Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  Yet when Emerson needed a steady and capable hand, he called on Henry. When his elderly mother died, in November 1853, Henry handled the arrangements, and when distinguished lecturers needed a host or an escort, Emerson counted on Henry’s “courtesy & counsel” to smooth the way. Still, the distance between the two did not close. Thoreau wrote into Walden a sad epitaph for their friendship: “There was one other with whom I had ‘solid seasons,’ long to be remembered, at his house in the village, and who looked in upon me from time to time; but I had no more for society there.”24 For society they both turned to Ellery Channing, who had made the Walden house ring with boisterous mirth and resound with sober talk.

  Walks with Channing must have been fun. “‘What a fine day this is! Nothing about immortality here!’” he exclaimed once to Emerson, who dubbed him “Professor of the Art of Walking.” Thoreau said Channing was the only one he could really walk with, for only Channing could stay in the present moment “& vary exactly with the scene & events & the contour of the ground.”25 While his poems may have been too Ideal—“sublimo-slipshod,” Thoreau called them—Emerson noticed that Channing started to imitate Thoreau, carrying around a little pocket notebook in which he wrote down the name of every new plant or the date of every first flower.26 Sometime around January 1852, Channing showed up with a big black Newfoundland puppy—for company, he said, “to stir up the air of the room” and break his “awful solitudes.” Soon the town dubbed the faithful dog who followed him everywhere “the Professor,” as the smarter of the two. For years thereafter, Thoreau recorded the antics of “this great calf of a dog” as he muddied the clear brook, or stood in the water snapping at each wave as if it were alive, or barked ridiculously at an oddly shaped stump, or piddled on upright objects—watering and manuring the plants, smiled Thoreau, no doubt contributing to nature’s economy.27

  Ellery had his dark side, too—“the moodiest person perhaps that I ever saw,” Thoreau called him, as brindled as a cow with gentle and rough. Channing’s boorishness made his friend wince, as when two boys to whom Thoreau had lent his boat were returning quietly through Channing’s yard, whereupon Channing stalked out in shirtsleeves and closed the gate behind them “as if to shut them out.” He could be cruel, too: one evening Thoreau saw him punch his cat with a poker because she purred too loud.28 Such comments make one fear for his family, and indeed, calamity came shortly after Ellen gave birth to their fourth child, Giovanni (named for his uncle, the Marquis d’Ossoli). Tired of living in penury with her moody and unemployable husband, she called in the help of her brother-in-law, Thomas Wentworth Higginson. On November 18, 1853, Higginson arrived, packed up Ellen and the children, and swept them out of the house for good. Ellery, miserable, never left his room. The scandal rocked Concord: a shocked Mrs. Barzillai Frost gossiped indignantly that the very next night, Henry Thoreau and Ellery Channing “had a jubilee in the front parlor”—an uncharitable interpretation of what must have been, for Thoreau at least, an awkward and difficult situation. The storekeeper Horace Hosmer, who adored Ellen, admitted that “I should have enjoyed lynching Channing at that time.” Channing thereafter reverted to his best behavior, and he continued to be welcomed at the Emersons’ home and at least once at Cynthia Thoreau’s dinner table. But he remained mercurial as ever: “Who can predict his comings and goings,” said Thoreau in Walden.29

  Bronson Alcott was another regular in Thoreau’s social world. Henry called him “perhaps the sanest man” of any he knew, with no creed to defend, pledged to no institution, a peddler of philosophy whose talk put the world behind them.30 But the world, despite Alcott’s serene indifference to it—not to mention the unflagging work and steely economies of his wife and daughters—was nipping at his heels. In November 1848, his happy years tending Hillside’s beloved gardens came to an end when the money ran out and the family was once again in crisis. Alcott put Hillside on the market and moved the family to Boston, where the women sought work while Bronson sought a paying audience for his “Conversations.”

