Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  When Thoreau found these books in Emerson’s library, he was entranced. For the Dial he went back to his early favorite, “one of the oldest compositions extant”: The Laws of Menu (or Manu, from the same root as mind and man), scripture literally from the dawn of civilization. Thoreau filled nine pages with its wisdom: “The resignation of all pleasures is far better than the attainment of them.” “The hand of an artist employed in his art is always pure.” “Whatever is hard to be traversed, whatever is hard to be acquired, whatever is hard to be visited, whatever is hard to be performed, all this may be accomplished by true devotion; for the difficulty of devotion is the greatest of all.” These, he wrote in his Journal, were “the laws of you and me—a fragrance wafted down from those old-times, and no more to be refuted than the wind.” Thoreau found his India in New England, for these laws were true wherever there was solitude and silence: “In my brain is the sanscrit.”49

  He also collected the “Sayings of Confucius” (“Having knowledge, to apply it; not having knowledge, to confess your ignorance; this is real knowledge”) and the “Chinese Four Books,” which introduced the fundamentals of Confucianism to America: “Sincerity is the Taou or way of heaven. To aim at it is the way of man.” Next was the Nepalese text “The White Lotus of the Good Law,” detailing the path to Buddha—enlightenment or awakening. For Thoreau these scriptures were absolutely foundational, and he dreamed of reviving ancient “Oriental” wisdom in the modern world. He also vowed to follow his own devotional path: “The Bráhmen is the ideal man.”50 It struck him as singular that even as the tide of religion was withdrawing and religious scholars were “picking to pieces its old testaments, here are some coming slowly after on the sea-shore picking up the durable relics of perhaps older books and putting them together again.” To truly renew this ancient spiritual wisdom, he must first find a way to live it—he must attempt to be a Brahman, to be awakened, Buddha. He must attempt a devotion so complete that he would be a teacher not merely in his writings, but in his life. As he would tell his first disciple, “To some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a yogin.”51

  All through 1842 Thoreau’s vision was deepening and clarifying, but his moods were often ungovernable. January 1843, the first anniversary of John’s death, found him ill with “bronchitis.” He dumped a glum self-assessment in his Journal: “What am I at present? A diseased bundle of nerves standing between time and eternity like a withered leaf that still hangs shivering on its stem.” Yet he could look back on a year of real growth: a stack of publications, including two original essays; a growing role in Concord’s civic affairs; increasing responsibility as coeditor of a respected journal; important, lifelong friendships begun and nurtured. The very same day he dumped his misery into his Journal, he wrote Richard Fuller a warm, loving letter, trimming an osprey feather he’d been saving for “some state occasion” to thank him for his New Year’s gift, a music box. It “seems to be playing just for us two pilgrims marching over hill and dale of a summer afternoon,” he wrote, recalling their happy days together. Lidian was charmed with Henry’s “child-like joy” in his new possession. After dancing across the carpet with Edith, not quite two years old, he dashed off to play it for his mother and sisters.52

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  That winter Emerson was away lecturing, and he placed his family and possessions into Thoreau’s care, an overwhelming degree of trust. After three weeks as surrogate father to the Emerson children, Thoreau wrote Emerson a letter of thanks: “I have been your pensioner for nearly two years and still left free as under the summer sky . . . as free a gift as the sun or the summer.” He wasn’t the easiest person to have around—early on Emerson had said he admired Henry’s “perennial threatening attitude,” but how long could that have lasted?—and Thoreau admitted he’d “sometimes molested you with my mean acceptance.” But with Emerson away, Thoreau visibly relaxed. Lidian reported that “after breakfast the little girls all petitioned to have some pop-corn parched,” and Henry played master of ceremonies, holding the warming pan over the fire and enjoying the frolic as much as any child. Henry, too, reported on the children’s progress: “Edith takes rapid strides in the arts and sciences . . . as well as over the carpet,” and had taken to calling him “papa.” The older Ellen “declares every morning that ‘Papa may come home to-night.’” As for Lidian, she “almost persuades me to be a Christian”—indeed, confided an astonished Lidian, after they talked over his “heresies,” Henry had actually gone to church.53

