Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  Managing success—perhaps even celebrity—was a new and disconcerting prospect. That fall the New-York Daily Tribune published Thoreau’s name in a list of lecturers for the upcoming season, which they expected to be “more brilliant” than ever. Thoreau geared up, bravely announcing to Blake that he had a lecture planned in Plymouth, a second in Philadelphia, “and thereafter to the West, if they shall want me.” Yet the prospect filled him with qualms. In “obscurity and poverty” he was free to live as he wished, free to spend two whole years with the flowers alone and an entire fall observing the changing tints of the foliage. “Ah, how I have thriven on solitude and poverty! I cannot overstate this advantage.” What if the public demanded him? “If I go abroad lecturing, how shall I ever recover the lost winter?” Perhaps he owed his very success to his vices, including his willingness to make “enormous sacrifices” to gain his ends.6 Nevertheless, Thoreau pushed aside his fears and resolved to go on the lecture circuit, plunging into the most active social season of his life.

  Thoreau sat for his portrait only three times in his life, the first just after Walden’s publication.7 One of Boston’s most important illustrators, Samuel Worcester Rowse, had been commissioned to paint a formal portrait of Emerson, and while boarding with the Thoreaus he became intrigued with Henry’s features. A family friend recorded Rowse’s process: for two or three weeks he studied Thoreau’s face without putting pencil to paper, until “one morning at breakfast, he suddenly jumped up from the table, asked to be excused and disappeared for the rest of the day.” A certain expression had crossed Henry’s face, and Rowse wished to capture it. The following morning he brought down a sensitive rendering in chalk and charcoal of a young and gentle poet. It pleased most of Henry’s family—Sophia treasured it for the rest of her days—although Aunt Maria scoffed it was a poor likeness, and Henry’s friends were unconvinced. Blake thought it “very unsatisfactory,” Franklin Sanborn judged it “rather weak,” and Alcott complained it made his friend “too much of a gentleman.” That, no doubt, was exactly the intent. Rowse sought to capture artistic impressions rather than render factual accuracy; in an age when the camera was turning the art world upside down, he earned his fame by transforming his sitters into idealized, sentimental images of middle-class Victorian gentility. Henry’s reaction to his bland and dreamy avatar does not survive, but after his death, it would become the nineteenth century’s iconic image of Thoreau.8

  Another visitor that August was the Salem botanist John Lewis Russell. For two days they walked and boated while Thoreau peppered him with questions. Russell was in quest of Concord’s rarest and most treasured plant, the beautiful and delicate climbing fern that, alone of all the ferns of New England, twines up other plants like a vine. It grew in only one place, a thicket deep in the woods, where Thoreau discovered it late in November 1851—a secret he shared with only his most trusted friends. Elizabeth Hoar was one; in August 1854 he helped her gather a little for a garland, unwinding the delicate and lacy fronds with care and patience. Two days later, on the bright morning of August 16, Thoreau took Russell to gather a specimen of the rare and elegant treasure for his own collection. From then on, the two remained friends. The following March, Russell published a graceful essay on their “tour of discovery into unknown regions of fairy land.”9 Russell returned two years later for a second ramble in the field, and in September 1858 they explored Cape Ann together, botanizing cheerfully in the estuaries and boiling their dinnertime tea over fires kindled from dead bayberry bushes.10

  Walden soon brought Thoreau fan letters and new friendships. One came from Adrien Rouquette, a French Catholic priest in New Orleans who spotted a review of the book and hurried out to buy a copy. Rouquette, an ardent abolitionist who admired Orestes Brownson and Isaac Hecker, would soon remove from the city to live with the Choctaw Indians as a missionary and protector, adopting their clothing, their language, and the Choctaw name “Chahta-Ima.” Writing in his native French, he expressed immense admiration for Walden, beseeched Thoreau for a copy of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and enclosed his own books of sacred poetry and reflections on his life as a religious hermit. Thoreau was gratified to receive so cordial a greeting in French, “the language of my paternal Grandfather.” As he added gracefully, “I assure you it is not a little affecting to be thus reminded of the breadth & the destiny of our common country.”11 His sense of kinship with the French in North America, ignited by his brief excursion to Canada, had not abated.

