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Title: Henry D. Thoreau

Author: F. B. Sanborn

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American Men of Letters

HENRY D. THOREAU

Henry D. Thoreau.

American Men of Letters.

HENRY D. THOREAU.

BY

F. B. SANBORN.

REVISED EDITION.

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

The Riverside Press, Cambridge

Copyright, 1882,
By F. B. SANBORN.

All rights reserved.

[Pg v]

[Pg vii]

PREFACE

When, in 1879, I was asked by my friend Charles Dudley Warner to write the biography of Thoreau which follows, I was by no means unprepared. I had known this man of genius for the last seven years of his too short life; had lived in his family, and in the house of his neighbor across the way, Ellery Channing, his most intimate friend outside of that family; and had assisted Channing in the preparation and publication of his "Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist,"—the first full biography which appeared. Not very long after Thoreau's death Channing had written me these sentences, with that insight of the future which he often displayed:

This I was ready to do in 1864; and it was through my means that the volume, then much enlarged by Channing, was published in 1873, and again, with additions and corrections, in 1902.

I had also the great advantage of hearing from the mother and sister of Henry the affectionate side of his domestic life,—which indeed I had witnessed, both in his health and in his long mortal illness. From Emerson, who had a clear view of Thoreau's intellect and his moral nature, I derived many useful suggestions, though not wholly agreeing with him in some of his opinions. In March, 1878, after hearing Emerson read a few unpublished notes on Thoreau, made years before, I called on him one evening, and thus entered the event in my journal:—

Thus far my Journal of 1878.

[Pg xi]

I was myself introduced to Thoreau by Emerson, March 28, 1855, in the Concord Town Hall, one evening, just before a lecture there by Emerson. From that time until Henry's death, May 6, 1862, I saw him every few days, unless he or I was away from Concord, and for more than two years I dined with him daily at his mother's table, in the house opposite to Ellery Channing's. I thus came to know all the surviving members of his kindred,—his eccentric uncle, Charles Dunbar, his two aunts on each side, Jane and Maria Thoreau, and Louisa and Sophia Dunbar (both older than Mrs. Thoreau), and the descendants in Maine of his aunt Mrs. Billings, long since dead. His sister Helen and his brother John I never knew, but learned much about them from their mother and sister; for neither Henry nor his father often spoke of them. Sophia also placed in my hands after Henry's death several of his poems, which I printed in the "Commonwealth," and Emerson gave me other manuscripts of Thoreau which had lodged with him while he was editing the "Dial." He had urged Sophia to leave all the MSS. with me, but her pique against Channing at the[Pg xii] time prevented this,—she knowing him to be intimate with me.

With all this preparation, I received from Mr. Blake, to whom Sophia had bequeathed them in 1876, the correspondence of Thoreau and his college essays, with some other papers of Henry's and his own, but without the replies from the family to Henry's affectionate letters. Even his own to his mother and sisters had been withheld from publication by Emerson in 1865, when a small collection of Thoreau's Letters and Poems was edited by Emerson. This omission Sophia regretted, as she told me; and finding them now in my hands, though I made use of their contents in writing the biography, I withheld them from full publication, foreseeing that I should probably have occasion to edit the letters in full at some later time; and I made but sparing use of the early essays.

On the other hand, I perceived that the character and genius of Thoreau could not be well understood unless some knowledge was had of the Concord farmers, scholars, and citizens, among whom he had spent his days, and who have furnished a background for that scene of authorship which the small town of[Pg xiii] Concord has presented for now more than seventy years. Therefore, having access to the records and biographies of the Concord "Social Circle," then in preparation for the public, and to many other records of the past in New England, I sketched therefrom the character of our interesting community, which gave color and tone to the outlines of this thoughtful scholar's career. But I held back for the "Familiar Letters" the more intimate details of Thoreau's self-devoted life, and did not draw heavily on the thirty-odd volumes of the Journals, to which, at Worcester, Mr. Blake gave me free access. It was then his purpose to bring out these Journals much earlier and more fully than was done, until Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. published their admirable edition in fourteen volumes, a few years ago, after Mr. Blake's death.

The success of my biography, written under these limitations, has more than justified reasonable expectations. It was popular from the first, and is still widely read, and called for by a generation of readers quite distinct from those for whom it was originally written. Since the spring of 1882, when it was published, many details of Thoreau's life[Pg xiv] and that of his ancestors have become known by an examination of his copious manuscripts, of the papers of his Loyalist ancestors, and his father's relatives in the island of Jersey; and by the publication of some twenty-five volumes from Thoreau's own hand. He never employed an amanuensis, and he seems to have carefully preserved the large mass of his manuscripts which accumulated during his literary life of some twenty-five years. The exceptions to this remark were the copies of his earlier verses, which he told me, in his last illness, he had destroyed, because they did not meet Emerson's approval, and those pages of his Journals which he had issued in printed books or magazine articles. Fragments of his youthful verses were kept, however, by some of his family, and still exist. From all these sources many things have come to light concerning his ancestry and the minor events of his life, which I hope eventually to give the world in a final biography that will serve as a sequel to this one. The greatly enhanced reputation which Thoreau now enjoys, as compared with his fame in 1882, seems to warrant a detail which was not then needful, and which even the "Familiar[Pg xv] Letters" does not furnish. Much misconception of his character and the facts of his life still prevails; and singular statements have been made in text-books, as to his origin and training. One authority described Thoreau as descended from "farmer folk" in Connecticut, who were recent immigrants from France. So far as I know, not a single ancestor of his ever dwelt in Connecticut; they were all merchants; and though his Thoreau ancestors spoke French, or a patois of it, in Jersey, there is no evidence that any of them had lived in France for more than five centuries.

This initial authentic biography, with its few errors corrected, now comes forth in a new edition, which will long be found useful, in the manner indicated, and I hope, may be received as the earlier edition has been, with all the favor which its modest aim deserves.

F. B. S.

Concord, Mass., October 8, 1909.

[Pg xvii]

CONTENTS.

[Pg 1]

HENRY D. THOREAU.

CHAPTER I.

BIRTH AND FAMILY.

There died in a city of Maine, on the river Penobscot, late in the year 1881, the last member of a family which had been planted in New England a little more than a hundred years before, by a young tradesman from the English island of Jersey, and had here produced one of the most characteristic American and New English men of genius whom the world has yet seen. This lady, Miss Maria Thoreau, was the last child of John Thoreau, the son of Philip Thoreau and his wife, Marie le Galais, who, a hundred years ago, lived in the parish of St. Helier, in Jersey. This John Thoreau was born in that parish, and baptized there in the Anglican church, in April, 1754; he emigrated to New England about 1773,[Pg 2] and in 1781 married in Boston Miss Jane Burns, the daughter of a Scotchman of some estate in the neighborhood of Stirling Castle, who had emigrated earlier to Massachusetts, and had here married Sarah Orrok, the daughter of David Orrok, a Massachusetts Quaker. Jane (Burns) Thoreau, the granddaughter of David Orrok, and the grandmother of Henry David Thoreau, died in Boston, in 1796, at the age of forty-two. Her husband, John Thoreau, Sr., removed from Boston to Concord, in 1800, lived in a house on the village square, and died there in 1801. His mother, Marie le Galais, outlived him a few weeks, dying at St. Helier, in 1801. Maria Thoreau, granddaughter and namesake of Marie le Galais, died in December, 1881, in Bangor, Maine.

From the recollections of this "aunt Maria," who outlived all her American relatives by the name of Thoreau, Henry Thoreau derived what information he possessed concerning his Jersey ancestors. In his journal for April 21, 1855, he makes this entry:—

These memoranda indicate that the grandfather of Henry Thoreau was the younger son of a family of some substance in Jersey, which had a branch in London and a[Pg 5] grandson in the army that fought under Wellington against Napoleon; that the American Thoreau engaged in trade in Boston, with a partner, and carried on business successfully for years; and that there was the same pleasant family feeling in the English and French Thoreaus that we shall see in their American descendants. Miss Maria Thoreau, in answer to a letter of mine, some years ago, sent me the following particulars of her ancestry, some of which repeat what is above stated by her nephew:—

It would be hard to compress more family history into a short letter, and yet leave it so sprightly in style as this. Of the four children of Maria Thoreau's brother John and Cynthia Dunbar,—John, Helen, Henry, and Sophia,—the two eldest, John and Helen, were said to be "clear Thoreau," and the others, Henry and Sophia, "clear Dunbar;" though in fact the Thoreau traits were marked in Henry also. Let us see, then, who and what were the family of Henry Thoreau's mother, Cynthia Dunbar, who was born in Keene, N. H., in 1787. She was the daughter of Rev. Asa Dunbar,[Pg 9] who was born at Bridgewater, Mass., in 1745; graduated at Harvard College in 1767 (a classmate of Sir Thomas Bernard and Increase Sumner); preached for a while at Bedford, near Concord, in 1769, when he was "a young candidate, newly begun to preach;" settled in Salem in 1772; resigned his pastorate in 1779; and removed to Keene just at the close of the Revolution, where he became a lawyer, and died, a little upwards of forty-two, in 1787. He married before 1775, Miss Mary Jones, the daughter of Col. Elisha Jones, of Weston, a man of wealth and influence in his town, who died in 1776. Mrs. Mary (Jones) Dunbar long outlived the husband of her youth; in middle life she married a Concord farmer, Jonas Minott, whom she also outlived; and it was in his house that her famous grandson was born in July, 1817. Mrs. Minott was left a widow for the second time in 1813, when she was sixty-five years old, and in 1815 she sent a petition to the Grand Lodge of Masons in Massachusetts, which was drawn up and indorsed by her pastor, Dr. Ripley, of Concord, and which contains a short sketch[Pg 10] of Henry Thoreau's maternal grandfather, from whom he is said to have inherited many qualities. Mrs. Minott's petition sets forth "that her first husband, Asa Dunbar, Esq., late of Keene, N. H., was a native of Massachusetts; that he was for a number of years settled in the gospel ministry at Salem; that afterwards he was a counselor-at-law; that he was Master of a Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons at Keene, where he died; that in the cause of Masonry he was interested and active; that through some defection or misfortune of that Lodge she has suffered loss, both on account of what was due to him and to her, at whose house they held their meetings; that in the settlement of the estate of her late husband, Jonas Minott, Esq., late of Concord, she has been peculiarly unfortunate, and become very much straitened in the means of living comfortably; that being thus reduced, and feeling the weight of cares, of years, and of widowhood to be very heavy, after having seen better days, she is induced, by the advice of friends, as well as her own exigencies, to apply for aid to the benevolence and charity of the Masonic[Pg 11] fraternity." At the house of this decayed gentlewoman, about two years after the date of this petition, Henry Thoreau was born. She lived to see him running about, a sprightly boy, and he remembered her with affection. One of his earliest recollections of Concord was of driving in a chaise with his grandmother along the shore of Walden Pond, perhaps on the way to visit her relatives in Weston, and thinking, as he said afterward, that he should like to live there.

Ellery Channing, whose life of his friend Henry is a mine of curious information on a thousand topics, relevant and irrelevant, and who often traversed the "old Virginia road" with Thoreau before the house in which he was born was removed from its green knoll to a spot further east, where it now stands, thus pictures the brown farm-house and its surroundings: "It was a perfect piece of our old New England style of building, with its gray, unpainted boards, its grassy, unfenced door-yard. The house is somewhat isolate and remote from thoroughfares; on the Virginia road, an old-fashioned, winding, at length deserted[Pg 12] pathway, the more smiling for its forked orchards, tumbling walls, and mossy banks. About it are pleasant sunny meadows, deep with their beds of peat, so cheering with its homely, hearth-like fragrance; and in front runs a constant stream through the centre of that great tract sometimes called 'Bedford levels,'—the brook a source of the Shawsheen River." (This is a branch of the Merrimac, as Concord River is, but flows into the main stream through Andover, and not through Billerica and Lowell, as the Concord does.) The road on which it stands, a mile and a half east of the Fitchburg railroad station, and perhaps a mile from Thoreau's grave in the village cemetery, is a by-path from Concord to Lexington, through the little town of Bedford. The farm-house, with its fields and orchard, was a part of Mrs. Minott's "widow's thirds," on which she was living at the date of her grandson's birth (July 12, 1817), and which her son-in-law, John Thoreau, was "carrying on" for her that year.

Mrs. Minott, a few years before Dr. Ripley's petition in her behalf, came near having[Pg 13] a more distinguished son-in-law, Daniel Webster, who, like the young Dunbars, was New Hampshire born, and a year or two older than Mrs. Minott's daughter, Louisa Dunbar. He had passed through Dartmouth College a little in love with two or three of the young ladies of Hanover, and had returned to his native town of Salisbury, N. H., when he met in Boscawen, near by, Miss Louisa, who, like Miss Grace Fletcher, whom he married a few years afterward, was teaching school in one of the New Hampshire towns. Miss Dunbar made an impression on Webster's heart, always susceptible, and, had the fates been propitious, he might have called Henry Thoreau nephew in after years; but the silken tie was broken before it was fairly knit. I suspect that she was the person referred to by one of Webster's biographers, who says, speaking of an incident that occurred in January, 1805: "Mr. Webster, at that time, had no thought of marrying; he had not even met the lady who afterward became his wife. He had been somewhat interested in another lady, who is occasionally referred to in his letters, written after he left college,[Pg 14] but who was not either of those whom he had known at Hanover. But this affair never proceeded very far, and he had entirely dismissed it from his mind before he went to Boston in 1804." In January, 1806, about the time of his father's death, Webster wrote to a college friend, "I am not married, and seriously am inclined to think I never shall be," though he was then a humble suitor to Grace Fletcher.

Louisa Dunbar was a lively, dark-haired, large-eyed, pleasing young lady, who had perhaps been educated in part at Boscawen, where Webster studied for college, and afterwards was a school-teacher there. She received from him those attentions which young men give to young ladies without any very active thoughts of marriage; but he at one time paid special attentions to her, which might have led to matrimony, perhaps, if Webster had not soon after fallen under the sway of a more fascinating school-teacher, Miss Grace Fletcher, of Hopkinton, N. H., whom he first saw at the door of her little school-house in Salisbury, not far from his own birthplace. A Concord matron, a neighbor and friend of the[Pg 15] Dunbars and Thoreaus, heard the romantic story from Webster's own lips forty years afterward, as she was driving with him through the valley of the Assabet: how he was traveling along a New Hampshire road in 1805, stopped at a school-house to ask a question or leave a message, and was met at the door by that vision of beauty and sweetness, Grace Fletcher herself, to whom he yielded his heart at once. From a letter of Webster's to this Concord friend (Mrs. Louisa Cheney) I quote this description of his native region, which has never been printed:—

No doubt the old statesman was thinking, as he wrote, not only of his father, Captain Ebenezer Webster ("with a complexion," said Stark, under whom he fought at Bennington, "that burnt gunpowder could not change"), of his mother and his brethren, but also of Grace Fletcher,—and echoing in his heart the verse of Wordsworth:—

It was no such deep sentiment as this which Louisa Dunbar had inspired in young Webster's breast; but he walked and talked with her, took her to drive in his chaise up and down the New Hampshire hills, and no doubt went with her to church and to prayer-meeting. She once surprised me by confiding to me (as we were talking about Webster in the room where Henry Thoreau[Pg 18] afterwards died, and where there hung then an engraving by Rowse of Webster's magnificent head) "that she regarded Mr. Webster, under Providence, as the means of her conversion." Upon my asking how, she said that, in one of their drives,—perhaps in the spring of 1804,—he had spoken to her so seriously and scripturally on the subject of religion that her conscience was awakened, and she soon after joined the church, of which she continued through life a devout member. Her friendship for Mr. Webster also continued, and in his visits to Concord, which were frequent from 1843 to 1849, he generally called on her, or she was invited to meet him at the house of Mr. Cheney, where, among social and political topics, Webster talked with her of the old days at Boscawen and Salisbury.

Cynthia Dunbar, the mother of Henry Thoreau, was born in Keene, N. H., in 1787, the year that her father died. Her husband, John Thoreau, who was a few months younger than herself, was born in Boston. When Henry Thoreau first visited Keene, in 1850, he made this remark: "Keene Street strikes the traveler[Pg 19] favorably; it is so wide, level, straight, and long. I have heard one of my relatives who was born and bred there [Louisa Dunbar, no doubt] say that you could see a chicken run across it a mile off." His mother hardly lived there long enough to notice the chickens a mile off, but she occasionally visited her native town after her marriage in 1812, and a kinswoman (Mrs. Laura Dunbar Ralston, of Washington, D. C.), now living, says, "I recollect Mrs. Thoreau as a handsome, high-spirited woman, half a head taller than her husband, accomplished, after the manner of those days, with a voice of remarkable power and sweetness in singing." She was fond of dress, and had a weakness, not uncommon in her day, for ribbons, which her austere friend, Miss Mary Emerson (aunt of R. W. Emerson), once endeavored to rebuke in a manner of her own. In 1857, when Mrs. Thoreau was seventy years old, and Miss Emerson eighty-four, the younger lady called on the elder in Concord, wearing bonnet-ribbons of a good length and of a bright color,—perhaps yellow. During the call, in which Henry Thoreau was the subject[Pg 20] of conversation, Miss Emerson kept her eyes shut. As Mrs. Thoreau and her daughter Sophia rose to go, the little old lady said, "Perhaps you noticed, Mrs. Thoreau, that I closed my eyes during your call. I did so because I did not wish to look on the ribbons you are wearing, so unsuitable for a child of God and a person of your years."

In uttering this reproof, Miss Emerson may have had in mind the clerical father of Mrs. Thoreau, Rev. Asa Dunbar, whom she was old enough to remember. He was settled in Salem as the colleague of Rev. Thomas Barnard, after a long contest which led to the separation of the First Church there, and the formation of the Salem North Church in 1772. The parishioners of Mr. Dunbar declared their new minister "admirably qualified for a gospel preacher," and he seems to have proved himself a learned and competent minister. But his health was infirm, and this fact, as one authority says, "soon threw him into the profession of the law, which he honorably pursued for a few years at Keene." Whether he went at once to Keene on leaving[Pg 21] Salem in 1779 does not appear, but he was practicing law there in 1783, and was also a leading Freemason. His diary for a few years of his early life—a faint foreshadowing of his grandson's copious journals—is still in existence, and indicates a gay and genial disposition, such as Mrs. Thoreau had. His only son, Charles Dunbar, who was born in February, 1780, and died in March, 1856, inherited this gaiety of heart, but also that lack of reverence and discipline which is proverbial in New England for "ministers' sons and deacons' daughters." His nephew said of him, "He was born the winter of the great snow, and he died in the winter of another great snow,—a life bounded by great snows." At the time of Henry Thoreau's birth, Mrs. Thoreau's sisters, Louisa and Sarah, and their brother Charles were living in Concord, or not far off, and there Louisa Dunbar died a few years before Mrs. Thoreau. Her brother Charles, who was two years older than Daniel Webster, was a person widely known in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and much celebrated by Thoreau in his journals. At the time of his death, I[Pg 22] find the following curious entries, in Thoreau's journal for April 3, 1856:—

This was the uncle who, as Thoreau said in "Walden," "goes to sleep shaving himself, and is obliged to sprout potatoes in a cellar Sundays in order to keep awake and keep the Sabbath." He was a humorous, ne'er-do-weel character, who, with a little property, no family, and no special regard for his reputation, used to move about from place to place, a privileged jester, athlete, and unprofessional juggler. One of his tricks was to swallow all the knives and forks and some of the plates at the tavern table, and then offer to restore them if the landlord would forgive him the bill. I remember this worthy in his old age, an amusing guest at his brother-in-law's table, where his nephew plied him with questions. We shall find him mentioned again, in[Pg 24] connection with Daniel Webster's friendship for the Dunbar family.

Thoreau's mother had this same incessant and rather malicious liveliness that in Charles Dunbar took the grotesque form above hinted at. She was a kindly, shrewd woman, with traditions of gentility and sentiments of generosity, but with sharp and sudden flashes of gossip and malice, which never quite amounted to ill-nature, but greatly provoked the prim and commonplace respectability that she so often came in contact with. Along with this humorous quality there went also an affectionate earnestness in her relation with those who depended on her, that could not fail to be respected by all who knew the hard conditions that New England life, even in a favored village like Concord, then imposed on the mother of a family, where the outward circumstances were not in keeping with the inward aspiration.

[Pg 25]

Her husband was a grave and silent, but inwardly cheerful and social person, who found no difficulty in giving his wife the lead in all affairs. The small estate he inherited from his father, the first John Thoreau, was lost in trade, or by some youthful indiscretions, of which he had his quiet share; and he then, about 1823, turned his attention to pencil-making, which had by that time become a lucrative business in Concord. He had married in 1812, and he died in 1859. He was a small, deaf, and unobtrusive man, plainly clad, and "minding his own business;" very much in contrast with his wife, who was one of the most unceasing talkers ever seen in Concord. Her gift in speech was proverbial, and wherever she was the conversation fell largely to her share. She fully verified the Oriental legend, which accounts for the greater loquacity of women by the fact that nine baskets of talk were let down from heaven to Adam and Eve in their garden, and that Eve glided forward first and secured six of them. Old Dr. Ripley, a few years before his death, wrote a letter to his son, towards the end of which he said, with[Pg 26] courteous reticence, "I meant to have filled a page with sentiments. But a kind neighbor, Mrs. Thoreau, has been here more than an hour. This letter must go in the mail to-day." Her conversation generally put a stop to other occupations; and when at her table Henry Thoreau's grave talk with others was interrupted by this flow of speech at the other end of the board, he would pause, and wait with entire and courteous silence, until the interruption ceased, and then take up the thread of his own discourse where he had dropped it; bowing to his mother, but without a word of comment on what she had said.

Dr. Ripley was the minister of Concord for half a century, and in his copious manuscripts, still preserved, are records concerning his parishioners of every conceivable kind. He carefully kept even the smallest scrap that he ever wrote, and among his papers I once found a fragment, on one side of which was written a pious meditation, and on the other a certificate to this effect: "Understanding that Mr. John Thoreau, now of Chelmsford, is going into business in that place, and is about to apply for license to[Pg 27] retail ardent spirits, I hereby certify that I have been long acquainted with him, that he has sustained a good character, and now view him as a man of integrity, accustomed to store-keeping, and of correct morals." There is no date, but the time was about 1818. Chelmsford is a town ten miles north of Concord, to which John Thoreau had removed for three years, in the infancy of Henry. From Chelmsford he went to Boston in 1821, but was successful in neither place, and soon returned to Concord, where he gave up trade and engaged in pencil-making, as already mentioned.

From that time, about 1823, till his death in 1859, John Thoreau led a plodding, unambitious, and respectable life in Concord village, educating his children, associating with his neighbors on those terms of equality for which Concord is famous, and keeping clear, in a great degree, of the quarrels, social and political, that agitated the village. Mrs. Thoreau, on the other hand, with her sister Louisa and her sisters-in-law, Sarah, Maria, and Jane Thoreau, took their share in the village bickerings. In 1826, when Dr. Lyman Beecher, then of[Pg 28] Boston, Dr. John Todd, then of Groton, and other Calvinistic divines succeeded in making a schism in Dr. Ripley's parish, and drawing off Trinitarians enough to found a separate church, the Thoreaus generally seceded, along with good old Deacon White, whose loss Dr. Ripley bewailed. This contention was sharply maintained for years, and was followed by the antimasonic and antislavery agitation. In the latter Mrs. Thoreau and her family engaged zealously, and their house remained for years headquarters for the early abolitionists and a place of refuge for fugitive slaves. The atmosphere of earnest purpose, which pervaded the great movement for the emancipation of the slaves, gave to the Thoreau family an elevation of character which was ever afterward perceptible, and imparted an air of dignity to the trivial details of life. By this time, too,—I speak of the years from 1836 onward till the outbreak of the civil war,—the children of Mrs. Thoreau had reached an age and an education which made them noteworthy persons. Helen, the oldest child, born in 1812, was an accomplished teacher. John, the elder son, born in 1814[Pg 29] was one of those lovely and sunny natures which infuse affection in all who come within their range; and Henry, with his peculiar strength and independence of soul, was a marked personage among the few who would give themselves the trouble to understand him. Sophia, the youngest child, born in 1819, had, along with her mother's lively and dramatic turn, a touch of art; and all of them, whatever their accidental position for the time, were superior persons. Living in a town where the ancient forms survived in daily collision or in friendly contact with the new ideas that began to make headway in New England about 1830, the Thoreaus had peculiar opportunities, above their apparent fortunes, but not beyond their easy reach of capacity, for meeting on equal terms the advancing spirit of the period.

