Henry David Thoreau
Page 65
51. PEJ, 3:110.
52. Exc., 101–5.
53. Ibid, 88–89.
54. Ibid., 93–94.
55. Ibid., 103.
56. Ibid., 122–25, 131–32.
57. Ibid., 117 (Thoreau spells them “snells”); “Headnote,” in Exc., 471–96, p. 474.
58. Ibid., 161.
59. Ibid., 126, 163. See also PEJ, 3:328: “Where there were books only—to find realities.”
60. Studies of this florescence in Thoreau’s thought and work should begin with Robert Sattelmeyer, Thoreau’s Reading: A Study in Intellectual History with Bibliographical Catalogue (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 92–110, and continue with Richardson, HDT: Life of the Mind, esp. 219–23, 279–87.
61. PEJ, 4:7–8 (August 22, 1851); TL I, 202.
62. Corr., 2:102 (Greeley to HDT, March 18, 1852); Exc., 88–89; Corr., 2:139 (Greeley to HDT, January 2, 1853), 145 (HDT to H. G. O. Blake, February 27, 1853).
63. PEJ, 3:131–34 (November 8, 1850), 134–36 (November 9, 1950).
64. Ibid., 141–42.
65. The groundbreaking insight that Thoreau’s Journal is, in itself, a complete work of art was first advanced by Sharon Cameron in her influential Writing Nature: Henry Thoreau’s Journal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
66. Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Henry D. Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1882), quoted in THOT, 132.
67. PEJ, 4:133, 329; W. E. Channing II, Poet-Naturalist (1873), 47; Emerson, “Thoreau,” 419. See also Channing’s detailed, eloquent pages describing Thoreau’s exact method of taking field notes and expanding them (Poet-Naturalist [1902], 65–66).
68. PEJ, 4:170 (“with these I deal”), 3:150 (“out of my senses”), 151 (“a different sort of man”).
69. Ibid., 3:152–54 (November 26, 1850).
70. Ibid., 3:41–42; Corr., 2:48 (Samuel Cabot to HDT, before December 10, 1849); JMN, 11:277–78.
71. PEJ, 3:44; Corr., 2:89 (Samuel Cabot to HDT, December 27, 1850). The BSNH’s present-day avatar is the Museum of Science, Boston.
72. PEJ, 5:469–70 (March 5, 1853); Corr., 2:151–53 (HDT to Spencer Fullerton Baird, before March 5, 1853), 181–82 (HDT to Spencer Fullerton Baird, December 19, 1853). It has been assumed that Thoreau declined the AAAS membership with disdain and returned the questionnaire only after ignoring it for nearly a year. However, records of the AAAS list him as a member for 1853, and Thoreau himself stated that he returned the questionnaire, which lists his scientific interests, soon after he received it. Despite his private fulminations, Thoreau was interested in the AAAS and was honored by the invitation, which was probably issued by Spencer Fullerton Baird.
73. ABAJ, 238; Thoreau was visiting Alcott on his way to Medford to deliver the lecture “Economy,” January 22, 1851.
74. See JMN, 11:404 (July 1851) (“pounding beans”), 400 (draft of “captain of a huckleberry party”); Emerson, “Thoreau,” 429.
75. JMN, 15:352–53.
76. PEJ, 3:148; cf. 192–93, where he rewrites this passage, marking it as a significant moment.
77. Ibid., 198.
78. Ibid., 245 (June 7, 1851).
79. Ibid., 302–3, 329–30. An example of how Thoreau used the sense of touch: in feeling mullein leaves on a hot day, he noticed that the live ones feel cool, but the dead ones feel warm (ibid., 280).
80. Ibid., 313 (“step to the music”), 306 (“With all your science”), 331 (“But this habit”). Even the experience of having a dentist pull his teeth (which he did on May 12, 1851) became an occasion to explore a new experience—namely, of going under ether, which for Thoreau became an experiment in mind/body relationality: one becomes “a sane mind without organs—groping for organs,” and existing “in your roots—like a tree in the winter.” He added a puckish warning: “If I have got false teeth, I trust that I have not got a false conscience.” (ibid., 218).
81. Ibid., 337.
82. Ibid., 3:338–40. Thomas Blanding details various versions of this story in “Mary Russell Watson’s Reminiscences of Thoreau,” Concord Saunterer 9.2 (June 1974): 1–6.
83. PEJ, 3:341. Thoreau says 1690, but Lawrence D. Geller says 1700. See his Between Concord and Plymouth: The Transcendentalists and the Watsons (Concord, MA: Thoreau Foundation; Plymouth, MA: Pilgrim Society, 1973), the source for much of the following information.
