, says,—“Doctor Johnson, Milton, Chaucer and Burns had it. Aunt Mary Moody Emerson has it, and can write scrap letters. Who has it need never write anything but scraps. Henry Thoreau has it.”
            [132] When “Walden” appeared Mr. Emerson seems to have felt as much pleasure as if his brother had written it. But when the Thoreau family, after Henry’s death, submitted the journals to his friend’s consideration, he, coming from [PAGE 110] his study, day by day, would tell his children his joyful surprise in the merit and the beauty which he found everywhere in those daily chronicles of Nature and of thought.

            [133] The virtue of Thoreau has always commanded respect; of his knowledge of Natural History, Lowell alone, as far as I know, has spoken slightingly. But his views of life,—when these are referred to, how often it is with a superior smile. True the fault lies partly with Thoreau, that his Scotch pugnacity sometimes betrayed him into rhetorical over-statement and he would not stoop to qualify: thought a maximum dose of bitter-tonic, in the condition of society in his day, would do it no harm. But let us also bethink ourselves before we give final judgment. Might not modesty whisper that some of us, the critics, live on a [PAGE 111] lower plane, and that the point of view made a difference? May not a man on a hill see that his friends below, though apparently on a clear ascending path, will soon come to thickets and ravines, while by taking what looks like a wildcat path to them they will soon reach the height. Have the conduct and words of most poets, prophets, even of the founders of the great religions, been considered sagacious “on ‘Change”?
            [134] When one sees another, helpful and kindly in common relations, sincere and brave in speech, and ever trying to keep the conversation above gossip and triviality; easily earning a simple living by work, humble, but done as if for God’s inspection, yet saving a share of each day for the life to which his instinct and genius lead him, yet, on occasion, leaving it readily to please and help others; able to rise above bitter bereavement; using [PAGE 112] disappointment in early love to purify life; fearless and in good heart in life and in death,—one may well ask, Is Folly behind all this?
            [135] Make allowance for strong statement due to any original, vigorous man, trying to arouse his neighbours from lethargy to freedom and happiness that he believed within their reach, and then, with the perspective of years to help us, look fairly at the main lines of his life and thought, which have been considered so strange and outré.
            [136] Consider the standards of education and religion in New England in Thoreau’s youth,—­the position of the churches, their distrust of the right of the individual to question the words of the Bible as interpreted by the Sects; the horror that Theodore Parker inspired, the shyness of the so-called Pagan Scriptures, the difficulty with which any one [PAGE 113] who spoke for the slave could get a hearing, the ridicule of the so-called Transcendentalists, the general practice of what is now called, “pauperizing Mediæval Charity,” the indignant rejection of Evolution theories, the slight taste for Natural History, and the astonishment that a rich family “camping out” would have excited. Now we have long had intelligent system in schools, and vocational instruction too, and electives in the Universities; we blush to remember the rendition of Sims and Burns,1 John Brown has been almost canonized by some people as the John Baptist of Freedom’s Triumph; the “Dial” is spoken of with respect, the memory of Theodore Parker is honoured in the churches, the “light of Asia” read as a religious work, Mediæval alms-giving, we are told by the Associated Charities, is a sin; the so-called “lower animals” [PAGE 114] have their companions, yea, are practically owned as ancestors; and when a party is found under the greenwood tree no Orlando would say, now,—

            “Whatever you are
That in this desert inaccessible
Under the shade of melancholy boughs
Lose and neglect the creeping hours of Time;
If ever you have looked on better days,
If ever been where bells have knolled to church,” etc.

but, on the contrary, knows that they are trying to preserve or regain their sanity after a season of lecture, party, street-car, and telephone life. “Who laughs last, laughs best.” Was society wrong in his day, or Thoreau?
            [137] This rare and happy venture of Thoreau’s,—bringing his soul face to face with Nature as wondrous artist, as healer, teacher, as mediator between us and the Creator, has slowly spread its wide beneficence. Look at out-of-door life, and love of plant and tree, and sympa- [PAGE 115] thy with animals, now, as compared with these seventy years ago. Yet to-day the inestimable value of frequent solitude is much overlooked.
            [138] He devoutly listened. He writes in his Journal: “If I do not keep step with others, it is because I hear a different drummer. Let a man step to the music which he hears, however measured, and however far away.”
            [139] Again: “If within the old man there is not a young man,—within the sophisticated one, an unsophisticated one,—then he is but one of the Devil’s angels.”
            [140] When we read the poems that have become great classics describing the man, pure, constant and upright; David’s “Lord, who shall abide in Thy tabernacle?” the “Integer Vitæ” of Horace, Sir Henry Wotton’s—

“How happy is he born and taught,
Who serveth not another’s will”;—

[PAGE 116] or Herbert’s “Constancie,”—to one who knew Henry Thoreau well, whose image would more quickly arise than his? Does one need to labor to prove that he had a religion?
            [141] Read his acknowledgment of the sudden coming of spiritual help,—

“It comes in Summer’s broadest noon,
By a grey wall, in some chance place,
Unseasoning time, insulting June,
And vexing day with its presuming face.

