Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  The Thoreau school was formally closed on April first. In his Journal, Henry tried to buck himself up: “Again foul weather shall not change my mind. / But in the shade I will believe what in the sun I loved.” By April 20, he was trying to keep a stiff upper lip while shoveling manure: “To day I earned seventy five cents heaving manure out of a pen, and made a good bargain of it. If the ditcher muses the while how he may live uprightly, the ditching spade and turf knife, may be engraved on the coat of arms of his posterity.”84 Coincidentally, at that very moment his future friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had joined Brook Farm, was doing the very same thing and thinking similarly optimistic thoughts. As he wrote his fiancée, Elizabeth Peabody’s sister Sophia: “After breakfast, Mr. Ripley put a four-pronged instrument into my hands, which he gave me to understand was called a pitch-fork; and he and Mr. Farley being armed with similar weapons, we all three commenced a gallant attack upon a heap of manure. . . . Dearest,” he concluded, “I shall make an excellent husbandman. I feel the original Adam reviving within me.”85

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  While Hawthorne shoveled away at Brook Farm, Emerson devised a solution for Thoreau: Come live with me. Emerson, too, had rejected Ripley’s invitation to join Brook Farm, stating that he had “builded and planted” his own utopian community—namely, his household and town. At home he was already reforming “labor and self-help” by trying “some domestic & social experiments,” including “a common table” where the servants would sit and eat with the Emersons as equals. He’d invited the Alcotts to move in, too, so they could all forge their own united utopian “Association.” Emerson’s plans didn’t go quite as he’d hoped. The maid agreed to eat at the common table, but the cook refused; caught in the middle, the maid decided to dine with the cook. As for the Alcotts moving in, Bronson was all for it, but Abigail was dead set against it. But the idea was planted. In two years they would go off to their own utopian community, Fruitlands.86

  Meanwhile, Emerson had a convert in Henry Thoreau, who joined his household on April 26, “to live with me & work with me in the garden & teach me to graft apples.”87 The arrangement would last over two years: Thoreau became Emerson’s live-in gardener and handyman, and tutor and caretaker to the Emerson children. Ellen, their eldest daughter, was still an infant, but Thoreau played daily with their young son Waldo Jr., whose winsome curiosity captured all hearts. In exchange, Thoreau had free run of Emerson’s library, free rein to entertain Emerson’s endless stream of visitors, and free time to study, write, and roam as he pleased. Thoreau’s mood lifted immediately.

  On move-in day he sketched in his Journal a vision of his new role: “At R.W.E.’s. The charm of the Indian to me is that he stands free and unconstrained in nature—is her inhabitant—and not her guest—and wears her easily and gracefully.” As he added, sensing new possibilities, “It is a great art to saunter.”88 In his inscribed copy of Emerson’s new Essays, he could read, in “Self-Reliance,” Emerson’s first public portrait of the person he saw in Henry: “A sturdy lad . . . who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not ‘studying a profession,’ for he does not postpone his life, but lives already.” Here “my brave Henry” (as the passage read in the original) could be a resident “Indian” in Emerson’s world, learning to wear that world with ease and grace.89 It was a fortunate move that allowed Thoreau to grow, as Fuller had hinted, from mere apprentice into his own command.

  The benefit was mutual. On May 30, Emerson wrote to Carlyle that in his house now dwelled “a poet whom you may one day be proud of:—a noble, manly youth, full of melodies and inventions. We work together by day in my garden, and I grow well and strong.” A week later Thoreau took Emerson rowing at sunset, and the man who by day had been annoyed by life on the dusty turnpike was enchanted by night as “the good river-god” in “the form of my valiant Henry Thoreau” introduced him “to the riches of his shadowy starlit, moonlit stream, a lovely new world lying as close & yet unknown to this vulgar trite one of streets & shops as death to life or poetry to prose.”90 Thoreau was in a river-god mood: a few days before, he’d been drifting in his boat on Walden Pond, playing his flute, watching the charmed perch hover around him and “the moon travelling over the ribbed bottom.” He felt then “that nothing but the wildest imagination can conceive of the manner of life we are living.” By August he was sailing on the Assabet at night, again with his flute, “and my music was a tinkling stream which meandered with the river—and fell from note to note as a brook from rock to rock.” When Margaret Fuller came for a visit, he took her out on the pond one night. She wrote to her favorite brother, Richard, that Henry rowed her before “a sweet breeze full of apple blossom fragrance which made the pond swell almost into waves. I had great pleasure.”91