  Lidian continued to host Transcendental gatherings. Once, she looked on, amused, as Alcott and Lane proclaimed “the Love of Nature” to be “the most subtle and dangerous of sins,” an idolatry so refined it deluded its sinners into unconscious degradation. “Henry frankly affirmed to both the wise men that they were wholly deficient in the faculty in question, and therefore could not judge of it.” Alcott rejoined that they were filled with spiritual love, “as Mr. T. was not.” “It was ineffably comic,” smiled Lidian. “Henry was brave and noble; well as I have always liked him, he still grows upon me.” As for Henry, he was, as he wrote Lucy Brown, very happy, even though it was “a strangely mixed life” there among the “brooms and scouring and taxes and house keeping.” But, he added with a smile, “even Valhalla must have its kitchen.”54

  Emerson had confided the Dial, too, to Henry’s care. Buoyed by the vote of confidence, Thoreau soon had the issue in hand: Lane’s essay on Alcott; a report from Charles Stearns Wheeler beavering away in Heidelberg; pieces by Fuller, Lydia Maria Child, and Fuller’s friend James Freeman Clarke; more from Alcott and the inevitable Ellery Channing; plus his own essay on the “Dark Ages.” “As for poetry,” he snapped back to Emerson, “I have not remembered to write any for some time—it has quite slipped my mind—but sometimes I think I hear the muttering of the thunder,” though in fact, he did slip in those three poems.55 Emerson returned in March to finish off a solid and notably cosmopolitan issue, completing his first year as editor. Lately the Dial had drawn some good reviews, and in England, said Alcott, it was regarded as “quite an Oracle.” But Peabody had more bad news. They were down to 220 paying subscribers, which couldn’t pay even the cost of paper and printing. For weeks Emerson fretted while his friends argued: Keep it going, begged Lane and Alcott. Let it go, said Elizabeth Hoar, so its best writers could publish elsewhere. One more year, pleaded Fuller, to please “wellwishers” in the distance “or even in the Future.”56

  Thoreau was ready to bail. It wasn’t just the unpaid service as editorial assistant; the whole arrangement as Emerson’s “pensioner” was wearing thin. On March 1, 1843, he wrote Emerson, who was then visiting his brother William on Staten Island, to say he was feeling better than he had been, “and am meditating some other method of paying debts than by lectures and writing. . . . If anything of that ‘other’ sort should come to your ears in N.Y. will you remember it for me?” Emerson hated New York, but he had a notion that the land of Wall Street was ready to hear a little Transcendentalism. He talked it over with William, and together they came up with a plan: Henry would tutor William’s son Willie. He’d be a good influence on the boy, and he could take him to the woods and into the city. In exchange, Henry would get room, board, and $100 a year for expenses. Henry liked the idea, but asked if there wasn’t some way to earn a little money beyond expenses. Perhaps he could do some clerical work in William’s law office on Wall Street, or in some other office—at least until he got a little literary work going? He could leave right away, as soon as April 1, only two weeks away.57

  A move from Waldo Emerson’s Concord pensioner to William Emerson’s Wall Street scrivener might not sound very promising. Had he been able to reach into the future and read Melville’s portrait in “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street,” Thoreau might have been more wary. But his career had reached a dead end. Life on Staten Island would put him at last beyond Emerson’s orbit and well within reach of the New York literary market. Thoreau was willing to take the
gamble. He packed up his life in Concord and planned a new beginning in New York City, the heart of American commerce, not suspecting it would be his second near-death experience.

  Thoreau on Staten Island

  Hawthorne was still looking out for his friend. “The man has stuff in him to make a reputation of,” he’d told the editor of the New Monthly Magazine in October 1842. That magazine folded and the editor never replied, but in January 1843 Hawthorne tried again, when his friend John O’Sullivan, the New York publisher of the Democratic Review, visited him at the Old Manse. Hawthorne invited Thoreau to meet them at the athenaeum, where O’Sullivan’s journal was on prominent display, and they took tea together at the Old Manse before Thoreau escorted O’Sullivan to the lyceum. Thoreau wasn’t especially impressed with O’Sullivan himself, but he was very impressed when “he made a point of asking me to write for his Review, which I shall be glad to do.”58 The Democratic Review published some of the nation’s best-known writers: Hawthorne, of course, and also Bryant, Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell, and Catherine Sedgwick. It was, in fact, the publishing arm of the reformist, liberal-minded “Young America” group, sympathetic to Transcendentalism: “The Best Government Is That Which Governs Least,” trumpeted the cover. With a circulation of 3,500, anything Thoreau placed there would multiply his Dial audience fifteen-fold. Thoreau bookmarked the offer to bring with him to New York, along with a special Journal volume he’d begun in the summer of 1842, dubbed the “Long Book” for its large pages, into which he’d been copying and arranging entries relating to his 1839 river voyage with John. Thoreau was making long plans.

