Thoreau was living with Brownson at the very moment he was writing his breakthrough book, New Views of Society, Christianity, and the Church, which soon joined Emerson’s Nature as a founding text of Transcendentalism. When Thoreau arrived back at Harvard, he began working through Brownson’s reading list: the latest European literature and philosophy—Goethe and Coleridge, Heine, Cousin, Constant. He bought Brownson’s New Views and Emerson’s Nature for his personal library, even though he didn’t have a dollar to spare. When Channing assigned an essay on government-supported education, Thoreau let fly: “I maintain that the Government ought to provide for the education of all children who would otherwise be brought up, or rather grow up, in ignorance. In the first place the welfare of the individual, and in the second that of the community, demand it. . . . The duty in this instance amounts to a moral obligation.”53
Nearly two years later, when he was defining his own path as an educator, Thoreau wrote Brownson a remarkable letter. The six weeks they lived together were, Thoreau told him, “an era in my life—the morning of a new Lebenstag”—meaning one’s moral and intellectual birth, the day one’s life as a philosopher begins. Brownson, at a chance meeting with Henry’s brother John, passed along his “great regard” for Henry. “Young men!” he had urged, “Ye who are full of the future . . .’tis yours to hasten that day. Your fathers have done nobly. They have begun a magnificent work, but it is yours to finish it.”54 Thoreau took Brownson’s call to heart. The Henry who returned to Harvard was a new man: the sleepy student had woken up.
The road back was a bumpy one. Thoreau’s absence from the winter term meant he’d earned no points, and by Quincy’s harsh reckoning, his rank plummeted. By March 20, 1836, he was back in the classroom for the spring term, loading up on classes (another eight in all) to make up for the lost time. But in April he was struck down by a lingering illness, probably his first bout with tuberculosis. By May twenty-first he was forced to withdraw from school, and for a few summer weeks it was unclear whether he had the strength—or his family the funds—to return. They debated whether Henry should drop out. It could not have helped that Quincy’s ranking system penalized Thoreau for his absences due to illness, too, and the few points he’d managed to earn before his health collapsed were, by some oversight, not counted. By the end of his junior year, the honors student had sunk to the bottom half of his class. When his talented friends gathered once again to collect their Exhibition Day prize money, Thoreau’s name was nowhere to be found.
While his family fretted about his future, Henry recreated himself by building a new and better boat, which he dubbed Red Jacket after the Seneca chief whose landmark “Speech to the U.S. Senate” had insisted on Indians’ right to practice their own religion without interference. His Harvard chums tried to cheer him up with long newsy letters: “Everything goes on here as regular as clock work” and “as dull as one of Dr. Ware’s sermons,” one reassured him, a claim belied by his hilarious account of doings at the student’s chemistry club, where a fireworks display had brought Tutor Bowen storming out of his room to quell the riot and send the instigators up to Quincy for punishment. Then the noxious fumes of Professor Webster’s volcano demonstration had emptied the classroom. After class, two students cooked up some “laughing gas,” nitrous oxide. One dose and the sobersides Stearns Wheeler cut loose in a dance; two doses and Sam Hildreth raved on in conversation with Shakespeare. High times indeed! It was too much to miss. On July 5, 1836, a lonely Thoreau wrote a playful dialogue to Henry Vose vowing to be back for classes and asking his “chum” to have Wheeler secure a dorm room for him. A month later, another worried friend, also sick at home, wrote to commiserate, asking what interesting Indian artifacts Henry had dug up lately; why not come for a visit, so they could explore Indian sites together? Henry answered with an “extract from the log-book of the Red Jacket, Captain Thoreau,” which in its maiden voyage had lost her mast in a terrible squall and been cast ashore on Nawshawtuct beach, where the astonished natives appeared “a harmless inoffensive race, principally devoted to agricultural pursuits.” Henry closed with good news: his health was better and he hoped to return; meanwhile, do come for a visit.55
These happy, warm, playful letters show that it was more than academics that drew Henry back to Harvard. As he remarked in Walden, while college demands money for tuition, it makes no charge for “the far more valuable education” of associating with one’s classmates. Nevertheless, there was still the business of money. To cover tuition, Henry traveled to New York City with his father to help open up a new market for Thoreau pencils.56 By September 12, 1836, he was finally back in Cambridge, just in time to join two hundred other undergraduates, thirteen hundred alumni and eighty invited guests to celebrate Harvard’s bicentennial. The festivities started with students and alumni parading to the Unitarian Church, where they sat through Quincy’s two-hour speech before emptying out into Harvard Yard for “toasts, libations, and a meal” that lasted until curfew, when students adjourned to dorm rooms whose windows were lit with lamps arranged in patterns and mottos.57
At some point during the day, four of those alumni slipped away to a nearby hotel for a private meeting. They had been called together by Frederic Henry Hedge, visiting from his ministry in Maine, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had been corresponding with Hedge all summer long about starting a discussion group. New ideas were bubbling up everywhere: Brownson’s New Views, Emerson’s Nature, and Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus were just out, and Elizabeth Peabody and Bronson Alcott were turning heads with their radical new approach to education in Record of a School. Hedge and Emerson invited George Ripley and George Putnam, a Unitarian minister from Boston, to join them. Even as the self-congratulations went on at Harvard, four of its own graduates were secretly discussing how to unsettle it all and lead America forward to a radically new intellectual life. The meeting went well; they called a second for a week later at George and Sophia Ripley’s home in Boston, inviting, among others, Orestes Brownson, Amos Bronson Alcott, Theodore Parker, and Emerson’s new protégé—Charles Stearns Wheeler. These meetings went on for four years, bringing together the loose group of intellectuals and reformers dubbed “the Transcendentalists.” Thoreau was not yet invited, although Brownson had already ignited him and Wheeler filled him in on the discussions. Thoreau was testing out Transcendentalism on his own well before it existed as a movement.
