Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  Thoreau had written to Brownson that the classroom should never be separate from the street, and the greatest success of the Thoreau school was the brothers’ ability to integrate the school with their community. Why, wondered Thoreau, should we “leave off our education when we begin to be men and women”? “It is time that villages were universities,” uncommon schools where citizens could pursue liberal studies for the rest of their lives, banding together to fund the arts and learning, and make not a village with a few noblemen, but “noble villages of men”—a classroom so open that everyone would be welcome.44 It was a goal he would never surrender.

  “There is no remedy for love but to love more”

  In 1839, Henry Thoreau’s life blossomed. He rose to a position of standing and honor in his community; he went on the adventure of a lifetime; he began polishing poems and essays for the Transcendentalists’ new literary journal; and to top it all off, he fell in love—twice. Teaching at the Concord Academy did more than give Thoreau a respectable job: it put him at the center of Concord’s cultural life, as Phineas Allen had been a decade before. At the first meeting of the Concord Lyceum’s new season, Thoreau was elected secretary, and thereafter he proudly recorded lyceum proceedings in his finest handwriting. When one of the lyceum curators resigned, Thoreau was elected to fill his place, too. This meant helping to arrange twenty-five lectures over the six-month season: choosing speakers, writing letters persuading them to come, handling schedule and travel arrangements, securing payments, and returning forgotten articles, all on a tight budget. This was genuine service, the kind that earned Thoreau the right to suggest, in Walden, that villages could indeed become “universities.” Lyceum members showed their appreciation by reelecting him to double duty for a second year. They tried to reelect him for a third year as curator, but, overwhelmed, Thoreau begged off—only to be reelected again two years later, in November 1842, over his protests.

  Altogether, Thoreau’s social world was exploding. He dropped by the Emersons’ every few days to greet their constant stream of visitors, including, about this time, Margaret Fuller and Bronson Alcott. When Emerson tried to lure Fuller to Concord, in February 1839, he sent Thoreau to find her a suitable house. To their disappointment she chose Jamaica Plain instead. With Alcott they had better luck: he arrived on April 29, 1839, just in time to witness Emerson’s marriage of Sam Staples, the bartender and future jailer, to Lucinda Wesson, the innkeeper’s daughter. Alcott liked the simple ceremony, and he liked how Emerson spoke from the soul—a good start to days of walking and talking. When Emerson lectured at the lyceum, Thoreau, as curator, no doubt joined them at the Emersons’ afterward; two days later Alcott held one of his formal “Conversations” at “Mrs. Thorows,” where he launched into “Knowledge, Memory, Hope, Pre-existence, Faith, Elements of the Soul, Incarnation, Miracles,” stunning the normally voluble Thoreaus into silence. Alcott, disappointed, recorded Emerson’s criticism that “the people were stupid, and that I did not meet them wisely.” Nevertheless, a year later he moved his family to Concord, going to work as a woodcutter and enrolling his eldest daughter, Anna, in the Thoreau school. Thus did Alcott and Thoreau begin their lifelong conversation. To Thoreau’s delight, he could now, in a few steps, go from the agricultural “Scythia” of his farmer friend George Minott to the philosophical “Athens” of Mr. Alcott and his family.45

  To top it off, Henry was again writing poetry. In “Sic Vita” he had been cut off, rootless and uncertain; now he imagined himself as one voice in a duet of two—like a woman singing her songs from the shore over the waves until she hears the voice of “a kindred soul out of the distance” answering, or floating on the waves, all strife dissolved away: “Drifting in a sultry day on the sluggish waters of the pond I almost cease to live—and begin to be. . . . I am dissolved in the haze.”46 Three times that year Henry would float unmoored and dissolved by joy: first with Edmund Sewall; then with Edmund’s sister Ellen; and finally with his brother John.

