Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  For almost six weeks Thoreau could not bear to open his Journal. “When two approach to meet they incur no petty dangers but they run terrible risks,” he finally wrote on February 20. “I feel as if years had been crowded into the last month,” he added the next day. Time seemed deranged; he couldn’t find his way back into the present, or even into his own body: nothing else in nature, he confessed, seemed so strange to him as his body. Walks into nature only intensified his estrangement. “She always retreats as I advance,” he lamented; he felt like a feather floating, ungrounded, with “depth unfathomable” on every side, soul and body tottering along together “tripping and hindering oneanother [sic] like unpracticed Siamese twins—They two should walk as one.”9 But how? His answer is extraordinary, and central to his rebirth: “walking as one” would not mean walking “into” nature, penetrating it on his quest for unity only to drive nature ever farther away, but something far riskier: stopping. Still the mind, open the body, clear the senses. Thoreau called this listening, beyond sound itself: “I was always conscious of sounds in nature which my ears could never hear—that I caught but the prelude to a strain.” To listen truly meant cultivating a new sense, a deeper hearing: “Will not this faith and expectation make to itself ears at length.” Here is his pathway forward. “The death of friends should inspire us as much as their lives,” he reminds himself. “How can any good depart. It does not go and come but we. Shall we wait for it? is it slower than we?”10

  No, we are the slow ones; we lag behind while the good waits for us ahead. John had always gone before and was before him still. To John, Henry wrote his most achingly personal poem:

  Brother where dost thou dwell?

  What sun shines for thee now?

  Dost thou indeed farewell?

  As we wished here below. . . .

  His questions mount: Where can he feel John’s presence? “Along the neighboring brook / May I thy voice still hear? . . . What bird wilt thou employ / To bring me word of thee?” The birds John loved become messengers to his brother—but they are silent still. “They have remained to mourn / Or else forgot.”

  Yet in a second ending, Henry ventures to hope:

  When on the pond I whirl

  In sport, if sport may be,

  Now thou art gone

  May I still follow thee?

  For then, as now, I trust,

  I always lagg’d behind,

  While thou were ever first,

  Cutting the wind.11

  To “lag behind” is now to “follow.” From now on, following John into the woods and along the rivers was no longer to pursue a Nature forever retreating “away behind and behind,” but to advance into Nature, following the tracks of the beloved who has gone before, drawing nearer to him, listening for the messages he sends. Henry, still struggling at twenty-five to find his voice as a poet, heard John calling to him from the places they loved and shared together. In life, John overshadowed his shy brother. In death, John became his brother’s muse. The Henry who felt he was half of one could never have grown out of John’s shadow. Now he had to grow to fill John’s absence; he had to make ears to hear him and voice to speak. John’s death became Henry Thoreau’s birth—the birth of the writer who would voice Nature to the world.

  It was another week before Henry could write to his friends. He turned first to the kind-hearted Lucy: “What right have I to grieve, who have not ceased to wonder?” This sense of wonder allowed Thoreau to accept what Emerson refused: nature’s inhuman onwardness, as the winter ice melts despite all and the morning birds sing. “I do not wish to see John ever again—I mean him who is dead,” he confided to her, but only that “other” John, the one whom he must now strive to become. His second letter, to the grieving Emerson, was harder. To his friend’s bitterness Henry offers the glacial comforts of Transcendentalism: “Nature . . . finds her own again under new forms without loss.” But then Henry takes a green turn: “Every blade in the field—every leaf in the forest—lays down its life in its season as beautifully as it was taken up.” It startles to hear this abrupt outcropping, in young Henry, of the older Thoreau, who in “Autumnal Tints” anticipates his own death. Here it seems premature, a faith he has yet to earn. But to Emerson, the intellectual father who had feared for his life, Henry needed to avow his new faith, with a sincere promise to live up to it: “After I have imagined thus much will not the Gods feel under obligation to make me realize something as good?”12

