Before he left, Whitman gave Thoreau a copy of the 1856 second edition of Leaves of Grass—the one with Emerson’s greeting on the spine—and as soon as he was back in Concord, Thoreau read it through with deep attention. He liked what he saw. “It has done me more good than any reading for a long time,” he wrote Blake; he especially liked “The Sundown Poem” (soon retitled “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”) and “Song of Myself.” As for Whitman’s brag, Thoreau declared he had a right to it—a tip of the hat from one chanticleer to another. And as for Whitman’s notorious eroticism, Thoreau wrote simply, “It is as if the beasts spoke,” a complex comment from one who had studied the beasts with such closeness and empathy that some said the same of himself. Thoreau wished, he finally decided, not that Whitman had not written such profanity, “as that men & women were so pure that they could read it without harm.”98 To make his point, Thoreau carried his new copy of Leaves of Grass around Concord “like a red flag, defiantly,” as Emerson later told Whitman. As for Whitman, late in life he praised Thoreau’s “lawlessness—his dissent—his going his own absolute road let hell blaze all it chooses.” Emerson’s eulogy asserted that three people had profoundly impressed Thoreau, and one of them, he told Sanborn, was Whitman—whose name he later withheld from the eulogy, at Sophia’s request.99
Two weeks after his sit-down with Whitman, Thoreau finally finished his labors at Eagleswood. On his last Sunday there, he read one more lecture, “What Shall It Profit?”, “unexpectedly with some success.” This seemed to be a lecture only eccentrics could appreciate. Blake, who had missed Thoreau on the way down, urged him to stop at Worcester on his return and give another lecture, but the exhausted Thoreau literally couldn’t wait to get home. On Monday, November 24, he washed the red New Jersey clay off his hands, packed up his surveying equipment, and headed north. When the train deposited him in Worcester at 3:30 a.m. with several hours to kill before the connection to Concord, he wandered Main Street in a daze of fatigue, alarming the night watchman as he cruised past Theo Brown’s tailor shop, halfway tempted to rouse his friends out of bed.100 Relief washed over him the moment he was back on New England’s “sandy, wholesome land” of scrub oaks, birches, and pines, now “all in their russet dress.” As he walked in the door, he laughed to see how in a month, Min the cat had suddenly turned all grown up and stately, cheeks “puffed out like a regular grimalkin” with thick new winter fur.101
He, too, must get ready for the winter. Merely carting his boat home through the snow was enough to make him break out into a sweat. Time for some real work! Thoreau turned some of his New Jersey profits into a new pair of cowhide boots, waterproofed against all slush and snow, and that night he gazed at them happily, “dreaming of far woods and woodpaths, of frost-bound or sloshy roads.”102 After the stifling air of Eagleswood, everything his eyes touched turned to gold. “How I love the simple, reserved countrymen, my neighbors, who mind their own business and let me alone!” he gushed; “Friends! Society! It seems to me I have an abundance of it, there is so much that I rejoice and sympathize with.” Everything, he told a friend, is “made for happiness”: “Wood, earth, mould, etc., exist for joy. Do you think that Concord River would have continued to flow these millions of years by Clamshell Hill and round Hunt’s Island, if it had not been happy?” And here, to top it off, was “that grand old poem called Winter” come round again. “I have never got over my surprise that I should have been born into the most estimable place in all the world, and in the very nick of time, too.”103
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Through the winter of 1856–57, Thoreau stayed strong enough to lecture, but not too much: he was grateful that lecture invitations were so few. “I cannot afford to be telling my experience, especially to those who perhaps will take no interest in it. I wish to be getting experience.”104 Now that he was writing again, new material was accumulating fast, but the old lectures would serve for another year. On December 18—“a snapper” of a day, said the newspaper, with the mercury at 20 below—he hired a horse and sleigh to deliver “Walking” in Amherst, New Hampshire. For the last eleven miles, he warmed one hand against his body while the other held the reins, until it went numb with the cold and he switched. He spoke in the basement of the Amherst Congregational Church, which perhaps, he joked, he’d helped to undermine. No one spoke to him afterward, but they listened, and anymore that was all he expected. He spent the night at a desolate country tavern, where the noise from a dance kept him awake and the staff disgusted him by blowing their noses with their fingers and wiping them on their boots. Deep in the night the ground cracked and startled him awake. It shook the house “like the explosion of a powder-mill” and split the road open a quarter-inch. On the way home the next morning, he paused to walk on the frozen Merrimack River, and that afternoon he walked to Walden Pond. Sure enough, it froze over in the night, with ice so clear he felt he was walking on water.105
