Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

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  Henry had penciled a few notes, but he didn’t copy them into his Journal until the following summer.61 The trip was a summer lark, not a literary vehicle, although when Emerson heard about it, he thought it a fine commentary on the “death-cold convention” on education he had suffered through the day before, shivering with boredom at the very moment when Henry and John were skimming with delight down the Merrimack, the wind filling their sails. “We are shut up in schools & college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years & come out at last with a bellyfull of words & do not know a thing,” muttered Emerson. We don’t know an edible root in the woods, we can’t tell our course by the stars or the time by the sun. “Now here are my wise young neighbors who instead of getting like the wordmen into a railroad-car where they have not even the activity of holding the reins, have got into a boat which they have built with their own hands with sails which they have contrived to serve as a tent by night, & gone up the river Merrimack to live by their wits on the fish of the stream & the berries of the wood.”62 This would make a fine story. Meanwhile, it was time to spread the word: young writers like Henry Thoreau needed a place to publish their new poems and their radical ideas without prejudice or censorship.

  Emerson and his friends had been toying with the idea of a new journal since 1832. When the topic came up yet again in May 1839, the lack of a literary journal in Boston—the supposed literary center of America—had become an embarrassment.63 Now the time felt right. On September 18, 1839, the Transcendentalists held a meeting to discuss founding a journal of their own. Emerson wasn’t there, but Alcott was, and he came up with a name: the Dial, for the gnomon on the sundial that always shows the true, celestial time. Nothing happened until October 19, when Orestes Brownson forced the issue by suggesting to Alcott that the two branches of Transcendentalism, his and Emerson’s, should join forces, and The Dial should merge with Brownson’s Boston Quarterly Review. Consternation followed; Brownson’s militant self-righteousness had already split the Transcendentalist coterie, and Emerson’s friends agreed that his new proposal had to be squelched. The next morning Alcott swept up Margaret Fuller and the two dashed off to Emerson’s house to press the point: there must be a journal, the Dial, and it must be kept out of Brownson’s hands. By day’s end the Dial was born. Fuller would edit it, George Ripley would be the business manager, and Emerson would assist as needed. By mid-November, before Fuller had even begun to think of contacting potential contributors, Emerson had in hand their very first submission: “Sympathy,” Thoreau’s elegy to his love for Edmund Sewall.

  The perilous fortunes of the Dial are a story unto itself. Suffice it to say that after months of jostling, the project had devolved into the hands of Fuller, Emerson, and their closest friends, which included, of course, Bronson Alcott and Henry Thoreau, both busy writing up their contributions. Alcott was at work on “Orphic Sayings,” and Thoreau was finishing up “Aulus Persius Flaccus,” an essay on an obscure Roman satirist. When the Dial’s first issue was published, on July 1, 1840, it included both his poem and his essay. Reviewers greeted the new journal with ridicule and hostility, but Thoreau, at least, could pride himself on success: “Sympathy” was picked up and reprinted in the Boston Morning Post for July 5, 1840. His summer of poetry had, just a year later, borne its first fruit. Encouraged, he began drafting passages on the river journey, testing out the excursion’s literary potential.

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  John, meanwhile, had been making his own plans, and was now actively pursuing Ellen. On September 30, he took the stage to Scituate and knocked on her door, unconscious of the awkwardness he created: her parents were away on a two-week trip to Niagara Falls, leaving Ellen to care for Edmund and George; otherwise only the occasional maid was present. It was a scandal—there was John, quite immovable, with no chaperone in sight. Ellen did not send him away, nor did she tell her parents of his visit. To Aunt Prudence, who knew all about it, Ellen insisted the maid was there, even though she had sent her away (it being much more pleasant without “a stranger” in the house for John’s visit!).

