A few blank pages remained in John’s parlor album, and Henry overwrote them with a draft of “A Walk to Wachusett,” elevating his pedestrian excursion into an epic mountaintop revelation. From now on, he vowed, heaven would indeed be under his feet: whenever he gazed on Wachusett on the horizon, his eyes could rest “on the very rocks where we boiled our hasty pudding amid the clouds,” reminding him that “there is elevation in every hour, as no part of the earth is so low that the heavens may not be seen from it.” Hawthorne had just published a sketch in the stylish new Boston Miscellany, and it was surely Hawthorne who tipped Thoreau off that his picturesque travel narrative was just the thing for that high-class popular magazine. If he sent it there instead of the Dial, he would gain a national audience—and get paid! In January 1843, the editors published “A Walk to Wachusett,” Thoreau’s first piece to reach the wider world.27 It seemed he was pointed toward commercial success. But publishing was a chancy world; the promising startup folded with the next issue. Thoreau was never paid, despite repeated attempts and both Emerson’s and Peabody’s intercessions. Still, he’d found his voice, and he’d found an audience too. A career as a professional author seemed well within his grasp.
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In summer 1842, Emerson drew into his orbit yet another young idealist: Ellery Channing. In the fall of 1839, Emerson had received a portfolio of poems in which he recognized a new and important unknown poet. Their author was the nephew of the “Pope” of Transcendentalism himself, William Ellery Channing, and also the family’s black sheep. In 1834, Ellery Channing dropped out of Harvard after a single term and fled Boston altogether to homestead on the Illinois prairie, which was where Emerson’s ecstatic greeting reached him: “I have seen no verses written in America that have such inward music, or that seem to be such authentic inspiration.” Ellery agreed to let the Dial publish his poems, and Emerson introduced the unknown poet with a flourish: the Muse, he proclaimed, had finally found a voice in America.28 Thereafter nearly every issue of the Dial would feature poems by Ellery Channing, and Emerson would help collect them into a book—even as Henry Thoreau worked away, dreaming he himself would someday blossom into Emerson’s Great Poet.
Ellery Channing did not present himself to Emerson in person until summer 1842. By then he was part of the Transcendental family—literally. After giving up the Illinois farm, he married Margaret Fuller’s younger sister Ellen, much to her family’s dismay. The happy if penniless couple considered joining Brook Farm, but instead stayed in Cincinnati until Ellery decided he must meet Emerson in person. Margaret arrived for her July visit to find her brother-in-law already there, fast friends with Henry. Where would they live? Margaret suggested the Old Manse. Absolutely not, said the Hawthornes. Emerson thought Ellery, Henry, and Richard Fuller should all buy a farm together, grow produce, and peddle it from a wheelbarrow on the street, like Marston Watson in Plymouth. Instead the Channings moved in with Margaret in Cambridge, until Ellery concluded he must live next to Emerson, nowhere else. Thoreau located a little red cottage just down the street, in poor repair and overpriced, but Channing took a fancy to it. In April 1843, Channing the poet sent Thoreau the handyman a long list of repairs: painting, stoning the cellar, building new stairs, clearing and resetting the well, moving the privy, fencing the property—enough to keep a crew busy for weeks. “O beloved Thoreau!” he exclaimed in May as the family was moving in. “So many have been your benevolences that my wish is too shallow to know how to bring you into my debt.”29
Ellery Channing was not the easiest of friends. He could be sweet, funny, and sardonic, or rude, moody, and cranky—“a great genius with a little wretched boy trotting beside him,” said Margaret Fuller, who saw “a touch of the goblin in his beauty.”30 Hawthorne thought he was a perfect example of the “queer and clever young men” Emerson was “continually picking up by way of a genius”—yet he, too, found Channing irresistible. With him, their talk “up-gushed” like “the babble of a fountain. The evanescent spray was Ellery’s,” and so, too, were the deep gold nuggets of thought “that lay glimmering in the fountain’s bed.”31 More than once Channing lured the reclusive Hawthorne out of the Old Manse for a fishing excursion in the Pond Lily, though for really long walks he counted on Thoreau. From the very beginning, the two became each other’s closest friend, inseparable companions—“a pair of knights in homespun”—who lived in nature with a religious intensity.32