Six weeks later, on February 3, 1857, he delivered “Walking” again, at the Fitchburg Athenaeum. Given that his topic was walking, he was bemused to observe that no one did: the snow crust was unbroken for miles around, showing not one of the town’s thousands had even once stepped off its narrow and crowded streets. Their minds, he feared, were just as circumscribed as their feet, and sure enough, his audience stared up at him, there at the podium going through the motions, “as if they were the antics of a rope-dancer or mountebank pretending to walk on air” or playing kittly-benders on thin ice. But one, at least, cheered him on: “This lecture contains more genuine wit, wisdom, and poetry, than can be found in whole courses of Lyceum lectures,” declared the local newspaper.106 The author was almost certainly none other than the devoted Blake, who in his fit of enthusiasm invited Thoreau to repeat the performance in Worcester. Thoreau did, giving “Walking” one more time, on February 13 at Worcester’s fine newly renovated Brinley Hall, thus keeping the promise he made to Blake in November when he hastened through Worcester too tired to stop.
The extreme cold was this winter’s grand feature, breaking all records. The ground was cracking all over New England—because, reasoned Thoreau, there was too little snow to insulate it. On Christmas Day he pushed the snow aside under Lee’s Cliff and got some fresh green catnip for Min.107 Around New Year’s Day he surveyed Lee’s Farm on Nawshawtuct Hill, the same farm staked out in 1635 by Simon Willard for his trading post at the junction of Concord’s three rivers. How old do you think this house is? asked the new owner. Thoreau rummaged around in Shattuck’s History of Concord and guessed it was the oldest house in Concord, dating back to the 1650s. Only weeks later it burned down in the night, leaving nothing standing but the chimneys. Thoreau laid a board across the embers and examined the ancient chimney, copying out the inscription in the crumbling old mortar: “Concord Made—October 1650.” Given that the mortar had been laid over bricks already blackened with soot, the house must have been older still. He brought a brick home as a keepsake.108
As winter deepened and the cold intensified, Thoreau realized that here in Concord, too, no one but himself was abroad in the woods and fields. Nothing, he realized, marked so strongly the difference between himself and everyone else he knew. He tried to put into words why he felt impelled each day to enter the cold heart of winter: it was like coming home to the homesick, or like prayer to the religious, or water to a fish, or opening a window in a suffocating room. “I must have a true skylight . . . . It chances that the sociable, the town and country, or the farmers’ club does not prove a skylight to me. . . . They bore me.” But in the wildness of winter solitude, he met “some grand, serene, immortal, infinitely encouraging, though invisible, companion, and walked with him”—steadying his nerves, recovering his senses. He recalled a recurring dream from his childhood, which he named “Rough and Smooth”—tossing on “a horrible, a fatal surface,” then suddenly “lying on a delicious smooth surface, as of a summer sea”: “My waking experience always has been and is such an alternate Rough and Smooth. In other words it is
Insanity and Sanity.”109 It was only in his “sane” state that he could be “a witness with unprejudiced senses to the order of the universe,” or address “the problem of existence,” the problem winter presented in its starkest terms.
The pith of winter was reached in the depths of January: Boston Harbor froze on the eighteenth. On the nineteenth neither butcher nor milkman could make it to the house. On the twentieth, Eddy Emerson proudly showed Henry his deep and marvelous snow cave: a single lamp lit the interior like reflectors in a lighthouse, but when Eddy shouted at the top of his lungs, he could barely be heard. All the children and Henry took turns crawling inside and trying the experiment, the snow drinking up all the sound. On the twenty-third, Thoreau’s ink froze; on the twenty-fourth, the thermometer dropped into the bulb, which made it, he guessed, 26 below. He, too, had dropped into the bulb, solidified and crystallized like ice: “in my solitude I have woven for myself a silken web or chrysalis, and, nymph-like, shall ere long burst forth a more perfect creature, fitted for a higher society. By simplicity, commonly called poverty, my life is concentrated and so becomes organized, or a Κόσμοσ, which before was inorganic and lumpish.”110 Thoreau would be Walt Whitman, inverted: “I, Walt Whitman, a Kosmos, of Manhattan the son,” who barreled down the streets of New York bellowing Homer to the crowds, had conjured Thoreau, a Kosmos, of Concord the son, a chrysalis deep in a crystal cave.