  On June 17, 1839, Caroline Ward Sewall brought her eleven-year-old son Edmund from Scituate for a weeklong visit with her sister, Prudence Ward, and her mother, Mrs. Ward. Henry was immediately drawn to the boy: “I have within the last few days come into contact with a pure uncompromising spirit” who, all unconscious, carried “the air and conviction of virtue. . . . Such it is impossible not to love.” They went sailing together on the river and walking to the Cliffs and Walden Pond, just as the brothers often did with students and other visitors. This time, though, Henry ventured a poem: “Lately alas I knew a gentle boy, / Whose features all were cast in Virtue’s mould.” The poem, “Sympathy,” elegized a friendship that could never be: drawn together like two planets by unconscious sympathy, the emotion proved too strong. The speaker’s love, springing to consciousness, forced the two apart, “beyond each other’s reach,” leaving Henry alone to love not the boy himself, but “that virtue which he is.” Alas, he added, “I might have loved him, had I loved him less.”47 Seldom has the pain of Platonic passion burned more brightly.

  The Sewalls were delighted with the poem, and Edmund was so proud of it that his five-year-old brother George suffered in jealousy until Henry, with his unerring sympathy for the quieter, younger ones, inscribed to the boy a copy of his other great poem about love and loss, “The Bluebirds.” Emerson loved “Sympathy,” too, calling it “the purest strain & the loftiest, I think, that has yet pealed from this yet unpoetic American forest.” He sent a copy to Samuel Gray Ward, suggesting he pass it along to Margaret Fuller, and alerted both Thomas Carlyle and Mary Moody Emerson that Concord at last had a genuine poet “who writes the truest verses,” “that rarest product of New England wit.”48 But by the time Edmund returned in March 1840 as a boarding student, Henry’s passion for him was spent. Edmund’s earnest diary records a lively array of excursions, but mostly with John, who attended to the serious boy like an affectionate older brother.

  Ellen Devereux Sewall arrived for her own family visit on July 20, three weeks after her brother’s departure. Since she, too, was part of the extended family circle, Henry and John had often seen her before; Edmund found her initials carved in the “red bridge” between the initials of John and Henry Thoreau, dated 1830 and 1835, with Henry’s initials “cut very neatly and deep.”49 But by 1839, things were different. Ellen was now seventeen, the cultivated daughter of Scituate’s Unitarian minister Edmund Quincy Sewall, and an exceptionally handsome young woman. A daguerreotype taken of her about this time shows her poised and alert, with a strong, angular nose and deep-set, level eyes, barely resisting an ironic smile. Henry the dreamer, Emerson’s grave jester, erupted into poetry: “Come let’s roam the breezy pastures,” he invites in his first poem to Ellen. “One green leaf shall be our screen, / Till the sun doth go to bed, / I the king and you the queen / Of that peaceful little green.” Four days later, the flirtation turned romantic: “Our rays united make one Sun, / With fairest summer weather.” And on July 25, he recorded but a single line that entirely reversed the tortured distance of his poem to her brother: “There is no remedy for love but to love more.”50

  Henry and Ellen did all the things vacationing young people did then (chaperoned, of course, by Cynthia or Prudence). On Monday Henry took her to see a giraffe on display in Concord; on Tuesday he took her rowing up the Assabet River—“Forward press we to the dawning, / For Aurora leads the way”—and on Wednesday, a school holiday, John, Henry, and Ellen all walked together to the Cliffs and beyond to Fairhaven Bay. Cynthia, John, Ellen, and Henry all took tea at the Reverend Barzillai Frost’s. They went a-berrying, and walked to Walden Pond. Henry took Ellen for a drive, and they went sailing on the Concord River. Her visit nearly over, Ellen wrote to her father, with perhaps intentional double-meaning, “I can not tell you half I have enjoyed here.” That same evening her lover was showing his new poems to Emerson, who was telling him that under the inspiration of love Thoreau had become, at last, America’s true poet.