  Hillside, that once-proud showcase, had deteriorated considerably by the time Nathaniel Hawthorne returned to Concord, hoping to settle down and write. After being forced to vacate the Old Manse in October 1845, the Hawthornes had decamped to Salem, where Nathaniel took up his famous, lucrative, and soul-killing political appointment as surveyor of the Salem Custom House; there Thoreau had found them in 1848. As it happened, both Thoreau’s and Hawthorne’s fortunes had collapsed soon afterward and in synchrony: at the very moment the failure of A Week put Thoreau into a tailspin, the loss of Hawthorne’s plum position propelled him into crisis. Faced with poverty, he turned to his pen and completed in quick succession The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, and The Blithedale Romance. None were best-sellers, but all were well received, and they put enough money into Nathaniel’s pocket that when he looked over Alcott’s dilapidated old house—still on the market in February 1852—he had the funds to buy it. In June 1852 the Hawthornes returned to Concord in triumph, moving into a refurbished Hillside, which they promptly renamed “the Wayside”—the name the famous house still bears.

  For the next year (until the Hawthornes moved yet again, to England), Thoreau’s steps often turned up the walkway to the Wayside’s front door. Their son Julian recalled a day in 1852, when he was not yet seven: Thoreau showed up with his surveying equipment on his shoulder. The curious boy followed “the short, dark, unbeautiful man with interest” while the property survey went on, not missing a move and not uttering a word. Hours later, the work done, Thoreau turned to his father: “Good boy! Sharp eyes, and no tongue!” Julian became another of Thoreau’s walking companions: “In our walks about the country, Thoreau saw everything, and would indicate the invisible to me with a silent nod of the head.” Once, when they stood on the bank of the Concord River, Thoreau told the boy how the water lilies closed their petals at sunset, but at the first touch of morning sun “stirred and awoke, and, from green buds, became glorious blooms. ‘Worth seeing!’ said Thoreau, turning upon me his ‘terrible blue eyes.’ . . . All the strange man said was gospel to me, and I silently resolved to get up early some morning, and witness that exquisite drama.”31

  Meanwhile, the Alcotts, having been evicted to Boston, were trying to find their way. To earn some money, Bronson set about peddling “his brains . . . like the nut its kernel”—indeed, Thoreau elaborated, given that Alcott could talk to anyone—“children, beggars, insane, and scholars”—he should “keep a caravansary on the world’s highway, where philosophers of all nations might put up.”32 So Alcott rented rooms next to Elizabeth Peabody’s West Street bookstore to hold his Conversations, which Thoreau attended whenever he could. In February 1849, Alcott started a monthly symposium called the Town and Country Club, gathering a select company of gentlemen for “the study and diffusion of the Ideas and Tendencies proper to the nineteenth century.”33 Thoreau was invited, duly attended the first meeting, and promptly dropped out. Channing scoffed at the impossible alliance between Boston lawyers and country ministers, and it dissolved after a year. Not long afterward, Emerson tried the concept himself, helping found the far more successful Saturday Club, whose forward-looking magazine, the Atlantic, would eventually give Thoreau a place to publish some of his best work.

  Alcott kept his caravansary rolling, passing through Concord from time to time, venturing west on long lecture tours or circulating around Boston, organizing lectures and Conversations wherever he thought Ideas and Tendencies might find a hospitable reception. Thoreau was always on his short list, and once Alcott learned Walden was again under way, in March 1852, he invited Thoreau to his Conversation rooms to read his lecture on “The Sylvan Life.” (Alcott was nudging his friend to title his book Sylvania.) He rounded up an audience of sixty or so, who heard Thoreau’s lecture with “great delight.”34 When the audience clamored for more, their old friend Higginson stepped in and arranged a second lecture for two weeks later. Thoreau hesitated, fearing his medit
ative second lecture was too “transcendental” to “entertain a large audience,” but he needed the money and hated to turn down a friend. It turned out his worst nightmare. Decades later, Higginson still cringed at the memory: a blizzard had blocked the entry, and once he and Thoreau forced their way in, they found only Alcott and four or five others. Alcott decided they should enlarge the audience by enlightening the young men in the adjacent reading room. Thoreau read into the echoing silence while his auditors shuffled their newspapers in boredom or fell asleep. Afterward he heard one ask another, “What does he lecture for?” “It made me quake in my shoes,” Thoreau added.35

