Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  The next day they retreated to the grounds of Toronto College before boarding the Grand Trunk Railway, which they rode east along Lake Ontario, then up the St. Lawrence River. At Prescott Junction they ferried to Ogdensburg, New York. It was morning, July 9, and they had many hours to wait until the next train to Boston, at 4:00 a.m. What they did is unknown. Henry’s notes stop here, and Horace had already posted his last letter home. The tired travelers finished with a long, weary ride through northernmost New York, across Vermont and New Hampshire, and down into Massachusetts along the Merrimack River. Gazing at the once-familiar landscape, Thoreau could see the changes wrought by two decades of industrialization. They arrived in Boston too late to catch the last train for Concord. They had friends in the city and could have sought them out, but instead they waited through the night for the first train home. It was Thursday morning, July 11, when they walked the last couple of blocks from Concord station: to Horace Mann’s home on Sudbury Road, where his mother greeted her son; a bit farther on to Henry’s home on Main Street, where his mother, sister, and aunts were relieved to see him home again, safe, after a long two months away.

  It was a bittersweet homecoming. Thoreau had set off still hopeful, still venturing, still planning future work. He came back knowing that he had, at best, a few months to live. It was a hard blow to family and friends. His letters home had told of views and adventures without a word about his health, and Horace had always insisted his charge was “pretty well,” always just about to get better. About his own cough Horace said nothing, but it is all the more heartbreaking that he, too, would die of consumption, at age twenty-six, on the verge of a major career in science. When Alcott read the reports they sent home, he dared to hope that Thoreau’s trip West had been “predestined from the beginning,” his “lassitude” merely the sign that he had exhausted Concord and was ready for a new field of observation. But now the truth was evident to all. Moncure Conway visited Thoreau shortly after the Battle of Bull Run on July 21—the first pivotal battle of the Civil War, another Union rout. Conway found his old friend was the only happy man in Concord, “in a state of exaltation about the moral regeneration of the nation”—but also “sadly out of health.” Perhaps it was he who wrote the note, published soon after in the New-York Tribune, alerting the world that the celebrated naturalist and poet was in “poor health.”73 The season of goodbyes had begun.

  “The leaves teach us how to die”

  Back in October 1860, Thoreau had opened his latest letter from Daniel Ricketson to find his old friend was seriously annoyed: “Friend Thoreau, Am I to infer from your silence that you decline any further correspondence and intercourse with me?” An embarrassed Thoreau replied he meant no neglect, but was merely busy; then in March 1861 he had to tell the anxious Ricketson that “bronchitis” kept him indoors. Now, back from Minnesota, Thoreau found waiting a most extraordinary letter announcing the old Quaker’s born-again conversion to Christianity. “I hardly know what to say,” he wrote back; “I must see you before I can judge.” Of course!—responded Ricketson. Come visit; all you need is rest and mild occupation, the perfect Ricketson cure.74 On August 19, the old friends met at the depot, and Ricketson began administering treatment: long fireside talks in the Shanty, slow buggy rides around the lake. But seeing Thoreau put him in a tailspin. Thoreau’s case was critical, his cough nasty, his body emaciated. But his spirits were good—reason to keep fighting.

  Two days later, on a clear warm morning, Ricketson drove Thoreau to the studio of E. S. Dunshee, photographer, where his friend obligingly sat for two ambrotypes. One was lighter, and Ricketson kept it for himself, leaving the other image, darker and stronger, at the studio. The photograph delighted his family—an excellent likeness, they agreed, scarcely showing Henry’s loss of health. From its oval frame, an aging Thoreau looks out soberly, in formal attire, full beard trimmed, mustache grizzled, hair as ever dressed by a pine cone. His gaze holds ours: gray eyes steady, deep and sad as a requiem. Alcott saw in the portrait the pallor of disease, and Emerson thought the beard disfigured his friend’s face, but when Ricketson sent Sophia the second copy, she could not hold back her tears at seeing “her own lost brother again,” just a “slight shade about the eyes expressive of weariness.”75 It was the last image of Thoreau, and his last trip away from home.