All through his senior year, Thoreau worked furiously to make up the time, points, and classes lost the year before. This was Harvard’s capstone year, and the load was heavy: recitations in philosophy (natural, moral, and intellectual), Channing’s assignments plus lectures in rhetoric, Ware’s sleepy theology lectures, Harris’s classes in natural history and botany, plus anatomy and mineralogy, German and Italian, a little Spanish and Portuguese, and required exercises in oratory—intended to teach the leaders of the future how to fill large rooms with their voices and read written addresses with the fresh energy of original creation. All year Thoreau beavered on, earning an astonishing 2,285 points in his final term—twice the normal accumulation—for a grand total of 14,397 by Quincy’s erratic reckoning. It was not enough to recapture his earlier high ground, to be sure, but it was enough to put him nineteenth of forty-one, securing him a speaking part at commencement and a twenty-five-dollar prize—but only after Emerson wrote to Quincy on his behalf. Quincy replied that he’d done all he could for Thoreau, who was “indifferent, even to a degree that was faulty” to the rules. Yet Quincy had long felt a certain respect for Thoreau, so he managed to get him a sum only “ten, or at most fifteen dollars” less than he would have received had no objections been made.58 In short, Thoreau worked hard but had a bad attitude—unlike Wheeler, who earned the grand prize, sixty dollars. Harvard was not ready to forgive Henry Thoreau for becoming his own man.
For his part in the ceremony, Thoreau was assigned a role in a “conference” of three addresses on the topic “The Commercial Spirit of Modern Times, con
sidered in its Influence on the Political, Moral, and Literary Character of a Nation.” This meant homework to complete during the traditional six-week senior holiday. As soon as classes were over, Henry returned to Concord, where John and Cynthia had just moved again, this time out of the old cramped townhouse on the square to the gracious Parkman house near Main Street. Henry arrived just in time to help dedicate the new Revolutionary Monument on the Fourth of July; after a dozen years of debate, everyone had agreed to Reverend Ripley’s proposal that a granite obelisk be erected behind his Old Manse. On that hot afternoon, Henry Thoreau joined the long procession up Monument Street to the site of the Old North Bridge, where three hundred men, women, and children gathered on the grass in the sun—the trees that would turn the bleak road into a shady lane had yet to be planted—to hear prayers and a speech by Samuel Hoar and to sing in chorus Emerson’s “Concord Hymn.” In old age, John S. Keyes still remembered the last stanza’s invocation of the heroes who dared “to die or leave their children free.”59
That last word, “free,” must have stayed in Henry’s mind as well, for he opened his address by invoking it as the keynote of the modern epoch: “perfect freedom—freedom of thought and action.” This was indeed his summer of perfect freedom: after the Fourth of July, he and Wheeler moved into a cabin Wheeler had built the summer before, perhaps with Thoreau’s help, on his family’s property on Flint’s (or Sandy) Pond. For six weeks the two friends loafed by the shore, reading, writing, and dreaming aloud while the leaves rustled overhead and the summer sun sparkled off the broad lake waters all around, walking to the family farmhouse for their meals. Wheeler brought their other college friends to this cabin, too. The following summer one would vow there, in this “beautiful and secluded spot . . . in communion with Nature and her God,” to “forsake all lower ambitions, and to devote himself to His service.”60 One could say that Henry Thoreau made a similar vow. His experiment at Walden Pond had its origin here, in these weeks spent living and writing with Charles Stearns Wheeler.