  It must have taken some time to clear the air after the Sewalls learned from the neighbors that their daughter had been entertaining a young gentleman in their absence. John tried to smooth things over with a second, courtesy visit during Thanksgiving, so that Ellen’s parents could look him over themselves. For Christmas, Prudence brought both brothers to Scituate. Both came bearing gifts: John brought South American opals for Ellen’s mineral collection, and Henry brought a volume of Jones Very’s poems. His gift exemplified Transcendentalism at its most formally elegant and most doctrinally dangerous: Very had been dismissed from Harvard after proclaiming himself Christ resurrected. Perhaps Henry thought he had little to lose, for at this point John was fully in the lead. That fall Henry gloomed in an essay on “Friendship” that to be “actually separated from that parcel of heaven—we call our friend—with the suspicion that we shall no more meet in nature—is source enough for all the elegies that were ever written. . . . My friend will be as much better than my-self as my aspiration is beyond my attainment.”64

  There matters rested until June, when Ellen visited Concord again. Henry had her to himself for an afternoon: “The other day I rowed in my boat a free—even lovely young lady—and as I plied the oars she sat in the stern—and there was nothing but she between me and the sky.” The moment didn’t last long. July 20 was the first anniversary of Ellen’s arrival in their universe, and John decided to act. He went with the Wards to Scituate, and while walking on the beach, led Ellen out of Prudence’s hearing long enough to propose marriage. Ellen said yes. What happened next is conjecture—Ellen scissored these pages out of her diary—but remorse set in immediately. She said she loved not John, but Henry. When her mother, horrified, insisted she break the engagement out of respect for her father, she did. By the time John returned to Concord two days later, it was all over. In his Journal Henry wrote, “These two days that I have not written in my Journal have really been an aeon in which a Syrian empire might rise and fall—How many Persias have been lost and won in the interim—Night is spangled with fresh stars.”65

  Now it was John’s turn to gloom, and he did. “Tonight I feel doleful, somewhat lachrymose, and desponding ‘Bluey,’” he wrote in his own journal, “not absolutely suicidal. . . . Can say with truth I think this the vilest world I have ever been in.” It couldn’t be, he joked mordantly, that he was “crossed in love”—no, it must be that “indigestible compound” concocted by “the Kitchen Cabinet” wasn’t sitting right; “wouldn’t be uncharitable, but certainly things in my chemical laboratory don’t assimilate kindly; rather more Chyme than than [sic] Chyle I fear, or something of that sort: hence my gloomy feelings.”66

  John’s famous gift for gab jollied him out of disappointment, but Henry’s gift for words may have been his own undoing. Henry should have gone to Scituate to press his case with Ellen in person, as John had done; instead he tried to woo her long-distance with poetry. In November, he wrote Ellen proposing marriage. The letter does not survive, but his Journal preserves a few words of the draft. They suggest he opened by alluding to his love poem “The Assabet,” Ellen’s favorite, in which he imagines the two of them voyaging together into the dawn: “I thought that the sun of our love should have risen as noiselessly as the sun out of the sea, and we sailors have found ourselves steering between the tropics as if the broad day had lasted forever. You know how the sun comes up from the sea when you stand on the cliff, and doesn’t startle you, but every thing, and you too are helping it.”67 Ellen had kept the poem and treasured it. But she could hardly turn down one brother and then accept the other—and her father, an old-school Unitarian minister, refused to allow his daughter to marry a Transcendentalist. The notoriety after Emerson’s scandalous “Divinity School Address” made that impossible, and besides, Thoreau’s work as a teacher hardly produced a solid income. Ellen’s letter refusing Henry’s proposal has not surv
ived, although her letter to Prudence suggests she followed her father’s order to make it “short, explicit and cold”:

  I wrote to H.T. that evening. I never felt so badly at sending a letter in my life. I could not bear to think that both those friends whom I have enjoyed so much with would now no longer be able to have the free pleasant intercourse with us as formerly. My letter was very short indeed. But I hope it was the thing. . . . It is all over now. We will say nothing of it till we meet. . . . Burn my last.68

  Henry’s reaction does not survive, though this was far from the end of their story.

  Although she grieved at being “deprived of one whose society I loved and would have cherished,” Ellen was soon being courted by the much more eligible Joseph Osgood, a Unitarian minister. They were married in her father’s church on March 20, 1844, and Ellen told their children she would have married their father no matter what her father said. In later years Henry Thoreau became a close family friend, visiting the Osgoods several times.69 His portrait hung in the entry of their parsonage home, his books were family favorites, and the poems he had given to Edmund, George, and Ellen became family heirlooms. As for Henry, having tried the experiment of romantic love once, he seemed quite satisfied not to repeat it. In his later years, though he cherished many close friendships with women—Lucy Jackson Brown, Lidian Emerson, Mary Russell—he never again proposed marriage. Sophia Thoreau claimed that on his deathbed, when Ellen’s name came up, her brother said, “I have always loved her.” But on this question Thoreau himself never broke his silence.70