The children of the house, as they grew up, all became school-teachers, and each displayed peculiar gifts in that profession. But they were all something more than teachers, and becoming enlisted early in the antislavery cause, or in that broader service of humanity which "plain living and high[Pg 30] thinking" imply, they gradually withdrew from that occupation,—declining the opportunities by which other young persons, situated as they then were, rise to worldly success, and devoting themselves, within limits somewhat narrow, to the pursuit of lofty ideals. The household of which they were loving and thoughtful members (let one be permitted to say who was for a time domesticated there) had, like the best families everywhere, a distinct and individual existence, in which each person counted for something, and was not a mere drop in the broad water-level that American society tends more and more to become. To meet one of the Thoreaus was not the same as to encounter any other person who might happen to cross your path. Life to them was something more than a parade of pretensions, a conflict of ambitions, or an incessant scramble for the common objects of desire. They were fond of climbing to the hill-top, and could look with a broader and kindlier vision than most of us on the commotions of the plain and the mists of the valley. Without wealth, or power, or social prominence, they still held a rank of their[Pg 31] own, in scrupulous independence, and with qualities that put condescension out of the question. They could have applied to themselves, individually, and without hauteur, the motto of the French chevalier:—

They lived their life according to their genius, without the fear of man or of "the world's dread laugh," saying to Fortune what Tennyson sings:—

[Pg 32]

CHAPTER II.

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH.

Concord, the Massachusetts town in which Thoreau was born, is to be distinguished from the newer but larger town of the same name which became the capital of New Hampshire about the time the first American Thoreau made his appearance in "old Concord." The latter, the first inland plantation of the Massachusetts Colony, was bought of the Indians by Major Willard, a Kentish man, and Rev. Peter Bulkeley, a Puritan clergyman from the banks of the Ouse in Bedfordshire, and was settled under their direction in 1635. Mr. Bulkeley, from whom Mr. Emerson and many of the other Concord citizens of Thoreau's day were descended, was the first minister of the town, which then included the present towns of Concord, Acton, Bedford, Carlisle, and Lincoln; and among his parishioners were the ancestors of the principal families[Pg 33] that now inhabit these towns. Concord itself, the centre of this large tract, was thought eligible for settlement because of its great meadows on the Musketaquid or Meadow River. It had been a seat of the Massachusetts Indians, and a powerful Sachem, Tahattawan, lived between its two rivers, where the Assabet falls into the slow-gliding Musketaquid. Thoreau, the best topographer of his birthplace, says:—

From these river-grapes, by seedling[Pg 34] cultivation, a Concord gardener, in Thoreau's manhood, bred and developed the Concord grape, which is now more extensively grown throughout the United States than any other vine, and once adorned, in vineyards large and small, the hillsides over which Thoreau rambled. The uplands are sandy in many places, gravelly and rocky in others, and nearly half the township is now covered, as it has always been, with woods of oak, pine, chestnut, and maple. It is a town of husbandmen, chiefly, with a few mechanics, merchants, and professional men in its villages; a quiet region, favorable to thought, to rambling, and to leisure, as well as to that ceaseless industry by which New England lives and thrives. Its population in 1909 approaches 5,000, but at Thoreau's birth it did not exceed 2,000. There are few great estates in it, and little poverty; the mode of life has generally been plain and simple, and was so in Thoreau's time even more than now. When he was born, and for some years afterward, there was but one church, and the limits of the parish and the township were the same. At that time it was one of the two shire towns of the[Pg 35] great county of Middlesex,—Cambridge, thirteen miles away, being the other. It was therefore a seat of justice and a local centre of trade,—attracting lawyers and merchants to its public square much more than of late years.

Trade in Concord then was very different from what it has been since the railroad began to work its revolutions. In the old days, long lines of teams from the upper country, New Hampshire and Vermont, loaded with the farm products of the interior, stopped nightly at the taverns, especially in the winter, bound for the Boston market, whence they returned with a cargo for their own country. If a thaw came on, or there was bad sleighing in Boston, the drivers, anxious to lighten their loads, would sell and buy in the Concord public square, to the great profit of the numerous traders, whose little shops stood around or near it. Then, too, the hitching-posts in front of the shops had full rows of wagons and chaises from the neighboring towns fastened there all day long; while the owners looked over goods, priced, chaffered, and beat down by the hour together the calicoes,[Pg 36] sheetings, shirtings, kerseymeres, and other articles of domestic need,—bringing in, also, the product of their own farms and looms to sell or exchange. Each "store" kept an assortment of "West India goods," dry goods, hardware, medicines, furniture, boots and shoes, paints, lumber, lime, and the miscellaneous articles of which the village or the farms might have need; not to mention a special trade in New England rum and old Jamaica, hogsheads of which were brought up every week from Boston by teams, and sold or given away by the glass, with an ungrudging hand. A little earlier than the period now mentioned, when Colonel Whiting (father of the late eminent lawyer, Abraham Lincoln's right-hand adviser in the law of emancipation, William Whiting, of Boston) was a lad in Concord village, "there were five stores and three taverns in the middle of the town, where intoxicating liquors were sold by the glass to any and every body; and it was the custom, when a person bought even so little as fifty cents' worth of goods, to offer him a glass of liquor, and it was generally accepted." Such was the town[Pg 37] when John Thoreau, the Jerseyman, came there to die in 1800, and such it remained during the mercantile days of John Thoreau, his son, who was brought up in a house on the public square, and learned the business of buying and selling in the store of Deacon White, close by. Pencil-making, the art by which he earned his modest livelihood during Henry Thoreau's youth, was introduced into Concord about 1812 by William Munroe, whose son has in later years richly endowed the small free library from which Thoreau drew books, and to which he gave some of his own. In this handicraft, which was at times quite profitable, the younger Thoreaus assisted their father from time to time, and Henry acquired great skill in it; even to the extent, says Mr. Emerson, of making as good a pencil as the best English ones. "His friends congratulated him that he had now opened his way to fortune. But he replied that he should never make another pencil. 'Why should I? I would not do again what I have done once.'" Thoreau may have said this, but he afterward changed his mind, for he went on many years, at intervals,[Pg 38] working at his father's business, which in time grew to be mainly the preparation of fine-ground plumbago for electrotyping. This he supplied to various publishers, and among others to the Harpers, for several years. But what he did in this way was incidental, and as an aid to his father, his mother, or his sister Sophia, who herself carried on the business for some time after the death of Henry in 1862. It was the family employment, and must be pursued by somebody.

Perpetuity, indeed, and hereditary transmission of everything that by nature and good sense can be inherited, are among the characteristics of Concord. The Heywood family has been resident in Concord for two hundred and fifty years or so, and in that time has held the office of town clerk, in lineal succession from father to son, for one hundred years at least. The grandson of the first John Heywood filled the office (which is the most responsible in town, and generally accompanied by other official trusts) for eighteen years, beginning in 1731; his son held the place with a slight interregnum for thirteen years; his nephew,[Pg 39] Dr. Abiel Heywood, was town clerk from 1796 to 1834 without a break, and Dr. Heywood's son, Mr. George Heywood, was the town clerk for thirty-odd years after March, 1853.

Of the dozen ministers who, since 1635, have preached in the parish church, five were either Bulkeleys or Emersons, descendants of the first minister, or else connected by marriage with that clerical line; and the young minister who, in the year 1882, accepted the pastorate of Rev. Peter Bulkeley, is a descendant, and bears the same name. Mr. Emerson himself, the great clerk of Concord, which was his lay parish for almost half a century after he ceased to preach in its pulpit, counted among his ancestors four of the Concord pastors, whose united ministry covered a century; while his grandmother's second husband, Dr. Ripley, added a half century more to the family ministry. For this ancestral claim, quite as much as for his gift of wit and eloquence, Mr. Emerson was chosen, in 1835, to commemorate by an oration the two hundredth anniversary of the town settlement. In this discourse he said:—

[Pg 40]

Into such a community Henry Thoreau, a free and just man, was born. Dr. Heywood, above-named, was the first town clerk he remembered, and the one who entered on the records the marriage of his father and mother, and the birth of all the children. He cried the banns of John Thoreau and Cynthia Dunbar in the parish meeting-house; and he was the last clerk who made this Sunday outcry.

He thus proclaimed his own autumnal nuptials in 1822, when he married for the first time at the age of sixty-three. The banns were cried at the opening of the[Pg 41] service, and this compelled the town clerk to be a more regular attendant in the meeting-house than his successors have found necessary. Dr. Heywood's pew was about half-way down the broad aisle, and in full view of the whole congregation, whether in the "floor pews" or "up in the galleries." Wearing his old-fashioned coat and small-clothes, the doctor would rise in his pew, deliberately adjust his spectacles, and look about for a moment, in order to make sure that his audience was prepared; then he made his proclamation with much emphasis of voice and dignity of manner. There was a distinction, however, in the manner of "publishing the banns" of the white and the black citizens; the former being "cried" in the face of the whole congregation, and the latter simply "posted" in the meeting-house porch, as was afterwards the custom for all. Dr. Heywood, from a sense of justice, or some other proper motive, determined on one occasion to "post" a white couple, instead of giving them the full benefit of his sonorous voice; but, either because they missed the éclat of the usual proclamation, or else felt humiliated at being[Pg 42] "posted like niggers in the porch," they brought the town clerk to justice forthwith, and he was forced for once to yield to popular outcry, and join in the outcry himself. After publishing his own banns, and just before the wedding, he for the first time procured a pair of trousers,—having worn knee-breeches up to that time, as Colonel May (the father-in-law of Mr. Alcott) and others had thought it proper to wear them. When Dr. Heywood told his waggish junior, 'Squire Brooks, of the purchase, and inquired how young gentlemen put their trousers on, his legal neighbor advised him that they were generally put on over the head.

Dr. Heywood survived amid "this age loose and all unlaced," as Marvell says, until 1839, having practiced medicine, more or less, in Concord for upward of forty years, and held court there as a local justice for almost as long. Dr. Isaac Hurd, who was his contemporary, practiced in Concord for fifty-four years, and in all sixty-five years; and Dr. Josiah Bartlett, who accompanied and succeeded Dr. Hurd, practiced in Concord nearly fifty-eight years; while the united medical service of himself[Pg 43] and his father, Dr. Josiah Bartlett of Charlestown, was one hundred and two years.

Dr. Bartlett himself was one of the most familiar figures in Concord through Thoreau's life-time, and for fifteen years after. To him have been applied, with more truth, I suspect, than to "Mr. Robert Levet, a Practiser in Physic," those noble lines of Dr. Johnson on his humble friend:—

He said more than once that for fifty years no severity of weather had kept him from visiting his distant patients,—sometimes miles away,—except once, and then the snow was piled so high that his sleigh upset every two rods; and when he unharnessed and mounted his horse, the beast, floundering through a drift, slipped him off over his crupper. He was a master of the horse, and encouraged that proud creature to do his best in speed. One of his neighbors mentioned in his hearing a former horse of Dr. Bartlett's, which was in the habit of[Pg 44] running away. "By faith!" said the doctor (his familiar oath), "I recollect that horse; he was a fine traveler, but I have no remembrance that he ever ran away." When upwards of seventy, he was looking for a new horse. The jockey said, "Doctor, if you were not so old, I have a horse that would suit you." "Hm!" growled the doctor, "don't talk to me about old. Let's see your horse;" and he bought him, and drove him for eight years. He practiced among the poor with no hope of reward, and gave them, besides, his money, his time, and his influence. One day a friend saw him receiving loads of firewood from a shiftless man to whom he had rendered gratuitous service in sickness for twenty years. "Ah, doctor! you are getting some of your back pay." "By faith! no; the fellow is poor, so I paid him for his wood, and let him go."

Dr. Bartlett did not reach Concord quite in season to assist at the birth of Henry Thoreau; but from the time his parents brought him back to his native town from Boston, in 1823, to the day of Sophia Thoreau's death, in 1876, he might have supplied[Pg 45] the needed medical aid to the family, and often did so. The young Henry dwelt in his first tabernacle on the Virginia road but eight months, removing then to a house on the Lexington road, not far from where Mr. Emerson afterwards established his residence, on the edge of Concord village. In the mean time he had been baptized by Dr. Ripley in the parish church, at the age of three months; and his mother boasted that he did not cry. His aunt, Sarah Thoreau, taught him to walk when he was fourteen months old, and before he was sixteen months he removed to Chelmsford, "next to the meeting-house, where they kept the powder, in the garret," as was the custom in many village churches of New England then. Coming back to Concord before he was six years old, he soon began to drive his mother's cow to pasture, barefoot, like other village boys; just as Emerson, when a boy in Boston, a dozen years before, had driven his mother's cow where now the fine streets and halls are. Thoreau, like Emerson, began to go to school in Boston, where he lived for a year or more in Pinckney Street. But he[Pg 46] returned to Concord in 1823, and, except for short visits or long walking excursions, he never left the town again till he died, in 1862. He there went on with his studies in the village schools, and fitted for Harvard College at the "Academy," which 'Squire Hoar, Colonel Whiting, 'Squire Brooks, and other magnates of the town had established about 1820. This private school was generally very well taught, and here Thoreau himself taught for a while in after years. In his boyhood it had become a good place to study Greek, and in 1830, when perhaps Henry Thoreau was one of its pupils, Mr. Charles Emerson, visiting his friends in Concord, wrote thus of what he saw there: "Mr. George Bradford and I attended the Exhibition yesterday at the Academy. We were extremely gratified. To hear little girls saying their Greek grammar and young ladies read Xenophon was a new and very agreeable entertainment." Thoreau must have been beginning his Greek grammar about that time, for he entered college in 1833, and was then proficient in Greek. He must also have gone, as a boy, to the "Concord Lyceum,"[Pg 47] where he afterwards lectured every winter. Concord, as the home of famous lawyers and active politicians, was always a place of resort for political leaders, and Thoreau might have seen and heard there all the celebrated congressmen and governors of Massachusetts, at one time and another. He could remember the visit of Lafayette to Concord in 1824, and the semi-centennial celebration of the Concord Fight in 1825. In 1830 he doubtless looked forward with expectation for the promised lecture of Edward Everett before the Lyceum, concerning which Mr. Everett wrote as follows to Dr. Ripley (November 3, 1830):—

It would hardly occur to a popular lecturer now to apologize because he had delivered his lecture twice before, or to send the copy forward, when he could not himself be there to read it.

Mr. Emerson began to lecture in the Concord Lyceum before 1834, when he came to reside in the town. In October of that year he wrote to Dr. Ripley, declining to give the opening lecture, but offering to speak in the course of the winter, as he did. During its first half century he lectured nearly a hundred times in this Lyceum, reading there, first and last, nearly all the essays he published in his lifetime, and many that have since been printed. Thoreau gave his first lecture there in April, 1838, and afterwards lectured nearly every year for more than twenty years. On one occasion, very early in his public career, when the expected lecturer of the Lyceum failed to[Pg 49] come, as Mr. Everett had failed, but had not been thoughtful enough to send a substitute, Henry Thoreau and Mr. Alcott were pressed into the service, and spoke before the audience in duet, and with opinions extremely heretical,—both being ardent radicals and "come-outers." A few years after this (in 1843), Wendell Phillips made his first appearance before the Concord Lyceum, and spoke in a manner which Thoreau has described in print, and which led to a sharp village controversy, not yet quite forgotten on either side.

But to return to the childhood and youth of Thoreau. When he was three or four years old, at Chelmsford, on being told that he must die, as well as the men in the New England Primer, and having the joys of heaven explained to him, he said, as he came in from "coasting," that he did not want to die and go to heaven, because he could not carry his sled to so fine a place; for, he added, "the boys say it is not shod with iron, and not worth a cent." At the age of ten, says Channing, "he had the firmness of the Indian, and could repress his pathos, and had such seriousness that[Pg 50] he was called 'judge.'" As an example of childish fortitude, it is related that he carried his pet chickens for sale to the tavern-keeper in a basket; whereupon Mr. Wesson told him to 'stop a minute,' and, in order to return the basket promptly, took the darlings out, and wrung their necks, one by one, before the boy's eyes, who wept inwardly, but did not budge. Having a knack at whittling, and being asked by a schoolmate to make him a bow and arrow, young Henry refused, not deigning to give the reason,—that he had no knife. "So through life," says Channing, "he steadily declined trying or pretending to do what he had no means to execute, yet forbore explanations." He was a sturdy and kindly playmate, whose mirthful tricks are yet remembered by those who frolicked with him, and he always abounded with domestic affection. While in college he once asked his mother what profession she would have him choose. She said, pleasantly, "You can buckle on your knapsack, dear, and roam abroad to seek your fortune;" but the thought of leaving home and forsaking Concord made the tears roll down his[Pg 51] cheeks. Then his sister Helen, who was standing by, says Channing, "tenderly put her arm around him and kissed him, saying, 'No, Henry, you shall not go; you shall stay at home and live with us.'" And this, indeed, he did, though he made one or two efforts to seek his fortune for a time elsewhere.

His reading had been wide and constant while at school, and after he entered college at the age of sixteen. His room in Cambridge was in Hollis Hall; his instructors were such as he found there, but in rhetoric he profited much by the keen intelligence of Professor Channing, an uncle of his future friend and biographer, Ellery Channing. I think he also came in contact, while in college, with that singular poet, Jones Very, of Salem. He was by no means unsocial in college, though he did not form such abiding friendships as do many young men. He graduated in 1837. His expenses at Cambridge, which were very moderate, compared with what a poor scholar must now pay to go through college, were paid in part by his father, in part by his aunts and his elder sister, Helen, who[Pg 52] had already begun to teach school; and for the rest he depended on his own efforts and the beneficiary funds of the college, in which he had some little share. I have understood that he received the income of the same modest endowment which had been given to William and Ralph Waldo Emerson when in college, some years before; and in other ways the generous thought of that most princely man, Waldo Emerson, was not idle in his behalf, though he knew Thoreau then only as the studious son of a townsman, who needed a friend at court. What Mr. Emerson wrote to Josiah Quincy, who was then president of Harvard College, in behalf of Henry Thoreau does not appear, except from the terms of old Quincy's reply; but we may infer it. Thoreau had the resource of school-keeping in the country towns, during the college vacation and the extra vacation that a poor scholar could claim; and this brought him, in 1835, to an acquaintance with that elder scholar, Brownson, who afterwards became a Catholic doctor of theology. He left college one winter to teach school at Canton, near Boston, where he was examined by[Pg 53] Rev. Orestes A. Brownson, then a Protestant minister in Canton. He studied German and boarded with Mr. Brownson while he taught the school. In 1836, he records in his journal that he "went to New York with father, peddling." In his senior year, 1836-37, he was ill for a time, and lost rank with his instructors by his indifference to the ordinary college motives for study. This fact, and also that he was a beneficiary of the college, further appears from the letter of President Quincy to Mr. Emerson, as follows:—

It is possible the college faculty may have had other grounds of distrust in Thoreau's case. On May 30, 1836, his classmate Peabody wrote him the following letter from Cambridge,—Thoreau being then at home, for some reason,—from which we may infer that the sober youth was not averse to such deeds as are there related:—

[Pg 55]

The persons named were classmates of Thoreau: one of them afterward Rev. John[Pg 57] Weiss; Wheeler was of Lincoln, and died early in Germany, whither he went to study; Samuel Tenney Hildreth was a brother of Richard Hildreth, the historian, and also died young. The zest with which his classmate related these pranks to Thoreau seems to imply in his correspondent a mind too ready towards such things to please the learned faculty of Cambridge.

Mr. Quincy's letter was in reply to one which Mr. Emerson had written at the request of Mrs. Thoreau, who feared her son was not receiving justice from the college authorities. Thoreau graduated without much distinction, but with a good name among his classmates, and a high reputation for general scholarship. When he went to Maine, in May, 1838, to see if there was not some school for him to teach there, he took with him this certificate from his pastor, Dr. Ripley:—

Accompanying this artless document is a list of clergymen in the towns of Maine,—Portland, Belfast, Camden, Kennebunk, Castine, Ellsworth, etc.,—in the handwriting of the good old pastor, signifying that as young Thoreau traveled he should report himself to these brethren, who might forward his wishes. But even at that early date, I suspect that Thoreau undervalued the "D. D.'s" in comparison with the[Pg 59] "chickadedees," as he plainly declared in his later years. Another certificate, in a firmer hand, and showing no token of impaired eyesight, was also carried by Thoreau in this first visit to Maine. It was this:—

The acquaintance of Mr. Emerson with his young townsman had begun perhaps a year before this date, and had advanced very fast toward intimacy. It originated in this way: A lady connected with Mr. Emerson's family was visiting at Mrs. Thoreau's while Henry was in college, and the conversation turned on a lecture lately read in Concord by Mr. Emerson. Miss Helen Thoreau surprised the visitor by saying, "My brother[Pg 60] Henry has a passage in his diary containing the same things that Mr. Emerson has said." This remark being questioned, the diary was produced, and, sure enough, the thought of the two passages was found to be very similar. The incident being reported to Mr. Emerson, he desired the lady to bring Henry Thoreau to see him, which was soon done, and the intimacy began. It was to this same lady (Mrs. Brown, of Plymouth) that Thoreau addressed one of his earliest poems,—the verses called "Sic Vita," in the "Week on the Concord and Merrimac," commencing:—

These verses were written on a strip of paper inclosing a bunch of violets, gathered in May, 1837, and thrown in at Mrs. Brown's window by the poet-naturalist. They show that he had read George Herbert carefully, at a time when few persons did so, and in other ways they are characteristic of the writer, who was then not quite twenty years old.

It may be interesting to see what old Quincy himself said, in a certificate, about[Pg 61] his stubbornly independent pupil. For the same Maine journey Cambridge furnished the Concord scholar with this document:—

It seems that there was question, at this time, of a school in Alexandria, near Washington (perhaps the Theological Seminary for Episcopalians there), in which young Thoreau might find a place; for on the 12th of April, 1838, President Quincy wrote to him as follows:—

We now know that Thoreau offered himself for the place; and we know that his journey to Maine was fruitless. He did, in fact, teach the town grammar school in Concord for a few weeks in 1837, and in July, 1838, was teaching, at the Parkman house, in Concord. He had already, as we have seen, though not yet twenty-one, appeared as a lecturer before the Concord Lyceum. It is therefore time to consider him as a citizen of Concord, and to exhibit further the character of that town.

[Pg 63]

CHAPTER III.

CONCORD AND ITS FAMOUS PEOPLE.

The Thoreau family was but newly planted in Concord, to which it was alien both by the father's and the mother's side. But this wise town adopts readily the children of other communities that claim its privileges,—and to Henry Thoreau these came by birth. Of all the men of letters that have given Concord a name throughout the world, he is almost the only one who was born there. Emerson was born in Boston, Alcott in Connecticut, Hawthorne in Salem, Channing in Boston, Louisa Alcott in Germantown, and others elsewhere; but Thoreau was native to the soil. And since his genius has been shaped and guided by the personal traits of those among whom he lived, as well as by the hand of God and by the intuitive impulses of his own spirit, it is proper to see what the men of Concord have really been. It is from them we must[Pg 64] judge the character of the town and its civilization, not from those exceptional, imported persons—cultivated men and women,—who may be regarded as at the head of society, and yet may have no representative quality at all. It is not by the few that a New England town is to be judged, but by the many. Yet there were a Few and a Many in Concord, between whom certain distinctions could be drawn, in the face of that general equality which the institutions of New England compel. Life in our new country had not yet been reduced to the ranks of modern civilization—so orderly outward, so full of mutiny within.