  To others, Thoreau confessed he had been harrowed. He was no longer the same person, and he would never fully heal. For the rest of his life Henry fought nightmares on the anniversary of John’s death. Whenever John’s name was mentioned, he grew pale and excused himself from the room. Yet in these early months the gravity of the experience was thrilling and challenging; he recovered by reshaping himself in the most fundamental way. The comparison with Emerson is revealing: for all his private agony, Emerson declared publicly in “Experience” that Waldo’s death changed nothing: “I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,—no more. . . . It was caducous,” falling away as easily as a leaf in autumn. “I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.” By contrast, Thoreau avowed that he “could not have done without this experience,” that it made him who he was.13 It taught him that his deep empathy for others made him terrifyingly vulnerable. Thoreau could feel another’s pain as his own, could suffer that pain beyond endurance. To buffer himself against such shocks, he erected a protective shield that could make him seem crusty and distant. Emerson noted Elizabeth Hoar saying around this time, “I love Henry, but do not like him; and as for taking his arm, I should as soon take the arm of an elm tree.”14

  But his deep empathy also opened Thoreau up radically to the world. Injustice to another made him storm with the passionate and sleepless rage that powered his great writings of political protest, and the natural world spoke to him of the spiritual ideals he and John had shared. “I live in the perpetual verdure of the globe—I die in the annual decay of nature,” he wrote that March. On this scale, every being and phenomenon in nature rang with meaning like a struck bell. Only if he could articulate these meanings could Henry, the aspiring poet, find a common world and a common language by which he might speak to all. A week later, he leaned into his hopes: “I have no private good—unless it be my peculiar ability to serve the public—this is the only individual property.”15 He’d offered himself up to death, and lived. Why? What was his mission? What good had the gods commissioned him to realize?

  “Surely joy is the condition of life!”: New Friends, New Ventures

  Emerson would open the path. In mid-March, Margaret Fuller sent him an alarming letter: exhausted, about to collapse from overwork, she was resigning as editor of the Dial. The Transcendentalists’ literary journal had steadily improved under her care, but its publisher had gone bankrupt. The new publisher, Elizabeth Peabody, had opened the account books to find it had only three hundred subscribers and could not possibly make a profit. Fuller, after working without pay for two years, told Emerson that unless he took over immediately, the Dial was dead. Emerson reluctantly accepted, unwilling to kill the one hope for publication left to his young flock of experimental writers. Pressed for copy to fill the July issue, he happened across a series of natural history reports published by the State of Massachusetts. He assigned them to Thoreau; setting the moping Henry on a review that would draw on his “woodcraft boatcraft & fishcraft” might cheer him up. The assignment was just a potboiler, but Thoreau plunged in. In a month he had fifty pages or so, and he summoned Emerson to a reading. “I do not like his piece very well,” he grumbled, but he needed to fill the issue, so in it went.16

  “The Natural History of Massachusetts” was no ordinary book review. Thoreau dismissed the books themselves as little more than an inventory of the state’s “natural riches,” useful in their way but “not interesting to the general reader”—but their very failure set him on fire. He pushed aside h
is stacks of old English poetry and combed his Journal for the best moments, the wild outdoor moments he longed to live again. “Surely joy is the condition of life!” he exclaimed: “the butterfly carrying accident and change painted in a thousand hues upon its wings,” the loon whose “wild laughter” makes the woods ring, foxes whose curving tracks seem “coincident with the fluctuations of some mind,” fish that call to his sympathy, snakes that send a mute appeal. The spring catkins become his “little vegetable redeemers”; summer’s green leaves and winter’s ghost-leaves of ice seem “creatures of but one law.”

  Yes, the books were dry, but Thoreau knew the spirit behind them was not: Thaddeus Harris himself had written the volume on insects. Thoreau paid tribute to the “quiet bravery” of science, and to his Harvard teacher’s real lesson: “Nature will bear the closest inspection; she invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. She has no interstices; every part is full of life.” The key was to stay alert to that life in even the driest of facts: “Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth.” This was Thoreau’s new motto, and his new method, too: “Let us.” “She invites us.” He’d been taught to lecture from on high. Now he was guide and companion, extending a hand, inviting us to come along and share his joy.17 Here, whipped out in a month’s inspiration, was a proto-Walden, rough and imperfect but leaping with life. It was like nothing Thoreau had written before; in places, it was like nothing anyone had written before. What he read aloud to Emerson that evening was nothing less than his first original writing.