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He’d reached his limit. First, with Emerson: “And now another friendship is ended,” he wrote that same Kosmos day, February 8, 1857. This, he was certain, was the final, ultimate and irrevocable break with his oldest and deepest friend. “I could better have the earth taken away from under my feet, than the thought of you from my mind,” he agonized. Day and night he suffered “a physical pain, an aching of the breast which unfits me for my tasks.” What had happened? Emerson offers no clue. Just returned from his Midwestern lecture tour, he was harassed for time; Thoreau, at this moment of his deepest spiritual intensity, felt cruelly rebuffed. But then the traveler’s cough Emerson brought home worsened into an acute illness. As he lay in bed, ill and feverish, a frantic Thoreau finally understood that Emerson, his deepest spiritual friend, would never change. Thoreau could not live with him, but life without him was unthinkable: “At the instant that I seem to be saying farewell forever to one who has been my friend, I find myself unexpectedly near to him, and it is our very nearness and dearness to each other that gives depth and significance to that forever. Thus I am a helpless prisoner, and these chains I have no skill to break. While I think I have broken one link, I have been forging another.”111 The crisis passed, and soon Thoreau was dining at the Emersons’, where he argued cheerfully with Louis Agassiz. By May first, they were again taking long companionable walks together. Thoreau’s emotional storm cleared the air between them. Never again did he question his love for Emerson, or Emerson’s love for him.112
For emotional balance and sanity, Thoreau needed the “skylight” of Nature. But the very image illustrates that he lived in a richly peopled social space, tied to those around him with a network of unbreakable chains. Ironically, just then Cholmondeley sent a shrewd evaluation of his character that verified the insight. Thoreau had written Cholmondeley, fighting in the Crimea, back in October, confessing his run-down health. He received no word back. Finally, in December, Cholmondeley found Thoreau’s letter in Rome and, exhilarated to be alive, wrote a magnificent reply, many pages long, brimful with his experiences and impressions of war, people, landscapes, nations, and destinies—including his own and Thoreau’s. For himself, he prescribed a dose of Thoreauvian medicine: a cottage in Kent with a few acres and plenty of room for Thoreau to visit. For his friend, he prescribed the opposite: “You are not living altogether as I could wish. You ought to have society. . . . Without this you will be liable to moulder away as you get older. Forgive my English plainness of speech.” In words echoing Fuller’s from many years before, Cholmondeley told Thoreau that his love for Nature “is ancillary for some affection which you have not yet discovered.” Let your retirement be not too lonely, he warned: “Take up every man as you take up a leaf, and look attentively at him.” Try writing a history of Massachusetts, or Concord. “It would be a great labor and a grand achievement,—one for which you are singularly qualified.”113
It was excellent advice, and by the time Thoreau received it—Cholmondeley did not mail his missive until February, after he reached the secure postal services of England—Thoreau had, for all his glacial meditations on solitude, been filling his Journal with canny studies of his friends and neighbors, taking them up quite like leaves. Having made up his mind to like Whitman, he sent off a copy of Leaves of Grass to Cholmondeley (along with Walden and Emerson’s Poems), then on April 2 he set off for a nice long fireside vacation at the Ricketsons. Could fish, once frozen, revive? That was what he and Agassiz had been arguing over. Fish remained an open question. What about frogs? On the way to Brooklawn, Thoreau pocketed a frog frozen stiff; no, he concluded. Frogs, once frozen, could not revive.