  Compensations

  The great public event of July 4, 1840, was Concord’s huge rally for William Henry Harrison, the Whig party’s “Log Cabin” presidential candidate whose catchy slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler too” cleverly positioned the elderly Harrison as a bold Indian fighter (in 1811, Harrison had defeated Tecumseh’s warriors at Indiana’s Tippecanoe River). Concord’s streets overflowed with “Tippecanoe clubs” from the neighboring towns, with banners, flags, and marching bands starting from the Old North Bridge battleground all the way to the speaker’s stand in Sleepy Hollow. Horace Hosmer, the lone Democrat in the Thoreau school, felt left out when John Thoreau, an ardent Whig, made sure all the boys had “canes with hard cider barrels for heads, there were Log Cabin medals, and breast pins, Log Cabin Hats made of Rattan . . . and hard cider flowed everywhere.” The campaign rally for “Old Tip” featured a twelve-foot red-white-and-blue ball drawn by ropes so that, as it rolled majestically along, everyone could read the songs and slogans written on it: “O’er every ridge we’ll roll this ball, / From Concord Bridge to Faneuil Hall,” read one; “Farewell poor Van, / You’re not the man / To guide our Ship. / We’ll try Old Tip,” opined another. It seemed a shame, Henry thought, that men did not move with such “dignity and grandeur” as the ball did.71

  The great intellectual event that week was the debut of the Dial, with Thoreau’s “Sympathy” and “Aulus Persius Flaccus,” his first major essay. Emerson thought Thoreau’s first published poem was “good enough to save a whole bad number”; as for the essay, he had asked Fuller to include it as “a piece of character,” and she had agreed.72 Getting the Dial off the ground proved hard work, in part because not everyone in the Transcendental Club was willing to commit to print. Hedge feared the Dial was too radical, while Brownson scoffed it was hardly radical enough. So they reached out to new and younger voices: Fuller, Thoreau, Alcott, and Ellery Channing, an unknown poet writing from Cincinnati. By now Thoreau was ready to come on board as a full-fledged Transcendentalist, and on May 13, 1840, he attended his first meeting of the Transcendental Club, at Emerson’s house. The topic was tailor-made for him: “the inspiration of the Prophet and Bard, the nature of Poetry, and the causes of the sterility of Poetic Inspiration in our age and country.”73 Alcott, Emerson, Hedge, and some of the older members were there, along with Jones Very and Margaret Fuller—the first time Thoreau and Fuller definitely met face-to-face.

  The reviews of the Dial were bad to the point of malice—so vicious and damaging that America’s first great literary magazine, though it would struggle on valiantly for another four years, never really recovered. The Boston Times hooted that “duck tracks in the mud convey a more intelligible meaning.” Alcott’s “Orphic Sayings” in particular was the butt of more ridicule than it could shake off. Henry’s elegant poem was reprinted, but few noticed his earnest essay or its attempt to practice what Fuller called “comprehensive” literary criticism, based not on personal taste but on universal aesthetic principles. When the Dial’s editorial board met in August, Theodore Parker called the essay “foolish” and told Thoreau to keep himself out of mischief by writing for newspapers instead. When Emerson protested that “Persius” was full of life, Parker retorted that indeed it was, but the life was all Emerson’s. And when Fuller turned her skeptical eye to Thoreau’s next submission, “Stanzas,” she saw much she didn’t like. Her red pencil provoked a tiff: Thoreau “boggled” at the way she smoothed his opening line, and Emerson had to intercede, begging Fuller, “Our tough Yankee must have his tough verse.”74 He got it, but not until Fuller was good and ready: the second issue of the Dial included nothing from Thoreau, and the third, published in January 1841, had only this one poem, its “tough” opening line intact. Thoreau’s great career as a poet was off to a rocky start.

