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Spring of 1856 settled into a hot summer—of course, summers in Concord were always hot, but this was hot with a difference, terrifically wet and damp. It made for a bumper crop of berries and a panoply of wild mushrooms, whose fabulous colors and bizarre shapes fascinated Thoreau—even the disgusting stinkhorn, shaped like “a perfect phallus” and smelling so strongly like a dead rat that when he brought one home, the household howled in protest and Thoreau couldn’t sleep until the attic had been aired out. What on earth was Nature thinking? “She almost puts herself on a level with those who draw in privies.” Despite the heat, he worked at his studies like a man obsessed. “I am drawing a rather long bow,” he wrote Calvin Greene; “I pray that the archer may receive new strength before the arrow is shot.” “When the arrow has flown, please post me,” Greene replied gracefully.74 He put off Greene’s invitation to Michigan, and Blake’s request for a lecture, and Greeley’s plan for a job—after giving it some thought; Greeley wanted Thoreau to move in with his family on their New York farm for a year or so, to tutor their two young children. Too young, Thoreau finally decided, and the Greeleys amiably agreed to call it off. “It is not that we love to be alone,” Thoreau wrote to Blake, “but that we love to soar.” Very few could follow him to the heights he craved.75
Emerson was one of those few. Channing had left Concord to join Ellen in Dorchester, hoping to reconcile, and in his absence the two old friends attempted a thaw. It was bumpy. Emerson grumbled that Thoreau would drop in, deliver his thought “in lump,” and stalk out again, while Thoreau feared to open his mouth lest he make the “long tragedy” of their friendship even worse.76 But by May 1856 they were walking together as in old times. Emerson chuckled that Thoreau kept account of the plants “as a banker when his notes fall due,” but when Thoreau boasted he could tell by the flowers what day of the month it was, Emerson was dazzled; this was truly telling time by the sundial. And when Henry went off soaring, Emerson glowed with pleasure. One day he warned Thoreau against finding a long-sought bird, “lest life should have nothing more to show him. He said, ‘What you seek in vain for half your life, one day you come full upon all the family at dinner.—You seek him like a dream, and as soon as you find him, you become his prey.’” In his journal Emerson fondly sketched his friend: “There came Henry with music-book under his arm, to press flowers in; with telescope in his pocket, to see the birds, & microscope to count stamens; with a diary, jackknife, & twine, in stout shoes, & strong grey trowsers, ready to brave the shrub oaks & smilax, & to climb the tree for a hawk’s nest. His strong legs when he wades were no insignificant part of his armour.”77
The iconic photograph of Thoreau dates from this summer. Henry, Sophia, and the Aunts Thoreau were visiting family in Worcester; on their last day, June 18, Harry Blake and Theo Brown induced Henry to sit before a photographer, something he’d always resisted. At Benjamin D. Maxham’s studio on 16 Harrington Street, for sixteen cents apiece, Thoreau had three daguerreotypes taken. He promptly gave one to Blake and one to Brown, and sent one to Greene, who had written fervently from Michigan that he longed to see the author of Walden. “I am not worth seeing personally—the stuttering, blundering, clod-hopper that I am,” Thoreau replied, but he went along with his friends’ desire for a memento, facing the camera with calm directness and the merest hint of amusement. Most sitters selected their finest clothes, straightened their collars, combed their hair neatly. Not he: hair rumpled and wild, bowtie slightly askew, Galway whiskers a-scraggle, Thoreau presented himself to the camera as he was, take it or leave it. Sophia hated the image, preferring Rowse’s gentle and dreamy poet. Alcott disliked it, detecting Thoreau’s illness lingering in the shadows. Thoreau mailed it to Greene with a rueful blessing: “My friends think [it] is pretty good—though better looking than I.”78 But Horace Hosmer loved it: “That Photo shows Thoreau at meridian. . . . He looked like this when he removed his hat and showed me the climbing fern in it, making a real crown or chaplet for its discoverer. I never saw him look so happy and human, as he did that day.”79