  Soon he was telling Richard Fuller, “I expect to leave Concord, which is my Rome—and its people, who are my Romans, in May.” Early in April he dropped in on Hawthorne to leave Fuller’s music box in his care. Thoreau’s move would be a good one, thought Hawthorne, though he’d miss Thoreau’s combination of “wild freedom” with “classic cultivation”; Thoreau “is physically out of health, and, morally and intellectually, seems not to have found exactly the guiding clue.” After Emerson’s visit, Hawthorne wryly added that Emerson “appears to have suffered some inconveniency from his experience of Mr. Thoreau as an inmate.” Perhaps Thoreau was better met “occasionally in the open air” than as “a permanent guest at table and fireside.”59

  The goodbyes mounted as the day approached: Hawthorne and Thoreau took the Pond Lily on one last row upriver, where they boarded an ice floe and rode it all the way home, towing the dory behind them. Prudence Ward gave Henry a small microscope for his natural history studies, and Elizabeth Hoar gave him a pen and inkstand, and her hope that the pen “may be made sometimes the interpreter of friendly thoughts to those whom you leave beyond the reach of your voice.” Emerson advanced him twenty dollars for supplies and new clothes, and another seven dollars for traveling expenses. He wrote William with a trace of anxiety, “And now goes our brave youth into the new house, the new connexion, the new City. I am sure no truer & no purer person lives in Wide New York”—though he might pester one with “some accidental crotchets and perhaps a village exaggeration of the value of facts.” Little Willie, he hoped, would value Thoreau “for his real power to serve & instruct him.”60

  On Saturday, May 6, Henry Thoreau and William Emerson’s wife, Susan Haven Emerson, journeyed together from Concord to Staten Island, stopping in Boston to collect the sum owed him by the bankrupt Boston Miscellany. It wasn’t just the principle of the thing; Thoreau really needed the money, though he still didn’t receive it. Their ship ran aground at low tide in New London, Connecticut, but otherwise the long ride was without incident. At ten o’clock Sunday morning, Thoreau and Mrs. Emerson stepped onto the wharf at the Battery in New York City, where they were instantly besieged by “an army of starving cab-men,” “a confused jumble of heads, and soiled coats dangling from flesh-colored faces, all swaying to and fro, as if by a sort of undertow,” each sighting along their buggy whips to the harried couple, all growing more insistent by the minute: “Want a cab sir?” “You want a cab sir.” Thoreau held them off with a stare and escorted Mrs. Emerson and their baggage to the Staten Island Ferry landing.61

  They were soon home at the long, low, brown-shingled house Waldo Emerson had dubbed “The Snuggery,” tucked behind a grape arbor and surrounded by gardens and a tree-shaded lawn.62 It was green and rural, overlooking woods stretching south to the sea. From the hilltop above Thoreau could see all of New York, Brooklyn, Long Island, the Narrows from Sandy Hook to the New Jersey Highlands, and over the Atlantic to ships on the horizon nearly a day’s sail away. Staten Island was William’s rural retreat from his Manhattan law offices. He was a man of stature, the Richmond County judge of the Court of Common Pleas, and Fuller thought he was “as unlike his brother as possible”: very much the gentleman, clearheaded, amiable, but “a mere business man” with no love for Transcendentalism.63 Thoreau was tasked with tutoring seven-year-old Willie and perhaps with helping the toddlers Charles and Haven as well. Days were rigid: breakfast at six thirty, lunch at noon, dinner at five, schoolmastering from nine to two. He found Mr. and Mrs. Emerson “irreproachable and kind” but “not indeed my kith or kin in any sense.” Waldo had insisted Thoreau have a room of his own, “be it never so small . . . wherein to dream, write, and declaim alone. Henry has always had it and always must.” But it wasn’t heated, so whenever Henry needed a room with a fire, he had to juggle with Judge Emerson for the library or the basement parlor.64