  It got worse. Just when he found his way into the Transcendental Club, it fell apart. That September, defiant in the face of growing national hostility, they held two more meetings to discuss organizing a new and more liberal church of their own. The split in their ranks opened wider: Would such a church be Christian? Or would it articulate new, post-Christian, universal principles? The deepening fractures destroyed what was left of their common ground, and the Transcendentalists never met again. What remained was the Dial and the coterie Fuller and Emerson had pulled together of young avant-garde writers eager to share their thoughts and poetry with like-minded friends.75 It was a narrow public, but it was still a public, and Thoreau wanted in. He worked up a long, ambitious essay, “The Service,” plus a new poem, “Wachusett,” in an experimental and still more rugged style, and sent both to Fuller.

  Fuller was having none of it. She wrote Thoreau two letters of rejection, each devastating in its own way. “The Service,” she admitted, was rich in thought, but those thoughts were “so out of their natural order, that I cannot read it through without pain. I never once feel myself in a stream of thought, but seem to hear the grating of tools on the mosaic.” Of “Wachusett” she granted “a noble recognition of nature,” two or three “manly thoughts,” and a moment of “plaintive music,” but it, too, lacked flow: thoughts were “too detached,” verses were “startling, as much as stern,” unconnected with life; “there is a want of fluent music.” The author seemed, she told Thoreau, “healthful, sane, of open eye, ready hand, of noble scope,” but “as yet a somewhat bare hill which the warm gales of spring have not visited.”76 After Fuller spiked “The Service,” Thoreau shelved it for good; it was never published in his lifetime. He salvaged the rugged “Wachusett” only by inserting it, years later, into his essay “A Walk to Wachusett” and then into his self-published first book. Fuller accepted only two more of Thoreau’s poems: his early, metaphysical verses “Sic Vita” and “Friendship.”77 The poet Emerson had hailed as America’s purest and loftiest had published, at the end of two years, exactly four poems.

  A lesser writer would have been discouraged. But Fuller’s real point, that his talent was far greater than his execution, was not lost on Thoreau. He was a genius, no doubt, but he had yet to learn his craft. This was precisely the lesson Thoreau needed to hear, and it was Fuller who gave it to him. As she admonished him, while “it is true as Mr. E says,” that essays much poorer than “The Service” had found their way into the Dial, “those are more unassuming in their tone, and have an air of quiet good-breeding which induces us to permit their presence. Yours is so rugged that it ought to be
commanding.”78 The challenge she offered was tremendous: no models existed for what Thoreau was attempting. He was on his own, bearing the potential for greatness but also the knowledge that getting to that greatness meant a leap to originality—a leap he didn’t know how to make.

  Fuller’s harsh criticism of “The Service” came into Henry’s hands barely two weeks after Ellen’s curt letter of refusal. The following months were tense. Henry was in a withdrawing mood: early in November he withdrew his name from reelection as the lyceum curator, and early in January 1841, he formally withdrew from the First Parish Church, freeing him from paying the tax the town levied for its support. As he put it in Walden, he told them that “I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society which I have not joined.”79 Worst of all, John was ill and not recovering: consumption, the dreaded New England curse, had him in its jaws. As he weakened, it fell to Henry to take over the “lower” school. Horace Hosmer, who always remembered John as the light of his life, was miserable in Henry’s classroom: “He never mixed with the schoolboys; he was hated. The bell tolled instead of rang, when he taught alone during John’s illness.”80 As John weakened further, it became painfully clear that at the end of winter term, they must close their school. They would both be out of work.

  Thoreau had to find a lifeboat. Early in March 1841 he rejected one possible solution, joining Brook Farm, the utopian community getting under way in West Roxbury. “As for these communities—I think I had rather keep batchelor’s [sic] hall in hell than go to board in heaven,” he grumbled. A few days later he applied for a teaching job at the world-famous Perkins School for the Blind,81 but knowing the odds, he cast around for alternatives. In February he started to think about buying some farmland, though as spring advanced, he fretted about losing his freedom by becoming a farmer and a landowner. “What have I to do with plows—” he wrote truculently; “I cut another furrow than you see.” Despite his doubts, on April 16 he actually did buy an old farm on the Sudbury River, but the deal, and his hopes, fell through when the farmer backed out of the sale.82 Chaffering with the local farmers was sobering: “I must confess I am startled to find everywhere the old system of things so grim and assured. Wherever I go the farms are run out, and there they lie, and the youth must buy old land and bring it to.” Whether Thoreau was up to the physical demands of farming must have been another worry, for he, too, was sick with “bronchitis,” probably a flare-up of his own incipient tuberculosis, through much of February.83