It is mentioned by Tacitus, in his life of Agricola, that this noble Roman lived as a child in Marseilles; "a place," he adds, "of Grecian culture and provincial frugality, mingled and well blended." I have thought this felicitous phrase of Tacitus most apposite for Concord as I have known it since 1854, and as Thoreau must have found it from 1830 onward. Its people lived then and since with little display, while learning was held in high regard; and the "plain living and high thinking," which Wordsworth[Pg 65] declared were gone from England, have never been absent from this New England town. It has always been a town of much social equality, and yet of great social and spiritual contrasts. Most of its inhabitants have lived in a plain way for the two centuries and a half that it has been inhabited; but at all times some of them have had important connections with the great world of politics, affairs, and literature. Rev. Peter Bulkeley, the founder and first minister of the town, was a near kinsman of Oliver St. John, Cromwell's solicitor-general, of the same noble English family that, a generation or two later, produced Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, the brilliant, unscrupulous friend of Pope and Swift. Another of the Concord ministers, Rev. John Whiting, was descended, through his grandmother, Elizabeth St. John, wife of Rev. Samuel Whiting, of Lynn, from this same old English family, which, in its long pedigree, counted for ancestors the Norman Conqueror of England and some of his turbulent posterity. He was, says the epitaph over him in the village burying-ground, "a gentleman of singular hospitality and[Pg 66] generosity, who never detracted from the character of any man, and was a universal lover of mankind." In this character some representative gentleman of Concord has stood in every generation since the first settlement of the little town.

The Munroes of Lexington and Concord are descended from a Scotch soldier of Charles II.'s army, captured by Cromwell at the battle of Worcester in 1651, and allowed to go into exile in America. His powerful kinsman, General George Munro, who commanded for Charles at the battle of Worcester, was, at the Restoration, made commander-in-chief for Scotland.

Robert Cumming, father of Dr. John Cumming, a celebrated Concord physician, was one of the followers of the first Pretender in 1715, and when the Scotch rebellion of that year failed, Cumming, with some of his friends, fled to New England, and settled in Concord and the neighboring town of Stow.

Duncan Ingraham, a retired sea-captain, who had enriched himself in the Surinam trade, long lived in Concord, before and after the Revolution, and one of his grandchildren[Pg 67] was Captain Marryatt, the English novelist; another was the American naval captain, Ingraham, who brought away Martin Kosta, a Hungarian refugee, from the clutches of the Austrian government. While Duncan Ingraham was living in Concord, a hundred years ago, a lad from that town, Joseph Perry, who had gone to sea with Paul Jones, became a high naval officer in the service of Catharine of Russia, and wrote to Dr. Ripley from the Crimea in 1786 to inquire what had become of his parents in Concord, whom he had not seen or heard from for many years. The stepson of Duncan Ingraham, Tilly Merrick, of Concord, who graduated at Cambridge in 1773, made the acquaintance of Sir Archibald Campbell, when captured in Boston Harbor, that Scotch officer having visited at the house of Mrs. Ingraham, Merrick's mother, while a prisoner in Concord Jail. A few years later Merrick was himself captured twice on his way to and from Holland and France, whither he went as secretary or attaché to our commissioner, John Adams. The first time he was taken to London; the second time to Halifax,[Pg 68] where, as it happened, Sir Archibald was then in command as Governor of Nova Scotia. Young Merrick went presently to the governor's quarters, but was refused admission by the sentinel,—while parleying with whom, Sir Archibald heard the conversation, and came forward. He at once recognized his Concord friend, greeted him cordially with "How do you do, my little rebel?" and after taking good care of him, in remembrance of his own experience in Concord, procured Merrick's exchange for one of Burgoyne's officers, captured at Saratoga. Returning to America after the war, Tilly Merrick went into an extensive business at Charleston, S. C., with the son of Duncan Ingraham for a partner, and there became the owner of large plantations, worked by slaves, which he afterwards lost through reverses in business. Coming back to Concord in 1798, with the remnants of his South Carolina fortune, and inheriting his mother's Concord estate, he married a lady of the Minott family, and became a country store-keeper in his native town. His daughter, Mrs. Brooks, was for many years the leader of the antislavery[Pg 69] party in Concord, and a close friend of the Thoreaus, who at one time lived next door to her hospitable house.

Soon after Mr. Emerson fixed his home in Concord, in 1834, a new bond of connection between the town and the great world outside this happy valley began to appear,—the genius of that man whose like has not been seen in America, nor in the whole world in our century:—

This genius, in one point of view so solitary, but in another so universal and social, soon made itself felt as an attractive force, and Concord became a place of pilgrimage, as it has remained for so many years since. When Theodore Parker left Divinity Hall, at Cambridge, in 1836, and began to preach in Unitarian pulpits, he fixed his hopes on Concord as a parish, chiefly because Emerson[Pg 70] was living there. It is said that he might have been called as a colleague for Dr. Ripley, if it had not been thought his sermons were too learned for the Christians of the Nine-Acre Corner and other outlying hamlets of the town. In 1835-36 Mr. Alcott began to visit Mr. Emerson in Concord, and in 1840 he went there to live. Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Peabody, coadjutors of Mr. Alcott in his Boston school, had already found their way to Concord, where Margaret at intervals resided, or came and went in her sibylline way. Ellery Channing, one of the nephews of Dr. Channing, the divine, took his bride, a sister of Margaret Fuller, to Concord in 1843; and Hawthorne removed thither, upon his marriage with Miss Peabody's sister Sophia, in 1842. After noticing what went on about him for a few years, in his seclusion at the Old Manse, Hawthorne thus described the attraction of Concord, in 1845:

The picture here painted still continued to be true until long after the death of Thoreau; and the attraction was increased at times by the presence in the village of Hawthorne himself, of Alcott, and of others who made Concord their home or their haunt. Thoreau also was resorted to by pilgrims, who came sometimes from long distances and at long intervals, to see and talk with him.

[Pg 72]

There was in the village, too, a consular man, for many years the first citizen of Concord,—Samuel Hoar,—who made himself known abroad by sheer force of character and "plain heroic magnitude of mind." It was of him that Emerson said, at his death in November, 1856,—

In his house and in a few others along the elm-planted street, you might meet at any time other persons of distinction, beauty, or wit,—such as now and then glance through the shining halls of cities, and, in great centres of the world's civilization, like London or Paris, muster

[Pg 73]

"In solemn troops and sweet societies,"

which are the ideal of poets and fair women, and the envy of all who aspire to social eminence. Thoreau knew the worth of this luxury, too, though, as a friend said of him, "a story from a fisher or hunter was better to him than an evening of triviality in shining parlors, where he was misunderstood."

There were not many such parlors in Concord, but there was and had constantly been in the town a learned and social element, such as gathers in an old New England village of some wealth and inherited culture. At the head of this circle—which fell off on one side into something like fashion and mere amusement, on another into the activity of trade or politics, and rose, among the women especially, into art and literature and religion—stood, in Thoreau's boyhood and youth, a grave figure, yet with something droll about him,—the parish minister and county Nestor, Dr. Ezra Ripley, who lived and died in the "Old Manse."

Dr. Ripley was born in 1751, in Woodstock, Conn., the same town in which Dr. Abiel Holmes, the father of the poet Holmes, was born. He entered Harvard[Pg 74] College in 1772, came with the students to Concord in 1775, when the college buildings at Cambridge were occupied by Washington and his army, besieging Boston, and graduated in 1776. Among his classmates were Governor Gore, Samuel Sewall, the second chief-justice of Massachusetts of that name, and Royal Tyler, the witty chief-justice of Vermont. Governor Gore used to say that in college he was called "Holy Ripley," from his devout character. He settled in Concord in 1778, and at the age of twenty-nine married the widow of his last predecessor, Rev. William Emerson (and the daughter of his next predecessor, Rev. Daniel Bliss), who was at their marriage ten years older than her husband, and had a family of five children. Dr. Ripley's own children were three in number: the Reverend Samuel Ripley, born May 11, 1783; Daniel Bliss Ripley, born August 1, 1784; and Miss Sarah Ripley, born August 8, 1789. When this daughter died, not long after her mother, in 1826, breaking, says Mr. Emerson, "the last tie of blood which bound me and my brothers to his house," Dr. Ripley said to Mr. Emerson, "I wish[Pg 75] you and your brothers to come to this house as you have always done. You will not like to be excluded; I shall not like to be neglected." He died himself in September, 1841.

Of Dr. Ripley countless anecdotes are told in his parish, and he was the best remembered person, except Thoreau himself, who had died in Concord, till Emerson; just as his house, described so finely by Hawthorne in his "Mosses," is still the best known house in Concord. It was for a time the home of Mr. Emerson, and there, it is said, he wrote his first book, "Nature," concerning which, when it came out anonymously, the question was asked, "Who is the author of 'Nature'?" The reply was, of course, "God and Ralph Waldo Emerson." The Old Manse was built about 1766 for Mr. Emerson's grandfather, then minister of the parish, and into it he brought his bride, Miss Phebe Bliss (daughter of Rev. Daniel Bliss, of Concord, and Phebe Walker, of Connecticut). Miss Mary Emerson, youngest child of this marriage, used to say "she was in arms at the battle of Concord," because her mother held her up,[Pg 76] then two years old, to see the soldiers from her window; and from his study window her father saw the fight at the bridge. It was the scene of many of the anecdotes, told of Dr. Ripley, some of which, gathered from various sources, may here be given; it was also, after his death, one of the resorts of Thoreau, of Margaret Fuller, of Ellery Channing, of Dr. Hedge, and of the Transcendentalists in general. His parishioners to this day associate Dr. Ripley's form "with whatever was grave and droll in the old, cold, unpainted, uncarpeted, square-pewed meeting-house, with its four iron-gray deacons in their little box under the pulpit; with Watts's hymns; with long prayers, rich with the diction of ages; and, not less, with the report like musketry from the movable seats."[1] One of these "iron-gray deacons," Francis Jarvis, used to visit the Old Manse with his children on Sunday evenings, and his son, Dr. Edward Jarvis, thus describes another side of Dr. Ripley's pastoral character:—

[Pg 77]

According to Mr. Emerson, Dr. Ripley was "a natural gentleman; no dandy, but courtly, hospitable, and public spirited; his[Pg 78] house open to all men." An old farmer who used to travel thitherward from Maine, where Dr. Ripley had a brother settled in the ministry, used to say that "no horse from the Eastern country would go by the doctor's gate." It was one of the listeners at his Sunday evening levees, no doubt, who said (at the time when Dr. Ripley was preparing for his first and last journey to Baltimore and Washington, in the presidency of the younger Adams) "that a man who could tell a story so well was company for kings and for John Quincy Adams."

When P. M., after his release from the State Prison, had the effrontery to call on Dr. Ripley, as an old acquaintance, as they were talking together on general matters, his young colleague, Rev. Mr. Frost, came in. The doctor presently said, "Mr. M., my brother and colleague, Mr. Frost, has come to take tea with me. I regret very much the causes (very well known to you), which make it impossible for me to ask you to stay and break bread with us." Mr. Emerson, his grandson (by Dr. Ripley's marriage with the widow of Rev. William Emerson) relates that he once went to a[Pg 79] funeral with Dr. Ripley, and heard him address the mourners. As they approached the farm-house the old minister said that the eldest son, who was now to succeed the deceased father of a family in his place as a Concord yeoman, was in some danger of becoming intemperate. In his remarks to this son, he presently said,—

He took Mr. Emerson about with him in his chaise when a boy, and in passing each house he would tell the story of its family, dwelling especially on the nine church-members who had made a division in the church in the time of his predecessor; every one of the nine having come to bad fortune or a bad end. "The late Dr. Gardiner,"[Pg 80] says Mr. Emerson, "in a funeral sermon on some parishioner, whose virtues did not readily come to mind, honestly said, 'He was good at fires.' Dr. Ripley had many virtues, and yet, even in his old age, if the firebell was rung, he was instantly on horseback, with his buckets and bag." He had even some willingness, perhaps not equal to the zeal of the Hindoo saint, to extinguish the Orthodox fires of hell, which had long blazed in New England,—so that men might worship God with less fear. But he had small sympathy with the Transcendentalists when they began to appear in Concord. When Mr. Emerson took his friend Mr. Alcott to see the old doctor, he gave him warning that his brilliant young kinsman was not quite sound in the faith, and bore testimony in particular against a sect of his own naming, called "Egomites" (from ego and mitto), who "sent themselves" on the Lord's errands without any due call thereto. Dr. Channing viewed the "apostles of the newness" with more favor, and could pardon something to the spirit of liberty which was strong in them. The occasional correspondence between the Concord shepherd of[Pg 81] his people and the great Unitarian preacher is full of interest. In February, 1839, when he was eighty-eight years old and weighed down with infirmities, he could still lift up his voice in testimony. He then wrote to Dr. Channing:—

Six years earlier, Dr. Channing had written to Dr. Ripley almost as if replying to some compliment like this, and expressed[Pg 82] himself thus, in a letter dated January 22, 1833,—

Dr. Ripley's prayers were precise and undoubting in their appeal for present providences.[Pg 83] He prayed for rain and against the lightning, "that it may not lick up our spirits;" he blessed the Lord for exemption from sickness and insanity,—"that we have not been tossed to and fro until the dawning of the day, that we have not been a terror to ourselves and to others." One memorable occasion, in the later years of his pastorate, when he had consented to take a young colleague, is often remembered in his parish, now fifty years after its date. The town was suffering from drought, and the farmers from Barrett's Mill, Bateman's Pond, and the Nine-Acre Corner had asked the minister to pray for rain. Mr. Goodwin (the father of Professor Goodwin, of Harvard University) had omitted to do this in his morning service, and at the noon intermission Dr. Ripley was reminded of the emergency by the afflicted farmers. He told them courteously that Mr. Goodwin's garden lay on the river, and perhaps he had not noticed how parched the uplands were; but he entered the pulpit that afternoon with an air of resolution and command. Mr. Goodwin, as usual, offered to relieve the doctor of the duty of leading in prayer,[Pg 84] but the old shepherd, as Mr. Emerson says, "rejected his offer with some humor, and with an air that said to all the congregation, 'This is no time for you young Cambridge men; the affair, sir, is getting serious; I will pray myself.'" He did so, and with unusual fervor demanded rain for the languishing corn and the dry grass of the field. As the story goes, the afternoon opened fair and hot, but before the dwellers in Nine-Acre Corner and the North Quarter reached their homes a pouring shower rewarded the gray-haired suppliant, and reminded Concord that the righteous are not forsaken. Another of Mr. Emerson's anecdotes bears on this point:—

In his later years Dr. Ripley was much[Pg 85] distressed by a schism in his church, which drew off to a Trinitarian congregation several of his oldest friends and parishioners. Among the younger members who thus seceded, seventy years ago, were the maiden aunts of Thoreau, Jane and Maria,—the last of whom, and the last of the name in America, has died recently, as already mentioned. Thoreau seceded later, but not to the "Orthodox" church,—as much against the wish of Dr. Ripley, however, as if he had. In later years, Thoreau's church (of the Sunday Walkers) was recognized in the village gossip; so that when I first spent Sunday in Concord, and asked my landlord what churches there were, he replied, "The Unitarian, the Orthodox, and the Walden Pond Association." To the latter he professed to belong, and said its services consisted in walking on Sunday in the Walden woods. Dr. Ripley would have viewed such rites with horror, but they have now become common. His Old Manse, which from 1842 to 1846 was occupied by Hawthorne, was for twenty years (1847-1867) the home of Mrs. Sarah Ripley, that sweet and learned lady, and has since been the[Pg 86] dwelling-place of her children, the grandchildren of Dr. Ripley. Near by stands now the statue of the Concord Minute-Man of 1775, marking the spot to which the Middlesex farmers came

"In sloven dress and broken rank,"

and where they stood when in unconscious heroism they

"Fired the shot heard round the world,"

and drove back the invading visitor from their doorsteps and cornfields.

Dr. Ripley, however, seldom repelled a visitor or an invader, unless he came from too recent an experience in the state prison, or offered to "break out" his path on a Sunday, when he had fancied himself too much snow-bound to go forth to his pulpit. The anecdote is characteristic, if not wholly authentic. One Sunday, after a severe snow-storm, his neighbor, the great farmer on Ponkawtassett Hill, half a mile to the northward of the Old Manse, turned out his ox-teams and all his men and neighbors to break a path to the meeting-house and the tavern. Wallowing through the drifts, they had got as far as Dr. Ripley's gate,[Pg 87] while the good parson, snugly blocked in by a drift completely filling his avenue of ash-trees, thought of nothing less than of going out to preach that day. The long team of oxen, with much shouting and stammering from the red-faced farmer, was turned out of the road and headed up the avenue, when Dr. Ripley, coming to his parsonage door, and commanding silence, began to berate Captain B. for breaking the Sabbath and the roads at one stroke,—implying, if not asserting, that he did it to save time and oxen for his Monday's work. Angered at the ingratitude of his minister, the stammering farmer turned the ten yoke of cattle round in the doctor's garden, and drove on to the village, leaving the parson to shovel himself out and get to meeting the best way he could. Meanwhile, the teamsters sat in the warm bar-room at the tavern, and cheered themselves with punch, flip, grog, and toddy, instead of going to hear Dr. Ripley hold forth; and when he had returned to his parsonage they paraded their oxen and sleds back again, past his gate, with much more shouting than at first. This led to a long quarrel between[Pg 88] minister and parishioner, in course of which, one day, as the doctor halted his chaise in front of the farmer's house on the hill, the stammering captain came forward, a peck measure in his hand, with which he had been giving his oxen their meal, and began to renew the unutterable grievance. Waxing warm, as the doctor admonished him afresh, he smote with his wooden measure on the shafts of the chaise, until his gentle wife, rushing forth, called on the neighbors to stop the fight which she fancied was going on between the charioteer of the Lord and the foot-soldier.

Despite these outbursts, and his habitual way of looking at all things "from the parochial point of view," as Emerson said of him, he was also a courteous and liberal-minded man, as the best anecdotes of him constantly prove. He was the sovereign of his people, managing the church, the schools, the society meetings, and, for a time, the Lyceum, as he thought fit. The lecturers, as well as the young candidates for school-keeping—Theodore Parker, Edward Everett, and the rest—addressed themselves to him, and when he met Webster, then the[Pg 89] great man of Massachusetts, it was on equal terms.

Daniel Webster was never a lyceum lecturer in Concord, and he did not often try cases there, but was sometimes consulted in causes of some pecuniary magnitude. When Humphrey Barrett died (whose management of his nephew's estate will be mentioned in the next chapter), his heir by will (a young man without property, until he should inherit the large estate bequeathed him), found it necessary to employ counsel against the heirs-at-law, who sought to break the will. His attorney went to Mr. Webster in Boston and related the facts, adding that his client could not then pay a large fee, but might, if the cause were gained, as Mr. Webster thought it would be. "You may give me one hundred dollars as a retainer," said Webster, "and tell the young man, from me, that when I win his case I shall send him a bill that will make his hair stand on end." It so happened, however, that Webster was sent to the Senate, and the case was won by his partner.

In the summer of 1843, while Thoreau[Pg 90] was living at Staten Island, Webster visited Concord to try an important case in the county court, which then held sessions there. This was the "Wyman Trial," long famous in local traditions, Webster and Choate being both engaged in the case, and along with them Mr. Franklin Dexter and Mr. Rockwood Hoar, the latter a young lawyer, who had been practicing in the Middlesex courts for a few years, where his father, Mr. Samuel Hoar, was the leader of the bar. Judge Allen (Charles Allen of Worcester) held the court, and the eminent array of counsel just named was for the defense.

The occasion was a brilliant one, and made a great and lasting sensation in the village. Mr. Webster and his friends were entertained at the houses of the chief men of Concord, and the villagers crowded the court-house to hear the arguments and the colloquies between the counsel and the court. Webster was suffering from his usual summer annoyance, the "hay catarrh," or "rose cold," which he humorously described afterward in a letter to a friend in Concord:—

[Pg 91]

Notwithstanding this affliction, Mr. Webster made himself agreeable to the ladies of Concord, old and young, and even the little girls, like Louisa Alcott, went to the courthouse to see and hear him. He was present at a large tea-party given by Mrs. R. W.[Pg 92] Emerson in his honor, and he renewed his old acquaintance with the Dunbars and Thoreaus. Mr. Emerson, writing to Thoreau September 8, 1843, said, briefly, "You will have heard of our 'Wyman Trial,' and the stir it made in the village. But the Cliff and Walden, which know something of the railroad, knew nothing of that; not a leaf nodded; not a pebble fell;—why should I speak of it to you?" Thoreau was indeed interested in it, and in the striking personality of Webster. To his mother he wrote from Staten Island (August 29, 1843):—

This uncle was Charles Dunbar, of course, who was in fact two years older than Webster, and, like him, a New Hampshire man. He and his sisters—the mother and the aunt of Henry Thoreau—had known Webster in his youth, when he was a poor young lawyer in New Hampshire; and the acquaintance was kept up from time to time as the years brought them together. Whenever Webster passed a day in Concord, as he did nearly every year from 1843 to 1850, he would either call on Miss Dunbar, or she would meet him at tea in the house of Mr. Cheney, a college classmate of Mr. Emerson, whom he usually visited; and whose garden was a lovely plot, ornamented[Pg 94] with great elm trees, on the bank of the Musketaquid. Mrs. Thoreau was often included in these friendly visits; and it was of this family, as well as of the Emersons, Hoars, and Brookses, no doubt, that Webster was thinking when he sadly wrote to Mrs. Cheney his last letter, less than a year before his death in 1852. In this note, dated at Washington, November 1, 1851, when he was Secretary of State under Fillmore, Mr. Webster said:—

[Pg 95]

He never came; for in June, 1852, the Whig convention at Baltimore rejected his name as a Presidential candidate, and he went home to Marshfield to die. The tone of sadness in this note was due, in part, perhaps, to the eloquent denunciation of Webster by Mr. Emerson in a speech at Cambridge in 1851, and to the unequivocal aversion with which Webster's contemporary, the first citizen of Concord, Samuel Hoar, spoke of his 7th of March speech, and the whole policy with which Webster had identified himself in those dreary last years of his life. Mr. Hoar had been sent by his State in 1846 to protest in South Carolina against the unconstitutional imprisonment at Charleston of colored seamen from Massachusetts; and he had been driven by force from the State to which he went as an envoy. But, although Webster knew the gross indignity of the act, and introduced into his written speech in March, 1850, a denunciation of it, he did not speak this out in the Senate, nor did it appear in all the authorized editions of the speech. He could hardly expect Mr. Hoar to welcome him in Concord after he had uttered his[Pg 96] willingness to return fugitive slaves, but forgot to claim reparation for so shameful an affront to Massachusetts as the Concord Cato had endured.

Mr. Webster was attached to Concord—as most persons are who have ever spent pleasant days there—and used to compliment his friend on his house and garden by the river side. Looking out upon his great trees from the dining-room window, he once said: "I am in the terrestrial paradise, and I will prove it to you by this. America is the finest continent on the globe, the United States the finest country in America, Massachusetts the best State in the Union, Concord the best town in Massachusetts, and my friend Cheney's field the best acre in Concord." This was an opinion so like that often expressed by Henry Thoreau, that one is struck by it. Indeed, the devotion of Thoreau to his native town was so marked as to provoke opposition. "Henry talks about Nature," said Madam Hoar (the mother of Senator Hoar, and daughter of Roger Sherman of Connecticut), "just as if she'd been born and brought up in Concord."