  Then there was an odd missive from New Bedford, which opened with a stiff “Dear Sir,” then warmed up quick as a teakettle to rattle on for pages as the writer bubbled over with his own love for nature, his beloved Middleboro Ponds, his rural retreat—but he had a wife and four children and being in his forty second year had “got a little too far along” to undertake a new mode of life; but still, he was writing from his own “rough board Shanty 12x14 three miles from New Bedford in a quiet & secluded spot.” Pages later, the effusion abruptly ends: “Dear Mr Walden good bye for the present. Daniel Ricketson.” Thoreau penned a courteous but cautious reply that included kind wishes, a book recommendation, and a mild joke: “Much as you have told me of yourself, you have still I think the advantage of me in this correspondence, for I have told you still more in my book. You have therefore the broadest mark to fire at.” “Letter hastily written and hardly satisfactory,” Ricketson scrawled in his journal before seizing a new sheet of paper and inviting Thoreau to come visit—an invitation he did not send. Impulsive, querulous, quick to sense insult, a restless chatterbox, Ricketson had, it would seem, no future with “Mr Walden.”12

  While Ricketson’s cheeky letter lay on his desk unanswered, Thoreau was busy on his rounds, watching the summer drought finally break and the turtle eggs he’d buried in the garden that spring hatch. He was moved to see the earth could nurse such fragile seeds of creaturely life. Often he walked with friends, such as Minot Pratt, a Brook Farmer who bought a farm in Concord and was learning about beekeeping and native plants, or Rowse, who was teaching Thoreau to see with an artist’s eye, or Channing, still tormented and lonely, rattling around his empty house across the street. Or his latest visitor, a lanky Shropshire gentleman named Thomas Cholmondeley—“pronounced Chumly”—who showed up at Emerson’s door in August and was now boarding with the Thoreaus through the fall. The Oxford-educated Cholmondeley had just published Ultima Thule, a study of New Zealand’s political and social economy based on his years as a New Zealand sheep farmer; now he wanted to see what the English Commonwealth had done in the New World. Thoreau praised him as “an English country gentleman of simple habits and truly liberal mind, who may one day take part in the government of his country.”13 Somehow they took to each other. Just after New Year’s Day, about to board a ship home to England, Cholmondeley stopped by Concord to talk Thoreau into coming along. Their friendship must have been warm indeed: Emerson feared Thoreau might go.14

  Thoreau’s fall campaign to cut a figure on the lecture circuit had gotten off to a good start. His first invitation came from Marston Watson in Plymouth, who raised ten dollars with James Spooner and a few others for an encore.15 Alcott was there, scouting out a possible new home for his family, and Watson hoped Thoreau would survey his extensive gardens and orchards as well. Thoreau cheerfully packed both compass and lecture and set off for Plymouth on October 7, though Watson’s invitation put him in a bit of a bind: they requested two lectures, but Thoreau had only one on hand, which they had already heard. Pressed for time, he expanded sections of “Walking” into a suite of lectures suitable for his planned Western tour. In Plymouth, he began with “Moonlight,” a rhapsody on walking by the moon’s ethereal light, which revealed that we “are not of the earth earthy, but of the earth spiritual.”16 The audience was tiny: the Watsons, the devoted Spooner, Alcott—supportive as ever, pronouncing the new lecture “admirable”—plus a few others, barely more than a “sewing circle.” Thoreau kept no record of the trip; the writer w
ho loved wide margins in his life had, this autumn, no margins at all. He roomed with Alcott, the two talking until bedtime, and spent three days surveying Hillside’s eighty acres—Watson showing the way and Alcott carrying the chains—before returning by way of Boston and a visit with the Alcott family on October 13.17