The social season continued: even as Thoreau was sitting in Worcester for his portrait, Ricketson was sitting in Concord awaiting his return. Having set off on a whim, Ricketson was disappointed to find his friend away, but instead of returning home, he took tea with Henry’s parents, listening patiently as Cynthia gave him a long and loving account of her son’s many virtues. He befriended Henry’s quiet father as well, walking with him to the cemetery the next morning. “A fine specimen of the gentleman of the old school,” Ricketson said of him; “a character of honesty illumines his countenance. Few men have impressed me so favorably.” Once Henry returned home that afternoon, Ricketson finally had his friend all to himself, and they went off boating together. For four more days he lingered in Concord, walking and talking, rowing and sailing, meeting other Concord luminaries, including Emerson, whom Ricketson, a professed collector of characters, found kind and intelligent but not “warm-hearted” and, though “a blessing to the age,” a little limited in power.80
Thoreau then accompanied Ricketson back to Brooklawn to continue their rambles. On Naushon Island they explored the deep forest of grand old trees long protected from the axe—great beeches, large and spreading oaks, tupelos three feet in diameter—and startled two deer, creatures long since hunted out of Concord.81 They visited old Martha Simonds, the last “pure-blooded” Indian in New Bedford, at her hut on the tiny scrap of Indian land that remained hers. “She had half an acre of the real tawny Indian face,” wrote Thoreau, but he found her vacant and listless, answering his questions in monosyllables. Though born on that spot, she knew not a word of her native language and nothing of her race, having gone out to whites as a servant early in childhood. But she lit up when Thoreau asked what she called a certain plant: “That’s husk-root. It’s good to put into bitters for a weak stomach.” Ah, if only he’d had a hat full of plants. To cap it off, “a conceited old Quaker minister, her neighbor, told me with a sanctified air, ‘I think that the Indians were human beings; dost thee not think so?’”82
After a week, Ellery Channing dropped in, anxious to see Thoreau. The two camped out in the Shanty that night, and early next morning Ricketson drove Thoreau to the train station while Channing walked back to town. It was not a chance visit and could not have been pleasant. The previous fall, Ellen had infuriated her family by reconciling with Ellery, and for a while they got on well enough. Just after Christmas, Ellery, resolving to turn over a new leaf, asked Ricketson for help setting them up in New Bedford. Ricketson must have put a word in, for Ellery landed a job as assistant editor for the New Bedford Mercury, but then he started avoiding his family, working long hours on weekdays and hanging out at Ricketson’s all weekend. Bewildered, Ricketson wrote Thoreau for help: Channing was clearly miserable, but he would reveal nothing of his private life. Was there something . . . wrong with him? Could he be trusted? Thoreau hastened to reassure him: Channing is exactly what you see, both good and bad. He had long been a problem for his Concord friends, and now—oh dear—he was Ricketson’s problem, too; “perhaps it is left for you to solve it.” Daniel and Louisa Ricketson did what they could for Ellery and, behind his back, for Ellen.83 But by mid-May, Daniel was losing patience and feeling “oppressed” by Ellery’s “black mood.” When Daniel dropped in unannounced on the Thoreaus a month later, it was partly to inquire about Channing. The blunt-speaking Cynthia gave Daniel a “long and particular” account, and once Henry returned, they, too, took up the Channing Problem.84
When Channing himself materialized that afternoon to shut himself up with Thoreau for the night, their conversation must have been grim. Thoreau, caught in the middle, had tried for years to distance himself from the “problem” of Channing, who in his “obtuseness” had made any emotional closeness impossible.85 But that night he had to listen when Channing told him, as he must surely have done, that Ellen had just given birth to their fifth child, whom they named Henry
(later changed to Edward), and that, weakened by childbirth and ill with consumption, she was not expected to live. Three months later, on September 22, Ellen Fuller Channing died. Arthur and Richard Fuller buried their sister and distributed the five children among various Fullers, while Ellery stayed away in New Bedford, boarding alone, working at the Mercury, and walking to the Shanty on weekends to sit by the fire and smoke. For hours, Ricketson would sit at his table by the window, writing in his journal, ignoring the guest he could not bear to turn away.86