[Pg 97]

CHAPTER IV.

THE EMBATTLED FARMERS.

It was not the famous lawyers, the godly ministers, the wealthy citizens, nor even the learned ladies of Concord, who interested Henry Thoreau specially,—but the sturdy farmers, each on his hereditary acres, battling with the elements and enjoying that open-air life which to Thoreau was the only existence worth having. As his best biographer, Ellery Channing, says: "He came to see the inside of every farmer's house and head, his pot of beans, and mug of hard cider. Never in too much hurry for a dish of gossip, he could sit out the oldest frequenter of the bar-room, and was alive from top to toe with curiosity."

Concord, in our day, and still more in Thoreau's childhood, was dotted with frequent old farm-houses, of the ample and picturesque kind that bespeaks antiquity and hospitality. In one such he was born,[Pg 98] though not one of the oldest or the best. He was present at the downfall of several of these ancient homesteads, in whose date and in the fortunes of their owners for successive generations, he took a deep interest; and still more in their abandoned orchards and door-yards, where the wild apple tree and the vivacious lilac still flourished.

To show what sort of men these Concord farmers were in the days when their historical shot was fired, let me give some anecdotes and particulars concerning two of the original family stocks,—the Hosmers, who first settled in Concord in 1635, with Bulkeley and Willard, the founders of the town; and the Barretts, whose first ancestor, Humphrey Barrett, came over in 1639. James Hosmer, a clothier from Hawkhurst in Kent, with his wife Ann (related to Major Simon Willard, that stout Kentishman, Indian trader and Indian fighter, who bought of the Squaw Sachem the township of Concord, six miles square), two infant daughters, and two maid-servants, came from London to Boston in the ship "Elizabeth," and the next year built a house on Concord Street, and a mill on the town brook.[Pg 99] From him descended James Hosmer, who was killed at Sudbury in 1658, in an Indian fight, Stephen, his great-grandson, a famous surveyor, and Joseph, his great-great-grandson, one of the promoters of the Revolution, who had a share in its first fight at Concord Bridge. Joseph Hosmer was the son of a Concord farmer, who, in 1743, seceded from the parish church, because Rev. Daniel Bliss, the pastor, had said in a sermon (as his opponents averred), "that it was as great a sin for a man to get an estate by honest labor, if he had not a single aim at the glory of God, as to get it by gaming at cards or dice." What this great-grandfather of Emerson did say, a century before the Transcendental epoch, was this, as he declared: "If husbandmen plow and sow that they may be rich, and live in the pleasures of this world, and appear grand before men, they are as far from true religion in their plowing, sowing, etc., as men are that game for the same purpose." Thomas Hosmer, being a prosperous husbandman, perhaps with a turn for display, took offense, and became a worshipper at what was called the "Black Horse Church,"—a seceding[Pg 100] conventicle which met at the tavern with the sign of the Black Horse, near where the Concord Library now stands. Joseph Hosmer, his boy, was known at the village school as "the little black colt,"—a lad of adventurous spirit, with dark eyes and light hair, whose mother, Prudence Hosmer, would repeat old English poetry until all her listeners but her son were weary. When he was thirty-nine years old, married and settled, a farmer and cabinet-maker, there was a convention in the parish church to consider the Boston Port Bill, the doings of General Gage in Boston, and the advice of Samuel Adams and John Hancock to resist oppression. Daniel Bliss, the leading lawyer and leading Tory in Concord, eldest son of Parson Bliss, and son-in-law of Colonel Murray, of Rutland, Vt., the chief Tory of that region, made a speech in this convention against the patriotic party. He was a graceful and fluent speaker, a handsome man, witty, sarcastic, and popular, but with much scorn for the plain people. He painted in effective colors the power of the mother country and the feebleness of the colonies; he was elegantly dressed,[Pg 101] friendly in his manner, but discouraging to the popular heart, and when he sat down, a deep gloom seemed to settle on the assembly. His brother-in-law, Parson Emerson, an ardent patriot, if present, was silent. From a corner of the meeting-house there rose at last a man with sparkling eyes, plainly dressed in butternut brown, who began to speak in reply to the handsome young Tory, at first slowly and with hesitation, but soon taking fire at his own thoughts, he spoke fluently, in a strain of natural eloquence, which gained him the ear and applause of the assembly. A delegate from Worcester, who sat near Mr. Bliss, noticed that the Tory was discomposed, biting his lip, frowning, and pounding with the heel of his silver-buckled shoe. "Who is the speaker?" he asked of Bliss. "Hosmer, a Concord mechanic," was the scornful reply. "Then how does he come by his English?" "Oh, he has an old mother at home, who sits in her chimney-corner and reads and repeats poetry all day long;" adding in a moment, "He is the most dangerous rebel in Concord, for he has all the young men at his back, and[Pg 102] where he leads the way they will surely follow."

Four months later, in April, 1775, this Concord mechanic made good the words of his Tory townsman, for it was his speech to the minute-men which goaded them on to the fight. After forming the regiment as adjutant, he addressed them, closing with these words: "I have often heard it said that the British boasted they could march through our country, laying waste every village and neighborhood, and that we would not dare oppose them,—and I begin to believe it is true." Then turning to Major Buttrick, who commanded, and looking off from the hill-side to the village, from which a thick smoke was rising, he cried, "Will you let them burn the town down?" whereupon the sturdy major, who had no such intention, ordered his men to march; and when, a few minutes later, the British fired on his column of companies, the Acton men at the head, he sprang from the ground shouting, "Fire, fellow-soldiers, for God's sake fire!" and discharged his own piece at the same instant. The story has often been told, but will bear repetition. Thoreau[Pg 103] heard it in 1835 from the lips of Emerson, as he pronounced the centennial discourse in honor of the town's settlement and history; but he had read it and heard it a hundred times before, from his earliest childhood. Mr. Emerson added, after describing the fight:—

Humphrey Barrett, fifth in descent from the original settler, was born in 1752, on the farm his ancestors had owned ever since 1640, and was no doubt in arms at Concord Fight in 1775. His biographer says:—

[Pg 104]

The biographer of Mr. Barrett, who was also his attorney and legal adviser, goes on to say:—

Conceive a community in which such characters were common, and imagine whether the claim of King George and the fine gentlemen about him, to tax the Americans without their own consent would be likely to succeed! I find in obscure anecdotes like this sufficient evidence that if John Hampden had emigrated to Massachusetts when he had it in mind, he would have found[Pg 108] men like himself tilling their own acres in Concord. The Barretts, from their name, may have been Normans, but, like Hampden, the Hosmers were Saxons, and held land in England before William the Conqueror. When Major Hosmer, who was adjutant, and formed the line of the regiment that returned the British fire at Concord Bridge, had an estate to settle about 1785, the heir to which was supposed to be in England, he employed an agent, who was then visiting London, to notify the heir, and also desired him to go to the Heralds' Office and ascertain what coat-of-arms belonged to any branch of the Hosmer family. When the agent (who may have been Mr. Tilly Merrick, of Concord, John Adams's attaché in Holland), returned to America, after reporting his more important business to Major Hosmer, he added,—

[Pg 109]

If Major Hosmer's ancestors failed to drive back the invaders then, their descendants made good the failure in Concord seven centuries later.

Thoreau's favorite walk, as he tells us,—the pathway toward Heaven,—was along the old Marlborough road, west and southwest from Concord village, through deep woods in Concord and in Sudbury. To reach this road he passed by the great Hosmer farm-house, built by the old major already mentioned, in 1760 or thereabout, and concerning which there is a pretty legend that Thoreau may have taken with him along the Marlborough road. In 1758, young Jo. Hosmer, "the little black colt," drove to Marlborough one autumn day with a load of furniture he had made for Jonathan Barnes, a rich farmer, and town clerk in thrifty Marlborough. He had received the money for his furniture, and was standing on the doorstep, preparing to go home, when a young girl, Lucy Barnes, the daughter of the house, ran up to him and said, "Concord woods are dark, and a thunderstorm is coming up; you had better stay all night." "Since you ask me, I will,"[Pg 110] was the reply, and the visit was often repeated in the next few months. But when he asked farmer Jonathan for his daughter, the reply was,—

Joseph returned from that land of Egypt, and like a wise youth took the hint, and built a house of his own, planting the elm trees that now overshadow it, after a hundred and twenty years. After the due interval he went again to Marlborough, and found Lucy Barnes in the September sunshine, gathering St. Michael's pears in her father's garden. Cousin John was married, by this time, to another damsel. Miss Lucy was bent on having her own way and her own Joseph; and so Mr. Barnes gave his consent. They were married at Christmas, 1761; and Lucy came home behind him on his horse, through the same Concord woods. She afterwards told her youngest son, with some pique:—

[Pg 111]

The son of this lively Lucy Hosmer, Rufus Hosmer, of Stow, was a classmate, at Cambridge, of Washington Allston, the late Chief Justice Shaw, and Dr. Charles Lowell, father of Lowell the poet. They graduated in 1798, and Dr. Lowell afterwards wrote:—

Forty years afterward, in 1838, Dr. Lowell's son, James Russell Lowell, coming under college discipline, was sent to Concord to spend a similar summer vacation, and wrote his class poem in that town.

Major Hosmer died in 1821, at the age of eighty-five. Mr. Samuel Hoar, long the leader of the Middlesex County bar, who knew him in his later life, once said,—

Another old lawyer of Concord, who first saw Major Hosmer when he was a child of ten, and the Major was sixty years old, said,—

[Pg 113]

He was for many years sheriff of the county, and it was the habit of the young lawyers in term-time to get round his chair and ask his opinion about their cases. Such was his knowledge of the common law, and so well did he know the judges and jurymen, that when he said to Mr. Hoar, "I fear you will lose your case," that gentleman said, "from that moment I felt it lost, for I never knew him to make a wrong guess." He was a Federalist of the old school, and in his eyes Alexander Hamilton was the first man in America. His son held much the same opinion of Daniel Webster.

Near by Major Hosmer's farm-house stood the old homestead and extensive farm buildings of the Lee family, who at the beginning of the Revolution owned one of the two or three great farms in Concord. This estate has been owned and sold in one parcel of about four hundred acres ever since[Pg 114] it was first occupied by Henry Woodhouse about 1650. It lies between the two rivers Assabet and Musketaquid, and includes Nahshawtuc, or Lee's Hill, on which, in early days, was an Indian village. The Lees inherited it from the original owner, and held it for more than one hundred years, though it narrowly escaped confiscation in 1775, its owner being a Tory. Early in the present century it fell, by means of a mortgage, into the hands of "old Billy Gray" (the founder of the fortunes that for two or three generations have been held in the Gray family of Boston), was by him sold to Judge Fay, of Cambridge, and by him, in 1822, conveyed to his brother-in-law, Joseph Barrett, of Concord, a distant cousin of the Humphrey Barrett, mentioned elsewhere. Joseph Barrett had been one of Major Hosmer's deputies, when the old yeoman was sheriff, but now turned his attention to farming his many acres, and deserves mention here as one of the Concord farmers of two generations after the battle, among whom Henry Thoreau grew up. Indeed, the Lee Farm was one of his most accustomed haunts,[Pg 115] since the river flowed round it for a mile or two, and its commanding hill-top gave a prospect toward the western and northwestern mountains, Wachusett and Monadnoc chief among the beautiful brotherhood, whom Thoreau early saluted with a dithyrambic verse:—

Lee's Hill (which must be distinguished from Lee's Cliff, three miles further up the main river), was the centre of this farm, and almost of the township itself, and Squire Barrett, while he tilled its broad acres (or left them untilled), might be called the centre of the farmers of his county. He was for some years president of the Middlesex Agricultural Society (before which, in later years, Emerson, and Thoreau, and Agassiz gave addresses), and took the prize[Pg 116] in the plowing-match at its October cattle-show, holding his own plow, and driving his oxen himself. Descending from the committee-room in dress coat and ruffled shirt, he found his plow-team waiting for him, but his rivals in the match already turning their furrows. Laying off his coat, and fortifying himself with a pinch of maccaboy, while, as his teamster vowed, "that nigh-ox had his eye on the 'Squire from the time he hove in sight, ready to start the minute he took the plow-handles,"—then stepping to the task, six feet and one inch in height, and in weight two hundred and fifty pounds, the 'Squire began, and before the field was plowed he had won the premium. He was one of the many New England yeomen we have all known, who gave the lie to the common saying about the sturdier bulk and sinew of our beer-drinking cousins across the water. 'Squire Barrett could lift a barrel of cider into a cart, and once carried on his shoulders, up two flights of stairs, a sack containing eight bushels of Indian corn, which must have weighed more than four hundred pounds. He was a good horseman, an accomplished dancer, and in[Pg 117] the hayfield excelled in the graceful sweep of his scythe and the flourish of his pitchfork.

In course of time (1840) Mr. Alcott, with his wife (a daughter of Colonel May, of Boston), and those daughters who have since become celebrated, came to live in the Hosmer cottage not far from 'Squire Barrett's, and under the very eaves of Major Hosmer's farm-house, to which in 1761 came the fair and willful Lucy Barnes. The portly and courtly 'Squire, who knew Colonel May, came to call on his neighbors, and had many a chat with Mrs. Alcott about her Boston kindred, the Mays, Sewalls, Salisburys, etc. His civility was duly returned by Mrs. Alcott, who, when 'Squire Barrett was a candidate for State Treasurer in 1845, was able, by letters to her friends in Boston, to give him useful support. He was chosen, and held the office till his death in 1849, when Thoreau had just withdrawn from his Walden hermitage, and was publishing his first book, "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack."

Thoreau's special friend among the farmers was another character, Edmund Hosmer,[Pg 118] a scion of the same prolific Hosmer stock, who died in 1881. Edmund Hosmer, with Mr. Alcott, George Curtis and his brother Burrill, and other friends, helped Thoreau raise the timbers of his cabin in 1845, and was often his Sunday visitor in the hermitage. Of him it is that mention is made in "Walden," as follows:—

Edmund Hosmer, who was a friend of Mr. Emerson also, and of whom George Curtis and his brother hired land which they cultivated for a time, has been celebrated[Pg 119] in prose and verse by other Concord authors. I suppose it was he of whom Emerson wrote thus in his apologue of Saadi, many years ago:—

Edmund Hosmer was also, in George Curtis's description of a conversation at Mr. Emerson's house in 1845, "the sturdy farmer neighbor, who had bravely fought his way through inherited embarrassments to the small success of a New England husbandman, and whose faithful wife had seven times merited well of her country." And it may be that he was Ellery Channing's

Hosmer might have sat, also, for the more idyllic picture of the Concord farmer, which Channing has drawn in his "New England":—

Near the small farm of Edmund Hosmer, when Mr. Curtis lived with him and sometimes worked on his well-tilled acres, lay a larger farm, which, about the beginning of Thoreau's active life, was brought from neglect and barrenness into high cultivation by Captain Abel Moore, another Concord farmer, and one of the first, in this part of the country, to appreciate the value of our bog-meadows for cultivation by ditching and top-dressing with the sand which Nature had so thoughtfully ridged up in hills close by. Under the name of "Captain[Pg 121] Hardy," Emerson celebrated this achievement of his townsman, upon which the hundreds who in summer strolled to the School of Philosophy in Mr. Alcott's orchard, gazed with admiration,—bettered as it had been by the thirty years' toil and skill bestowed upon it since by Captain Moore's son and grandson. Emerson said:—

Such were and are the yeomen of Concord, among whom Thoreau spent his days, a friend to them and they to him, though each sometimes spoke churlishly of the other. He surveyed their wood-lots, laid out their roads, measured their fields and pastures for division among the heirs when a husbandman died, inspected their rivers and ponds, and exchanged information with them concerning the birds, the beasts, insects, flowers, crops, and trees. Their yearly Cattle Show in October was his chief festival,—one of the things he regretted, when living on the edge of New York Bay, and sighing for Fairhaven and White Pond. Without them the landscape of his native valley would not have been so dear to his eyes, and to their humble and perennial virtues he owed more inspiration than he would always confess.

He read in the crabbed Latin of those old Roman farmers, Cato, Varro, and musically-named Columella, and fancied the farmers of Concord were daily obeying[Pg 123] Cato's directions, who in turn was but repeating the maxims of a more remote antiquity.

[Pg 124]

CHAPTER V.

THE TRANSCENDENTAL PERIOD.

Although Henry Thoreau would have been, in any place or time of the world's drama, a personage of note, it has already been observed, in regard to his career and his unique literary gift, that they were affected, and in some sort fashioned by the influences of the very time and place in which he found himself at the opening of life. It was the sunrise of New England Transcendentalism in which he first looked upon the spiritual world; when Carlyle in England, Alcott, Emerson, and Margaret Fuller in Massachusetts, were preparing their contemporaries in America for that modern Renaissance which has been so fruitful, for the last forty years, in high thought, vital religion, pure literature, and great deeds. And the place of his birth and breeding, the home of his affections, as it was the Troy, the Jerusalem, and the Rome of his[Pg 125] imagination, was determined by Providence to be that very centre and shrine of Transcendentalism, the little village of Concord, which would have been saved from oblivion by his books, had it no other title to remembrance. Let it be my next effort, then, to give some hint—not a brief chronicle—of that extraordinary age, not yet ended (often as they tell us of its death and epitaph), now known to all men as the Transcendental Period. We must wait for after-times to fix its limits and determine its dawn and setting; but of its apparent beginning and course, one cycle coincided quite closely with the life of Thoreau. He was born in July, 1817, when Emerson was entering college at Cambridge, and Carlyle was wrestling "with doubt, fear, unbelief, mockery, and scoffing, in agony of spirit," at Edinburgh. He died in May, 1862, when the distinctly spiritual and literary era of Transcendentalism had closed, its years of preparation were over, and it had entered upon the conflict of political regeneration, for which Thoreau was constantly sounding the trumpet. In these forty-five years,—a longer period than the age of Pericles,[Pg 126] or of the Medici, or of Queen Elizabeth,—New England Transcendentalism rose, climbed, and culminated, leaving results that, for our America, must be compared with those famous eras of civilization. Those ages, in fact, were well-nigh lost upon us, until Channing, Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and their fellowship, brought us into communication with the Greek, the Italian, and the noble Elizabethan revivals of genius and art. We had been living under the Puritan reaction, modified and politically fashioned by the more humane philosophy of the eighteenth century, while the freedom-breathing, but half-barbarizing influences of pioneer life in a new continent, had also turned aside the full force of English and Scotch Calvinism.

It is common to trace the so-called Transcendentalism of New England to Carlyle and Coleridge and Wordsworth in the mother-country, and to Goethe, Richter, and Kant in Germany; and there is a certain outward affiliation of this sort, which cannot be denied. But that which in our spiritual soil gave root to the foreign seeds thus wafted hitherward, was a certain inward[Pg 127] tendency of high Calvinism and its counterpart, Quakerism, always welling forth in the American colonies. Now it inspired Cotton, Wheelwright, Sir Harry Vane, and Mistress Anne Hutchinson, in Massachusetts; now William Penn and his quaint brotherhood on the Delaware; now Jonathan Edwards and Sarah Pierpont, in Connecticut; and, again, John Woolman, the wandering Friend of God and man, in New Jersey, Nicholas Gilman, the convert of Whitefield, in New Hampshire, and Samuel Hopkins, the preacher of disinterested benevolence, in Rhode Island, held forth this noble doctrine of the Inner Light. It is a gospel peculiarly attractive to poets, so that even the loose-girt Davenant, who would fain think himself the left-hand son of Shakespeare, told gossiping old Aubrey that he believed the world, after a while, would settle into one religion, "an ingenious Quakerism,"—that is, a faith in divine communication that would yet leave some scope for men of wit like himself. How truly these American Calvinists and Quakers prefigured the mystical part of Concord philosophy, may be seen by a few of their sayings.

[Pg 128]

Jonathan Edwards, in 1723, when he was twenty years old, and the fair saint of his adoration was fifteen, thus wrote in his diary what he had seen and heard of Sarah Pierpont:—

Nicholas Gilman, the parish minister of[Pg 129] little Durham, in New Hampshire,—being under concern of mind for his friend Whitefield, and the great man of New England, at that time, Sir William Pepperell, just setting forth for the capture of Louisburg—wrote to them in March, 1745,—to Sir William thus:—

To Whitefield, Gilman wrote in the same vein, on the same day:—

John Woolman, the New Jersey Quaker (born in 1720, died in 1772), said,—

[Pg 131]

That even the pious egotism and the laughable vagaries of Transcendentalism had their prototype in the private meditations of the New England Calvinists, is well known to such as have studied old diaries of the Massachusetts ministers. Thus, a minister of Malden (a successor of the awful Michael Wigglesworth, whose alleged poem, "The Day of Doom," as Cotton Mather thought, might perhaps "find our children till the Day itself arrives"), in his diary for 1735, thus enters his trying experiences with a "one-horse Shay," whose short life may claim comparison with that of the hundred-year master-piece of Dr. Holmes's deacon:—

At last this divine comedy ends with the pathetic conclusive line,—

[Pg 133]

I will not pause to dwell on the laughable episodes and queer characteristic features of the Transcendental Period, though such it had in abundance. They often served to correct the soberer absurdity with which our whole country was slipping unconsciously down the easy incline of national ruin and dishonor,—from which only a bloody civil war could at last save us. Thoreau saw this clearly, and his political utterances, paradoxical as they seemed in the two decades from 1840 to 1860, now read like the words of a prophet. But there are some points in the American Renaissance which may here be touched on, so much light do they throw on the times. It was a period of strange faiths and singular apocalypses—that of Charles Fourier being one. In February, 1843, Mr. Emerson, writing to Henry Thoreau from New York, where he was then lecturing, said:—

This was written a few months before Thoreau himself went to New York, and it was while there that he received from his friends in Concord and in Harvard, the wondrous account of Mr. Alcott's Paradise Regained at Fruitlands; where in due time Thoreau made his visit and inspected that Garden of Eden on the Coldspring Brook.