  This makes it all the more revealing that Emerson didn’t much like it. Bronson Alcott loved it, declaring it “worthy of Isaac [sic] Walton himself.” After reading it, Nathaniel Hawthorne decided that Thoreau “is a good writer . . . with real poetry in him.”18 What Emerson did like was the strange, dark story he solicited from his new friend, Charles King Newcomb: “The Two Dolons,” a mystical Gothic fantasy in which a thinly disguised Waldo is stalked in the woods by a cave-dwelling Druidical hermit with an eerie resemblance to Henry, who sacrifices the boy on an altar by driving a knife into his breast. Today Newcomb’s overwrought tale is almost unreadable, but Emerson loved it so much that he pestered Newcomb endlessly for part two, the “second” of “The Two Dolons,” without success: Newcomb’s genius was spent. The creepy allegory of his son’s bloody sacrifice by an uncanny woods-god must have allowed Emerson to exorcise certain demons. By July, with the issue in print, Emerson’s own uncanny river-god had moved back to the alcove at the top of the stairs, once again serving as handyman and now the Dial’s editorial assistant as well.

  This put Thoreau back at the heart of Emerson’s growing circle of friends and associates. Indeed, so many visitors took to dropping by that the Emersons’ cook threatened to post a sign on the front gate: “This House is not a Hotel.” Their daughter Ellen remembered how in those “Transcendental Times,” “All sorts of visitors with new ideas began to come to the house, the men who thought money was the root of all evil, the vegetarians, the sons of nature who did not believe in razors nor in tailors, the philosophers and all sorts of come-outers.”19 Hawthorne chuckled to see how Emerson conjured up such “hobgoblins of flesh and blood” who were drawn to his “intellectual fire, as a beacon burning on a hill-top”—“bats and owls, and the whole host of night-birds, which flapped their dusky wings against the gazer’s eyes, and sometimes were mistaken for fowls of angelic feather.” “Never,” he concluded hilariously, “was a poor, little country village infested with such a variety of queer, strangely dressed, oddly behaved mortals.”20

  One of them, arguably, was Hawthorne himself. After heaving manure for eight months at Brook Farm, he’d concluded to resume a more ordinary relation to society. Just as he was looking for a place to bring his bride-to-be, Sophia Peabody, the Reverend Ezra Ripley passed on to his heavenly reward, leaving the Old Manse open. Hawthorne signed the lease, and by June 1842, Cynthia Thoreau and Elizabeth Hoar had made the old gray parsonage “all new & bright again as a toy” for the newlyweds. By then Henry was strong enough to help Jack Garrison’s son John work up some land alongside the avenue to the Manse, planting it with beans, peas, cabbages, and squash, both summer and winter, as his wedding gift to Nathaniel and Sophia. They moved into the Old Manse on July 9, 1842—the afternoon of their wedding day.

  Soon afterward Emerson and Thoreau paid their formal call. It was awkward—three great writers sitting bolt upright, each struggling to break the silence with something profound—but when Thoreau returned alone, he and Hawthorne found their friendship growing. At first Hawthorne thought “Mr. Thorow” (spelling the name as Concord pronounced it) “a singular character . . . ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and somewhat rustic, although courteous manners.” But his ugliness, Hawthorne judged, was “honest and agreeable,” suiting him better than beauty. His new friend lived “a sort of Indian life” as part of Emerson’s family, and showed himself “a keen and delicate observer of nature—a genuine observer, which, I suspect, is almost as rare a character as even an original poet.”21