He, however, could: for two weeks Thoreau, melted into jollity, took his ease among friends. Alcott was staying there, too, and sometimes Channing, who struck Alcott as “saner, & sounder than heretofore,” walked down to smoke his pipe. One evening, as Daniel and Ellery were holed up in the Shanty, Louisa Ricketson struck up the lively Scottish air “The Campbells Are Coming” on the piano in the parlor. Their daughter Anna, laughing, called to the Shanty: Come see! Thoreau had burst into dance, pirouetting and taking mad “Indian” leaps over the furniture, delighting the children. When a disapproving Alcott squirmed deeper into the sofa, Thoreau danced his way over to tread on his toes.114 When Louisa, holding the sheet music for “Tom Bowling”—Henry’s favorite song, in memory of John—sat down at the piano and begged him to sing along, he protested, “Oh, I fear if I do I shall take the roof of the house off!” Then he belted out the sea chanty with “spirit and feeling,” and Louisa copied out the music and mailed it to Concord. “It has been sung & encored several times,” Thoreau thanked her, “& is duly made over to my sister & her piano.”115
He even waxed romantic: on April 13, Thoreau and Ricketson stopped on a ride around Quinsigamond Pond to take dinner with Kate Brady. Part Irish and part Yankee, Kate had once been a maid in the Ricketson household. She grew up on the farm, riding the horse to plow, fishing, keeping sheep, learning to spin, weave, and sew. She had read Walden, and now was keeping school for a living. Kate had big plans, as she confessed to Henry during their long walk together. Despite the jeers of her female friends, she would return, alone, to the abandoned family farm to “‘live free’” and make it bloom again. “I never heard a girl or woman express so strong a love for nature,” wrote Thoreau, deeply affected. He was forty years old, twice her age, and had long since closed the door on marriage—“All nature is my bride,” he reminded himself—but there is a sparkle of glee in his portrait of Kate as one of the “Children of the Golden Age,” a strong soul with a love for good books who would make “a true home in nature, a hearth in the fields and woods.”116
Thoreau returned home ready for more company. The instant he learned he had missed a visit from Blake, he wrote inviting his Worcester friends to return, adding, with a grin, his wickedest pun: “Come one & all. . . . Come & be Concord, as I have been Worcestered.”117 Meanwhile, he was busy planting: his father had bought the plot of land next door, and Henry set out new apple trees, built a new fence, and spaded the garden, amused as their neighbor Riordan’s handsome cock followed his every move. At “Texas” he dropped beans in the garden, and he spent three May days in shirtsleeves building a new arbor for Emerson. When Ricketson came for a visit, the Emersons held a family party for him at Emerson’s Cliff. That evening at supper, when Ricketson confessed his terror of thunderstorms and divine retribution, Thoreau, to Emerson’s delight, insisted that fearing God’s judgment was a false theology, while a new pear tree was the real religion: “
No ecstasy was ever interrupted,” declared Thoreau, “nor its fruit blasted.”118 Next morning, when Ricketson complained, as he so often did, of headache, Thoreau lured him out of the house and cured him with a swim and a boating excursion—for now it was Henry, “suddenly become much stronger than for the last 2 years,” cajoling such “notional nervous invalids.”119
While bounding through forest and field with renewed energy, Thoreau was struck by the leaps that the young pines had taken in just a year. Barren fields had burst overnight into thrifty young forests, little trees stretching to the sky, grown three feet in a single season. Back on Nantucket, he had seen how Captain Gardiner was reforesting even that bleak landscape; now, walking with Emerson, Thoreau proposed to do the same at Walden: one could run a plow over Wyman’s field, follow the plow with a planter supplied with pine seed, and reseed that way a whole forest. Everywhere Thoreau saw a season of regeneration. On a walk to Lee’s Cliff, he stopped to talk with a farmer’s son on his way to graft apples, then, sizing up a small dark cloud low to the northwest, walked on under a serene blue sky to Fairhaven, where the raindrops started to spatter. As the storm broke out of ash-dark clouds, he rushed to Lee’s Cliff, and there in the rock cleft, sheltering amid lightning and thunder, Thoreau sang out “Tom Bowling” in the rain.120
Two days later he was again surprised by joy, out on a hillside, by a bobolink’s song. At first, “one or two notes globe themselves and fall in liquid bubbles from his teeming throat,” a vase full of melody. “Oh never advance farther in your art, never let us hear your full strain sir. But away he launches, and the meadow is all bespattered with melody.”121 For three long years, Henry Thoreau had held back his full strain, had advanced no farther in his art. Now, released into the spring of 1857, he was ready to go full-throat, all the way to the end.
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