If Mr. Brisbane had his "stellar duties" and inculcated them in others, the Brook Farmers of 1842-43 had their planetary mission also; namely, to cultivate the face of the planet they inhabited, and to do it with their own hands, as Adam and Noah did. Of the Brook Farm enterprise much has been written, and much more will be; but[Pg 135] concerning the more individual dream of Thoreau's friends at "Fruitlands," less is known; and I may quote a few pages concerning it from Thoreau's correspondence. While Thoreau was at Staten Island in 1843, Mr. Emerson wrote to him often, giving the news of Concord as a Transcendental capital. In May of that year we have this intelligence:—

This was "Fruitlands," described in the "Dial" for 1843, and which Charles Lane himself describes in a letter soon to be cited. In June, 1843, Mr. Emerson again sends tidings from Concord, where the Fitchburg railroad was then building:—

Then, passing in a moment from "Fruitlands" to Concord woods, Thoreau's friend writes:—

Not so with Mr. Alcott and Mr. Lane in the first flush of their hopes at Fruitlands. On the 9th of June,—the date of the letter just quoted being June 7,—Mr. Lane writes to Thoreau:—

Another Palmer than the Edward here mentioned became an inmate of "Fruitlands,"[Pg 141] and, in course of time its owner; the abandoned paradise, which was held by Mr. Lane and Mr. Alcott for less than a year, is now the property of his son. Mr. Lane, after a time, returned to England and died there; Mr. Alcott to Concord, where, in 1845, he aided Thoreau in building his hut by Walden. Mr. Channing (the nephew and biographer of Dr. Channing) continued his connection with the "Phalansterians" in New Jersey until 1849 or later, for in that year Fredrika Bremer found him dwelling and preaching among them, at the "North American Phalanstery," to which he had been invited from his Unitarian parish in Cincinnati, about the time that Brook Farm was made a community, and before Mr. Alcott's dream had taken earthly shape at "Fruitlands." The account given by Miss Bremer of the terms upon which Mr. Channing was thus invited to New Jersey, show what was the spirit of Transcendentalism then, on its social side. They said to him,—

It was upon such terms as this, honorable alike to those who gave and those who received, that much of the intellectual and spiritual work of the Transcendental revival was done. There was another and an unsocial side to the movement also, which Mr. Emerson early described in these words, that apply to Thoreau and to Alcott at one period:—

It was this phase of Transcendentalism that gave most anxiety to Thoreau's good old pastor, Dr. Ripley, who early foresaw what immediate fruit might be expected from this fair tree of mysticism,—this "burning bush" which had started up, all at once, in the very garden of his parsonage. I know few epistles more pathetic in their humility and concern for the future,[Pg 144] than one which Dr. Ripley addressed to Dr. Channing in February, 1839, after hearing and meditating on the utterances of Alcott, Emerson, Thoreau, George Ripley, and the other "apostles of the newness," who disturbed with their oracles the quiet air of his parish. He wrote:—

At this time Dr. Ripley was almost eighty-eight, and he lived two years longer, to mourn yet more pathetically over the change of times and manners. "It was fit," said Emerson, "that in the fall of laws, this loyal man should die." But the young men who succeeded him were no less loyal to the unwritten laws, and from their philosophy, which to the old theologian seemed so misty and unreal, there flowered forth, in due season, the most active and world-wide philanthropies. Twenty years after this pastoral epistle, there came to Concord another Christian of the antique type, more Puritan and Hebraic than Dr. Ripley himself, yet a Transcendentalist, too,—and John Brown found no lack of practical good-will in Thoreau, Alcott,[Pg 147] Emerson, and the other Transcendentalists. The years had "come full circle," the Sibyl had burnt her last prophetic book, and the new æon was about to open with the downfall of slavery.

[Pg 148]

CHAPTER VI.

EARLY ESSAYS IN AUTHORSHIP.

It has been a common delusion, not yet quite faded away, that the chief Transcendentalists were but echoes of each other,—that Emerson imitated Carlyle, Thoreau and Alcott imitated Emerson, and so on to the end of the chapter. No doubt that the atmosphere of each of these men affected the others, nor that they shared a common impulse communicated by what Matthew Arnold likes to call the Zeitgeist,—the ever-felt spirit of the time. In the most admirable of the group, who is called by preëminence "the Sage of Concord,"—the poet Emerson,—there has been an out-breathing inspiration as profound as that of the Zeitgeist himself; so that even Hawthorne, the least susceptible of men, found himself affected as he says, "after living for three years within the subtle influence of an intellect like Emerson's." But, in[Pg 149] fact, Thoreau brought to his intellectual tasks an originality as marked as Emerson's, if not so brilliant and star-like—a patience far greater than his, and a proud independence that makes him the most solitary of modern thinkers. I have been struck by these qualities in reading his yet unknown first essays in authorship, the juvenile papers he wrote while in college, from the age of seventeen to that of twenty, before Emerson had published anything except his first little volume, "Nature," and while Thoreau, like other young men, was reading Johnson and Goldsmith, Addison and the earlier English classics, from Milton backward to Chaucer. Let me therefore quote from these papers, carefully preserved by him, with their dates, and sometimes with the marks of the rhetorical professor on their margins. Along with these may be cited some of his earlier verses, in which a sentiment more purely human and almost amatory appears, than in the later and colder, if higher flights of his song.

The earliest writings of Thoreau, placed in my hands by his literary executor, Mr.[Pg 150] Harrison Blake of Worcester, are the first of his Cambridge essays, technically called "themes" and "forensics." These began several years before his daily journals were kept, namely, in 1834; and it is curious that one of them, dated January 17, 1835, but written in 1834, recommends "keeping a private journal or record of our thoughts, feelings, studies, and daily experience." This is precisely what Thoreau did from 1837 till his death; and it may be interesting to see what reasons the boy of seventeen advanced for the practice. He says:—

This is ingenious, quaint, and mercantile, bespeaking the hereditary bent of his family to trade and orderly accounts; but what follows in the same essay is more to the purpose, as striking the key-note of Thoreau's whole after-life. He adds:—

[Pg 152]

The earliest record of the day's observations which I find is dated a few months later than this (April 20, 1835), when Henry Thoreau was not quite eighteen, and relates to the beauties of nature. The first passage describes a Sunday prospect from the garret window of his father's house, (afterwards the residence of Mr. William Munroe, the benefactor of the Concord Library), on the main street of the village. He writes:—

The second passage, under the same date, seems to describe earlier and repeated visits, made by his elder brother John and himself, to a hill which was always a favorite resort of Thoreau's, Fairhaven Cliffs, overlooking the river-bay, known as "Fairhaven," a mile or two up the river from Concord village toward Sudbury:—

[Pg 155]

Here we have a touch of fine writing, natural in a boy who had read Irving and Goldsmith, and exaggerating a little the dimensions of the rocks and rills of which he wrote. But how smooth the flow of description, how well-placed the words, how sure and keen the eye of the young observer! To this mount of vision did Thoreau and his friends constantly resort in after years, and it was on the plateau beneath that Mr. Alcott, in 1843, was about to cut down the woods and build his Paradise, when a less inviting fate, as he thought, beckoned his English friend Lane and himself to "Fruitlands," in the distant town of Harvard. At some time after this, perhaps while Thoreau was encamped at Walden with his books and his flute, Mr. Emerson sent him the following note, which gives us now a glimpse into that Arcadia:—

[Pg 156]

It does not appear that Thoreau wrote verses at this time, though he was a great reader of the best poetry,—of Milton very early, and with constant admiration and quotation. Thus, in a college essay of 1835, on "Simplicity of Style," he has this passage concerning the Bible and Milton:—

Early in 1837 Thoreau wrote an elaborate paper, though of no great length, on Milton's "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," with many quotations, in course of which he said:—

[Pg 157]

The moral view taken by the young collegian in these essays is quite as interesting as the literary opinions, or the ease of his style. In September, 1835, discussing punishments, he says:—

[Pg 158]

In an essay on the effect of story-telling, written in 1836, he says:—

In March, 1837, in an essay on the source of our feeling of the sublime, Thoreau says:—

[Pg 160]

Speaking of national characteristics, he says:—

(This was written in February, 1837.) Before he had reached the age of nineteen he thus declared his independence of foreign opinion, while asserting its general sway over American literature, in 1836:—

So early did he take this position, from which he never varied.

In May, 1837, we find another note of his opening life, in an essay on Paley's "Common Reasons." He says:—

Here we have that bold generalization and that calm love of paradox which mark his later style. The lofty imagination was always his, too, as where this youth of nineteen says in the same essay:—

What a confident and flowing movement of thought is here! like the prose of Milton or Jeremy Taylor, but with a more restrained energy.

[Pg 163]

I suspect that Thoreau's first poems date from the year 1836-37, since the "big red journal," in which they were copied, was begun in October, 1837. The verses entitled, "To the Maiden in the East," were by no means among the first, which date from 1836 or earlier; but near these in time was that poem called "Sympathy," which was the first of his writings to appear in Mr. Emerson's "Dial." These last were addressed, we are told, to Ellen Sewall,[Pg 164] with whom, the legend says, both Henry and John Thoreau were in love. Few of these poems show any imitation of Mr. Emerson, whose own verses at that time were mostly unpublished, though he sometimes read them in private to his friends. But like most of Thoreau's verses, these indicate a close familiarity with the Elizabethan literature, and what directly followed it, in the time of the Stuarts. The measure of "Sympathy" was that of Davenant's "Gondibert," which Thoreau, almost alone of his contemporaries, had read; the thought was above Davenant, and ranged with Raleigh and Spenser. These verses will not soon be forgotten:—

The other poem seems to have been written later than the separation of which that one so loftily speaks; and it vibrates with a tenderer chord than sympathy. It begins,—

and then it goes on with the picture of lover-like things,—the thrushes and the flowers, until, he says,

[Pg 166]

Then comes the Persian dialect of high love:—

"Let us," said Hafiz, "break up the tiresome roof of heaven into new forms,"—and with as bold a flight did this young poet pass to his "stellar duties." Then dropping to the Concord meadow again, like the tuneful lark, he chose a less celestial path

A frivolous question has sometimes been raised whether the young Thoreau knew what love was, like the Sicilian shepherd, who found him a native of the rocks, a lion's whelp. With his poet-nature, he early gathered this experience, and passed on; praising afterwards the lion's nature in the universal god:—

The Red Journal of five hundred and ninety-six long pages, in which the early verses occur, was the first collection of Thoreau's systematic diarizing. It ran on from October, 1837, to June, 1840, and was succeeded[Pg 168] by another journal of three hundred and ninety-six pages, which was finished early in 1841. He wrote his first lecture (on Society) in March, 1838, and read it before the Concord Lyceum in the Freemasons' Hall, April 11, 1838. In the December following he wrote a memorable essay on "Sound and Silence," and in February, 1840, wrote his "first printed paper of consequence," as he says, on "Aulus Persius Flaccus." The best of the early verses seem to have been written in 1836-41. His contributions to the "Dial," which he helped edit, were taken from his journals, and ran through nearly every number from July, 1840, to April, 1844, when that magazine ceased.

For these papers he received nothing but the thanks of Emerson and the praise of a few readers. Miss Elizabeth Peabody, in February, 1843, wrote to Thoreau, that "the regular income of the 'Dial' does not pay the cost of its printing and paper; yet there are readers enough to support it, if they would only subscribe; and they will subscribe, if they are convinced that only by doing so can they secure its continuance."[Pg 169] They did not subscribe, and in the spring of 1844 it came to an end.

In 1842 Thoreau took a walk to Wachusett, his nearest mountain, and the journal of this excursion was printed in the "Boston Miscellany" of 1843. In it occurred the verses, written at least as early as 1841, in which he addresses the mountains of his horizon, Monadnoc, Wachusett, and the Peterborough Hills of New Hampshire. These verses were for some time in the hands of Margaret Fuller, for publication in the "Dial," if she saw fit, but she returned them with the following characteristic letter,—the first addressed by her to Thoreau:—

"Faithful are the wounds of a friend." This searching criticism would not offend Thoreau; nor yet the plainness with which the same tongue told the faults of a prose paper—perhaps "The Service,"—which Margaret rejected in this note:—

These were the years of Thoreau's apprenticeship in literature, and many were the tasks and mortifications he must endure before he became a master of the writer's art.

[Pg 174]

CHAPTER VII.

FRIENDS AND COMPANIONS.

"Margaret Fuller," says William Henry Channing, "was indeed The Friend; this was her vocation." It was no less the vocation of Thoreau, though in a more lofty, unvarying, and serene manner.

It is, therefore, impossible to sketch him[Pg 175] by himself. He could have said, with Ellery Channing,—

His earliest companion was his brother John, "a flowing generous spirit," as one described him, for whom his younger brother never ceased to grieve. Walking among the Cohasset rocks and looking at the scores of shipwrecked men from the Irish brig St. John, in 1849, he said, "A man can attend but one funeral in his life, can behold but one corpse." With him it was the funeral of John Thoreau in February, 1842. They had made the voyage of the Concord and Merrimac together, in 1839; they had walked and labored together, and invented Indian names for one another from boyhood. John was "Sachem Hopeful of Hopewell,"—a sunny soul, always serene and loving. When publishing his first book, in 1849, Henry dedicated it to this brother, with the simple verse—

[Pg 176]

John Thoreau's death was singular and painful; his brother could not speak of it without physical suffering, so that when he related it to his friend Ricketson at New Bedford, he turned pale and was forced to go to the door for air. This was the only time Mr. Ricketson ever saw him show deep emotion. His sister Sophia once said:—

Before the death of his brother, Thoreau had formed the friendship with Ellery[Pg 178] Channing, that was in some degree to replace the daily intimacy he had enjoyed with John Thoreau. This man of genius, and of the moods that sometimes make genius an unhappy boon, was a year younger than Thoreau when he came, in 1843, to dwell in Concord with his bride, a younger sister of Margaret Fuller. They lived first in a cottage near Mr. Emerson's, Thoreau being at that time an inmate of Mr. Emerson's household; afterwards, in 1843, Mr. Channing removed to a hill-top some miles away, then to New York in 1844-45, then to Europe for a few months, and finally to a house on the main street of the village, opposite the last residence of the Thoreau family, where Henry lived from 1850 till his death in 1862. In the garden of Mr. Channing's house, which lay on the river, Thoreau kept his boat, under a group of willows, and from that friendly harbor all his later voyages were made. At times they talked of occupying this house together.

They did in fact associate more closely than if they had lived in the same house.

At the age of thirty-seven, when contemplating a removal from the neighborhood of his friend Thoreau, this humorous man of letters thus described himself and his tastes to another friend:—

This hour did come, and the removal was made for a few months or years, during which the two friends met at odd intervals, and in queer companionship. But the "sweet and solid mortar of friendship" was never broken, though the wall of life came to look like a ruin. When, in Thoreau's last illness, Channing, in deep grief, said "that a change had come over the dream of life, and that solitude began to peer out curiously from the dells and wood-roads," Thoreau whispered, "with his foot on the step of the other world," says Channing, "It is better some things should end." Of their earlier friendship, and of Channing's poetic gift, so admirable, yet so little appreciated by his contemporaries, this mention occurs in a letter written by Thoreau in March, 1856:—

[Pg 181]

In the record of his winter visitors at Walden, Thoreau had earlier made mention of Channing, who then lived on Ponkawtasset Hill, two or three miles away from the hermitage.

In his "Week," as Thoreau floats down the Concord, past the Old Manse, he commemorates first Hawthorne and then Channing, saying of the latter,—

These were true and deserved compliments, but they availed little (no more than did the praises of Emerson in the "Dial," and of Hawthorne in his "Mosses") to make Channing known to the general reader. Some years after Thoreau's death, when writing to another friend, this neglected poet said:—

Yet this self-disparaging poet was he who wrote,—

and who cried to his companions,—

It is he, also, who has best told, in prose and verse, what Thoreau was in his character and his literary art. In dedicating to[Pg 185] his friend Henry, the poem called "Near Home," published in 1858, Channing thus addressed him:—

In these majestic lines, suggestive of Dante, of Shakespeare, and of Milton, yet fitting, by the force of imagination, to the simplicity and magnanimity that Thoreau had displayed, one reads the secret of that character which made the Concord recluse first declare to the world the true mission of John Brown, whose friend he had been for a few years. Of Alcott and of Hawthorne, of Margaret Fuller and Horace Greeley,[Pg 186] he had been longer the friend; and in the year before he met Brown he had stood face to face with Walt Whitman in Brooklyn. Mr. Alcott's testimony to Thoreau's worth and friendliness has been constant.

Not less emphatic was Thoreau's praise of Mr. Alcott, after these long winter evenings with him in the hut:—

Nor did Thoreau participate in such discourse at Walden alone, but frequented Mr. Alcott's conversations at Mr. Emerson's house in Concord, at Hawthorne's in Salem,[Pg 188] at Marston Watson's in Plymouth, at Daniel Ricketson's in New Bedford, and once or twice in Boston and New York. With Mr. Alcott and Alice Carey, Thoreau visited Horace Greeley at Chappaqua, in 1856, and with Mr. Alcott alone he called on Walt Whitman in Brooklyn the same year.

Between Hawthorne and Thoreau, Ellery Channing was perhaps the interpreter, for they had not very much in common, though friendly and mutually respectful. The boat in which Thoreau made his voyage of 1839, on the Concord and Merrimac, came afterwards into Hawthorne's possession, and was the frequent vehicle for Channing and Hawthorne as they made those excursions which Hawthorne has commemorated. Channing also has commemorated those years when Hawthorne spent the happiest hours of his life in the Old Manse, to which he had removed soon after his marriage in 1842:—

In July, 1860, writing to his sister Sophia, among the New Hampshire mountains, Thoreau said:—

This was upon the return of Hawthorne from his long residence abroad, in England, Portugal, and Italy. Thoreau died two years before Hawthorne, and they are buried within a few feet of each other in the Concord cemetery, their funerals having proceeded from the same parish church near by.

Of Thoreau's relations with Emerson, this is not the place to speak in full; it was, however, the most important, if not the most intimate, of all his friendships, and that out of which the others mainly[Pg 190] grew. Their close acquaintance began in 1837. In the latter part of April, 1841, Thoreau became an inmate of Mr. Emerson's house, and remained there till, in the spring of 1843, he went for a few months to be the tutor of Mr. William Emerson's sons at Staten Island. In 1840, while teaching school in Concord, Thoreau seems to have been fully admitted into that circle of which Emerson, Alcott, and Margaret Fuller were the leaders. In May, 1840, this circle met, as it then did frequently, at the house of Mr. Emerson, to converse on "the inspiration of the Prophet and Bard, the nature of Poetry, and the causes of the sterility of Poetic Inspiration in our age and country." Mr. Alcott, in his diary, has preserved a record of this meeting, and some others of the same kind. It seems that on this occasion—Thoreau being not quite twenty-three years old, Mr. Alcott forty-one, Mr. Emerson thirty-seven, and Miss Fuller thirty—all these were present, and also Jones Very, the Salem poet, Dr. F. H. Hedge, Dr. C. A. Bartol, Dr. Caleb Stetson, and Robert Bartlett of Plymouth. Bartlett and Very were graduates[Pg 191] of Harvard a year before Thoreau, and afterwards tutors there; indeed, all the company except Alcott were Cambridge scholars,—for Margaret Fuller, without entering college, had breathed in the learned air of Cambridge, and gone beyond the students who were her companions. I find no earlier record of Thoreau's participation in these meetings; but afterward he was often present. In May, 1839, Mr. Alcott had held one of his conversations at the house of Thoreau's mother, but no mention is made of Henry taking part in it. At a conversation in Concord in 1846, one April evening, Thoreau came in from his Walden hermitage, and protested with some vehemence against Mr. Alcott's declaration that Jesus "stood in a more tender and intimate nearness to the heart of mankind than any character in life or literature." Thoreau thought he "asserted this claim for the fair Hebrew in exaggeration"; yet he could say in the "Week," "It is necessary not to be Christian to appreciate the beauty and significance of the life of Christ."

This earliest of his volumes, like most of his writings, is a record of his friendships,[Pg 192] and in it we find that high-toned, paradoxical essay on Love and Friendship, which has already been quoted. To read this literally, as Channing says, "would be to accuse him of stupidity; he gossips there of a high, imaginary world." But its tone is no higher than was the habitual feeling of Thoreau towards his friends, or that sentiment which he inspired in them. In Mr. Alcott's diary for March 16, 1847, he writes, two years before the "Week" was made public:—

[Pg 193]

This high anticipation of the young author's career was fully shared by Emerson himself, who everywhere praised the genius of Thoreau; and when in England in 1848, listened readily to a proposition from Dr. Chapman the publisher, for a new magazine to be called "The Atlantic," and printed at the same time in London and in Boston, whose chief contributors in England should be Froude, Garth Wilkinson, Arthur Hugh Clough, and perhaps Carlyle; and in New England, Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, the Channings, Theodore Parker, and Elliott Cabot. The plan came to nothing, but it may have been some reminiscence of it which, nine years afterward, gave its name to that Boston magazine, the "Atlantic Monthly." Mr. Emerson's letter was dated in London, April 20, 1848, and said:—

In 1846, before Mr. Emerson went abroad, we find Thoreau (whose own hut beside Walden had been built and inhabited for a year) sketching a design for a lodge which Mr. Emerson then proposed to build on the opposite shore. It was to be a retreat for study and writing, at the summit of a ledge, with a commanding prospect over the level country, towards Monadnoc and Wachusett in the west and northwest. For this lookout Mr. Alcott added a story to Thoreau's sketch; but the hermitage was never built, and the plan finally resulted in a rustic summer-house, erected by Alcott with some aid from Thoreau, in Mr. Emerson's garden, in 1847-48.[9]

[Pg 195]

Humbler friends than poets and philosophers sometimes shared the companionship of these brethren in Concord. In February, 1847, Mr. Alcott, who was then a woodman, laboring on his hillside with his own axe, where afterwards Hawthorne wandered and mused, thus notes in his diary an incident not unusual in the town:—

It was this slave, no doubt, who had lodged for a while in Thoreau's Walden hut.

My own acquaintance with Thoreau did not begin with our common hostility to slavery, which afterwards brought us most closely together, but sprang from the[Pg 196] accident of my editing for a few weeks the "Harvard Magazine," a college monthly, in 1854-55, in which appeared a long review of "Walden" and the "Week." In acknowledgment of this review, which was laudatory and made many quotations from his two volumes, Thoreau, whom I had never seen, called at my room in Holworthy Hall, Cambridge, in January, 1855, and left there in my absence, a copy of the "Week" with a message implying it was for the writer of the magazine article. It so happened that I was in the College Library when Thoreau was calling on me, and when he came, directly after, to the Library, some one present pointed him out to me as the author of "Walden." I was then a senior in college, and soon to go on my winter vacation; in course of which I wrote to Thoreau from my native town, as follows:—

[Pg 198]

This note, which I had entirely forgotten, and of which I trust my friend soon forgave the pertness, came to me recently among his papers; with one exception, it is the only letter that passed between us, I think, in an acquaintance of more than seven years. Some six weeks after its date, I went to live in Concord, and happened to take rooms in Mr. Channing's house, just across the way from Thoreau's. I met him more than once in March, 1855, but he did not call on my sister and me until the 11th of April, when I made the following brief note of his appearance:—

[Pg 199]

A month or two later my diary expanded this sketch a little, with other particulars:—

Notwithstanding the slow admiration that these trivial comments indicated, our friendship grew apace, and for two years or more I dined with him almost daily, and often joined in his walks and river voyages, or swam with him in some of our numerous Concord waters. In 1857 I introduced John Brown to him, then a guest at my house; and in 1859, the evening before Brown's last birthday, we listened together to the old captain's last speech in the Concord Town Hall. The events of that year and the next brought us closely together, and I found him the stanchest of friends.

[Pg 200]

This chapter might easily be extended into a volume, so long was the list of his companions, and so intimate and perfect his relation with them, at least on his own side.

[Pg 201]

CHAPTER VIII.

THE WALDEN HERMITAGE.

It is by his two years' encampment on the shore of a small lake in the Walden woods, a mile south of Concord village, that Thoreau is best known to the world; and the book which relates how he lived and what he saw there is still, as it always was, the most popular of his writings. Like all his books, it contains much that might as well have been written on any other subject; but it also describes charmingly the scenes and events of his sylvan life,—his days and nights with Nature. He spent two years and a half in this retreat, though often coming forth from it.

The localities of Concord which Thoreau immortalized were chiefly those in the neighborhood of some lake or stream,—though it would be hard to find in that well-watered town, especially in springtime, any place which is not neighbor either[Pg 202] to the nine-times circling river Musketaquid, to the swifter Assabet,

to Walden or White Pond, to Bateman's Pond, to the Mill Brook, the Sanguinetto, the Nut-Meadow, or the Second Division Brook. All these waters and more are renowned again and again in Thoreau's books. Like Icarus, the ancient high-flyer, he tried his fortune upon many a river, fiord, streamlet, and broad sea,—

He gave beauty and dignity to obscure places by his mention of them; and it is curious that the neighborhood of Walden,—now the most romantic and poetical region of Concord, associated in every mind with this tender lover of Nature, and his worship of her,—was anciently a place of dark repute, the home of pariahs and lawless characters, such as fringed the sober garment of many a New England village in Puritanic times.