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Bronson Alcott was on his epic trip to England this busy and sociable summer, hoping to spread the “Newness” and persuade some of England’s most radical “living minds” to come to America.33 America might not have allowed Alcott to keep a school, but England honored him as a prophet. His followers modeled their school, Alcott House, directly on his Temple School, and they welcomed him with such enthusiasm that Alcott began to dream of founding a whole New American Eden. In October 1842, he returned to Concord with two of his English disciples: Henry Wright, the director of Alcott House, and Charles Lane, a journalist and reformer. Emerson introduced them around town, where everyone took to calling them “the Englishmen,” for “they always go in platoon.” Thoreau listened to them spin plans for a new utopian community, just as soon as they could purchase a farm. His own family were won over—or at least, entertained: “We find the Englishmen very agreeable,” wrote Prudence Ward, and the Thoreau women all agreed they liked to hear Mr. Lane talk—Alcott all over, with a British accent—for “it makes a pleasant variety . . . to have these different thinkers near us.”34
Six weeks later the town suddenly had a lot more to talk about. In 1838, Bronson Alcott had become a founding member of the New England Non-Resistance Society, founded in reaction to a proslavery mob’s murder of the abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy. The society’s leader, William Lloyd Garrison, announced their principles in the Liberator: one must not oppose force with force. This meant rejecting all institutions based on fear or coercion: no wars, no voting, no holding of government offices, no imprisonment, and, of course, no payment of taxes. Alcott brought the nonresistance movement to Concord; in January 1841, the lyceum held a debate on whether it was ever proper to offer forcible resistance. Alcott argued no—against John and Henry Thoreau.35 As a conscientious nonresister, Alcott had refused to pay his taxes ever since arriving in Concord in 1840. The authorities let the matter slide until January 17, 1843, when the new tax collector, Sam Staples (whose wedding Alcott had witnessed in 1839) showed up to collect. When Alcott refused, Staples led him to the Middlesex County Jail, but the jailer was nowhere to be found. While they waited, Staples fed him supper while Alcott made his case. Sam wasn’t convinced, but he told Helen Thoreau, “I vum—I believe it was nothing but principle—for I never heard a man talk honester.” After a couple of hours, a messenger announced the tax had been paid, by Samuel Hoar, so Staples let Alcott go. “Thus we were spared the affliction of his absence and he the triumph of suffering for his principles,” wrote Abigail.36 Next time, her family, anxious to keep the peace, prepaid her husband’s taxes.
That night, at least, the peace was not entirely kept. While Alcott, Lane, and Thoreau ate supper and awaited the receipt for payment, they conspired: with Alcott in jail, Lane and Thoreau would “agitate the state.” But later that evening, Thoreau arrived at the lyceum to find Alcott in the audience, a free man after all; “my fire all went out—and the state was safe as far as I was concerned.” But Lane’s fire still burned hot. The speaker happened to be Charles M. Spear from the American Peace Society, a onetime Universalist preacher. The instant he finished, Lane leaped to his feet to proclaim his outrage at Alcott’s arrest. Then Alcott stood, too, and delivered “a ‘My Prisons’ which made us forget Silvio Pellico himself.” An annoyed Mr. Spear protested that the Concord radicals were wrong; as he muttered in his journal, “The Saviour’s example seems to be in favor of taxes.”37 But Lane wasn’t done. The next day he mailed his righteous defense of Alcott to the Liberator: the issue was not whether tax
money went to iniquitous purposes. After all, some went to support education, and no one supported that more fervently than Alcott himself. No, opposition to payment of taxes “is founded on the moral instinct which forbids every moral being to be a party, either actively or permissively, to the destructive principles of power and might over peace and love.” The State was diabolical when it used brute force, even—no, especially—when that force was sanctioned by majority opinion.38
Lane’s argument may not have carried Mr. Spear, but it did carry Henry Thoreau, who by then had also stopped paying his taxes. Lane himself would be arrested that December, when he happened to be taking the stagecoach through town; Staples spotted him, demanded he pay up, and, when Lane refused, clapped him behind bars. Then it was Samuel Hoar’s son Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar who paid the debt, and the liberated Lane, “sad & indisposed,” drooped over to Emerson’s house to retail his troubles. Emerson, who paid his own taxes regularly, was unconvinced.39 By the time Henry Thoreau’s turn came three years later, he had plenty of time to plot how his own “My Prisons” would agitate against the State.