  The instant he was home, Thoreau wrote to Blake to arrange their excursion to Mount Wachusett—not much of a trip, but all he could manage. At least it would show Cholmondeley, eager to climb an American mountain, a bit of the countryside. By the time they set off on October 19, the drought-stricken trees had already shed their leaves and the uplands were sugared with early snow. From Westminster they walked to Daniel Foster’s home; after a year as Concord’s Trinitarian minister, Foster had settled on a farm in East Princeton. Daniel was away lecturing, but his wife Dora, a close friend of Sophia Thoreau, welcomed them warmly. It was only a two-mile jaunt to the top of Wachusett, so off they went, meeting Blake at the summit, where they marveled to see the ships docked at Boston Harbor through Henry’s telescope.18

  After a few hours’ sleep at the Fosters’, they were back on the summit by sunrise, looking east into “misty and gilded obscurity.” To the west, Wachusett’s shadow touched the Hoosac Mountains in the farthest horizon before contracting steadily into a sharp pyramid on the farmlands below. They were home by day’s end. Daniel Foster wrote regretting his absence and hoping Thoreau would soon return, for he had been reading Walden to the family, slowly, with plenty of pauses for discussion, and wanted Thoreau to know that his fellowship “has been uncommonly useful in aiding & strengthening my own best purpose.”19 That purpose was to “seek truth and immortal living” in a happy home on a bit of his own land. A poignant wish—the ardent Foster would pursue his ideals to the Kansas frontier to join John Brown’s insurrection, and later would die in the Civil War, captain of the 37th Regiment of US Colored Troops.

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  As soon as he was home from Wachusett, Thoreau plunged back into writing. He had landed a major lecture engagement as the second speaker in a series at Philadelphia’s prestigious Spring Garden Mechanics Institute—his first appearance outside New England—and it weighed on his mind. His topic, he announced, would be “The Wild,” the second in his planned suite of lectures carved out of the ballooning pages of “Walking.” But plans for the big Western tour were not going well. He’d received only two nibbles, one from Akron, Ohio, and another from Hamilton, Ontario. In a flurry of letters, he tried to schedule them both for early January while angling for more—two would hardly pay expenses—plus juggling dates for appearances in Providence and Nantucket and trying to pin down yet another nibble, from the Boston area, that never materialized.20 His plans were still up in the air when he set off for Philadelphia on November 20, a long day’s journey: the early train to Boston, the express train to New York, connecting by candlelight to a third train across New Jersey to the Camden Ferry across the Delaware River to Philadelphia, arriving at 10:00 p.m. Fifteen hours, Thoreau noted, from Concord.21

  Thoreau stayed in America’s first capital for just one day. First thing in the morning, he headed to the Statehouse, where the Declaration of Independence had been signed, and climbed to the top of the cupola to look over the city (though he preferred the squirrels bustling around his feet to the great historical sights). Emerson had written ahead to ask a college friend, Philadelphia’s Unitarian minister William Henry Furness, to show Thoreau around. Furness got Thoreau admitted to the National Academy of Sciences, where carpenters were adding four more stories to house the growing collections. Thoreau lingered over Morton’s infamous collection of human skulls, whose crania measured the immutable scale of intelligence—the bigger the skull, the smarter the person, putting white men at the top. Of the American Philosophical Society, Thoreau noted that it was described “as a company of old women.” Of his lecture itself, he noted nothing. Yet “The Wild” was of the deepest importance to him: as he scrawled across the title page, “I regard this as a sort of introduction to all I may write hereafter.” Furness, who could not attend, told Emerson that a parishioner’s daughter said “the audience was stupid & did not appreciate him,” although Thoreau himself was “full of interesting talk,” in the most “amusing” intonations. To illustrate, Furness sketched a goofy Thoreau with staring eyes, pouting lips, a vanishing chin, scraggly hair, and an absurdly drooping nose, like a tapir.22