  Thoreau’s flute became a general favorite. On June 7, Emerson sent him a note inviting him up to the Cliff, “where our ladies will be greatly gratified to see you & the more they say if you will bring your flute for the echo’s sake.” The “ladies” included Lidian, Lucy, Margaret Fuller, and Mary Russell, a friend of Lidian’s who was spending summer at the Emersons’, running a small school. After she returned home, Henry sent her a poem, “To the Maiden in the East”: “Whatever path I take, / It shall be for thy sake.”92 It was almost Ellen all over again, except this time no proposal came between them. Mary eventually married Thoreau’s friend from Harvard, the Transcendentalist sympathizer Benjamin Marston Watson, and Thoreau became a lifelong friend of the family, making many visits to the Watsons’ famous garden and orchard in Plymouth.

  That fall Margaret Fuller, who was impressed with Thoreau himself if not his poetry, brought yet another friend into his life: her brother Richard, who had just quit the dry-goods business hoping to enter Harvard. Margaret asked Henry to tutor Richard in Greek while he boarded nearby and fortified himself with Lidian’s famous meat pies. The treatment worked: Richard entered Harvard, inoculated with just enough Transcendentalism to become something of a writer but not so much as to prevent him settling into a stable and prosperous life as a lawyer, Christian, and family man.93 It was while tutoring Richard, in October 1841, that Henry received Margaret’s critique of “Wachusett,” with its sisterly advice to open himself to the “harmonizing influences of other natures,” and learn not to say so constantly of nature, “She is mine.” For, as Fuller continued (showing how acute was her sympathy for Thoreau), “She is not yours until you have been more hers. Seek the lotus, and take a draught of rapture. . . . I apprehended you in spirit, and you did not seem to mistake me as widely as most of your kind do.” Henry must have confided deeply in her. “Let me know whether you go to the lonely hut,” she closed, “and write to me about Shakespeare, if you read him there.”94 Clearly Thoreau had confided to Fuller what he had barely confessed to himself: he longed to go away and live by the pond and be the writer he dreamed of becoming.

  Under Emerson’s roof, Thoreau consolidated his sense of himself as above all a writer—not a dilettante who published occasionally, but a true and focused professional patterned after Emerson’s own model, which Thoreau now witnessed daily. He was, he wrote, in “the mid-sea of verses,” which rustled about him like autumn leaves and rose around him “verse on verse, far and near, like the mountains from Agiocochook.” Among those leaves was the rugged “Wachusett,” plus a major new poem cycle that would push his ambition to the limit.95 As he pushed with ferocious energy toward a breakthrough he could not see, he took the massive bulk of his Journal—over a thousand pages—and tore it to shreds, transcribing a few “gleanings” into fresh volumes and destroying the rest. Meanwhile, Emerson was promoting him to the publisher of a major anthology of new American poetry, to whom Thoreau sent “Sic Vita,” “Sympathy,” and “Friendship�
��—his three best poems, but all old ones. The publisher ignored him. So Emerson had another idea: Thoreau would go to Harvard, ransack the library, and select the best of British poetry for an anthology—the “old” to America’s “new”—learning his craft by total immersion in the discipline of poetry. Late in November Thoreau moved to Cambridge, rooming with his old friend Wheeler. There he checked out great stacks of Old and Middle English poetry, carrying books to Concord two weeks later, illegally.96