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All year long, Thoreau’s energies were on the upswing. In August 1842, right after returning from climbing Wachusett, he joined Emerson and other prominent neighbors to found the Concord Athenaeum, a subscription reading room conveniently located in the vestry of the First Parish Church.40 And that November, when the Concord Lyceum again reelected Thoreau as a curator, he accepted, helping to invite Orestes Brownson as well as regional luminaries—Horace Greeley, Charles T. Jackson, Theodore Parker, Wendell Phillips—and such locals as Charles Lane, Ephraim Bull (who was about to earn fame for commercializing the Concord grape), the Reverend Barzillai Frost, and, of course, Emerson. It was a solid season, and Thoreau was proud that of the $109.20 allocated for the year, they spent exactly $100 for fees, rent, lighting, and heat, returning the remaining $9.20 for next year. “How much might be done for a town with $100,” he crowed. “I myself have provided a select course of twenty-five lectures for a winter, together with room, fuel, and lights, for that sum,—which was no inconsiderable benefit to every inhabitant.”41
Thoreau was on the program, too, for a February 8 lecture on “Sir Walter Raleigh.” It was his first time speaking in public as a full-fledged town citizen, and Emerson, away on a lecture tour, sent his blessing: may “the brightest star of the winter shed its clear beams on that night!” Lidian returned word that Henry’s lecture “pleased me much.” Others liked it, too, and the Concord newspaper noticed it as “a production very creditable to its author.” “Henry,” Lidian urged her husband, “ought to be known as a man who can give a Lecture. You must advertise him to the extent of your power. A few lyceum fees would satisfy his moderate wants” and give “improvement and happiness” to him and to his audiences. Thoreau himself wrote Emerson cheerfully, “It was as bright a night as you could wish.”42 Raleigh, in his treatment, became nothing less than a tragic Emersonian “American Scholar” executed by the State: an explorer of New World nature, a writer whose prose lay across the page vivid as “a green bough,” but whose real poems were written in action, with ships and fleets—altogether, a heroic ideal for the writer’s life. Thus it is puzzling that, when Thoreau submitted it to the Dial, Emerson never published it.
Being a lyceum curator gave Thoreau power to help set the agenda for town discussions, and he used it. Concord’s antislavery activists were led by women, including all the women in Thoreau’s family; but women were prohibited from speaking in public. If abolitionism were to take hold, the men would have to step up—and Thoreau did, by helping invite Wendell Phillips to the lyceum. This meant taking a stand with the radical wing, who had just split from the conservatives over the question of women’s rights. The split cut across Thoreau’s family, for Aunts Maria and Jane followed the conservatives in opposing voting rights for women, while Cynthia, Helen, and Sophia remained staunch Garrisonians, proud that women now had the right to vote at their meetings. To silence the radical wing, both the Trinitarian and the First Parish churches banned the radicals from speaking. Helen Thoreau was so incensed that she never went to church again. In defiance, the radicals brought to town the nation’s most radical speaker of all to keynote their October 1842 meeting: Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who was riveting audiences with his thunderous denunciations of slavery. With Douglass came William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, the two activists about to introduce Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass to the world, as well as Abigail Alcott’s brother Samuel May. Garrison and May stayed with the Alcotts, while Douglass stayed with the Thoreaus; from this visit forward, Douglass and Helen Thoreau were friends and correspondents.43
Out of this October 1842 meeting, someone—Thoreau’s mother or sisters, or Lidian Emerson, or perhaps Henry Thoreau himself—suggested that Phillips be invited back to speak at the Concord Lyceum. This was a canny choice, for Phillips knew precisely how to use well-modulated logic to unsettle a conservative audience. But when it was announced to the lyceum membership that Phillips would speak on slavery, the Honorable John Keyes rose to protest: the lyceum was no place for “the vexed and disorganizing question of Abolition or Slavery.” Keyes move to cancel the lecture. He was outvoted, and on December 21, 1842, Wendell Phillips spoke as scheduled. Almost certainly Phillips stayed with the Thoreaus, and as a curator, Henry Thoreau may have ushered him to the lecture hall and introduced him. Though the speech was not recorded, the town’s reaction suggests the tenor of his words: the indomitable Mary Brooks, the leader of the Concord radicals, beseeched Phillips to return and refute Keyes’s “gross barefaced malignant misrepresentation” and his charge that Phillips was a traitor to his country.44 Phillips would return, but not for another year. The stage was set for round two.