The topic Thoreau meditated on this blissful summer, “the commercial spirit,” was on everyone’s mind. It was especially on the minds of that year’s unfortunate college graduates, who found themselves turned loose to hunt for jobs during the Panic of 1837, the worst financial crash America had yet seen. Westward expansion had fueled massive speculation, and the storm broke in May when all of New York’s banks were closed, followed by bank closures across the nation. As the bubble in real estate burst, property values collapsed overnight; factories closed, and starving workers rioted in the streets. Prospects for the class of ’37 were bleak beyond all anticipation, and as their three classmates stood to speak about the economic crisis, the graduates must have leaned in to listen. Charles Rice the blacksmith’s son had drawn the “political” side of the question, and he came out swinging as a good Democrat, blaming the calamity on rampant speculation and the corruption of hard work and hard-earned gains by sheer greed. His fear was the Jacksonian one, that legislators would use the Panic to widen government power when the proper remedy was to leave the people alone so they could cultivate true self-reliance. Henry Vose, who drew the literary side, wrote a Whiggish hymn to commerce, which unites all the regions of America and all the peoples of the earth, feeding the growing energies of the American people and spreading wealth and enterprise among all. Without commerce, Vose closed, there is no freedom, and no true America.61
Standing before this audience of hundreds—which included Massachusetts Governor Edward Everett, an assemblage of congressmen and senators, the Harvard Overseers, and President Quincy, as well as the young rebel’s professors, graduating classmates and their families, plus the merely curious—“David-Henricus Thoreau” (in the Latinate formality of the commencement program) tackled the moral question head-on. Commerce, he told them, destroys moral freedom. But freedom must come first, for freedom generates commerce, not the other way around. From “an observatory in the stars,” would America’s “beehive” of commercial activity really look like freedom? Hardly. “There would be hammering and chipping, baking and brewing, in one quarter; buying and selling, money-changing and speech making, in another.” By tying us to material goods, commerce does not free us but enslaves us, turns us into brutes. To be human is to cast off these material desires and walk forth, freely, into paradise.
Right there, Thoreau laid the foundations for Walden: “The order of things should be somewhat reversed,—the seventh should be man’s day of toil . . . and the other six his Sabbath of the affections and the soul.” Caught between Jacksonian democracy and Whig cheerleading, Thoreau struck out a third, radically different path. Some in the audience scorned his path as a flight from reality. But Thoreau himself was about to wrestle hard with that same reality and to watch his classmates—whom he loved, he wrote in his Class Book Autobiography, with a love too sacred for words—struggle, too.62 “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” he would eventually tell them, “but it is characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.” In front of the whole wide world, for everyone in authority to hear, Thoreau was staking out his most sacred commitments. How could any man, in the teeth of this world, hope to keep such vows?
CHAPTER THREE
Transcendental Apprentice (1837–1841)
“What are you doing now?” he asked, “Do you keep a journal?”
—So I make my first entry today.
Henry David Thoreau, October 22, 1837
Sic Vita
On August 31, 1837, a bold new voice rang out over Harvard Yard from the First Parish Church: “In self-trust, all the virtues are comprehended. Free should the scholar be,—free and brave.” Crowds packed the church, spilled out the door and gathered under the open windows to hear the address Oliver Wendell Holmes called “America’s Intellectual Declaration of Independence.” The speaker was Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the speech, “The American Scholar,” would make him a star.1 There, standing next to President Quincy and facing an audience of Harvard dignitaries, Phi Beta Kappans, faculty, students, and the curious, Emerson leveled his first powerful blow at the foundation of the education Thoreau had just completed.
Thoreau was not in the audience. The day before, he had stood on that same stage and championed “perfect freedom—freedom of thought and action.” As soon as he finished, Thoreau had put his principles into action and vanished. “I hardly saw you again at all,” complained his old roommate; “I liked much” your speech, but “neither at Mr Quincy’s levee, neither at any of our Classmates’ evening entertainments, did I find you” to say goodbye. The Phi Beta Kappa address, held the day after commencement, was a tradition honored with much pomp and ceremony. Thoreau and his classmates were all expected to attend; his absence could only have been deliberate. Emerson had recently interceded on Thoreau’s behalf over the prize money, and for months Thoreau had been under the spell of Nature. Why didn’t he linger for a few more hours to see him and hear his philosophy in person? Thoreau must have asked himself the same question, for he answered it a few months later: “One goes . . . to a commencement thinking that there at least he may find the men of the country,” only to find those men completely merged in the occasion, “so that he is fain to take himself out of sight and hearing of the orator, lest he lose his own identity in the non-entities around him.”2 To see Emerson like this—one of them faceless in the crowd, the other merged in the ceremony—was not part of Thoreau’s plan.
He had an awkward homecoming. His striving self-consciousness comes out in “Sic Vita,” with its odd story: one morning that May, one of the Thoreaus’ boarders, Lucy Jackson Brown, found a poem, wrapped around a bunch of violets and sorrel and tied with a straw, tossed through her open window:
I am a parcel of vain strivings tied
By a chance bond together,
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
A bunch of violets without their roots,
And sorrel intermixed,
Encircled by a wisp of straw<
br />
Once coiled about their shoots,
The law
By which I’m fixed.3
Thoreau was flirting, but hardly serious; Lucy was twice his age and married with children, although her husband had recently abandoned her. Henry would become something of a son to her, helping her around the house and writing her letters in the same wistful, teasing tone. But for now, his whimsy combining the language of flowers—violets for modesty, sorrel for ill-timed wit—with an intricate and learned verse form was more a bid for attention from Lucy’s brother-in-law, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Feeling rootless and cut off from the person he had been, Thoreau was confessing anxiety over his new identity as a Harvard graduate and a young man of promise. It was around this time that he changed his name, reversing the baptismal “David Henry” to his preferred “Henry David.” Not everyone in Concord accepted this act of self-definition. One local farmer cracked up visitors by insisting, “His name’s Da-a-vid Henry and it ain’t never been nothing but Da-a-vid Henry. And he knows that!” But from now on he was, as the locals said, “Henery.”4
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