“I hearing get, who had but ears,
And sight, who had but eyes before;
I moments live, who lived but years,
And truth discern, who knew but learning’s lore.

“I will not doubt the love untold,
Which not my worth or want hath bought,
Which woed me young, and woes me old,
And to this evening hath me brought.”

            [142] Thoreau was but forty-four years old when he died. Even his health could not throw off a chill got by long stooping in [PAGE 117] a wet snow storm counting the growth-rings on the stumps of some old trees. The family infection became active. He lived a year and a half after this exposure and made a trip to Minnesota in vain for health. For the last months he was confined to the house, he was affectionate, and utterly brave, and worked on his manuscript until the last days. When his neighbour, Reverend Mr. Reynolds, came in he found him so employed, and he looked up cheerfully and, with a twinkle in his eye, whispered—his voice was gone—“you know it’s respectable to leave an estate to one’s friends.”006 His old acquaintance Staples, once his jailor, coming out, meeting Mr. Emerson coming in, reported that he “never saw a man dying with so much pleasure and peace.” To his Calvinistic Aunt who felt obliged to ask, “Henry, have you made your peace with God?” [PAGE 118] —“I did not know we had ever quarrelled, Aunt,” was the pleasant answer.
            [143] His friend and companion, Edward Hoar, said to me, “With Thoreau’s life something went out of Concord woods and fields and river that never will return. He so loved Nature, delighted in her every aspect and seemed to infuse himself into her.” Yes, something went. But our woods and waters will always be different because of this man. Something of him abides and truly “for good” in his town. Here he was born, and within its borders he found a wealth of beauty and interest—all that he asked—and shared it with us all.007
            [144] In his day, as now too, was much twilight, and men were slaves to their fears and to hobgoblins. Taking for his motto,—

“Make courage for life to be Capitaine Chief,”

[PAGE 119] he, with truth and Nature to help him, cut a way through to freedom.

“He looked up to a mountain tract
And saw that every morning, far withdrawn
Beyond the darkness and the cataract,
God made himself an awful rose of Dawn,
Unheeded; yes, for many a month and year
Unheeded ever.”

But not by him. He learned this, he says, by his experiment of a life with Nature simply followed for his guide; that “if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life that he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws will be expanded and interpreted in his favour in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of [PAGE 120] beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
            [145] This man, in his lifetime little known, except outwardly, even in his own town, whose books were returned to him as unsalable, is better known and prized more nearly at his worth each year, and to-day is giving freedom and joy in life to fellowmen in the far parts of this country, and beyond the ocean. Let us not misprize him, and regret that he did not make pencils and money. Something of his strange early prayer was granted. It was this:—

“Great God, I ask thee for no meaner pelf
Than that I may not disappoint myself;
[PAGE 121] That in my action I may soar as high
As I can now discern with this clear eye.
And, next in value which thy kindness lends,
That I may—greatly—disappoint my friends,
Howe’er they think or hope that it may be,
They may not dream how thou’st distinguished me.
That my weak hand may equal my firm faith,
And my life practise more than my tongue saith;
That my low conduct may not show,
Nor my relenting lines,
That I thy purpose did not know
Or overrated thy designs.”008