Close by Walden is Brister's Hill, where, in the early days of emancipation in Massachusetts,[Pg 203] the newly freed slaves of Concord magnates took up their abode,—

as Ossian says. Here dwelt Cato Ingraham, freedman of 'Squire Duncan Ingraham, who, when yet a slave in his master's backyard, on the day of Concord fight, was brought to a halt by the fierce Major Pitcairn, then something the worse for 'Squire Ingraham's wine, and ordered to "lay down his arms and disperse," as the rebels at Lexington had been six hours earlier. Here also abode Zilpha, a black Circe, who spun linen, and made the Walden Woods resound with her shrill singing:—

But some paroled English prisoners in the War of 1812, burnt down her proud abode, with its imprisoned cat and dog and hens, while Zilpha was absent. Down the road towards the village from Cato's farm and Zilpha's musical loom and wheel, lived Brister Freeman, who gave his name to the hill,—Scipio Brister, "a handy negro,"[Pg 204] once the slave of 'Squire Cummings, but long since emancipated, and in Thoreau's boyhood set free again by death, and buried in an old Lincoln graveyard, near the ancestor of President Garfield, but still nearer the unmarked graves of British grenadiers, who fell in the retreat from Concord. With this Scipio Africanus Brister Libertinus, in the edge of the Walden Woods, "dwelt Fenda, his hospitable wife, who told fortunes, yet pleasantly—large, round, and black,—such a dusky orb as never rose on Concord, before or since," says Thoreau. Such was the African colony on the south side of Concord village among the woods, while on the northern edge of the village, along the Great Meadows, there dwelt another colony, headed by Cæsar Robbins, whose descendants still flit about the town. Older than all was the illustrious Guinea negro, John Jack, once a slave on the farm which is now the glebe of the Old Manse, but who purchased his freedom about the time the Old Manse was built in 1765-66. He survives in his quaint epitaph, written by Daniel Bliss, the young Tory brother of the first mistress of the[Pg 205] manse (Mrs. William Emerson, grandmother of Emerson, the poet):—

Here lies the body of
John Jack,
A native of Africa, who died
March, 1773, aged about sixty years.
Though born in a land of slavery,
He was born free;
Though he lived in a land of liberty,
He lived a slave;
Till by his honest though stolen labors
He acquired the source of slavery
Which gave him his freedom;
Though not long before
Death the grand tyrant
Gave him his final emancipation,
And put him on a footing with kings.
Though a slave to vice,
He practised those virtues
Without which kings are but slaves."

This epitaph, and the anecdote already given concerning Cæsar Robbins, may illustrate the humanity and humor with which the freedmen of Concord were regarded, while an adventure of Scipio Brister's, in[Pg 206] his early days of freedom, may show the mixture of savage fun and contempt that also followed them, and which some of their conduct may have deserved.

The village drover and butcher once had a ferocious bull to kill, and when he had succeeded with some difficulty in driving him into his slaughter-house, on the Walden road, nobody was willing to go in and kill him. Just then Brister Freeman, from his hill near Walden, came along the road, and was slyly invited by the butcher to go into the slaughter-house for an axe,—being told that when he brought it he should have a job to do. The unsuspecting freedman opened the door and walked in; it was shut behind him, and he found the bull drawn up in line of battle before him. After some pursuit and retreat in the narrow arena, Brister spied the axe he wanted, and began attacking his pursuer, giving him a blow here or there as he had opportunity. His employers outside watched the bull-fight through a hole in the building, and cheered on the matador with shouts and laughter. At length, by a fortunate stroke, the African conquered, the bull fell, and his slayer[Pg 207] threw down the axe and rushed forth unhurt. But his tormentors declared "he was no longer the dim, sombre negro he went in, but literally white with terror, and what was once his wool straightened out and standing erect on his head." Without waiting to be identified, or to receive pay for his work, Brister, affrighted and wrathful, withdrew to the wooded hill and to the companionship of his fortune-telling Fenda, who had not foreseen the hazard of her spouse.

It was along the same road and down this hill, passing by the town "poor-farm" and poor-house,—the last retreat of these straggling soldiers of fortune,—that Thoreau went toward the village jail from his hermitage, that day in 1846, when the town constable carried him off from the shoemaker's to whose shop he had gone to get a cobbled shoe. His room-mate in jail for the single night he slept there, was introduced to him by the jailer, Mr. Staples (a real name), as "a first-rate fellow and a clever man," and on being asked by Thoreau why he was in prison, replied, "Why, they accuse me of burning a barn, but I[Pg 208] never did it." As near as Thoreau could make out, he had gone to bed in a barn when drunk, and smoked his pipe there. Such were the former denizens of the Walden woods—votaries of Bacchus and Apollo, and extremely liable to take fire upon small occasion,—like Giordano Bruno's sonneteer, who, addressing the Arabian Phenix, says,—

It seems by the letter of Margaret Fuller in 1841 (cited in chapter VI.), that Thoreau had for years meditated a withdrawal to a solitary life. The retreat he then had in view was, doubtless, the Hollowell Farm, a place, as he says, "of complete retirement, being about two miles from the village, half a mile from the nearest neighbor, and separated from the highway by a broad field." The house stood apart from the road to Nine-Acre Corner, fronting the Musketaquid on a green hill-side, and was first seen by Thoreau as a boy, in his earliest voyages up the river to Fairhaven Bay, "concealed behind a dense grove of red maples, through which I heard the[Pg 209] house-dog bark." This place Thoreau once bought, but released it to the owner, whose wife refused to sign the deed of sale. In his Walden venture he was a squatter, using for his house-lot a woodland of Mr. Emerson's, who, for the sake of his walks and his wood-fire, had bought land on both sides of Walden Pond.

How early Thoreau formed his plan of retiring to a hut among these woods, I have not learned; but in a letter written to him March 5, 1845, by his friend Channing, a passage occurs concerning it; and it was in the latter part of the same month that Thoreau borrowed Mr. Alcott's axe and went across the fields to cut the timber for his cabin. Channing writes:—

Of course, this imaginary Teufelsdröckh, like Carlyle's, was the satirical man in the writer himself, suggesting the humorous and contradictory side of things, and glancing at the coolness of Thoreau, which his friends sometimes found provoking. In his own person Channing adds:—

[Pg 211]

It is well to read this shrewd humor, uttered in the opposite sense from Thoreau's paradoxical wit in his "Walden," as an introduction or motto to that book. For Thoreau has been falsely judged from the wit and the paradox of "Walden," as if he were a hater of men, or foolishly desired all mankind to retire to the woods. As Channing said, soon after his friend's death,—

This last is not literally true, for he was sometimes secluded in his hut for days together; but he remained as social at Walden as he had been while an inmate of Mr. Emerson's family in 1841-43, or again in 1847-48, after giving up his hermitage. He, in fact, as he says himself,—

In another place he says he went to Walden to "transact some private business," and this he did to good purpose. He edited there his "Week," some portions of which had appeared in the "Dial" from 1840 to 1844, but which was not published as a volume until 1849, although he had made many attempts to issue it earlier. It was at Walden, also, that he wrote his essay[Pg 213] on Carlyle, which was first published in "Graham's Magazine," at Philadelphia, in 1847, through the good offices of Horace Greeley, of which we shall hear more in the next chapter.

Thoreau's hermit life was not, then, merely a protest against the luxury and the restraints of society, nor yet an austere discipline such as monks and saints have imposed upon themselves for their souls' good. "My purpose in going to Walden was not to live cheaply, nor to live dearly there, but to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles." He lived a life of labor and study in his hut. Emerson says, "as soon as he had exhausted the advantages of that solitude, he abandoned it." He had edited his first book there; had satisfied himself that he was fit to be an author, and had passed his first examinations; then he graduated from that gymnasium as another young student might from the medical college or the polytechnic school. "I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there." His abandoned hut was then taken by a Scotch gardener, Hugh Whelan by name, who removed it[Pg 214] some rods away, to the midst of Thoreau's bean-field, and made it his cottage for a few years. Then it was bought by a farmer, who put it on wheels and carried it three miles northward, toward the entry of the Estabrook Farm on the old Carlisle road, where it stood till after Thoreau's death,—a shelter for corn and beans, and a favorite haunt of squirrels and blue jays. The wood-cut representing the hermitage in the first edition of "Walden," is from a sketch made by Sophia Thoreau, and is more exact than that given in Page's "Life of Thoreau," but in neither picture are the trees accurately drawn.

On the spot where Thoreau lived at Walden there is now a cairn of stones, yearly visited by hundreds, and growing in height as each friend of his muse adds a stone from the shore of the fair water he loved so well.

The events and thoughts of Thoreau's life at Walden may be read in his book of that name. As a protest against society, that life was ineffectual,—as the communities at Brook Farm and Fruitlands had proved to be; and as the Fourierite phalansteries, in which Horace Greeley interested himself, were destined to be. In one sense, all these were failures; but in Thoreau's case the failure was slight, the discipline and experience gained were invaluable. He never regretted it, and the Walden episode in his career has made him better known than anything else.

[Pg 216]

CHAPTER IX.

HORACE IN THE RÔLE OF MÆCENAS.

In a letter to his sister Sophia, July 21, 1843, written from Mr. William Emerson's house at Staten Island, Thoreau says:—

This was the "Phalanstery" at which W. H. Channing afterward preached. A fortnight later, Thoreau writes to Mr. Emerson:—

This refers to the notice of Carlyle's "Past and Present," in the "Dial" for July, 1843, and shows that Mr. Greeley was a quick reader of that magazine, as Thoreau always was of the "New York Tribune." From this time onward a warm friendship continued between Thoreau and Greeley, and many letters went to and fro, which reveal the able editor in the light of a modern Mæcenas to the author of the Musketaquid Georgics.

No letters seem to have passed between them earlier than 1846; and in 1844-45 Thoreau must have known the "Tribune" editor best through his newspaper, and from the letters of Margaret Fuller, Ellery Channing, and other common friends, who saw much of him then, admired and laughed at him, or did both by turns. Miss Fuller, who had gone to New York to write for the "Tribune," and to live in its Editor's family, wrote:—

There was a laughable side even to these fine traits, and there were eccentricities of dress and manner, which others saw more keenly than this generous woman. Ellery Channing,—whose eye no whimsical or beautiful object ever escaped,—in the letter of March, 1845, already cited, thus signaled to Thoreau the latest news of his friend:—

Thoreau wrote an essay on Carlyle in 1846, and in the summer of that year sent it to Mr. Greeley, with a request that he would find a place for it in some magazine. To this request, which Mr. Greeley himself had invited, no doubt, he thus replied:—

[Pg 219]

On the 30th of September Mr. Greeley again wrote, saying,—

From the tenor of this I infer that Thoreau had written to say that he might wish to read his "Thomas Carlyle" as a lecture, and desired to stipulate for that before it was printed. He might be excused for some solicitude concerning payment, from his recent experience with the publishers of the "Boston Miscellany," which had printed, in 1843, his "Walk to Wachusett." At the very time when Thoreau, in New York, was making Greeley's acquaintance, Mr. Emerson, in Boston, was dunning the Miscellaneous publishers, and wrote to Thoreau (July 20, 1843):—

But I cannot learn that anything came of it. Mr. Greeley, as we shall see, was a more successful collector. On the 26th of October, 1846, he continued the adventures of the wandering essay as follows:—

It would seem that "Griswold" (who was Rufus W. Griswold, the biographer of Poe) and "Graham" (who was George R. Graham, the magazine publisher of Philadelphia), did not move so fast either in publication or in payment as they had led Mr. Greeley to expect; and also that Thoreau became impatient and wrote to his friend that he would withdraw the essay. Whereupon Mr. Greeley, under date of February 5, 1847, wrote thus:—

The Carlyle essay did appear in two numbers of "Graham's Magazine" (March and April, 1847), but alas, no payment came to hand. After waiting a year longer, Thoreau wrote to Greeley again (March 31, 1848), informing him of the delinquency of Griswold and Graham. At once, his friend replied (April 3), "It saddens and surprises me to know that your article was not paid for by Graham; and, since my honor is involved in the matter, I will see that you are paid, and that at no distant day." Accordingly on the 17th of May, 1848, he writes again as follows:—

This last allusion is to a new phase of the queer patronage which the good Mæcenas extended to our Concord poet. In his letter of March 31, 1848, Thoreau had offered Greeley, in compliance with his suggestion of the previous year, a paper on "Ktaadn and the Maine Woods," which[Pg 226] afterwards appeared in the "Union Magazine." On the 17th of April Greeley writes:—

On the 17th of May he adds:—

[Pg 227]

On the 28th of October, 1848, he writes:

In the letter of April 17, 1848, Mr. Greeley had further said:—

[Pg 228]

In the letter of May 17th, he reiterates the advice to be brief:—

May 25th he returns to the charge, when sending the last twenty-five dollars for the "Maine Woods":—

After a six months' interval (November 19, 1848), Greeley resumes in a similar strain:—

[Pg 229]

Here the letters ceased for a time. "Munroe did it,"—that is, a Boston bookseller published Thoreau's "Week," which was favorably reviewed by George Ripley in the "Tribune," by Lowell in the "Massachusetts Quarterly," and by others elsewhere; but the book did not sell, and involved its author in debt for its printing. To meet this he took up surveying as a business, and after a time, when some payment must be made, he asked his friend Greeley for a loan. In the interval, Margaret Fuller had written from Europe those remarkable letters for the "Tribune," had married in Italy, sailed for home in 1850, and died on the shore of Fire Island, near New York, whither Thoreau went with her friends to learn her fate, and recover the loved remains. This was in July, 1850, and he no doubt saw Mr. Greeley there. A year and a half later, when he was seeking opportunities[Pg 231] to lecture, he wrote to Mr. Greeley again, in February, 1852, offering himself to lecture in a course at New York, which the "Tribune" editor had some interest in. The reply was this:—

Thoreau responded at once with some manuscripts (March 5), and was thus addressed, March 18, by his friend:—

[Pg 232]

A week later he sent a letter from the publisher, Sartain, accepting the articles for a low price,[11] and adds: "If you break up[Pg 233] your 'Excursion to Canada' into three or four articles, I have no doubt I could get it published on similar terms." April 3, 1852, he returns to a former proposition, that Thoreau shall write about Emerson as he did six years before on Carlyle.

To this request, as before, there came a prompt negative, although Thoreau was then sadly in need of money. Mr. Greeley wrote, April 20:—

They were sent, and offered to the "Whig Review," and to other magazines; but on the 25th of June, Mr. Greeley writes:—

[Pg 235]

It seems that the author had relied upon money from this source, and a week or two later he asks his friend to lend him the expected seventy-five dollars, offering security, with mercantile scrupulosity. Promptly came this answer:—

The "Yankee in Canada," as it is now called (the record of Thoreau's journey through French Canada in September, 1850, with Ellery Channing), was offered to "Putnam's Magazine" by Mr. Greeley, and begun there, but ill-luck attended it. Before it went the paper on "Cape Cod," which became the subject of controversy, first as to price, and then as to its tone towards the people of that region. This will[Pg 236] explain the letters of Mr. Greeley that follow:—

[Pg 237]

Thoreau did what he would, of course, and the article in Putnam came to an abrupt end. The loan made in July, 1852, was paid with interest on the 9th of March, 1853, as the following note shows:—

A year later, Thoreau renewed his subscription to the "Weekly Tribune," but the letter miscarried. In due time came this reply to a third letter:—

In reply, Thoreau notified his friend of the early publication of "Walden," and was thus met:—

To the request of this postscript Thoreau attended at once, but the "Miscellanies" dwelt not in his mind, it would seem. He had now become deeply concerned about slavery, was also pursuing his studies concerning the Indians, and had little time for the collection of his published papers. A short note of April 2, 1854, closes this part of the Greeley correspondence, thus:—

In August, 1855, Mr. Greeley wrote to suggest that copies of "Walden" should be sent to the "Westminster Review," to "The Reasoner," 147 Fleet Street, London, to Gerald Massey, office of the "News," Edinburgh, and to "—— Wills, Esq., Dickens's Household Words," adding:—

In March, 1856, Mr. Greeley opened a new correspondence with Thoreau, asking him to become the tutor of his children, and to live with him, or near him, at Chappaqua. The proposition was made in the most generous manner, and was for a time considered by Thoreau, who felt a sense of obligation as well as a sincere friendship towards the man who had believed in him and served him so seasonably in the years of his obscurity. But it resulted in nothing further than a brief visit to Mr. Greeley in the following autumn, during which, as Thoreau used to say, Mr. Alcott and Mr. Greeley went to the opera together.

[Pg 242]

CHAPTER X.

IN WOOD AND FIELD.

Except the Indians themselves, whose wood-craft he never tires of celebrating, few Americans were ever more at home in the open air than Thoreau; not even his friend John Brown, who, like himself, suggested the Indian by the delicacy of his perceptions and his familiarity with all that goes forward, or stands still, in wood and field. Thoreau could find his path in the woods at night, he said, better by his feet than his eyes.

In his last illness says Channing,—

[Pg 243]

This out-door life began as early as he could recollect, and his special attraction to rivers, woods, and lakes was a thing of his boyhood. He had begun to collect Indian relics before leaving college, and was a diligent student of natural history there. Whether he was naturally an observer or not (which has been denied in a kind of malicious paradox), let his life-work attest. Early in 1847 he made some collections of fishes, turtles, etc., in Concord for Agassiz, then newly arrived in America, and I have (in a letter of May 3, 1847) this account of their reception:—

[Pg 244]

On the 27th of May, Thoreau's correspondent says:—

June 1st, in other collections, other new species were discovered, much to Agassiz's delight, who never failed afterward to[Pg 245] cultivate Thoreau's society when he could. But the poet avoided the man of science, having no love for dissection; though he recognized in Agassiz the qualities that gave him so much distinction.

The paper on "Ktaadn and the Maine Woods," which Horace Greeley bought "at a Jew's bargain," and sold to a publisher for seventy-five dollars, was the journal of a visit made to the highest mountain of Maine during Thoreau's second summer at Walden. An aunt of his had married in Bangor, Maine, and her daughters had again married there, so that the young forester of Concord had kinsmen on the Penobscot, engaged in converting the Maine forests into pine lumber. At the end of August, in 1846, while his Carlyle manuscript was passing from Greeley to Griswold, from Griswold to Graham, and from Graham to the Philadelphia type-setters, Thoreau himself was on his way from Boston to Bangor; and on the first day of September he started with his cousin from Bangor, to explore the upper waters of the Penobscot and climb the summit of Ktaadn. The forest region about this mountain had been explored[Pg 246] in 1837 by Dr. Jackson, the State Geologist, a brother-in-law of Mr. Emerson; but no poet before Thoreau had visited these solitudes and described his experiences there. James Russell Lowell did so a few years later, and, early in the century, Hawthorne, Longfellow, and Emerson had tested the solitude of the Maine woods, and written about them. The verses of Emerson, describing his own experiences there (not so well known as they should be), are often thought to imply Thoreau, though they were written before Emerson had known his younger friend, whose after adventures they portray with felicity.

Thus much is a picture of the Maine forests, and may have been suggested in part by the woodland life of Dr. Jackson there while surveying the State. But what follows is the brave proclamation of the poet, for himself and his heroes, among whom Thoreau and John Brown must be counted, since it declares their creed and practice,—while in the last couplet the whole inner doctrine of Transcendentalism is set forth:—

Thoreau may have heard these verses read by their author in his study, before he set forth on his first journey to Maine in[Pg 248] 1838; they were first published in the "Dial" in October, 1840, but are omitted, for some reason, in a partial edition of Emerson's Poems (in 1876). He never complied with this description so far as to spend three months in the Maine woods, even in the three campaigns which he made there (in 1846, in 1853, and in 1857), for in none of these did he occupy three weeks, and in all but little more than a month. His account of them, as now published, makes a volume by itself, which his friend Channing edited two years after Thoreau's death, and which contains the fullest record of his studies of the American Indian. It was his purpose to develop these studies into a book concerning the Indian, and for this purpose he made endless readings in the Jesuit Fathers, in books of travel, and in all the available literature of the subject. But the papers he had thus collected were not left in such form that they could be published; and so much of his untiring diligence seems now lost, almost thrown away. Doubtless his friends and editors, upon call, will one day print detached portions of these studies, from[Pg 249] entries in his journals, and from his commonplace books.

In his explorations of Concord and its vicinity, as well as in those longer foot-journeys which he took among the mountains and along the sea-shore of New England, from 1838 to 1860, Thoreau's habits were those of an experienced hunter, though he seldom used a gun in his years of manhood. Upon this point he says in "Walden":—

Emerson mentions that Thoreau preferred his spy-glass to his gun to bring the bird nearer to his eye, and says also of his patience in out-door observation:—

And I have thought that Emerson had[Pg 251] Thoreau in mind when he described his "Forester":—

The same friend said of him:—

It was this poetic and coördinating vision of the natural world which distinguished Thoreau from the swarm of naturalists, and raised him to the rank of a philosopher even in his tedious daily observations. Channing, no less than Emerson, has observed and noted this trait, giving to his friend the exact title of "poet-naturalist," and also, in his poem, "The Wanderer," bestowing on him the queer name of Idolon, which he thus explains:—

In an earlier poem Channing had called him "Rudolpho," and had thus portrayed his daily and nightly habits of observation:—

The hint here given that Thoreau injured his once robust health by his habits of out-door study and the hardships he imposed on himself, had too much truth in it. Growing[Pg 254] up with great strength of body and limb, and having cultivated his physical advantages by a temperate youth much exercised with manual labor, in which he took pleasure, Thoreau could not learn the lesson of moderation in those pursuits to which his nature inclined. He exposed himself in his journeys and night encampments to cold and hunger, and changes of weather, which the strongest cannot brave with impunity. Mr. Edward Hoar, who traveled with him in the Maine woods in 1857,—a journey of three hundred and twenty-five miles with a canoe and an Indian, among the head-waters of the Kennebec, Penobscot, and St. John's rivers,—and who in 1858 visited the White Mountains with him, remembers, with a shiver to this day, the rigor of a night spent on the bare rocks of Mount Washington, with insufficient blankets,—Thoreau sleeping from habit, but himself lying wakeful all night, and gazing at the coldest of full moons. It was after such an experience as this on Monadnoc, whither Thoreau and Channing went to camp out for a week in August, 1860, that the latter wrote:—

[Pg 255]

Thoreau had much scorn for weakness like this, and said of his comrade, "I fear that he did not improve all the night as he might have done, to sleep." This was his last excursion, and he died within less than two years afterward. The account of it which Channing has given may therefore be read with interest:—

These excursions were common with Thoreau, but less so with Channing, who therefore, notes down many things that his friend would not think worth recording, except as a part of that calendar of Nature which he set himself to keep, and of which his journals, for more than twenty years, are the record. From these he made up his printed volumes, and there may be read the details that he registered. He had gauges for the height of the river, noted the temperature of springs and ponds, the tints of the morning and evening sky, the flowering and fruit of plants, all the habits of birds and animals, and every aspect of nature from the smallest to the greatest. Much of this is the dryest detail, but everywhere you come upon strokes of beauty, in[Pg 258] a single word-picture, or in a page of idyllic description, like this of the Concord heifer, which might be a poem of Theocritus, or one of the lost bucolics of Moschus:—

Or take this apostrophe to the "Queen of Night, the Huntress Diana," which is not a translation from some Greek worshipper, but the sincere ascription of a New England hunter of the noblest deer:—

In such a lofty mystical strain did this Concord Endymion declare his passion for Nature, in whose green lap he slumbers now on the hill-side which the goddess nightly revisits.

[Pg 261]

CHAPTER XI.

PERSONAL TRAITS AND SOCIAL LIFE.