  Thoreau had one more lecture scheduled that spring of 1852: Marston and Mary Watson invited him to Plymouth to give his Walden lectures to the Leyden Hall Congregation—secular Sunday sermons exploring the day’s social and moral questions for those who refused to attend church. Each Sunday a different speaker would hold forth, once in the morning and again in the evening, for ten dollars and expenses—half the going rate, but the Watsons had pull. Emerson, Channing, and Alcott all spoke, plus Garrison, Phillips, Greeley, and Higginson. Thoreau’s was a double invitation: on February 22 he preached from Walden and on May 23 from “Walking, or The Wild.” The next morning one admirer, James Spooner, rushed out at dawn to see Thoreau off on the morning train. When Thoreau didn’t show, Spooner hunted him up and tagged along, playing Boswell to Thoreau’s Johnson, recording everything he said and did. They saw the graveyard, visited the scientist Charles T. Jackson, and rummaged around at Pilgrim Hall, where Thoreau read the letters of the Wampanoag warrior King Philip. Then they set off to the depot again, Thoreau talking a blue streak all the way while carrying a bunch of flowers from Marston’s garden for Mrs. Alcott in Boston. As they walked, Thoreau philosophized about missing trains, books, the ocean, the weather, and the gossip about Channing, Emerson, Alcott, Hawthorne, and himself. They shook hands before Thoreau boarded the train: come again, said Spooner. Next time, stay longer.36

  “It is astonishing how much information is to be got out of very unpromising witnesses,” Thoreau remarked; “a wise man will avail himself of the observation of all.” Spooner paints a rare portrait of Thoreau at work, perpetually in motion, covering miles before others had poured their second cup of morning coffee—seeking, looking, asking, carrying. He was courteous, generous, alert, purposeful, occasionally curt. He spent much of every day out on his “springy & unwearable” legs, as Channing called them, interrogating farmers, children, laborers, woodchoppers, shopkeepers, Indians, railroad workers, hunters, fishermen—in short, everyone except the loafers and “bar-room idlers” with nothing to do and with whom he had no patience. When Channing asked him why he was so endlessly curious about everything, Thoreau answered, “What else is there in life?”37 Only one man rebuffed him totally—Concord’s true hermit, Oliver B. Trask, who lived in the woods on the Acton town line. “Poor and crazy,” said Channing, with his rocking chair under a pine, some herbs and winter rye on a patch of cleared land, a padlocked door, and a sign on the roof: “Any pirson who shall Burn or distroy this bilding is liable to 15 years inprisonment.” It looked sad, thought Thoreau: “Is he insane or of sound serene mind?” If he knew it were the latter, “how rejoiced I should be to see his shanty!”—but the signs were worrisome.38

  The Irish, too, continued to intrigue Thoreau, as growing numbers of refugees settled in Concord. In 1850, when three generations of the Riordan family moved into a shanty near the Deep Cut, at first he was horrified by their dirt-floor poverty. But as he came to know them, he wondered if the Irish weren’t realizing his ideals better than he was, living independent lives close to the land without being seduced by Yankee markers of success. He especially admired young Johnny Riordan, leaping “lively as a cricket” from snowbank to snowbank on his way to school while the worthies of Concord waddled past encased in furs.39 In January 1852, when he saw Johnny with no jacket and snow melting on his bare toes, Henry rushed to tell Cynthia, who set the Charitable Society to sewing. A week later Henry brought Johnny’s new coat to the shanty, which he found “warmed by the simple social relations of the Irish. . . . What if there is less fire on the hearth, if there is more in the heart.” There he learned that Johnny’s uncle had moved to town and took the Irish newspaper, the Flag of Our Union; and it was “musical news” to hear that Johnny, one of the school’s best students, “does not love to be kept at home from school in deep snows.”40