Thoreau was gaining confidence as a literary professional, which is one reason he was ready to step into town affairs. When Fuller resigned from the Dial, Emerson realized he needed to find “some friendly Hercules who will lend a shoulder to uphold the little world.” He found Thoreau, who helped Emerson with his second issue. The results were uneven. When the last batch of printer’s copy arrived late in September during a stretch of “mild sweet perfect days,” Emerson handed off the pages to his friendly Hercules and left on a two-day walk with Hawthorne. Weeks later, when Fuller received her October Dial, she was furious: her essay on Tennyson had been spoiled by an outrageous misprint. Tennyson’s lines were supposed to read “O’er the deep mind of dauntless infancy,” but instead it read “dauntless infamy.” Was this a joke? she demanded—all the more vexed because she’d counted on sharing her review with Tennyson himself. For that and certain other embarrassing errors, replied Emerson, the fault belonged to “Henry T.” He considered bumping Henry T. for someone else, but Henry was still jobless, so Emerson kept him on.45
Henry’s limitations as an editor were one thing; his shortcomings as a poet were another. Fuller had rejected almost all his poetry, and now Emerson rushed to put it before the world: the October 1842 Dial printed no fewer than eight Thoreau poems, and only one by the usual favorite, Ellery Channing. This, too, pained Fuller, who complained that Thoreau’s tin ear had ruined his best poem, whereas Channing’s “Dirge” was “more and more beautiful” the more she read it—as everyone at Brook Farm agreed. This, the peak of Thoreau’s career as a poet, was the beginning of the end. An embarrassed Emerson sat him down and critiqued his poems, pulling no punches. For all their “honest truth” and “rude strength,” they lacked beauty. “Their fault is, that the gold does not yet flow pure, but is drossy & crude. The thyme and marjoram are not yet made into honey; the assimilation is imperfect.”46 After five years dedicated to poetry, Thoreau was devastated. Emerson never printed another Thoreau poem. Thoreau himself slipped in three more when he edited the April 1843 issue, including two of his greatest, “Smoke” and “Haze.” But from then on, Emerson’s designated poet would be Ellery Channing.
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For Thoreau, Emerson had something else in mind: selecting, editing, and translating hard-to-find literature from such old and foreign books as Anacreon’s graceful lyrics and Aeschylus’s tragedy Prometheus Bound. Thoreau’s translation of the latter was used as a trot by generations of Harvard students; he worked hard to embody in English the genius of the ancients, hoping to inspire a modern poetry deeper and truer than Tennyson’s sugared rhymes.47 Emerson also asked Thoreau to collect “Ethnical Scriptures,” a new feature offering selections from world ethical and religious writings. Emerson led off with extracts from the Panchatantra, a collection of animal fables by the ancient Indian scholar Vishnu Sharma. “What is religion?” one of them asked. “Compassion for all things which have life. . . . What is philosophy? An entire separation from the world.” Ever since the 1830s Emerson had steeped in the religious writings of Asia—ancient Hindu scriptures, the sayings of Confucius, Zoroastrian works, the Arabian Nights—reading them not for exotic ornamentation, but as guides to the rebirth in America of ancient and honorable spiritual traditions: the origins of perennial philosophy, universal ethical truths that could guide individual moral belief and action.48
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