The face of Thoreau, once seen, could not easily be forgotten, so strong was the mark that genius had set upon it. The portrait of him, which has been commonly engraved, though it bore some resemblance at the time it was taken (by S. W. Rowse, in 1854), was never a very exact likeness. A few years later he began to wear his beard long, and this fine silken muffler for his delicate throat and lungs, was also an ornament to his grave and thoughtful face, concealing its weakest feature, a receding chin. The head engraved for this volume is from a photograph taken, in 1861, at New Bedford, and shows him as he was in his last years. His personal traits were not startling and commanding like those of Webster, who drew the eyes of all men wherever he appeared, but they were peculiar, and dwelt long in the memory. His features were[Pg 262] prominent, his eyes large, round, and deep-set, under bold brows, and full of fearless meditation; the color varying from blue to gray, as if with the moods of his mind. A youth who saw him for the first time, said with a start, "How deep and clear is the mark that thought sets upon a man's face!" And, indeed, no man could fail to recognize in him that rare intangible essence we call thought; his slight figure was active with it, while in his face it became contemplative, as if, like his own peasant, he were "meditating some vast and sunny problem." Channing says of his appearance:—

It is not possible to describe him more exactly.

In December, 1854, Thoreau went to lecture at Nantucket, and on his way spent a day or two with one of his correspondents, Daniel Ricketson of New Bedford,—reaching his house on Christmas day. His host, who then saw him for the first time, thus recorded his impressions:—

This was a common mistake to make about Thoreau. When he ran the gauntlet of the Cape Cod villages,—"feeling as strange," he says, "as if he were in a town in China,"—one of the old fishermen could not believe that he had not something to sell, as Bronson Alcott had when he perambulated Eastern Virginia and North Carolina in 1819-22, peddling silks and jewelry. Being assured that Thoreau was not peddling spectacles or books, the fisherman said at last: "Well, it makes no odds what it is you carry, so long as you carry Truth along with you."

Of Thoreau's appearance then (at the age of thirty-seven), Mr. Ricketson goes on to say:—

A strange mistake has prevailed as to the supposed churlishness and cynical severity of Thoreau, which Mr. Alcott, in one of his octogenarian sonnets, has corrected, and[Pg 267] which all who knew the man would protest against.

Of his domestic character Mr. Ricketson writes:—

Channing says the same thing more quaintly:—

He was sometimes given to music and song, and now and then, in moments of great hilarity, would dance gayly,—as he did once at Brooklawn, in the presence of his host, Mr. Ricketson, and Mr. Alcott,[Pg 268] who was also visiting there. On the same occasion he sung his unique song of "Tom Bowline," which none who heard would ever forget, and finished the evening with his dance.

Hearing Mr. Ricketson speak of this dance, Miss Thoreau said:—

Mr. Ricketson's own account is this:—

After Thoreau's return home from this[Pg 269] visit, his New Bedford friend seems to have sent him a copy of the words and music of "Tom Bowline," which was duly acknowledged and handed over to the musical people of Concord for them to play and sing. It is a fine old pathetic sailor-song of Dibdin's, which pleased Thoreau (whose imagination delighted in the sea), and perhaps reminded him of his brother John. As Thoreau sang it, the verses ran thus:—

Another of his songs was Moore's "Canadian Boat Song," with its chorus,—

"Row brothers, row."

Mrs. W. H. Forbes, who knew him in her childhood, from the age of six to that of fifteen more particularly, and who first remembers him in his hut at Walden, writes me:—

Although so great a traveler in a small circle—being every day a-field when not too ill,—he was also a great stay-at-home.[Pg 274] He never crossed the ocean, nor saw Niagara or the Mississippi until the year before his death. He lived within twenty miles of Boston, but seldom went there, except to pass through it on his way to the Maine woods, to Cape Cod, to the house of his friend, Marston Watson at Plymouth, or to Daniel Ricketson's at New Bedford. To the latter he wrote in February, 1855:—

What took him from home in the winter season was generally some engagement to lecture, of which he had many after his Walden life became a little known abroad.

From the year 1847 Thoreau may be said to have fairly entered on his career as author and lecturer; having taken all the needful degrees and endured most of the mortifications necessary for the public profession of authorship. Up to that time he had supported himself, except while in college, chiefly by the labor of his hands;[Pg 275] after 1847, though still devoted to manual labor occasionally, he yet worked chiefly with his head as thinker, observer, surveyor, magazine contributor, and lecturer.

His friends were the first promoters of his lectures, and among his correspondence are some letters from Hawthorne, inviting him to the Salem Lyceum. The first of these letters is dated, Salem, October 21, 1848, and runs thus:—

A month later, Hawthorne, who had received an affirmative answer from Thoreau, wrote to him from Boston (November 20, 1848), as follows:—

Apparently another lecture was wanted by the Salem people the same winter, for[Pg 277] on the 19th of February, 1849, when the "Week on the Concord and Merrimac" was in press, Hawthorne wrote again, thus:—

These letters were written just before Hawthorne was turned out of his office in the Salem custom-house, and while his own literary success was still in abeyance,—the "Scarlet Letter" not being published till a[Pg 278] year later. They show the friendly terms on which Hawthorne stood with the Concord Transcendentalists, after leaving that town in 1846. He returned to it in 1852, when he bought Mr. Alcott's estate, then called "Hillside," which he afterward christened "Wayside," and by this name it is still known. Mr. Alcott bought this place in 1845, and from then till 1848, when he left it to reside in Boston, he expended, as Hawthorne said, "a good deal of taste and some money in forming the hill-side behind the house into terraces, and building arbors and summer-houses of rough stems, and branches, and trees, on a system of his own." In this work he was aided by Thoreau, who was then in the habit of performing much manual labor. In 1847 he joined Mr. Alcott in the task of cutting trees for Mr. Emerson's summer-house, which the three friends were to build in the garden. Mr. Emerson, however, went with them to the woods but one day, when finding his strength and skill unequal to that of his companions, he withdrew, and left the work to them. Mr. Alcott relates that Thoreau was not only a master workman with the[Pg 279] axe, but also had such strength of arm, that when a tree they were felling lodged in some unlucky position, he rushed at it, and by main strength carried out the trunk until it fell where he wanted it.

It was one of the serious doctrines of the Transcendentalists that each person should perform his quota of hand-work, and accordingly Alcott, Channing, Hawthorne, and the rest, took their turn at wood-chopping, hay-making, plowing, tree-pruning, grafting, etc. Even Emerson trimmed his own orchard, and sometimes lent a hand in hoeing corn and raking hay. To Thoreau such tasks were easy, and, unlike some amateur farmers, he was quite willing to be seen at his work, whatever it might be (except the pencil-making, in which there were certain secrets), and by choice he wore plain working clothes, and generally old ones. The fashion of his garments gave him no concern, and was often old, or even grotesque. At one time he had a fancy for corduroy, such as Irish laborers then wore, but which occasionally appeared in the wardrobe of a gentleman. As he climbed trees, waded swamps, and was[Pg 280] out in all weathers during his daily excursions, he naturally dressed himself for what he had to do.

As may be inferred from his correspondence with Horace Greeley, Thoreau's whole income from authorship during the twenty years that he practiced that profession, cannot have exceeded a few hundred dollars yearly,—not half enough in most years to supply even his few wants. He would never be indebted to any person pecuniarily, and therefore he found out other ways of earning his subsistence and paying his obligations,—gardening, fence-building, white-washing, pencil-making, land-surveying, etc.,—for he had great mechanical skill, and a patient, conscientious industry in whatever he undertook. When his father, who had been long living in other men's houses, undertook, at last, to build one of his own, Henry worked upon it, and performed no small part of the manual labor. He had no false pride in such matters,—was, indeed, rather proud of his workmanship, and averse to the gentility even of his industrious village.

During his first residence at Mr. Emerson's[Pg 281] in 1841-43, Thoreau managed the garden and did other hand-work for his friend; and when Mr. Emerson went to England in 1847, he returned to the house (soon after leaving his Walden hut), and took charge of his friend's household affairs in his absence. In a letter to his sister Sophia (October 24, 1847), Thoreau says:—

[Pg 282]

There is a poem of Thoreau's, of uncertain date, called "The Departure," which, as I suppose, expresses his emotions at leaving finally, in 1848, the friendly house of Emerson, where he had dwelt so long, upon terms of such ideal intimacy. It was never seen by his friends, so far as I can learn, until after his death, when Sophia Thoreau gave it to me, along with other poems, for publication in the "Boston Commonwealth," in 1863. Since then it has been mentioned as a poem written in anticipation of death. This is not so; it was certainly written long before his illness.

[Pg 284]

CHAPTER XII.

POET, MORALIST, AND PHILOSOPHER.

The character of poet is so high and so rare, in any modern civilization, and specially in our American career of nationality, that it behooves us to mark and claim all our true poets, before they are classified under some other name,—as philosophers, naturalists, romancers, or historians. Thus Emerson is primarily and chiefly a poet, and only a philosopher in his second intention; and thus also Thoreau, though a naturalist by habit, and a moralist by constitution, was inwardly a poet by force of that shaping and controlling imagination, which was his strongest faculty. His mind tended naturally to the ideal side. He would have been an idealist in any circumstances; a fluent and glowing poet, had he been born among a people to whom poesy is native, like the Greeks, the Italians, the Irish. As it was, his poetic light illumined[Pg 285] every wide prospect and every narrow cranny in which his active, patient spirit pursued its task. It was this inward illumination as well as the star-like beam of Emerson's genius in "Nature," which caused Thoreau to write in his senior year at college, "This curious world which we inhabit is more wonderful than it is convenient; more beautiful than it is useful," and he cherished this belief through life. In youth, too, he said, "The other world is all my art, my pencils will draw no other, my jack-knife will cut nothing else; I do not use it as a means." It was in this spirit that he afterwards uttered the quaint parable, which was his version of the primitive legend of the Golden Age:—

In the same significance read his little-known verses, "The Pilgrims."

[Pg 286]

It seems to have been the habit of Thoreau, in writing verse, to compose a couplet, a quatrain, or other short metrical expression, copy it in his journal, and afterward, when these verses had grown to a considerable number, to arrange them in the form of a single piece. This gives to his poems the epigrammatic air which most of them have. After he was thirty years old, he wrote scarcely any verse, and he even destroyed much that he had previously written, following in this the judgment of Mr.[Pg 287] Emerson, rather than his own, as he told me one day during his last illness. He had read all that was best in English and in Greek poetry, but was more familiar with the English poets of Milton's time and earlier, than with those more recent, except his own townsmen and companions. He valued Milton above Shakespeare, and had a special love for Æschylus, two of whose tragedies he translated. He had read Pindar, Simonides, and the Greek Anthology, and wrote, at his best, as well as the finest of the Greek lyric poets. Even Emerson, who was a severe critic of his verses, says, "His classic poem on 'Smoke' suggests Simonides, but is better than any poem of Simonides." Indeed, what Greek would not be proud to claim this fragment as his own?

No complete collection of Thoreau's poems has ever been made. Amid much that is harsh and crude, such a book would contain many verses sure to survive for centuries.

[Pg 288]

As a moralist, the bent of Thoreau is more clearly seen by most readers; and on this side, too, he was early and strongly charged. In a college essay of 1837 are these sentences:—

In another essay of the same year he wrote:—

This was an anticipation of his theory of labor and leisure set forth in "Walden," where he says:—

This was true of Thoreau, because, as he said, his "greatest skill had been to want but little." In him this economy was a part of morality, or even of religion.

"The high moral impulse," says Channing, "never deserted him, and he resolved early to read no book, take no walk, undertake no enterprise, but such as he could endure to give an account of to himself." How early this austerity appeared in what he wrote, has been little noticed; but I discover it in his earliest college essays, before he was eighteen years old. Thus, in such a paper of the year 1834, this passage occurs:—

In contrast with this man the young philosopher sets before us the man who wishes, as the Greeks said, πλεονεκτειν [pleonektein],—to get more than his square meal at the banquet of life.

What was his own ambition—a purpose[Pg 291] in life which only the unthinking could ever confound with selfishness—was expressed by him early in a prayer which he threw into this verse:—

And it may be said of him that he acted this prayer as well as uttered it. Says Channing again:—

Thus it is said that when he went to prison rather than pay his tax, which went to support slavery in South Carolina, and[Pg 292] his friend Emerson came to the cell and said, "Henry, why are you here?" the reply was, "Why are you not here?"

In this act, which even his best friends at first denounced as "mean and sneaking and in bad taste,"—this refusal to pay the trifling sum demanded of him by the Concord tax-gatherer,—the outlines of his political philosophy appear. They were illuminated afterwards by his trenchant utterances in denunciation of slavery and in encomium of John Brown, who attacked that monster in its most vulnerable part. It was not mere whim, but a settled theory of human nature and the institution of government, which led him, in 1838, to renounce the parish church and refuse to pay its tax, in 1846 to renounce the State and refuse tribute to it, and in 1859 to come forward, first of all men, in public support of Brown and his Virginia campaign. This theory found frequent expression in his lectures. In 1846 he said:—

And again:—

[Pg 293]

This sounded hollow then, but when that embodiment of American justice and mercy, John Brown, lay bleeding in a Virginia prison, a dozen years later, the significance of Thoreau's words began to be seen; and when a few years after our countrymen were dying by hundreds of thousands to complete what Brown, with his single life, had begun, the whole truth, as Thoreau had seen it, flashed in the eyes of the nation.

In this same essay of 1846, on "Civil Disobedience," the ultimate truth concerning government is stated in a passage which also does justice to Daniel Webster, our "logic-fencer and parliamentary Hercules," as Carlyle called him in a letter to Emerson in 1839. Thoreau said:—

[Pg 294]

Such a legislator, proclaiming his law[Pg 295] from the scaffold, at last appeared in John Brown:—

Before these simple words of Brown, down went Webster and all his industry in behalf of the "compromises of the Constitution." When Thoreau heard them, and saw the matchless behavior of his noble old friend, he recognized the hour and the man.

Words like these have proved immortal when spoken in the cell of Socrates, and they lose none of their vitality, coming from the Concord philosopher.

The weakness of Webster was in his moral principles; he could not resist temptation; could not keep out of debt; could not avoid those obligations which the admiration or the selfishness of his friends forced upon him, and which left him, in his old age, neither independence nor gratitude. Thoreau's strength was in his moral nature, and in his obstinate refusal to mortgage himself, his time, or his opinions, even to the State or the Church. The haughtiness of his independence kept him from a thousand temptations that beset men of less courage and self-denial.

[Pg 297]

CHAPTER XIII.

LIFE, DEATH, AND IMMORTALITY.

The life of Thoreau naturally divides itself into three parts: his Apprenticeship, from birth to the summer of 1837, when he left Harvard College; his Journey-work (Wanderjahre) from 1837 to 1849, when he appeared as an author, with his first book; and his Mastership,—not of a college, a merchantman, or a mechanic art, but of the trade and mystery of writing. He had aspired to live and study and practice, so that he could write—to use his own words—"sentences which suggest far more than they say, which have an atmosphere about them, which do not report an old, but make a new impression." To frame such sentences as these, he said, "as durable as a Roman aqueduct," was the art of writing coveted by him; "sentences which are expressive, towards which so many volumes, so much life went; which lie like boulders[Pg 298] on the page, up and down or across,—not mere repetition, but creation, and which a man might sell his ground or cattle to build." It was this thirst for final and concentrated expression, and not love of fame, or "literary aspirations," as poor Greeley put it, which urged him on to write. For printing he cared little,—and few authors since Shakespeare have been less anxious to publish what they wrote. Of the seven volumes of his works first printed, and twenty more which may be published some day, only two, "The Week" and "Walden," appeared in his lifetime,—though the material for two more had been scattered about in forgotten magazines and newspapers, for his friends to collect after his death. Of his first works (and some of his best) it could be said, as Thomas Wharton said, in 1781, of his friend Gray's verses, "I yet reflect with pain upon the cool reception which those noble odes, 'The Progress of Poetry' and 'The Bard' met with at their first publication; it appeared there were not twenty people in England who liked them." This disturbed Thoreau's friends, but not himself; he rather rejoiced[Pg 299] in the slow sale of his first book; and when the balance of the edition,—more than seven hundred copies out of one thousand,—came back upon his hands unsold in 1855, and earlier, he told me with glee that he had made an addition of seven hundred volumes to his library, and all of his own composition. "O solitude, obscurity, meanness!" he exclaims in 1856 to his friend Blake, "I never triumph so as when I have the least success in my neighbors' eyes." Of course, pride had something to do with this; "it was a wild stock of pride," as Burke said of Lord Keppel, "on which the tenderest of all hearts had grafted the milder virtues." Both pride and piety led him to write,—

Though often ranked as an unbeliever, and too scornful in some of his expressions concerning the religion of other men, Thoreau was in truth deeply religious. Sincerity and devotion were his most marked traits; and both are seen in his verses from[Pg 300] the same poem ("Inspiration") so often quoted:—

Thoreau's business in life was observation, thought, and writing, to which last, reading was essential. He read much, but studied more; nor was his reading that indiscriminate, miscellaneous perusal of everything printed, which has become the vice of this age. He read books of travel, scientific books, authors of original merit, but few newspapers, of which he had a very poor opinion. "Read not the 'Times,' read the Eternities," he said. Nor did he admire the magazines, or their editors, greatly. He quarreled with "Putnam's Magazine," in 1853-54, and in 1858, after yielding to the suggestion of Mr. Emerson, that he should contribute to the "Atlantic," in consequence of a dispute with Mr. Lowell, its editor, about the omission of a sentence in one of his articles, he published no more in that magazine until the year of his death (1862), when Mr. Fields obtained from him some of[Pg 301] his choicest manuscripts. He spent the last months of his life in revising these, and they continued to appear for some years after his death. Those which were published in the "Atlantic" in 1878 are passages from his journals, selected by his friend Blake, who long had the custody of his manuscripts. These consist chiefly of his journals in thirty-nine volumes, many parts of which had already been printed, either by Thoreau himself, by his sister Sophia, or his friend Channing, who, in 1873, published a life of Thoreau, containing many extracts from the journals, which had never before been printed. When we speak of his works, we should include Mr. Channing's book also, half of which, at least, is from Thoreau's pen.

His method in writing was peculiarly his own, though it bore some external resemblance to that of his friends, Emerson and Alcott. Like them he early began to keep a journal, which became both diary and commonplace book. But while they noted down the thoughts which occurred to them, without premeditation or consecutive arrangement, Thoreau made studies and[Pg 302] observations for his journal as carefully and habitually as he noted the angles and distances in surveying a Concord farm. In all his daily walks and distant journeys, he took notes on the spot of what occurred to him, and these, often very brief and symbolic, he carefully wrote out, as soon as he could get time, in his diary, not classified by topics, but just as they had come to him. To these he added his daily meditations, sometimes expressed in verse, especially in the years between 1837 and 1850, but generally in close and pertinent prose. Many details are found in his diaries, but not such as are common in the diaries of other men,—not trivial but significant details. From these daily entries he made up his essays, his lectures, and his volumes; all being slowly, and with much deliberation and revision, brought into the form in which he gave them to the public. After that he scarcely changed them at all; they had received the last imprint of his mind, and he allowed them to stand and speak for themselves. But before printing, they underwent constant change, by addition, erasure, transposition, correction, and combination.[Pg 303] A given lecture might be two years, or twenty years in preparation; or it might be, like his defense of John Brown, copied with little change from the pages of his diary for the fortnight previous. But that was an exceptional case; and Thoreau was stirred and quickened by the campaign and capture of Brown, as perhaps he had never been before.

The fact that Thoreau noted down his thoughts by night as well as by day, appears also from an entry in one of his journals,[Pg 304] where he is describing the coming on of day, as witnessed by him at the close of a September night in Concord. "Some bird flies over," he writes, "making a noise like the barking of a puppy (it was a cuckoo). It is yet so dark that I have dropped my pencil and cannot find it." No writer of modern times, in fact, was so much awake and abroad at night, or has described better the phenomena of darkness and of moonlight.

It is interesting to note some dates and incidents concerning a few of Thoreau's essays. The celebrated chapter on "Friendship," in the "Week," was written in the winter of 1847-48, soon after he left Walden, and while he was a member of Mr. Emerson's household during the absence of his friend in Europe. On the 13th of January, 1848, Mr. Alcott notes in his diary:—

To the same period or a little later[Pg 305] belong those verses called "The Departure," which declare, under a similitude, Thoreau's relations with one family of his friends.

In 1843, when he first met Henry James, Lucretia Mott, and others who have since been famous, in the pleasant seclusion of Staten Island, he wrote a translation of the "Seven Against Thebes," which has never been printed, some translations from Pindar, printed in the "Dial," in 1844, and two articles for the New York "Democratic Review," called "Paradise to be Regained," and "The Landlord."

Thoreau left "a vast amount of manuscript," in the words of his sister, who was his literary executor until her death in 1876, when she committed her trust to his Worcester friend, Mr. Harrison Blake. She was aided in the revision and publication of the "Excursions," "Maine Woods," "Letters," and other volumes which she issued from 1862 to 1866, by Mr. Emerson, Mr. Channing, and other friends,—Mr. Emerson having undertaken that selection of letters and poems from his mass of correspondence and his preserved verses, which appeared in 1865. His purpose, as he said[Pg 306] to Miss Thoreau, was to exhibit in that volume "a most perfect piece of stoicism," and he fancied that she had "marred his classic statue" by inserting some tokens of natural affection which the domestic letters showed. Miss Thoreau said that "it did not seem quite honest to Henry" to leave out such passages; Mr. Fields, the publisher, agreed with her, and a few of them were retained. His correspondence, as a whole, is much more affectionate, and less pugnacious than would appear from the published volume. He was fond of dispute, but those who knew him best loved him most.

Of his last illness his sister said:—

Walking once with Mr. Alcott, soon after he passed his eightieth birth day, as we faced the lovely western sky in December, the old Pythagorean said, "I always think of Thoreau when I look at a sunset;" and[Pg 307] I then remembered it was at that hour Thoreau usually walked along the village street, under the arch of trees, with the sunset sky seen through their branches. "He said to me in his last illness," added Alcott, "'I shall leave the world without a regret,'—that was the saying either of a grand egotist or of a deeply religious soul." Thoreau was both, and both his egotism and his devotion offended many of those who met him. His aversion to the companionship of men was partly religious—a fondness for the inward life—and partly egotism and scorn for frivolity.

In 1859 he wrote to Mr. Blake:—

[Pg 308]

Yet Thoreau knew the value of society, and avoided it oftentimes only because he was too busy. To his friend Ricketson, who reproached him for ceasing to answer letters, he wrote in November, 1860, just before he took the fatal cold that terminated in consumption and ended his life prematurely:—

He did make a last visit to this friend in August, 1861, after his return from Minnesota, whither he went with young Horace Mann, in June. And it was to Mr. Ricketson that Sophia Thoreau, two weeks after her brother's death, wrote the following account of his last illness:—

To Parker Pillsbury, who would fain talk with Thoreau in this last winter concerning the next world, the reply was, "One world at a time." To a young friend (Myron Benton) he wrote a few weeks before death:—

"With an unfaltering trust in God's mercies," wrote Ellery Channing, "and never deserted by his good genius, he most bravely and unsparingly passed down the inclined plane of a terrible malady—pulmonary consumption; working steadily at the completing of his papers to his last hours, or so long as he could hold the pencil in his trembling fingers. Yet if he did get a little sleep to comfort him in this year's campaign of sleepless affliction, he was sure to interest those about him in his singular dreams, more than usually fantastic. He said once, that having got a few moments[Pg 316] of repose, 'sleep seemed to hang round his bed in festoons.' He declared uniformly that he preferred to endure with a clear mind the worst penalties of suffering rather than be plunged in a turbid dream by narcotics. His patience was unfailing; assuredly he knew not aught save resignation; he did mightily cheer and console those whose strength was less. His every instant now, his least thought and work, sacredly belonged to them, dearer than his rapidly perishing life, whom he should so quickly leave behind."

Once or twice he shed tears. Upon hearing a wandering musician in the street playing some tune of his childhood he might never hear again, he wept, and said to his mother, "Give him some money for me!"