  Any discouragement Thoreau may have felt in Philadelphia was dispersed the next day in New York, where the ebullient and ever-supportive Greeley treated his newly published client like a celebrity. Thoreau was dazzled by the Crystal Palace, with its displays of everything from a column of solid coal fifty feet thick to iron and copper ores, sculptures and paintings innumerable, and eighth-century armor from the Tower of London. At Barnum’s Museum he paused over Indian artifacts dug out of the mounds, towering “camelopards,” or giraffes—not nearly so tall as Barnum claimed, scoffed Thoreau the surveyor—and Barnum’s diorama of the world, which told the builder of a house at Walden that houses were pretty much the same the world over. Greeley introduced Thoreau to the Tribune staff before sweeping him off to the opera, Bellini’s I Puritani (The Puritans), all the rage in Paris and Queen Victoria’s favorite. As the page ushered them around the opera house to meet this group and that, Thoreau lost track of the social whirl: “Greeley appeared to know and be known by everybody.”23

  Back home, there was no time to rest. In two weeks he was due in Provincetown, where he had promised to deliver an entirely new lecture, “What Shall It Profit?”—the debut of what became his most frequently delivered lecture and eventually his great polemic, “Life without Principle.” This, too, like “Moonlight” and “The Wild,” was a spin-off from “Walking”: this third segment expanded on the failure to walk with a redemptive “saunterer’s” eye. Alone of all his lectures, Thoreau reserved these two, “Walking, or The Wild” and “What Shall It Profit?”, to remain lectures, not moving them to publication until he was on his deathbed. They were designed as a complementary pair—nature and humanity—which, taken together, gave voice to Thoreau’s leading principles. Once he had asked, in the aftershock of Shadrach Minkin’s escape, “What is the value of any political freedom, but as a means of moral freedom?” These two lectures were his answer. “Walking” advanced the freedom to step away from the demands of earning a living, to shape one’s day as a dwelling wholly within the higher law. This new lecture advanced the freedom to earn that living honestly, even poetically—to make the higher law one’s daily bread. As his biblical title asked his audience, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”24

  The irony of it all pierced Thoreau to the quick. He was earning a living telling audiences to “get your living by loving,” but hated what he was doing; it cost him everything he loved. On December 6, after days of writing and a whirl of engagements, he collapsed into a window seat on the train to Providence and brooded on the landscape: “I see thick ice and boys skating all the way to Providence, but know not when it froze, I have been so busy writing my lecture.” It was as he feared in September: “If I go abroad lecturing, how shall I ever recover the lost winter?”25 But he soldiered on. The Providence organizers specified that, given the “outrages of slavery,” their speakers must emphasize reform. They’d invited Theodore Parker, Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, and T. W. Higginson, ranking Thoreau with the era’s greatest reform speakers. The audience would have loved that great barnburner “Slavery in Massachusetts,” but Thoreau, who did not repeat published material, gave them “What Shall It Profit?” instead—less fire, more philosophy. Their reaction was cool, and Thoreau left deeply unhappy. “I fail to get even the attention of the mass. I should suit them better if I suited myself less.” They wanted not the original, but the familiar: “You cannot interest them except as you are like them and sympathize with them.” The only saving grace was the “providential” appearance of H. G.
O. Blake’s best friend, Theo Brown. Knowing there was some “Worcester soil there” saved his words from falling on “stony ground.”26

  Even stony ground might yield a little fruit, though. In Providence that meant meeting Emerson’s protégé Charles King Newcomb, he of “The Two Dolons,” who took Thoreau to see Roger Williams’ Rock and the old fort on Narragansett Bay. But Thoreau couldn’t get rid of the bad taste in his mouth. He had cheapened himself, exhausted himself trying to become a popular lecturer, and for what? Twice now, audiences in major cities had yawned at his best new material. The whole enterprise was a failure. Worse, it took away what he treasured above all else, his freedom to walk daily into nature, to see what each new day brought forth. “Winter has come unnoticed by me,” he sulked again, on his return from Providence. Better to write books. Let his audience be sifted that way; better they come to him than he go to them.27 And with that resolution, his plans for a big Western lecture tour evaporated. Such grand tours worked for Emerson, who made them annually, but this was the last time Thoreau sought a lecture engagement outside New England. Meanwhile, he honored the commitments he’d already made, giving “What Shall It Profit?” to the New Bedford Lyceum the day after Christmas and to the Nantucket Atheneum two days later. Fortunately, given his despairing mood, both places gave him good reason not to give up altogether.