84. PEJ, 3:348–49.
85. Ibid., 352; Days of HT, 293; W. E. Channing II, Poet-Naturalist (1873), 35.
86. PEJ, 3:357; Walden, 4. As Thoreau also wrote, a traveler may see “what the oldest inhabitant has not observed” (PEJ, 3:384).
87. Ibid., 4:154–55.
88. Ibid., 200–201.
Chapter Eight
1. RP, 108; PEJ, 8:200.
2. PEJ, 2:123; RP, 61.
3. PEJ, 5:120.
4. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, ed. Len Gougeon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 79.
5. To Set This World, 77–78.
6. PEJ, 3:194; To Set This World, 80–83.
7. Elizabeth Hoar to Frances Jane Hallett Prichard, April 1851, Prichard, Hoar, and Related Family Papers, vault A45, Prichard unit 2, box 5, folder 11, CFPL; PEJ, 3:204–05, 4:288.
8. PEJ, 3:202–07; Emerson, “Address to the Citizens of Concord” (May 3, 1851), in Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, 57.
9. Seward gave his speech on March 11, 1850. Albert J. von Frank, The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson’s Boston (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 281–82; see also Wesley T. Mott, ed., Encyclopedia of Transcendentalism, s.v. “Higher Law,” by Linck C. Johnson, 82–84; and Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, “The ‘Higher Law’: Then and Now,” TSB 262 (Spring 2008): 5–7.
10. Quoted in TL I, 199; Exc., 185. See Daniel S. Malachuk, Two Cities: The Political Thought of American Transcendentalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2016), especially ch. 5, “‘So we saunter to the Holy Land’: Thoreau and the City of God.”
11. PEJ, 4:114–15. Henry Williams’s fate is unknown.
12. Ibid., 7:134–35.
13. Moncure Daniel Conway, Autobiography, Memories and Experiences, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904), 1:141; see also Annie Russell Marble, Thoreau: His Home, Friends, and Books (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1902), 198–99, although Marble conflates the two incidents.
14. David Wood, An Observant Eye: The Thoreau Collection at the Concord Museum (Concord, MA: Concord Museum, 2006), 46–47; the statue is on display at the Concord Museum.
15. PEJ, 7:102–3; To Set This World, 94–95.
16. PEJ, 6:212–13. The three men were the Reverend Andrew T. Foss, the Reverend H. C. Wright, and Loring Moody.
17. Margaret Fuller, “The Great Lawsuit,” Dial 4.1 (July 1843): 10, 14.
18. Corr., 1:199 (HDT to Cynthia Thoreau, July 7, 1843), 211 (HDT to Helen Thoreau, July 21, 1843).
19. Thoreau Log, 206; PEJ, 4:233. Smith lectured at the Concord Lyceum on December 31, 1851.
20. PEJ, 4:183–84, 266.
21. “Love,” in EEM, 270.
22. PEJ, 4:309–10, 426.
23. JMN, 13:26–27, 183.
24. LRWE, 4:413, 426; Walden, 270.
25. JMN, 13:20; PEJ, 3:302; see also Walden, 267–68.
26. JMN, 13:61.
27. PEJ, 5:293; for Thoreau on Channing’s dog, see 4:286, 4:20, 6:10, 4:418.
28. Ibid., 4:170 (“moodiest person”), 6:150–51 (“shut them out”), 7:247 (Channing punches cat).
29. George Hendrick, ed., Remembrances of Concord and the Thoreaus: Letters of Horace Hosmer to Dr. S. A. Jones (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 26; Walden, 268. For more on the difficult Ellery Channing, see Frederick T. McGill Jr., Channing of Concord: A Life of William Ellery Channing II (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1967); and Robert N. Hudspeth, Ellery Channing (New York: Twayne, 1973).
30. Walden, 268–69, PEJ, 6:101–02.
31. Thoreau as Se
en, 166, 165.
32. Walden, 268–69, see also PEJ, 6:294.
33. Corr., 2:13–14 (Bronson Alcott to “Dear Sir,” February 20, 1849).
34. PEJ, 4:451; TL I, 206.
35. PEJ, 4:487; TL I, 206–08; RP, 168.
36. TL I, 209–11.
37. PEJ, 3:92; William Ellery Channing II, Thoreau: The Poet-Naturalist, ed. F. B. Sanborn (Boston: Charles E. Goodspeed, 1902), 10–11; J. Lyndon Shanley, The Making of “Walden,” with the Text of the First Version (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 60n7.