  If Emerson expected an epiphany, he was disappointed. Certainly Thoreau was. “When looking over the dry and dusty volumes of the English poets,” he wrote in his new Journal volume, “I cannot believe that those fresh and fair creations I had imagined are contained in them.” One look out the window made the whole of English poetry, from Gower on down, seem “very mean.” Oppressed by sadness, Thoreau ransacked his books for any “living word.” From time to time he found something—in Chaucer, say, or in the old Scottish poet Gawin Douglas—but it made him wonder what he was doing. They all seemed so tame and civil, as if not a one of them had seen so much as “the west side of any mountain”—why, even “Wordsworth is too tame for the Chippeway.” Thoreau felt more “kith and kin” with the lichen on the bare winter branches than with anything in these books. His yearning for wildness struck him as peculiar, his one redeeming quality, even as it isolated him from all of literary history.97

  On Christmas Eve 1841, surrounded by mountains of dusty books and the rustling dead leaves of his old poems, Henry Thoreau looked out the window and brooded. In his Journal he wrote, “I want to go soon and live away by the pond. . . . But my friends ask what I will do when I get there? Will it not be employment enough to watch the progress of the seasons?” On New Year’s Eve, brooding still, he vowed, “To the soul that contemplates some trait of natural beauty no harm nor disappointment can come.”98 It was a noble affirmation of his emerging faith—a faith about to meet its hardest test.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Not till We Are Lost” (1842–1844)

  Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.

  Henry David Thoreau, Walden

  The Death of John Thoreau

  In April 1841, Ellen Sewall recorded sad news about her friend John Thoreau: “Poor fellow, his health is poor & he cannot keep school.” After the brothers closed their school, John traveled to New Hampshire for a spell, and not until he returned did Henry move in with the Emersons. Through the summer of 1841 into the fall, John helped out around the house, working at the pencil shop and taking on garden chores, his future still uncertain. Thus things stood on New Year’s Day 1842. Out at the Emersons’, Henry was giving himself a pep talk—“Let him remember the sick in their extremities,” he wrote in his Journal, “but not look thither as to his goal”—while back home, John was going about an ordinary Saturday afternoon.1 While stropping a razor, he chanced to slice off a bit of skin on his left ring finger, just deep enough to draw blood. Without thinking twice he replaced the loose skin, bound the wound with a rag, and went on with his day.

  It was an insignificant cut, and no one suspected anything wrong. But it was deep enough to let tetanus spores enter John’s body; only decades later would doctors realize that tetanus bacteria can lurk in animal droppings and soils treated with manure, the very setting of John’s daily chores. Two or three days later his finger began to hurt. The following Saturday he found the skin he’d replaced had “mortified,” and, alarmed, he walked over to see Dr. Bartlett, who reassured him, dressed the wound, and sent him home. But the neurotoxins released by the incubating bacteria were already at work. Walking home, John felt strange pains throughout his body and barely made it to the door. Even as he collapsed inside, Henry, a few blocks away, was writing: “Am I so like thee my brother that the cadence of two notes affects us alike?” Something, or someone, called him home, for the next morning he told Lidian Emerson he’d been helping out his family, since John’s cut finger disabled him from his usual labors.2 Everyone was taking everything in stride. But that very evening—Sunday, January 9—the Thoreaus’ neighbor Nathan Brooks pounded on the Emersons’ door: Henry, you must come home immediately. John has the symptoms of lockjaw.

  The end was swift and terrible. Tetanus neurotoxins disable muscle contractions, causing spasms that start in the jaw muscles—hence the name “lockjaw”—and spread rapidly throughout the body, which goes into violent and agonizing convulsions. The instant Henry arrived home, he became John’s constant nurse. On Monday, someone was sent to Boston to fetch another doctor. When he arrived, he could do nothing but tell John that his death was upon him. A friend recalled John’s response: “‘Is there no hope?’ he said. ‘None,’ replied the doctor. Then, although his friends were almost distracted around him, he was calm, saying, ‘The cup that my Father gives me, shall I not drink it?’ He bade his friends all goodbye.”3 The convulsions continued through the evening, all that night, and all the next morning. Finally, at 2:00 p.m. on Tuesday, January 11, John Thoreau, twenty-six years old, died in Henry’s arms.