  Thoreau sold his boat, the beloved Musketaquid, to Hawthorne—“being in want of money,” thought Hawthorne, although Thoreau was grateful to shed this reminder of his grief. After a test paddle, Hawthorne paid the seven dollars, and the next morning Thoreau gave the author a rowing lesson. Hawthorne marveled how the boat, “as docile as a trained steed” under “Mr. Thorow’s” management, at first went in every direction but the one he intended. He renamed it the Pond Lily, and soon his journal filled with idyllic river excursions. Eventually he passed the old fisherman’s dory along to Ellery Channing, under whose care it rotted away into honorable oblivion. In the winter, boating gave way to skating, and Sophia Hawthorne recorded the three friends setting off down the ice, Thoreau “figuring dithyrambic dances and Bacchic leaps,” Hawthorne, wrapped in his cloak, moving “like a self-impelled Greek statue, stately and grave,” and Emerson “evidently too weary to hold himself erect, pitching headforemost, half lying on the air.” Twice the Hawthornes would move away from Concord, and both times on their return Nathaniel and Henry would renew their friendship. When they laughed together, said Channing, “the operation was sufficient to split a pitcher.”22

  · · ·

  Another young idealist drawn to Emerson, that “prime minister” of the spirit, was Margaret Fuller’s younger brother Richard.23 Fuller’s tutorials in Concord gained him midterm admission to Harvard, and in July 1843, eager for a summer break, he walked from Cambridge to Emerson’s house. After being roundly examined “to see if I yet surrendered to Imagination,” the next morning he and Thoreau shouldered knapsacks and set off for Mount Wachusett, thirty miles away on the western horizon. They planned it as a literary excursion: Richard kept a running record of his thoughts, and Henry’s notes grew into his next original essay, “A Walk to Wachusett.” From childhood on, Thoreau’s eyes had rested on the dim blue outline of Wachusett. He even addressed a poem to the mountain—the one Margaret Fuller had so firmly rejected. Now this walk with her brother would be itself a form of composition, using the approach she had recommended: nature will not be yours, she had said, until you have been more hers. “Seek the lotus, and take a draught of rapture.”24

  After setting out in the cool dawn twilight, they paused to cut stout walking sticks, then again to chat with mowers in the meadows. As they walked on westward, Thoreau’s excitement grew at the locals’ “truer and wilder pronunciation”: “not Way-tatic, Way-chusett, but Wor-tatic, Wor-chusett.” What a letdown that evening when at that wild western inn, the innkeeper handed them a copy of the Concord newspaper! Next morning they left in the gray twilight to hike the remaining four miles to the mountain’s base; as they ascended, the trees got smaller, then vanished altogether on the summit, where on the ruins of an old observation tower they read Virgil and Wordsworth and ate wild blueberries washed down with fresh milk from a farm
below. From on high they watched the sun set and night creep over the land, until “the sun’s rays fell on us two alone, of all New England men.” As the moon rose, they kindled their campfire, visible for thirty miles around, and at dawn the whole of Massachusetts lay “spread out before us, in its length and breadth, like a map.” At noon they descended eastward into the dusty abodes of men, stopping at Harvard village to reflect on the sunset and spend the night. Next morning they parted, Henry for Concord and Richard to join his family.25

  Back at the Emersons’, Henry opened the “Nature Notes” album in which John had recorded his trophies: birds seen, specimens collected. Earlier that spring, the grieving Henry had taken out the long-untouched album and, alongside John’s elegant script, inserted a few scraggly jottings of his own. Then, early that June, something astonishing happened. While out walking, Henry came upon a brood of partridge chicks squatting in the leaves. He cradled them in his hand, where they lay unflinching, then set them gently back among the leaves, touched when one accidently fell over and stayed that way. Recording the sighting in John’s elegant album, Henry struggled to capture why he was so moved: “The innocent yet adult expression of their eyes I shall not soon forget. There was the clarified wisdom and cunning of the sphinx and sybil in their clear eyes. When the mind is born then is not the eye born . . . coeval with the sky it reflects.”26 The effect is uncanny: Henry’s raw and angular handwriting spills down the page, ripping open a vortex in John’s tidy checklist, inscribing a moment of rapture that would become one of Walden’s most beautiful passages—indeed, a touchstone for Walden itself, as Thoreau took the vulnerable young bird into his hand, saw the birth of cosmic intelligence in its limpid eye, laid it back among the leaves, and, with that same hand, ignited a routine entry into radiance.