38. PEJ, 4:491–92, 582n.
39. Ibid., 4:216. My thanks to Robert Gross for clarifying that school attendance was still, at this time, voluntary in Concord, which means that Johnny’s brave choice to go to school was his own (personal communication).
40. PEJ, 4:336–37. For an extended consideration, see my essay “‘As You Are Brothers of Mine’: Thoreau and the Irish,” New England Quarterly 88.1 (March 2015): 5–36. Late in November 1850, Thoreau drafted “The Little Irish Boy,” a poem modeled on William Blake’s “The Little Black Boy” (PEJ, 3:155–56); he also wrote an uncollected essay on Johnny Riordan (J, 3:242–44, January 28, 1852). Both literary works deserve far more attention.
41. Corr., 2:176 (HDT to various recipients, October 12, 1853), 175 (HDT to various recipients, October 12, 1853); PEJ, 7:102–3, 134–35; Flannery quoted in 8:33–34. See also Bradley P. Dean, “Thoreau and Michael Flannery,” The Concord Saunterer 17.3 (December 1984): 27–33. The man who cheated Flannery, Abiel Wheeler, was the Concord farmer who still bore Henry a grudge for burning his woodlot in 1844.
42. PEJ, 4:194 (“strains of the piano”), Henry S. Salt, The Life of Henry David Thoreau (London: Richard Bentley, 1890; revised version of 1908, edited by George Hendrick, Willene Hendrick, and Fritz Oehlschlaeger. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993, 2000), 69; PEJ, 3:325 (“singing from various houses”), 4:134 (mild October evening); J, 8:70 (snow); PEJ, 6:241 (calls Sophia). See also the fine discussion in Michael Sims, The Adventures of Henry Thoreau: A Young Man’s Unlikely Path to Walden Pond (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), and especially in Alan D. Hodder, Thoreau’s Ecstatic Witness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 184–85; as Hodder observes, Thoreau’s “acoustic rapture” served as a leitmotif in his Journal and often led to some of his most searching reflections. Virtually any sound—the locomotive’s whistle, the hum of telegraph wires, the song of a robin or a wood thrush, even a dog barking in the distance—could send Thoreau into profound ecstasy.
43. PEJ, 5:188; see also 117, 121–22; 188. Thoreau describes his “botany-box,” a straw hat with a scaffolding lining in which he carried his plant specimens, in ibid., 126, and J, 9:157.
44. PEJ, 6:244, 7:30–33.
45. Quoted in Sarah Gertrude Pomeroy, “Sophia Thoreau,” in Little-Known Sisters of Well-Known Men (Boston: Dana Estes, 1912), 259–61.
46. PEJ, 6:41 (Aunt Maria), 5:417 (Uncle Charles).
47. Ibid., 5:403.
48. Ibid., 4:41, 178.
49. Ibid., 4:269, 392; cf. “Walking,” in Exc., 209.
50. Ibid., 7:15, 4:252.
51. Ibid., 4:291; 6:172.
52. Ibid., 4:270–73, 277. The standard source on the composition of Walden is Shanley, Making of “Walden”; for a useful, concise treatment, see Robert Sattelmeyer, “The Remaking of Walden,” in Writing the American Classics, ed. James Barbour and Tom Quirk (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990): 53–78; repr. in Henry David Thoreau, “Walden,” “Civil Disobedience,” and Other Writings, ed. William Rossi (New York: Norton, 3rd edition, 2008), 489–507.
53. For this exchange of letters between Greeley and Thoreau, see Corr., 2:100–104, 111–12 (February 24–July 8, 1852).
54. Corr., 2:137–38 (HDT to Benjamin Marston Watson, December 31, 1852).
55. Ibid., 140 (HDT to H. G. O. Blake, February 27, 1853), PEJ 7:201; PEJ, 6:234 (June), 303 (August), 7:3, 310.
56. PEJ, 8:6; Corr., 2:197–98 (HDT to George Thatcher, February 25, 1854).
57. Corr., 2:140–41 (HDT to H. G. O. Blake, February 27, 1853); PEJ, 7:156.
58. PEJ, 6:236, 245.
59. MW, 95.
60. MW, 97, 99; PEJ, 7:51–58.
61. PEJ, 7:61–63.
62. Ibid., 66, 69–70.
63. Ibid., 80–82. The identification as Sebattis Dana is according to Fanny Hardy Eckstorm, who identifies his companion as “Swasin (Joachim) Tahmunt.” “Notes on Thoreau’s ‘Maine Woods,’” TSB 51 (Spring 1955): 1. Sebattis Dana is not the same person as “Sabattis Solomon,” who according to Thoreau had come with Joe Aitteon from Oldtown to the Thatchers, stayed the night with Aitteon in the Thatcher’s barn, then gone on his way to stay a few days in Bangor before traveling to Chesuncook to meet up with Joe and John Aitteon to continue moosehunting (ibid., 41).