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  Off-duty, he explored the neighborhood, alternating between the “two things I hear. . . . The roar of the sea—and the hum of the city.” The Island’s natural history drew him first: sweetgum and tulip trees, wild garlic that grew everywhere and flavored the cows’ milk, seventeen-year locusts that filled the air with their din—“Phar-r-r-aoh—Pha-r-r-aoh”—and fattened the local dogs, cats, and chickens.65 He walked all over Staten Island from Telegraph Hill to the sailor’s Snug Harbor to the old elm tree on the shore where the island’s first settlers, the Huguenots, landed in 1661. The sea drew him most. “I like it much,” he wrote Emerson. “Everything there is on a grand and generous scale—sea-weed, water, and sand; and even the dead fishes, horses and hogs have a rank luxuriant odor. Great shad nets spread to dry, crabs and horse-shoes crawling over the sand.”66 He watched men draw their boats up onto the sand with teams of oxen, “stepping about amid the surf, as if it were possible they might draw up Sandy Hook,” and he made friends with old Captain Smith the fisherman, who drew up nets full of “moss-bonkers,” or menhaden, which he sold by the thousand to fertilize the Island’s lean soil. From shore Thoreau could watch immigrant ships stop at the nearby quarantine quay, where children ran races and swam while their parents stretched their limbs and took the air, waiting for the ships to be purified. “They are detained but a day or two, and then go up to the city, for the most part without having landed here.”67

  For the most part, neither had he. To go “up to the city” was a half-day’s trip. The boat ran five or six times daily, and catching it meant a half-hour walk up Richmond Road or nearly a mile along the beach. From the south tip of Manhattan, it was another two- or three-mile walk on hard pavement to anywhere, and only were it to “rain shillings” could Thoreau afford the omnibus. “You see,” he wrote his parents, “it is quite a day’s training to make a few calls in different parts of the city.”68 His first Saturday, he called on Prudence Ward’s brother George, who told him about setting up a daguerreotype studio; then he met with Emerson’s young friends Giles Waldo and William Tappan, clerks in the national credit bureau that Tappan’s father, the abolitionist Lewis Tappan, ran. “A kind of intelligence office for the whole country,” Thoreau explained to his father, a business about to employ thousands. Saturday being a workday, the two took Henry to a neighborhood alehouse for a quick visit. He finished with some sightseeing: the Great Western, the first transatlantic passenger steamship, which cut the crossing to Europe from several dangerous we
eks to a few safe days; the Croton Waterworks, to see how water was piped in from forty miles away, making such urban density possible; the National Academy of Design, where he saw landscapes by Asher Durand and Emanuel Leutze’s career-making Return of Columbus in Chains (his Washington Crossing the Delaware would soon follow).69 It was a heady introduction to technologies on the vanguard of modernity: photography, a global economy, urban expansion, his first glimpse of modern art.

  The Thoreau who loved machinery was fascinated, but the Thoreau homesick for Concord was appalled. Like Poe and Hawthorne, the crowd struck him as “something new and to be attended to,” but the more he saw of the city, the worse he liked it. “I am ashamed of my eyes that behold it. It is a thousand times meaner than I could have imagined. It will be something to hate that’s the advantage it will be to me,” he pronounced. “When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man.” Impressions overwhelmed him. “Persons and things flit so rapidly through my brain now a days that I can hardly remember them.”70 It didn’t help that as soon as he returned from the city, a cold he caught while traveling worsened to “bronchitis,” keeping him inside for a week. He rallied after that, but in June he worried to Emerson that he was failing the family: “I do not feel myself especially serviceable to the good people with [whom] I live, except as inflictions are sanctified to the righteous.” Nor did he and Willie hit it off: “I am not attracted toward him but as to youth generally.” But he tried as best he could. In July he reported, “My pupil and I get on apace,” and in August William Emerson assured his brother that “Thoreau makes us all like & respect him, & he is doing William much good.”71

  As for cultivating a literary career, here, too, Thoreau started off with a good will. Emerson was eager for him to meet Henry James, “an independent right-minded man” and “the best apple on the tree,” assuring James that once he got past Thoreau’s “village pedantry & tediousness of facts,” he would find “a profound mind and a person of true magnanimity.” James reached out immediately with a warm invitation, and as soon as he was well enough, Thoreau visited his home on Washington Square, where he perhaps looked in on the newborn Henry James Jr., the future novelist, and his infant brother William, the future philosopher. For the first time in New York, Thoreau was genuinely happy: “I have been to see Henry James and like him very much. . . . he is a refreshing forward looking, and forward moving man, and has naturalized and humanized New York for me.” After three hours’ talk, James told Thoreau to make “free use of his house,” and Thoreau returned at least once—until suddenly James and his family boarded the Great Western to be spirited away to Europe. “I am the more sorry because you liked him so well,” Emerson commiserated, adding in a letter to James that losing him was a “great disappointment.” He had hoped James would move his family to Concord.72