  Ricketson could not bear to see his friend so ill. He persuaded his personal physician, Dr. Denniston, to visit Thoreau. The two arrived together on September 2. Thoreau listened to the doctor’s prescription, a course of water treatments starting with a two-week stay at his spa, and politely declined. Ricketson returned home convinced Thoreau was improving. Others thought so, too: Channing wrote Mary Russell Watson that another month of such recovery would see Thoreau well again. Judge Hoar lent him a horse and carriage, and in the fine autumn days Henry took Sophia out riding.76 Sometime that September they rode to Walden Pond together, where she sketched as he sat and gazed out on the pond, tossing grapes from a vine overhead into its clear waters—his last visit to the pond that, since childhood, had been the drapery of his dreams.77 In October he assured Ricketson that, on the whole, his health was better. But, as he admitted, “It is easy to talk, but hard to write.”78 It was his last letter to Ricketson. They did not see each other again.

  On November 3, Thoreau took his Journal out one last time. He had abandoned regular entries since he first caught cold, and after Minnesota he had brought it out only a few times, mostly to capture his fond observations of the family’s several cats and newest kittens. Then, at noon on November 3, 1861, he looked outdoors: a violent storm was just clearing, and what he saw gave him the conclusion he wanted. The wind-driven rain had carved ruler-straight ridges behind each pebble, from which he could read the precise direction of the storm. “All this is perfectly distinct to an observant eye,” he wrote, “and yet could easily pass unnoticed by most. Thus each wind is self-registering.”79 With this he closed his Journal, his great monument to self-registration, forever.

  The cold of winter undermined all his apparent progress. Writing was impossible; but talking, as Thoreau had said to Ricketson, was easy, and with his writing voice stilled, his speaking voice became his lifeline. A family friend recalled how, that last winter, toward evening a flush would come to his cheeks and “an ominous brightness and beauty to his eyes, painful to behold.” His conversation was “brilliant,” and he held them charmed, talking “until his weak voice could no longer articulate.” At a family dinner in December, Alcott found the feeble Thoreau expansive on books, men, and the nation’s “civil troubles,” impatient as ever with the politicians’ “temporizing” and the people’s “indifferency” to the true issues at stake. He sat up with the family at the dinner table as long as he possibly could, telling Channing, “It would not be social to take my meals alone.”80 When he grew too weak to manage the stairs, Sophia had his cane bed brought down to the front parlor overlooking the river, where she surrounded her brother with plants and flowers. At bedtime she arranged the furniture so the lamplight would make fantastical shadows on the walls to entertain him on sleepless nights. Sophia Hawthorne sent over their “sweet old musicbox” so he could lie back and rest as it dreamed forth its tunes, and neighbors brought more flowers, dropping by daily with tempting treats—a dish of jelly, fresh-caught game, sweet apples and bottles of cider.81

  At first the town’s children stayed away, fearing to disturb the sick man. “Why don’t they come to see me?” Thoreau cried to Sophia, watching them pass by. “I love them as if they were my own.” Sophia told Lidian, who told Edith, who spread the word, and after that, children came often. Ever the teacher, Thoreau once asked some lads who had been robbing birds’ nests if they knew what a wail of anguish their cruelty sent over the fields and through the woods.82 The universal kindness brought out the side of Henry he hid from all but his most trusted friends. While Emerson said the stoic Henry was “with difficulty sweet,” Ed Hoar explained that Henry was “very affectionate,
” but had gotten it in his head that people didn’t mean what they said. But now, with all the visits and flowers, “he came to feel very differently toward people, and said if he had known he wouldn’t have been so offish.”83

  Formal callers found him in an easy chair, dressed in a handsome black suit instead of his raffish dun corduroys. Intimate friends found him surrounded by masses of books and manuscripts, busy and cheerful, delighting them with his bon mots. One day in January, Blake and Brown skated through a snowstorm all the way from Framingham to spend a few hours. “You have been skating on the river,” Thoreau told them; “perhaps I am going to skate on some other.” Perhaps that was when the conversation turned to gray hair. He’d never had any trouble in his life, teased Thoreau, at least not since about age fourteen, when for a little while he felt bad on account of his sins—“but no trouble since that I know of. That must be the reason my hair doesn’t turn gray faster. But there is Blake; he is as gray as a rat.”84 When his orthodox Aunt Louisa asked, “Henry, have you made your peace with God?” he answered pleasantly, “I did not know we had ever quarreled, Aunt.” By the time Parker Pillsbury called, Thoreau’s voice was reduced to a whisper. “I suppose this is the best you can do now,” Pillsbury said as he grasped Thoreau’s hand. “The outworks seem almost ready to give way.” “Yes,” whispered Thoreau with a smile, “but as long as she cracks she holds”—the saying of boys playing kittlybenders on the vanished millpond ice. Pillsbury kept on: “You seem so near the brink of the dark river, that I almost wonder how the opposite shore may appear to you.” “One world at a time,” quipped Thoreau.85