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NOTES

        001 Page 96, note 1. The fishman, in those days, proclaimed his advent by blasts on a long tin horn, as he drove his covered wagon through the country roads. Only towns near the seashore had fishmarkets. [Back to text]
        002
Page 97, note 1. The pickerel of Walden, now nearly, if not quite, extinct, who lived in that [PAGE 147] pure water supplied by springs at the bottom, were quite different from those of the sluggish and more weedy river, with its darker water. The latter seemed of less delicate lines, and were of a dark, more muddy green, while the Walden pickerel were more silvery, and the green, as I recall it, was very pure, light and iridescent. [Back to text]
        003 Page 107, note 1. Abbot Samson is the hero in Carlyle’s Past and Present. [Back to text]
        004 Page 107, note 2. On my birthday, in the early summer, just before I went to take my examination for Harvard, my father and mother invited Thoreau and Channing, both, but especially Thoreau, friends from my babyhood, to dine with us. When we left the table and were passing into the parlour, Thoreau asked me to come with him to our East door—our more homelike door, facing the orchard. It was an act of affectionate courtesy, for he had divined my suppressed state of mind and remembered that first crisis in his own life, and the wrench that it seemed in advance, as a gate leading out into an untried world. With serious face, but with a very quiet, friendly tone of voice, he reassured me, told me that I should be really close to home; very likely should pass my life in Concord. It was a great relief. [Back to text]
        005 Page 108, note 1. The legend is beautifully given by Browning in his “Pheidippides.” [Back to text]
        006 Page 117, note 1. Mr. Reynolds also told how, [PAGE 148] speaking of Indian arrow-heads, he asked Thoreau if they were not rather hard to find. He said, “Yes, rather hard, but at six cents apiece I could make a comfortable living out of them.”
        Mr. Reynolds added: “Thoreau was one of the pleasantest gentlemen, most social and agreeable, I ever met. When I officiated at his father’s funeral he came over the next evening as a courteous acknowledgment, and spent two hours, and told his Canada story far better than in his book.”
        From his window Thoreau could see the quiet river. Mr. Emerson, coming home from a visit to him during the last weeks of his life, wrote,—
         “Henry praised to me the manners of an old, established, calm, well-behaved river, as distinguished from those of a new river. A new river is a torrent, an old one slow and steadily supplied. What happens in any part of an old river relates to what befals [sic] in every other part of it. ‘T is full of compensations, resources and reserved funds.”
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        007 Page 118, note 1. The news of Thoreau’s death came to Louisa Alcott, then nursing in a military hospital. In the watches of the night, sitting by the cot of a dying soldier, her thoughts wandered back to the happy evenings when Thoreau might bring his flute with him to please the growing girls, when he visited the [PAGE 149] elders; that yellow flute, very melodious in its tone, which his brother John used to play. In these sad surroundings she wrote:—

Thoreau’s Flute

We sighing said, “Our Pan is dead—
His pipe hangs mute beside the river,
Around it friendly moonbeams quiver,
But music’s airy voice is fled.
Spring comes to us in guise forlorn,
The blue-bird chants a requiem,
The willow-blossom waits for him,
The genius of the wood is gone”

Then from the flute, untouched by hands,
There came a low, harmonious breath:
For such as he there is no death.
His life the eternal life commands.
Above men’s aims his nature rose.
The wisdom of a just content
Made one small spot a continent,
And turned to poetry life’s prose

Haunting the hills, the stream, the wild,
Swallow and aster, lake and pine
To him seemed human or divine,
Fit mates for this large-hearted child.
Such homage Nature ne’er forgets;
And yearly on the coverlid
[PAGE 150] ‘Neath which her darling lieth hid
Will write his name in violets.

To him no vain regrets belong
Whose soul, that finer instrument,
Gave to the world no poor lament,
But wood-notes ever sweet and strong.
Oh lonely friend, He still will be
A potent presence, though unseen,
Steadfast, sagacious and serene.
Seek not for him: he is with Thee.
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        008 Page 121, note 1. A month after the death of his friend, Mr. Emerson wrote in his journal:—
            “Henry Thoreau remains erect, calm, self-subsistent before me, and I read him, not only truly in his Journal, but he is not long out of mind when I walk, and, as to-day, row upon the Pond. He chose wisely, no doubt, for himself to be the bachelor of thought and nature that he was—how near to the old monks in their ascetic religion! He had no talent for wealth, and knew how to be poor without the least hint of squalor or inelegance. Perhaps he fell—all of us do—into his way of living without forecasting it much, but approved and confirmed it with later wisdom.”
A little later Thoreau’s family put his Journals into Mr. Emerson’s hands for him to read. Their truth and beauty were a delight to him, and he felt that his friend had fully justified [PAGE 151] himself. He frequently came out of his study to read passages to the family. I find the following in his Journal for 1863:—
            “In reading Henry Thoreau’s journal, I am very sensible of the origin of his constitution. That oaken strength which I noted whenever he walked or worked or surveyed woodlots, the same unhesitating hand with which a field labourer accosts a piece of work, which I should shun as a waste of strength, Henry shows in his literary work. He has muscle and ventures on and performs feats which I am forced to decline. In reading him I find the same thoughts, the same spirit that is in me, but he takes a step beyond and illustrates by excellent images that which I should have conveyed in a sleepy generalization. ‘T is as if I went into a gymnasium and saw youths leap, climb, and swing with a force unapproachable, though their feats are only continuations of my initial grapplings and jumps.”
        The friendship and honour one for the other ran true to the end, in spite of temperamental barriers in communication. Emerson spoke his feeling about his friend at the burial:—
            “The Country knows not yet, or in the least part how great a son it has lost. It seems an injury that he should leave, in the midst, his broken task, which none can finish, a kind of indignity to so noble a soul that he should depart out of Nature before yet he has been really [PAGE 152] shown to his peers for what he is. But he, at least, is content. His soul was made for the noblest society; he had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of this world: wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home.”
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