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Back home in Concord, Thoreau watched the “dog days” of midsummer come in, writing in his own Journal every morning and panting in the hot afternoons through sproutlands and copses as the mercury climbed to 98 in the shade. It was so damp that his pressed flowers all mildewed and the family washing wouldn’t dry, but he loved the moist hot air and drew it deep into his lungs like a vapor bath. The berries were so thick they blackened the hillsides, “five or six species deep”; on August 4 he led the annual berry party to Conantum, where they picked blackberries big as thumbs and huckleberries big as bullets.87 Storms broke on August 8, and that day, just as Henry was about to rise from the dinner table to inspect the flooding river, a servant burst through the door and exclaimed (in the words of a witness), “Faith! th’ pig’s out o’ th’ pin, an’ th’ way he’s tearin’ roun’ Jege Hoore’s fluer-bids es enuf ter scare er budy.” While Henry, John, and Michael Flannery ran to pursue the marauder, the ladies “flew to the windows to see the fray.” Afterward Thoreau wrote up “The Capture of the Pig” as a shaggy-dog comedy worthy of Mark Twain.88
As his energy returned, Thoreau grew restless. He wanted to see September, and he decided that a look at the Connecticut River would help him see September on the Concord. On September 5, he took the cars to Brattleboro, Vermont, shouldering his valise and walking the tracks from Fitchburg to Westminster rather than waiting for the next train. The Connecticut was disappointing, narrow and shallow even at high water—“The Concord is worth a hundred of it for my purposes,” he sniffed—but the botanizing was grand and the welcome warm. For four days he tramped the mountains, woods and fields with Rev. Addison Brown, who ran a local girls’ school; his wife Ann, who had a flair for botany and astronomy; their daughters Frances and Mary; and their botanist friend Charles Christopher Frost, who made shoes.89 The Brown girls led Thoreau up the local mountain, which Frances called by the indigenous name, Wantastiquet; Mary recalled how their guest, who seemed to know everything, kept asking her all sorts of questions she couldn’t answer—as if a fourteen-year-old girl could know more than he did! The following March, Thoreau sent her a sample of the climbing fern and a letter explaining how it grew, adding gracefully, “The Climbing Fern would have been a pretty name for some delicate Indian maiden.”90 It was the first of three letters he would send her, all of which she said were among her most cherished possessions.
His next stop was Walpole, New Hampshire, to spend a day with Bronson Alcott. To get there he took the railroad north to Bellows Falls and walked south over Falls Mountain, slipping and sliding all the way down on his smooth-soled leather shoes, swimming in the Connecticut to wash up, then hitching the last mile into Walpole with a lumberer who said he’d helped get four million logs out of Bellows Falls, including some of the very masts Thoreau had seen carried through Concord on the railroad. The visit did Alcott good. It had been over a year since the family had moved to Walpole, and the people, he felt, were still strangers. After a morning talking politics—“Frémont, Garrison, Emerson, and the rest”—and an afternoon’s walk to view the Connecticut Valley, Alcott penned in his journal: “Seldom has a scholar’s study circumscribed so much of the Cosmos as that of this footed intelligence of ours.”91 In his own Journal Thoreau happily listed all the new plants he had gathered, and congratulated himself: the Concord River was in every way richer and more various than the Connecticut, “the most fertile in every sense.” The real advantage of circumscribing the Cosmos was how clearly it enabled him to see home.
After his long illness, Thoreau felt anxious to write and pressed for time, but instead his perennial need for income took him away from Concord for a hard month of surveying in New Jersey. Alcott had set it up: after their day together in Walpole, he had walked off to New York City, stopping at the Eagleswood Colony on Raritan Bay, east of Perth Amboy, to scout a possible new home for his family. The colony was the brainchild of Marcus and Rebecca Spring, liberal Quakers and ardent social reformers. In 1846, they had brought Margaret Fuller along on their European grand tour, whence Fuller had ventured off to become an Italian Revolutionary. In 1852, the Springs had tried to help the future along by founding their own utopian community, the Raritan Bay Union, modeled on Brook Farm. But it was a financial failure. By the time Alcott arrived, they were subdividing the land into estates to sell to New York City commuters who would be drawn, they hoped, to life in a planned community rich with cultural amenities.92 When they mentioned they needed a surveyor, Alcott suggested Thoreau, who not only needed the work but could bring along some culture, too. So on October 24, 1856, Henry Thoreau packed up all his available lectures plus compass and tripod and set off for New Jersey.