  The Thoreaus, like their neighbors, employed young Irish servants, who went out on their own once they had learned the American way of life. The 1850 census lists as members of Thoreau’s own family a Margaret Doland, eleven, and Catherine Riordan, thirteen, born in Ireland—likely Johnny’s big sister. Concord’s farmers employed Irish laborers, too. When Michael Flannery, an immigrant from Kerry County, won the spading contest at the Middlesex County Fair only to see his employer claim the four-dollar prize for himself, an outraged Thoreau drafted a petition collecting money to make up the theft; he also carried a subscription door-to-door to raise the fifty dollars needed to bring Flannery’s wife and children over from Ireland, lending much of the money himself. In March 1854, money in hand, Thoreau helped Flannery write home to bring them over. Perhaps thinking of the St. John, he was moved when Flannery dictated the words, “Don’t mind the rocking of the vessel, but take care of the children that they be not lost overboard.” The Flannery family made the crossing safely and lived with the Tho-reaus until they were settled.41

  Without such a stable and contented homelife, Thoreau could not possibly have pursued his career in the way that he did. His attic chamber in the Yellow House became Walden-on-Main, a room of his own in an equitable and interdependent household in which everyone helped out. There was wood to chop and fires to stoke, water to pump and chamber pots to empty, floors to sweep and carpets to beat, clothes to wash and bedding to air, food to purchase, gardens to plant and weed, meals to cook, dishes to clean, and trips to the post office twice daily (this increasingly became Henry’s job). Cynthia was the household manager, and Henry generally referred to his home as “her” house: growing up working in a tavern, then on a farm, taught her plenty of New England faculty, which included keeping a sharp eye on the servants—a necessity, in those labor-intensive days, for every middle-class household.

  None of this was in any way remarkable, except that Thoreau did, often, remark on it, up in his attic where he noticed that melody carried farther than noise. He loved “those strains of the piano which reach me here in my attic,” where only “what is sweet & musical” could find him; the sound was sure to draw him downstairs to join the family. To Thoreau even the most ordinary sounds were music, and his journal records the many “melodies” that reached him, little vignettes of ambience: warm summer evenings when neighbors and farmers “come a-shopping after their day’s haying are chatting in the streets and I hear the sound of many musical instruments and of singing from various houses”; the mild October night when he heard boys at play in the street and his neighbor playing his flute; the morning after the first snow when he found “miniature drifts against the panes” and a little conical peak in the fireplace under the chimney, while outside the neighbors’ snow shovels scraped on the doorsteps. One morning, roused by the train whistle, he glanced out his window to see “shooting through the town 2 enormous pine sticks stripped of their bark, just from the north west and going to Portsmouth navy yard they say. Before I could call Sophia they had got round the curve & only showed their ends on their way to the deep cut.”42

  Whenever he saw something rare or interesting, he called Sophia, and he thought of his family whenever he found an especially beautiful flower, bringing it home in the sewn-in compartment of his special “botany hat”: “How fitting to have every day in a vase of water on your table the wild flowers of the season—which are just blossoming—can any house said to be furnished without them?”43 When waterlilies were in bloom, Henry brought them home in armfuls to bri
ghten and scent the house. The cook gamely baked his serviceberries into a pudding (“rather dry” was the family’s verdict), and he brought asters home by the pail so Sophia could sort the species by their beauty.44 Years later a family friend recalled the home’s “undisturbed orderliness, the restful sitting-room where the sun lay all day” illuminating Sophia’s glorious window-plants, which she could always conjure into “luxuriant bloom.” There were evenings of reading aloud, playing the piano and singing together, games of chess and backgammon, tea parties, distinguished guests and lyceum lectures on cold winter nights, followed by hours of talk—a regular, steady drumbeat of social interaction that supported Henry’s explorations in nature and literature.45

  Sometimes he revealed snatches of that talk: one Sunday, after refusing to read a certain religious tome, he heard Aunt Maria shout through the wall to Aunt Jane, “Think of it, he stood half an hour today to hear the frogs croak, and he would’nt read the life of Chalmers!” One night, after talking with Uncle Charles about who, among the nation’s worthies, was a true genius, the door opened long after they’d gone to bed and Uncle Charles “called out in an earnest stentorian voice loud enough to wake the whole house—‘Henry! Was John Quincy Adams a genius’? ‘—No, I think not’ was my reply— Well I did n’t think he was” answered Charles.46