64. Ibid., 83–86.
65. Ibid., 83–84, 117. On the crucial role of the Penobscot in redirecting Thoreau’s thinking, see Phillip Round, “Gentleman Amateur or ‘Fellow-Creature’? Thoreau’s Maine Woods Flight from Contemporary Natural History,” in Thoreau’s World and Ours: A Natural Legacy, ed. Edmund A. Schofield and Robert C. Baron (Golden, CO: North American Press, 1993), 316–29.
66. PEJ, 7:90, 93; MW, 149.
67. PEJ, 7:119; MW, 150. This ground-level observation reversed Thoreau’s casual condemnation of Indian Island made in 1846, while passing by on a ferry.
68. PEJ 7:95; D. Wood, Observant Eye, 54–55. Wood notes that Thoreau’s snowshoes, made of ash and maple frames strung with deer rawhide webbing, were a distinctively Indian technology, and though snowshoes were by then being made in Oldtown, this particular pair was probably of Penobscot manufacture.
69. MW, 155–56.
70. PEJ, 7:160.
71. TL I, 212–13. The invitation was by Francis Underwood.
72. PEJ, 7:99, 103–7.
73. Ibid., 7:201, 203; Leslie Perrin Wilson, In History’s Embrace: Past and Present in Concord, Massachusetts (Concord, MA: Concord Free Public Library, 2007), 43–45; Jane Hallett Prichard to Moses B. Prichard, December 15, 1853, Prichard, Hoar, and Related Family Papers, vault A45, Prichard unit 2, box 6, folder 6, CFPL.
74. PEJ, 7:209–10 (tries on snowshoes), 211 (measuring snow), 224, 259 (thaw).
75. Ibid, 224, 233.
76. Corr., 2:192–93 (HDT to H. G. O. Blake, January 21, 1854); PEJ, 7:241 (new coat), 245 (Harris). The court case is detailed in PEJ, 7:349–51; Thoreau had to return on January 26.
77. PEJ, 7:123. For details see Steven Fink, Prophet in the Marketplace: Thoreau’s Development as a Professional Writer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 211–13.
78. PEJ, 7:176, 216.
79. Ibid., 276 (sand-foliage), 268 (living earth).
80. Ibid., 285–86.
81. Thoreau scholars like to point out that in April 1854, when the Fitchburg Railroad raised its fares from $1.30 to $1.55, the punctilious Thoreau made the change in the proof sheets. See Shanley, Making of “Walden,” 32; PEJ, 8:49, 51.
82. PEJ, 8:57, 61, 125.
83. Ibid., 148–54.
84. To Set This World, 98–100. See also von Frank, Trials of Anthony Burns. Burns was soon purchased by Boston activist Rev. Leonard Grimes. Restored to freedom in Boston, Burns emigrated to Canada. He died from tuberculosis in 1862, some thirteen weeks before Thoreau himself.
85. PEJ, 8:161–62 (cf. 278, on killing a box turtle [Cistudo] for science), 164.
86. See Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, “Editorial Savoir Faire: Thoreau Transforms His Journal into ‘Slavery in Massachusetts,’” Resources for American Literary Study 25.2 (1999): 206–31.
87. To Set This World, 103; Bradley P. Dean, “More Context for Thoreau’s ‘Slavery in Massachusetts,’” Thoreau Research Newsletter 1.3 (July 1990): 12.
88. RP, 92, 96; Conway, Autobiography, Memories and Experiences, 1:184–85; RP, 104, 106; von Frank, Trials of Anthony Burns, 284. Thoreau did not have time to deliv
er his entire speech; no record clarifies exactly how much of it, or which part of it, he read aloud.
89. RP, 108–9.
90. Thoreau called the familiar white pond lily “our lotus,” and linked it explicitly with the sacred Buddhist lotus—and also with Christian symbolism, as on Sabbath mornings in spring when young men would walk to church bearing pond lily blossoms. See, for example, PEJ, 5:149–50, 172.