  One can hope the end was peaceful. Likely a contraction kept John from drawing breath, or his heart stopped from lack of oxygen. Lidian reported that he retained his power of speech to the last, though exactly what he and Henry may have said to each other, Henry never revealed. “He was perfectly calm, ever pleasant while reason lasted,” Henry told a friend, “and gleams of the same serenity and playfulness shone through his delirium to the last.” That evening Henry went to the Emersons’ to see Ralph Waldo alone, and would talk to no one else. He came by again the next morning to collect his clothes and tell Lidian he did not know when he would return. Even then Lidian had been writing a letter to her sister Lucy, telling “the strange sad news” of John’s death, which at first seemed “terrible” but then, thanks to his calm resignation, “not terrible but beautiful. . . . I feel as if a pure spirit has been translated.” After Henry left, she added, “I love him for the feeling he showed and the effort he made to be cheerful. He did not give way in the least but his whole demeanor was that of one struggling with sickness of heart.”4

  The funeral service was held Sunday, January 16. Rev. Barzillai Frost’s sermon made John sound eerily like Henry’s double: “He had a love of nature, even from childhood amounting to enthusiasm. . . . There is not a hill, nor a tree, nor a bird, nor a flower of marked beauty in all this neighborhood that he was not familiar with, and any new bird or flower he discovered gave him the most unfeigned delight.” John was also deeply involved with the human community: “He had a heart to feel and a voice to speak for all classes of suffering humanity; and the cause of the poor inebriate, the slave, the ignorant and depraved, was very dear to him.” He loved music, and “the sound of his favorite flute mingling with and softening the voices of his friends, was but an emblem of his spirit,” preparing him for heaven; as to that, Reverend Frost admitted some qualms over his dalliance with “revolutionary opinion” and “transcendental views”—which under other circumstances would have made his brother smile—but, he concluded soberly, John’s “principles and religious feelings were always unshaken.” In Concord’s liberal First Parish Church, the state of one’s heart mattered most, and John’s heart was just and good.5

  Henry’s struggle to feign good cheer and not give way to unmanly grief resulted, at first, in a strange calm that incubated for a week. Then, to his family’s horror, he, too, collapsed with the terrible symptoms of lockjaw, his body seized by violent and uncontrollable convulsions. Emerson, away in Boston, returned home to the shocking news that the Thoreaus feared they were losing their second son as well: “It is strange—unaccountable—” he wrote his brother William, “yet the symptoms seemed precise and on the increase. You may judge we were all alarmed & I not the least who have the highest hopes of this youth.” Days later Henry’s affliction was easing and the emergency was past. Yet it wa
s another month before he could get out of bed, and all that spring he was too weak even to garden. Deep in depression, he lapsed into passivity, sitting in the house, able to do nothing. His sisters tried to walk him outside into nature, hoping to revive something of the old Henry, but it didn’t help. Friends, Henry had written exactly a year before, “are not two united, but rather one divided.”6 When John died, it seemed half of Henry died with him.

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  Once Henry began to reawaken, he learned the Emersons had suffered their own cruel blow. On January 24, their son Waldo Jr. was showing signs of scarlet fever; three days later, young Waldo died, just five years old. His father’s grief was raw and bottomless. A dozen times or more he had to write out the same words, in letter after letter: “Our darling is dead.” “Our little Waldo died this evening.” “Shall I ever dare to love any thing again.” Emerson had endured tragedy before, but this was different—the pain was keener, the loss baffling, incomprehensible. A dark reckoning with all his philosophy followed, culminating in his great, brooding essay “Experience.”7 The double blow numbed them both and brought them closer together: Waldo Jr. had been Thoreau’s special charge; he loved the boy as his own. Emerson, tormented by sweet memories, recalled how Thoreau had played with Waldo every day, charming him “by the variety of toys whistles boats popguns & all kinds of instruments which he would make & mend; & possessed his love & respect by the gentle firmness with which he always treated him.” Thoreau loved the boy’s way of asking unanswerable questions, “the same which you would ask of yourself.” Emerson lingered on the moment Waldo said, “My music makes the thunder dance,” for it chanced to thunder once when Waldo was blowing his willow whistle—one of the little toys Thoreau had fashioned for him.8