He died on the 6th of May, 1862, and had a public funeral from the parish church a few days later. On his coffin his friend[Pg 317] Channing placed several inscriptions, among them this, "Hail to thee, O man! who hast come from the transitory place to the imperishable." This sentiment may stand as faintly marking Thoreau's deep, vital conviction of immortality, of which he never had entertained a doubt in his life. There was in his view of the world and its Maker no room for doubt; so that when he was once asked, superfluously, what he thought of a future world and its compensations, he replied, "Those were voluntaries I did not take,"—having confined himself to the foreordained course of things. He is buried in the village cemetery, quaintly named "Sleepy Hollow," with his family and friends about him; one of whom, surviving him for a few years, said, as she looked upon his low head-stone on the hillside, "Concord is Henry's monument, covered with suitable inscriptions by his own hand."

[Pg 319]

INDEX.

• Academy, Concord, 46.
• Acton, originally a part of Concord, 32.
• Adams, John Quincy, 78.
• Adams, Samuel, 100.
• African Slaves in Concord, 203-205.
• Agassiz, Louis, 115, 243, 245.
• Agricola at Marseilles, 64.
• Alcott, A. Bronson, sonnet on Thoreau, v.;
• born in Connecticut, 63;
• at Concord Lyceum, 49;
• visits Dr. Ripley, 80;
• in old age, 81;
• goes to live in Concord, 117;
• helps "raise" Thoreau's hut, 118;
• his School of Philosophy, 121;
• an early Transcendentalist, 124;
• his Paradise at Fruitlands, 134-140;
• a friend of John Brown, 148;
• plan of living in Concord woods, 155;
• builds a summer-house for Emerson, 194;
• his friendship with Thoreau, 186;
• his conversations, 187, 188, 190, 199;
• from his diary, 192, 195, 304;
• peddler in Virginia, 187, 260;
• visits Horace Greeley, 188;
• harbors a fugitive slave, 195;
• lends Thoreau his axe, 209;
• goes to the opera with Greeley, 241;
• with Thoreau in New Bedford, 267;
• his opinion of Thoreau, 306.
• Alcott, Louisa, 63, 91.
• Allston, Washington, visits Concord, 111.
• American literature, Thoreau's view of, 160.
• American Slavery, Thoreau's opposition to, 195, 199, 292;
• John Brown's attack upon, 292, 303.
• Assabet River, 15, 33, 114, 202.
• Ball, B. W., 135.
• Bangor, 1, 5, 245.
• Barnes, Lucy, 109, 110.
• Barrett, Humphrey, a Concord farmer, 89, 98, 103, 107.
• Barrett, Joseph, 114-117.
• Bartlett, Dr. Josiah, 43, 44.
• Bartlett, Robert, 190.
• Bedford (the town), 9, 12.
• Bedford road, 12, 270.
• Betsey (Thoreau), 3, 4.
• Bigelow, Dr. H. J., 62.
• Blake, Harrison, 141, 301, 305, 307.
• Bliss, Rev. Daniel, 74, 75, 99, 100.
• Bliss, Daniel, the Tory, 100, 204.
• Bliss, Phebe, 75, 205.
• Boston, the home of John Thoreau, the Jerseyman, 2, 6;
• of Henry Thoreau, 27;
• birth-place of Emerson, 63.
• Boston Miscellany, 220.
• Bowen, Prof. Francis, 62.
• Bradford, George P., 46.
• Bradford, Gershom, 105.
• Bremer, Frederika, 141.
• Brisbane, Albert, 133, 134.
• Brister's Hill, 202.
• Brister, a freedman, 203, 205, 208.
• Brook Farm, 134, 141.
• Brooks, Nathan, 42, 46, 77, 105, 112.
• Brooks, Mrs. Nathan, 68.
• Brown, John, of Osawatomie, 146, 185, 199, 242, 292, 293, 295, 303. [Pg 320]
• Brown, Mrs., of Plymouth, 60.
• Brownson, Orestes A., 53.
• Bruno, Giordano, quoted, 208.
• Bulkley family in Concord, 33, 39, 98.
• Burke, Edmund, quoted, 299.
• Buttrick, Major, 102.
• Cambridge, Thoreau's residence in, 51;
• letters from, 56, 61;
• Thoreau's visit to, 196.
• Campbell, Sir Archibald, 68.
• Canada, Thoreau's excursion to, 233, 235.
• Cape Cod, 236, 264.
• Carlyle, Thomas, 124, 125, 193, 233;
• Thoreau's essay on, 218-224.
• Channing, Rev. Dr., 80, 82, 144.
• Channing, Ellery (the poet), 11, 41, 49-51, 63, 70, 135, 136, 177-189;
• his lines on Emerson, 69;
• on Thoreau, 185, 214;
• quoted, 49-51;
• his friendship for Thoreau, 178-185;
• his verses on Hawthorne, 188;
• his house, 198;
• his letters to Thoreau, 209, 218;
• calls Thoreau Idolon, 252;
• and Rudolpho, 253;
• visits Monadnoc, 255;
• describes Thoreau, 262, 267, 291, 315;
• his biography of Thoreau, 11, 49, 301.
• Channing, Rev. W. H., 140, 141, 174, 216.
• Chapman, Dr., 193.
• Chappaqua, 241.
• Cheney, Mrs., of Concord, 18, 93.
• Cohasset, 91, 175.
• Columella, 132.
• Concord (town of) described, 32-40;
• celebrities, 41-48, 63-96;
• farmers, 97-123;
• Lyceum, 47, 48, 168;
• as a transcendental capital, 135, 143, 146;
• the home of Channing and Thoreau, 178;
• localities, 201-204;
• freedmen, 204;
• jail, 207;
• the monument to Thoreau, 317.
• Concord Fight, 76, 86, 99, 102, 109.
• Concord grape, 34.
• Concord River, 33, 140, 154, 167, 176, 178, 183, 188, 199, 202, 208.
• Concord Village, 189, 201;
• trade in, 35;
• customs of, 40, 46, 48, 64, 72, 76, 87, 116, 122.
• Connecticut, 73, 82, 127, 186.
• Corner, Nine-Acre, 70, 84, 208.
• Davenant, Sir William, 127, 164.
• "Departure, The," 282, 305.
• Dial, The, 127, 135, 163, 168, 171, 173, 212, 217, 248.
• Diana, Ascription to, 260.
• Dunbar, Rev. Asa, 8, 9, 20.
• Dunbar, Charles, uncle of Thoreau, 21-24, 92, 93.
• Dunbar, Cynthia (mother of Thoreau), 8, 18, 19, 21, 24-28, 50, 57, 92, 96, 312.
• Dunbar, Louisa, 13-17, 21.
• Edwards, Jonathan, quoted, 128.
• "Egomites," 80.
• Emerson, Charles, 46.
• Emerson, Miss Mary, 19, 20, 75.
• Emerson, Ralph Waldo, born in Boston, 63;
• a descendant of Concord ministers, 39;
• quoted, 37;
• began to lecture in Concord, 48;
• begins acquaintance with Thoreau, 59;
• goes to live in Concord, 69;
• draws people there, 71;
• describes Dr. Ripley, 77-84;
• describes the "Concord Fight," 103;
• on Captain Hardy, 121, 123;
• goes to Europe, 281;
• his "Forester," 251;
• his proposition for an international magazine, 193;
• on Thoreau's acquaintance with Nature, 251, 252;
• on Thoreau's patience in observation, 250;
• his relations with Thoreau, 189;
• his summer-house, 194, 278;
• tries to work in the woods, 278;
• praises Thoreau's "Smoke," 287;
• gives his funeral eulogy, 313.
• Emerson, William, 190.
• Endymion of Concord, 260.
• Essays of Thoreau, in college, 150-163;
• "Effect of Story Telling," 158;
• "L'Allegro and Il Penseroso," 156;
• "National Characteristics," 160;
• "Paley's Common Reasons," 161;
• "Punishment," 158;
• "Source of our feeling for the Sublime," 159;
• "Simplicity of Style," 156. [Pg 321]
• Everett, Edward, 88.
• Fairhaven Cliffs, 153.
• Fenda, the fortune teller, 204.
• Fields, James T., 300, 306.
• Forbes, Mrs. W. H., recollections of Thoreau, 270-273.
• "Forester, The," verse by Emerson, 257.
• "Fruitlands," in Harvard, 135-137.
• Fugitive Slave, in Concord, 195.
• Fuller, Margaret, in Concord, 70;
• criticises Thoreau's poems, 169-172;
• rejects a prose article by him, 173;
• her character, 174;
• in Cambridge, 191;
• at a conversation, 190;
• visit to Europe, marriage, and death, 230;
• writes for the "Tribune," and lives with H. Greeley, 217.
• Gardiner, Dr., 79, 80.
• Garfield, his ancestors, 204.
• Gilman, Rev. Nicholas, 128-130.
• Goodwin, Rev. H. B., 83.
• Graham, George R., 222, 224.
• Graham's Magazine, 213, 224.
• Graveyard in Lincoln, 204.
• Greeley, Horace, as Mæcenas, 217;
• editor of the "Tribune," 216;
• described by Margaret Fuller, 217;
• his correspondence with Thoreau, 219-229, 231-240;
• invites Thoreau to Chappaqua, satirized by W. E. Channing, 218.
• Griswold, R. W., 220, 222.
• Hafiz, quoted, 166.
• Hamilton, Alexander, 113.
• Hampden, John, 107.
• Hardy, Captain, 120-122.
• Harvard Magazine, 196.
• Hawthorne, Nathaniel, moves and removes to Concord, 70;
• quoted, 71;
• Channing's verses on, 188;
• Emerson's influence on, 148;
• his "Scarlet Letter," 277;
• invites Thoreau to lecture in Salem, 276;
• returns to Concord, 278;
• returns thither from Europe, 189.
• Herald's Office, London, 108.
• Heywood, Dr. Abiel, 38, 40-42.
• Heywood, George, 39.
• Hildreth, S. T., 57.
• Hoar, E. R., 90, 312.
• Hoar, Edward, 254.
• Hoar, Miss Elizabeth, 239.
• Hoar, Mrs. Samuel, 96.
• Hoar, Samuel, 46, 72, 90, 95, 112.
• Hollowell Farm, 172, note, 208.
• Hosmer Cottage, 117.
• Hosmer, Cyrus, 111.
• Hosmer, Edmund, 118-120.
• Hosmer, James, 98.
• Hosmer, Joseph (the Major), 98, 99, 100, 109, 111, 112, 113.
• Hosmer, Lucy, 110.
• Hurd, Dr. Isaac, 42.
• Icarus, 202.
• Indians, (American), 240, 242, 248.
• Ingraham, Cato, a slave, 203.
• Ingraham, Duncan, 66-68.
• Jack, John, a negro, 204;
• epitaph on, 205.
• Jackson, Dr. C. T., 246, 247.
• James, Henry, 305.
• Jarvis, Deacon Francis, 76, 77.
• Jarvis, Dr. Edward, 76.
• Jersey, Isle of, 1-4.
• Journal of Thoreau, 2, 150, 154, 167.
• Ktaadn, and Thoreau's visit there, 226, 227, 228, 245.
• Keene, N. H., 18.
• Kosta, Martin, 67.
• Lane, Charles, 135-141.
• Lee family, 114;
• their farm and hill, 115.
• Letters from Maria Thoreau, 5;
• from D. Webster, 15;
• from Josiah Quincy, 53, 61;
• from Dr. Ripley, 57, 81;
• from Dr. Channing to Dr. Ripley, 82;
• from Charles Lane, to Thoreau, 137-140;
• from A. G. Peabody, 55, 56;
• from R. W. Emerson, 155, 193;
• from F. B. Sanborn, 197;
• from Henry Thoreau, 92, 181, 209, 210, 216, 307, 308, 314;
• from Horace Greeley, 219, 222-231, 233-240;
• from Margaret Fuller, 169-173;
• from Dr. Ripley, 144-146; [Pg 322]
• from Sophia Thoreau, 176, 268, 306, 310, 314;
• letter to Sophia Thoreau, 189, 216, 281.
• Levet, Robert, 43.
• Lowell, James Russell, 112, 246.
• Mæcenas, Greeley as, 216-241.
• Manse, Old, built in 1766, 75;
• occupied by Hawthorne 85;
• Channing's verses on, 188;
• farmers at, 86-88;
• "Mosses from," 183;
• first mistress of, 205.
• Marlboro road, 109.
• Marryatt, Captain, 67.
• Marvell, Andrew, 42.
• Massey, Gerald, 240.
• Merrick, Tilly, 67, 108.
• Milton, John, 156, 157.
• Minott, George, 22, 24, 92, 274.
• Minott, Mrs., the grandmother of Thoreau, 9-11.
• Minute-Man, statue of, 86.
• Monadnoc, 115, 254-257.
• Moore, Abel ("Captain Hardy"), 120, 121.
• Morton, Edwin, 197.
• Munroe of Lexington and Concord, 66;
• William, 37, 152.
• Musketaquid, 33.
• Nature, "born and brought up in Concord," 96;
• Thoreau's observation of, 252, 285.
• Orrok, David, 2.
• Orrok, Sarah, 2.
• Out-door life of Thoreau, at Walden, 209, 211;
• in general, 242, 243, 249-252, 264-267;
• by night, 304.
• Parker, Theodore, 69;
• school candidate, 88.
• "Past and Present," by Carlyle, notice of, 217.
• Peabody, A. G., letter from, 54.
• Peabody, Elizabeth P., 70, 168.
• Penobscot River, 245.
• Pepperell, Sir William, 129.
• Perry, Joseph, 67.
• Phalanstery, 140, 141, 216.
• Phillips, Wendell, at Concord, 49.
• Pierpont, Sarah, 128.
• Pillsbury, Parker, 314.
• Poems, quoted from Tennyson, 31;
• from Ellery Channing, 24, 69, 119, 176, 184, 185, 215, 252, 255;
• Emerson's "Saadi", 119;
• "Maine Woods," 246, 247;
• Milton, 181;
• Thoreau's "Love," 167;
• "Sympathy," 164;
• "The Maiden in the East," 165;
• to his brother John, 176;
• The Departure, 282;
• "The Pilgrims," 285;
• "Smoke" (a fragment), 287;
• from T. P. Sanborn, 260;
• from Keats, 316.
• Poet, the character of, 284.
• Ponkawtassett Hill, 86, 182.
• Putnam's Magazine, 236, 237.
• Quarterly, Massachusetts, 230.
• Quincy, Josiah, 52;
• letter from, 53, 61;
• certificate in favor of Thoreau, 61.
• Ralston, Mrs. Laura Dunbar, 19.
• Ricketson, Daniel, 176, 188, 263;
• description of Thoreau's actual appearance, 266;
• disappointment in imagined personal appearance of Thoreau, 264;
• on Thoreau's domestic character, 267;
• describes Thoreau's dance, 268;
• Letters from Thoreau to, 308, 309;
• Letter from Sophia Thoreau to, 310.
• Ripley, Dr. (pastor at Concord), petition to Grand Lodge of Masons, 1-9;
• letter from, 25;
• certificate in favor of Thoreau's father, 26;
• schism in parish of, 28, 85;
• Thoreau baptized by, 45;
• letter from Edward Everett to, 47;
• letter introducing Thoreau as a teacher, 57;
• anecdotes of, 73-80, 86, 87;
• letter to Dr. Channing, 81;
• reply, 82;
• his prayers, 83, 84;
• letter on the Transcendental movement, 144, 146.
• Ripley, Rev. Samuel, 74.
• Ripley, Mrs. Sarah, 85.
• Robbins, Cæsar, a negro, 104, 203.
• Sanborn, F. B., acquaintance with Thoreau, 196; [Pg 323]
• extract from diary, 198, 199;
• introduces John Brown to Thoreau, 199;
• letter to Thoreau, 197.
• Sanborn, T. P., his "Endymion" quoted, 260.
• Sartain, John, 232.
• "Service, The," 172.
• Sewall, Ellen, 163.
• "Shay," a one-horse, 131-133.
• Slave, fugitive, 195.
• Staten Island, 89, 92, 305.
• Sunday prospect, 152.
• Sunday walkers, 85.
• Tacitus, quoted, 64.
• Teufelsdröckh, 210.
• Thoreau family, 4, 5, 27-31.
• Thoreau, Helen, 59-61.
• Thoreau, Henry, his ancestry, 1-10;
• born in Concord, 12;
• his mother, 8, 24;
• his father, 25;
• as a pencil-maker, 37;
• first dwelling-place, 45;
• at the Concord Academy, 46;
• enters Harvard College, 46;
• at Chelmsford, 49;
• his childish stoicism, 50;
• his graduation, 51;
• as school teacher, 52;
• a beneficiary of Harvard College, 53, 54;
• his certificate from Dr. Ripley, 57, 58;
• from Emerson, 59;
• beginning of acquaintance with Emerson, 59;
• his "Sic Vita," 60;
• Quincy's certificate, 61;
• a Transcendentalist, 124;
• first essays in authorship, 149, 153;
• description of a visit to Fairhaven Cliffs, 153, 154;
• his early poems, 164-167;
• his first lecture, 168;
• his "Walk to Wachusett," 169;
• his earliest companion, 175;
• his friendship with Ellery Channing, 178-183;
• his praise of Alcott, 186;
• goes to Alcott's conversations, 187;
• visits Chappaqua and Walt Whitman, 188;
• his burial place, 189;
• his relation with Emerson, 189, 190;
• reads his "Week" to Alcott, 192;
• designs a lodge for Emerson, 194;
• his acquaintance with Sanborn, 195;
• at Walden, 201;
• his reasons for going to Walden, 212;
• edits "The Week," 212;
• talks with W. H. Channing and Greeley, 216;
• his essay on Carlyle, 218-225;
• his paper on "Ktaadn" and the "Maine Woods," 225;
• his "Week," 230;
• asks Greeley for a loan, 235;
• his "Canada," and "Cape Cod," 235, 236;
• Greeley asks him to become a tutor, 241;
• his out-door life, 242;
• collects specimens for Agassiz, 243, 245;
• his visits to Maine, 245, 248;
• as a naturalist, 249-252;
• a night on Mount Washington, 254;
• his Monadnoc trip, 256-257;
• his description of a Concord heifer, 258, 259;
• his apostrophe to the "Queen of Night," 259;
• his face, 199, 261, 266;
• described by Channing, 262;
• by Ricketson, 263-266;
• travels on Cape Cod, 264;
• domestic character, 267;
• dances, 268;
• sings "Tom Bowline," 269;
• his social traits, 270-273;
• as author and lecturer, 274-277;
• his manual labor, 278;
• fashion of his garments, 279;
• income from authorship, 280;
• lives in Emerson's household, 281;
• his parable, 285;
• his habit of versification, 286;
• his reading, 286;
• as naturalist, 288-291;
• his theory of labor and leisure, 288;
• his political philosophy, 292;
• eras in his life, 297;
• his aim in writing, 298;
• his religion, 299;
• his business in life, 300;
• his method in writing, 304;
• his sunset walks, 307;
• his aversion to society, 307;
• his decline and death, 313-316;
• his funeral, 317.
• Thoreau, John, the father, 25, 27.
• Thoreau, John, the brother, 175, 178.
• Thoreau, John, the Jerseyman; 1, 5-7, 37.
• Thoreau, Maria, 1-8.
• Thoreau, Sophia, 29, 38, 44, 265, 282, 301, 305, 310, 315;
• letter from, 176, 268, 306, 310-314;
• letters to, 189, 216, 281. [Pg 324]
• "Tom Bowline," sung by Thoreau, 268, 269, 272.
• Transcendentalism, 124, 126, 133, 142, 247, 279;
• in New England, 124-126;
• in politics, 292-296;
• social and unsocial, 141-145;
• at Brook Farm, 134;
• at Fruitlands, 137.
• Transcendentalists of Concord, 63, 70, 76, 80, 119, 134-137, 143, 146, 148, 288, 307.
• Transcendental Period, 124-147.
• "Tribune," New York, 217, 230, 238.
• Very, Jones, 51, 190.
• Wachusett, 115, 138, 169, 220.
• Walden (the book), 196, 211, 214, 239, 240.
• Walden Hermitage, 201-215.
• Walden woods, 11, 155, 202, 209, 212, 214.
• Watson, Marston, 188, 197.
• Webster, Daniel, a lover of Louisa Dunbar, 13, 14;
• describes his native place, 15-17;
• his friendship for Louisa Dunbar, 17, 93;
• at the "Wyman Trial," 90;
• his "rose-cold," 91;
• visits in Concord, 93;
• letter to Mrs. Cheney, 94;
• described by Carlyle, 293;
• by Thoreau, 294;
• contrasted with Thoreau, 296.
• Webster, Prof. J. W., 56.
• "Week," The, (Thoreau's first book), 183, 196, 213, 230, 240, 299, 304.
• Weiss, Rev. John, 57.
• "Westminster Review," 240.
• Wharton, Thomas, 298.
• Whig Review, 238.
• Whitefield, G., letter to, 129.
• Whiting, Colonel, 36, 46.
• Whiting, Rev. John, 65.
• Whitman, Walt, 186, 188.
• Whittier, J. G., quoted, 131.
• Wigglesworth, Michael, 131.
• Willard, Major, 32, 98.
• Woolman, John, 127, 130.
• Zilpha, the Walden Circe, 203.

AMERICAN STATESMEN

• BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. By John T. Morse, Jr.
• SAMUEL ADAMS. By James K. Hosmer.
• PATRICK HENRY. By Moses Coit Tyler.
• GEORGE WASHINGTON. By Henry Cabot Lodge. 2 volumes.
• JOHN ADAMS. By John T. Morse, Jr.
• ALEXANDER HAMILTON. By Henry Cabot Lodge.
• GOUVERNEUR MORRIS. By Theodore Roosevelt.
• JOHN JAY. By George Pellew.
• JOHN MARSHALL. By Allan B. Magruder.
• THOMAS JEFFERSON. By John T. Morse, Jr.
• JAMES MADISON. By Sydney Howard Gay.
• ALBERT GALLATIN. By John Austin Stevens.
• JAMES MONROE. By D. C. Gilman.
• JOHN QUINCY ADAMS. By John T. Morse, Jr.
• JOHN RANDOLPH. By Henry Adams.
• ANDREW JACKSON. By W. G. Sumner.
• MARTIN VAN BUREN. By Edward W. Shepard.
• HENRY CLAY. By Carl Schurz. 2 volumes.
• DANIEL WEBSTER. By Henry Cabot Lodge.
• JOHN C. CALHOUN. By Dr. H. Von Holst.
• THOMAS H. BENTON. By Theodore Roosevelt.
• LEWIS CASS. By Andrew C. McLaughlin.
• ABRAHAM LINCOLN. By John T. Morse, Jr. 2 volumes.
• WILLIAM H. SEWARD. By Thornton K. Lothrop.
• SALMON P. CHASE. By Albert Bushnell Hart.
• CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS. By C. F. Adams, Jr.
• CHARLES SUMNER. By Moorfield Storey.
• THADDEUS STEVENS. By Samuel W. McCall.

SECOND SERIES

• JAMES G. BLAINE. By Edward Stanwood.
• JOHN SHERMAN. By Theodore E. Burton.
• WILLIAM McKINLEY. By T. C. Dawson.
• ULYSSES S. GRANT. By Samuel W. McCall. In preparation.

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FOOTNOTES:

Transcriber's Notes

Minor punctuation errors have been silently corrected.

Page 39: Changed "aniversary" to "anniversary."
(Orig: two hundredth aniversary of the town settlement.)

Footnote from Page 111: Dashes represent blank spaces of unrecorded death date.
(Orig: Concord, December 24, 1761, and died in Concord, ——, ——.)

Page 130: Changed "acknowlege" to "acknowledge."
(Orig: to pure love, I may acknowlege with gratitude)

Page 229: Changed "existnce" to "existence."
(Orig: let common people know of his existnce.)

Page 234: Changed "that" to "than."
(Orig: make a use for them at this season that at any other.")

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