  When his speaking voice failed, Thoreau took command of his literary voice. “You know it’s respectable to leave an estate to one’s friends,” he whispered to Reverend Reynolds, who found him sitting up amid a sea of manuscripts. There could be no new work. Mary Stearns sorrowed that Thoreau would not write the biography of John Brown, leaving it to be written by “the winds of heaven.”86 There would be no Wild Fruits or Dispersion of Seeds, either. After working through the fall, accumulating hundreds of pages, that winter Thoreau arranged the pages carefully, wrapped the thick bundles, and tied them with string, putting them away for posterity.87 Then he turned to the rest of his literary legacy. Sometime that winter, James Fields, the publisher of Walden, offered to publish Thoreau’s lectures in the Atlantic, which he had just taken over from Thoreau’s nemesis, James Russell Lowell. On February 11, 1862, too weak to hold a quill pen, Thoreau penciled a reply for Sophia to copy and mail: Yes, the Atlantic could publish them—on two conditions. Fields must alter no “sentence or sentiment” without Thoreau’s consent, and Thoreau must keep the copyright.

  The deal was struck. Sophia added amanuensis and assistant editor to her other roles of caretaker, companion, and, eventually, literary executor: one by one she passed the pages through Henry’s hands. She read his drafts aloud when his eyes failed, entered his corrections, made fair copies when pages became too muddled with changes, took his letters by dictation, and sent essay after essay to the Atlantic’s owners, Ticknor and Fields.88 “Autumnal Tints” was the first and most urgent. Thoreau had it ready in a week, and sent it with his carefully chosen scarlet oak leaf to be engraved. The autumn leaves “teach us how to die,” he affirmed on his deathbed. “One wonders if the time will ever come when men . . . will lie down as gracefully and as ripe,—with such an Indian-summer serenity will shed their bodies, as they do their hair and nails.”89

  Next was Walden: they settled on terms for a new edition, and Thoreau made one change, dropping the subtitle “Life in the Woods.” Walden was, of course, about far more than that. Then came “Higher Law,” his latest title for the much-reworked lecture he wrote in Walden’s wake under the title “What Shall It Profit?”. When Fields objected to the new title, Thoreau changed it again, and the great polemic “Life without Principle” at last took its final form. By now it was March, and Thoreau was polishing its companion essay, “Walking, or The Wild”: “The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild,” wrote the man who had returned from the West with dying eyes; “and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the world.” Through the rest of March, between reading page proofs, Henry and Sophia tied off “Wild Apples,” and Sophia recruited Elizabeth Hoar to assist.

  Now Henry was racing the clock. Would they take on his stored copies of A Week, and reissue the book? Yes, they agreed, though their terms were not attractive. No matter. Thoreau had no time to dicker. The Maine Woods urgently needed his attention, especially the unfinished third section on Joe Polis. Thoreau had originally entitled it “The Allegash and Webster Stream,” but no book of his would do honor to the name of Daniel Webster, certainly no book with Polis’s account of Webster’s rudeness to the Indian. Thoreau struck out the offending words and wrote above them, “East Branch.” In the somber mood of these weeks, he was also striking out all the sentences that pained him with their mirthfulness.90 Perhaps that was why he deleted his convivial defense of Indians as “good fellows.” But an ending still eluded him: “It is a knot I cannot untie,” he sighed to Sanborn, and he left it unfinished, forever suspended in the act of saying goodbye to Polis on Indian Island. He had worried how Polis would react to reading his portrait of him. By the time The Maine Woods was published in 1864, the omnicompetent Polis was fighting for the Union in the Civil War, where he lost an arm. What he thought of Thoreau’s portrait of him was not recorded.91