  For two weeks H
enry went everywhere with Ellen—or nearly everywhere. He did refuse to accompany her to church, an ominous sign for a minister’s daughter. Nor was he there when, the morning after he showed Emerson his new poems, Aunt Prudence escorted Ellen through Captain Abel Moore’s fine gardens. John S. Keyes, on vacation from Harvard, happened to be there as well, and he was instantly infatuated: he walked Ellen home, then returned after dinner, hoping to see her again. Missing her then, he found her that night at a party and, in his words, “pounced upon” her, escorting her to supper and again walking her home. The next afternoon he found her again at tea, pried her away from the Thoreaus, and walked her home for a third time. The attention was overwhelming; the next morning, on the stagecoach home, Ellen cried all the way to Lexington. When she reached Scituate, she wrote Aunt Prudence that her two weeks at the Thoreaus had been some of the happiest of her life.51

  In the aftermath of Ellen’s visit, Henry’s Journal lapses. He could dismiss the cocksure Keyes, but he had to weigh the rivalry with his own brother: John the sunny extrovert, gregarious, witty, and athletic; John the elder, who took over as senior teacher even though Henry had the Harvard education and had started the school.52 The tension simmered even as they embarked on their great adventure. They’d built the Musketaquid that spring, roomy and strong, to take a trip together down the Concord River and up the Merrimack to the White Mountains, climb Mount Washington, then float home. To celebrate, the brothers held a melon party for the entire neighborhood. Keyes got the grand tour of “all the minutiae of packing” and affirmed Henry had “all things arranged prime and will have a glorious time if he is fortunate enough to have good weather.” After admiring the table spread “in the very handsomest style with all kinds and qualities of melons,” Keyes and the fellows “attacked them furiously” until “what with wine & all” he had quite as much as he could carry home. Late-summer melon parties became a Thoreau tradition: after another one years later, Elizabeth Hoar reported that Henry had adorned the table “with sunflowers, cornstalks, beet leaves & squash blossoms. There were forty-six melons, fifteen different kinds; & apples, all the production of his own garden.” To her amusement, Cynthia, having spread it around town that Henry detested parties, felt she had to apologize when he threw one himself.53

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  Saturday morning, August 31, dawned gloomy and drizzly, but as the skies cleared into a mild summer afternoon, the brothers unchained their boat from the wild apple tree and shoved off into the open waters of the Concord River. The Musketaquid was well loaded with potatoes, melons and other supplies; two masts, one doubling as a tent pole; a cotton tent that doubled as a sail; and a buffalo hide to sleep on. The gaily painted boat, green below with a border of blue above, made a picturesque sight for the family and friends gathered on shore to see them off, and as the brothers raised their guns and fired a farewell volley, the hills rang with echoes. As they floated past the Old North Bridge battleground, they meditated on the din of war, and at the Great Meadows, when they spotted a rare and spectacular hibiscus in bloom, they hailed a farmer and gave him a blossom with instructions to carry it to church on the morrow for their botanist friend Prudence Ward. They made seven miles that day, pitching their tent on a patch of high ground near Billerica, picking huckleberries for their supper of bread and sugar, then sipping hot cocoa made with river water while they watched their shadows lengthen and the sun set.

  Sunday morning their campfire smoke mingled with the thick morning fog, which had burned off by the time they reached the Middlesex Canal. They walked the towpath, drawing their boat behind, under the censorious gaze of Sunday churchgoers. After being locked to the swift Merrimack, they turned upriver, nooning in the shade near Chelmsford, where they gathered wild plums, then passing Wicasuck Island, the lost home of the Penacook Indians, where they refused a ride to two lost men anxious to get to Nashua. At Tyngsboro they made camp by twilight under an oak by the stream, and all night they drowsed while the river eddied and Irish railroad workers kept them awake with “boisterous sport.”54 That night, Henry reported, one sailor was beset in his dreams “by the Evil Destinies” while the other “passed a serene and even ambrosial or immortal night,” awakening the next morning to soothe and reassure with his good cheer. Need we guess which was which?