“This is a queer place,” Thoreau wrote home; it consisted of a huge stone phalanstery, the Springs’ residence (where he stayed), a few shops, an office, and the school. He had arrived on a Saturday afternoon, riding in with Elizabeth Peabody, just in time for the regular Saturday evening dance, which everyone, even he, was expected to attend—“They take it for granted that you want society!” Sunday morning was Quaker meeting, and when someone warned him they all expected him to be moved by the spirit, he prepared a few words, “just enough to set them a little by the ear & make it lively.” That night he read “Moosehunting” to the collective—composed mostly, he discovered, of children—and on Monday morning he set to work. And hard work it was: two hundred acres, “through woods ravines marshes & along the shore, dodging the tide—through cat briar mud and beggar ticks—having no time to look up or think where I am.” And as he worked, the job got bigger: the Springs decided he should set out an orchard and vineyards as well, and some of the new owners asked him to survey their plots.93
“I am sold for the time,—am merely Thoreau the surveyor here,” he wrote wearily to Blake. But it wasn’t all work. On Saturday, November first, Alcott arrived from New York to ask some tough questions about the struggling community’s future and whether his family might find a place in it. After spending the evening with Thoreau and the morning leading a Conversation on “Liberty and Responsibility,” Alcott listened approvingly that night as Thoreau read “Walking,” which he thought the children particularly enjoyed.94 Alcott was full of plans: next Saturday he brought Thoreau out to see Greeley’s Westchester farm, the same farm where Greeley had hoped Thoreau would live for a year or two. What Thoreau thought is not recorded, but Alcott thought the whole affair—acres and ditches, barn and crops, man, wife, and children—a disaster in the making. After a night in the city, they crossed on the Brooklyn Ferry to hear Henry Ward Beecher’s Sunday sermon. The church was jammed to the rafters, and Alcott was awed with the sheer spectacle of it, the congregation weeping and laughing and devout under the great evangelical’s powerful magnetism. Thoreau “called it pagan, and was restive under it.”95
Then they dropped in on Walt Whitman. The poet was out, but his mother was in, and she fed them with cakes hot from the oven and loving praise for her son, so good and wise, always for the weak against the strong. Her son would be home the next morning, she assured them—after all, he had nothing to do in life but “eat, drink, write, and sleep”—and he would be glad to see them. Alcott was eager to introduce Thoreau to Whitman; he had visited the strange new poet a few weeks before, and found him full of “brute power,” genius, and audacity. Emerson already knew all this, but especially the audacity. The year before, when Whitman published Leaves of Grass, he had mailed a copy straight to Emerson, who, s
eeing yet again a brilliant new poet to mentor, had written him one of his thrilling trademark letters of support. The buoyed Whitman seized on the letter’s most quotable line and, to Emerson’s horror, blazoned it right across the spine of his next edition: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.” In one stroke Whitman had given birth to the modern cover blurb, quite without Emerson’s permission.
Now at last it was Thoreau’s turn. Thoreau was deeply interested in Whitman, but still unsure what to make of him. Their meeting did not go particularly well. Alcott brought along Sarah Tyndale—“a solid walrus of a woman,” he called her, “the kindliest piece of cumbrous candour and common sense.” It is unclear whether her candor eased the conversation. Whitman met them at the door and escorted them up two flights of stairs to the attic, where the chamberpot stood visible and the unmade bed still showed the imprint of his body and that of his “feeble brother,” with whom he shared the room. After some small talk, they removed to the parlor downstairs, where Alcott contrived to set Thoreau and Whitman into direct communication. But the great men sat eyeing each other “like two beasts, each wondering what the other would do, whether to snap or run.” Thoreau feared he got off to a bad start by retorting to Whitman, who declared he represented America, “that I did not think much of America or of politics & so on—which may have been somewhat of a damper to him.” Then someone raised the issue of the Emerson letter, which put Whitman on the defensive. It was “a simple thing,” he apologized weakly, suggesting the blame rested partly on Emerson. After two hours, Alcott ended the interview, leaving Mrs. Tyndale “to have him all to herself.”96 A week later, Thoreau told Blake he was “still in a quandary,” still not sure what to make of Whitman—a man so coarse and rough yet so gentle and sweet, who loved “to ride up and down Broadway all day,” sitting beside the omnibus driver and declaiming Homer at the top of his lungs.97
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