  Thoreau’s friends were captured by the deep deliberation of his dying. As early as January, Theo Brown found him in an “exalted” state of mind, insisting “it was as good to be sick as to be well.” To an admiring correspondent, Thoreau replied in March that he supposed he had not long to live, but “I am enjoying existence as much as ever, and regret nothing.”92 A few days later, Sam Staples came away from Henry’s deathbed declaring, “Never saw a man dying with so much pleasure & peace.” In fact, Staples told Emerson, very few in Concord really knew Mr. Thoreau. Sophia, wrestling with her own grief, wrote Ricketson of her sainted brother’s “child like trust” in his fate, “as if he were being translated rather than dying in the ordinary way of most mortals.” Come, Henry chided his distraught friend, come soon, “and be cheered.”93 From then on, Ricketson sent a succession of bubbly letters, but still he could not bear to come in person. By contrast, Channing rarely left Thoreau’s side. He was profoundly moved that his dearest friend refused all opiates, “declaring uniformly that he preferred to endure with a clear mind the worst penalties of suffering, rather than be plunged in a turbid dream by narcotics.” Sleep, Thoreau told Channing, had its own terrors. One night he dreamed he was the railroad cut, and they were digging through and laying down the rails, right through his lungs.94

  On Sunday May 4, Alcott came by and, finding Channing already there, they went in together to see their friend. Alcott feared for Channing, knowing the “great desolation” Thoreau’s death would be to him. And Channing never forgot how Alcott, that day, bent down and kissed Henry’s brow “when the damps and sweat of death lay upon it, even if Henry knew it not.” It seemed “an extreme unction,” with Alcott the best priest. Perhaps it was then he heard Thoreau murmur the words “moose” and “Indians.” The next day the mail brought Ricketson’s last letter, and Sophia read it aloud to Henry: “I hope this may find you mending,” wrote the incurable optimist to his “dear and fellow pilgrim.”95 Later that afternoon, Sophia caught one of the Hosmer sisters passing the house, and told her Henry was asking for her brother to come sit with him through the night. Edmund, the “long-headed” farmer-philosopher who had helped raise the house at Walden, came, telling Henry he’d heard the robins sing as he walked along. “This is a beautiful world,” whispered Henry, “but soon I shall see one that is fairer. I have so loved nature. . . .” At his request, Sophia brought down Henry’s personal copy of A Week, the one in which he kept a lock of John’s hair, and Henry pressed it into the hands of his o
ldest surviving friend.96

  At 7:00 a.m. Tuesday morning, May 6, Judge Hoar called from across the street with a spring bouquet of hyacinths, which Henry smelled, and liked. He began to grow restless, and at eight he asked to be raised sitting up. Sophia, Cynthia, and Aunt Louisa all watched as his breath grew faint, then fainter, until at nine o’clock in the morning he was still. Her brother’s mind was clear to the last, said Sophia; as she read to him from his river voyage with John, she heard him say, “Now comes good sailing.”97 At forty-four years of age, Henry Thoreau had lived just long enough to see one last spring, and one more dawn.

  · · ·

  Word went out quickly. Channing brought the news to the Alcotts, Emerson wrote to Blake and James Fields, and someone brought the news to the Old Manse, where Sarah Ripley wrote a friend: “This fine morning is sad for those of us who sympathize with the friends of Henry Thoreau, the philosopher and the woodman.” They agreed that Alcott would plan the funeral, to be held at the First Parish Church. Alcott modeled it on the memorial Thoreau designed for John Brown: a public event, a town ceremony. As school superintendent, he ordered the town’s teachers to dismiss classes early that day so the children could attend. By three o’clock on Friday, May 9, the church where Thoreau had stood to defend John Brown was again filled: Anna Alcott Pratt and Louisa May Alcott came early with their father, and saw to it that Henry Thoreau lay in state, covered in wildflowers and forest boughs. While the church bell tolled, according to tradition, forty-four times, once for each year of Thoreau’s life, the company filed in: the Thoreau family with George Thatcher from Maine; the Emerson family; Harry Blake and Theo Brown from Worcester; James and Annie Fields from Boston; Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne with Una, Julian, and Rose; and untold others. Sophia Hawthorne told a friend she would have preferred to mourn in private, but attended to show others “her deep respect and value” for the man whose death made “a very large vacuum” in Concord.98