  Monday, September 2, they navigated the busy ferry passage as their countrymen stirred about their workweek. One brother brought the boat around the river’s lazy oxbow curves while the other cut across, collecting well water and reports of the countryside. They hailed a canal boat, tied up alongside, and floated in company, chatting with the boatmen. Later they stopped to explore an ancient Indian homesite exposed when fishermen had broken the bank pulling out the brush; the sand had blown ashore, creating a pocket desert. As they passed Nashua’s falls and factories, they cast longing eyes at the blue heights of Wachusett and Monadnock beyond, but stayed river-bound, camping near Nashville, New Hampshire under a pine wood by a deep ravine, where they fell asleep listening to a distant drummer practice for a muster of country militia.

  By 3:00 a.m. they were under way again, and by dawn they had been rowing for hours past woods, pastures, and fields of corn, potatoes, rye, oats, and English hay. At the locks around Cromwell’s Falls—“the Nesenkeag of the Indians”—they picked up arrowheads on the bank while waiting their turn, listening to the locktender’s stories of buried treasure, and witnessing the end of an era; soon the railroad, not the canals, would carry the region’s freight.55 That noon they watched a flock of passenger pigeons and shot exactly one. They plucked and broiled it with some squirrels, but the poor, skinned bodies were so disgusting they threw them away and ate rice instead. At Bedford they camped in a sheltered spot above the waterfalls; next morning, they found they were blocking the workmen’s path to the locks, the only time their campsite was observed by human eyes.

  Above Bedford the river was rocky and broken by falls—a refreshing change—but they hastened past Manchester, a village even then hammering away on the new foundations of an industrial city. In the canal beyond, they agreed to let a canal boat take them in tow until they learned this meant taking the Musketaquid, too heavy to lift, on board. So the canal men challenged the brothers to a race, taunting them until the brothers mounted their sail, doubled up on their oars, and shot gleefully past, taunting the canal men in return. That night the brothers reached the limit of their river journey, pitching their tent just below Hooksett Pinnacle, exactly where a party of Penobscot Indians had camped a few summers before. John went off to find a farmhouse for provisions and returned with young Nathan Mitchel the farmer’s boy, who longed to join them. Come along! they said, but Father said no, then compensated with a tour of his farm and permission to store their gear in his barn. That night Henry dreamed of “a difference with a Friend” that was, in dream space, resolved, leaving him “unspeakably soothed and rejoiced.”56

  Next morning, September fifth, dawned to the “ominous” sound of raindrops on their cotton rooftop. They walked ten miles through the rain to Concord, New Hampshire—“new Concord,” they joked with the friends who put them up for the night—where they caught the morning stage to Plymouth, on the verge of the White Mountains. From there it was fifteen miles up Pemigewasset Valley to James Tilton’s Inn in Thornton.57 The next day, the seventh, they walked through Peeling (now Woodstock) and Lincoln to Franconia to see the Notch and the famous Old Man of the Mountain (a craggy formation now lost in a rockfall). On the eighth they walked to Crawford House, from where they set off next morning to explore the mountains, reaching the summit of Mount Washington the next day. Back at the bottom they caught the stage to Conway and for two days retraced their steps to their campsite in Hookset, which they reached on September 12—a week to the day after they stored their gear in Mitchel’s barn. They didn’t linger: after packing up their boat and purchasing young Nathan’s prize watermelon, the largest on the farm, for ballast, they set off homeward. Thanks to the strong current and friendly wind
s, they made it all the way downstream to an island north of Merrimack, New Hampshire, where they pitched their tent for the last time.58

  Long before daybreak on their last day together, Friday, September 13, the brothers lay awake listening to a fresh autumn wind rustle the leaves overhead. The season had turned in the night: “We had gone to bed in summer,” wrote Henry years later, “and we awoke in autumn.”59 It was fifty miles to Concord, but with the north wind at their backs, they made the distance in a day, flying down the Merrimack past the sites of their upward journey, watching them fade one after another into memory. At noon, their old friend the locktender let them back into the Middlesex Canal, and they rowed up the gentle Concord River, a long pull in a dreamy mood through sunset into darkness until, “far in the evening, our boat was grating against the bulrushes of its native port, and its keel recognized the Concord mud.”60 The Thoreau brothers leaped out and fastened the Musketaquid to the wild apple tree. They were home.