Give Her a Kiss for Me
After their return from the river voyage in September 1839, John did not remain long in Concord. When he informed others that he was planning to visit Ellen Sewall in Scituate, her Aunt Prudence made it clear she thought such a plan inappropriate, because Ellen’s parents were away on a journey to Niagara Falls.
Nonetheless, John arrived in Scituate to a fond welcome from Ellen, whose only companions were her younger brothers, Edmund and George, who had been left in the care of the responsible seventeen-year-old. Edmund was there during the school break that the brothers had filled with their voyage. On the coast halfway between Boston and Plymouth, Scituate was rich in history. The Plymouth Pilgrims had visited the area before 1628 and within a few years were laying out property lines along the cliffs that John and the Sewall siblings visited, such as Colman’s Hill, which towered above the rocky coastline.
The Sewall children enjoyed John’s tales of his river exploits, although George kept accidentally referring to John as Henry. Soon a friend of the family dropped by the Sewall home, perhaps alerted by Aunt Prudence, and hinted that she would like to remain for a visit. Ellen managed to postpone the woman’s stay until after John’s departure. Soon she wrote to Aunt Prudence, “I have enjoyed Mr. John’s visit exceedingly though sorry father and Mother were not at home.”
At Christmastime, Henry and John accompanied Prudence Ward on a visit to Scituate. Their interest in Ellen was visible to everyone. After their departure, Ellen wrote to Prudence:
The house seems deserted1 since you left us; I never was so lonely in my life as the day you went away, and I have not quite recovered my spirits yet. . . . I have wished you and John and Henry here a thousand times this week. . . . Does Dr. Thoreau continue to give advice gratis? I do not clean my brasses half as quick without the accompaniment of his flute.
Following their return to Concord, the brothers took turns sending reminders of their affection to the Sewall home in Scituate. Henry mailed a book of poems by Jones Very, another of Emerson’s young protégés. While a student at Harvard Divinity School in 1838, Very had proclaimed that he was Christ resurrected. He notoriously cried to students one day, “Flee to the mountains,2 for the end of all things is at hand.” Divinity School administrators were not convinced and dismissed him. Emerson had responded to Very’s recent release from a mental institution by helping him publish his first collection, Essays and Poems. His book was a curious choice for Henry to send to the Sewalls, but soon Ellen was reporting that the family enjoyed it.
Knowing Ellen’s passion for natural history, as demonstrated by a cabinet of curiosities she kept, John sent her some opals that had originated in South America. To his intellectually inclined student, Edmund, John sent books. Little George couldn’t read much, if at all, so John slyly sent him a long letter to be read aloud by Ellen. “If sister has read it through3 to you very carefully,” John added at the end, “you may give her a kiss for me and wish her a Happy New Year!”
Henry then sent Ellen some of his own poems. They included “The Assabet,” which he had written in his journal the previous July, during Ellen’s visit that had led to all his distracting thoughts about her:
Up this pleasant stream let’s row
For the livelong summer’s day,
Sprinkling foam where’er we go
In wreaths as white as driven snow.
Ply the oars! away! away!
Now we glide along the shore,
Chucking lilies as we go,
While the yellow-sanded floor
Doggedly resists the oar,
Like some turtle dull and slow . . .
Apparently Ellen’s family insisted that, for the sake of propriety, she communicate with the Thoreau brothers through her aunt. Even when Ellen forgot for some time to thank Henry for his poems, she apologized through Prudence. On the twentieth of March, the first day of spring, Henry scrawled in his journal, “Love never degrades its votaries, but lifts them up to higher walks of being.”
The next day found him confiding to the journal a boundless ambition and optimism, as well as his recurring yearning to escape the bonds of society:
By another spring I may be a mail-carrier in Peru,4 or a South African planter, or a Siberian exile, or a Greenland whaler, or a settler on the Columbia River, or a Canton merchant, or a soldier in Florida, or a mackerel-fisher off Cape Sable, or a Robinson Crusoe in the Pacific, or a silent navigator of any sea. . . . I can move away from public opinion, from government, from religion, from education, from society.
In June 1840 Ellen visited Concord again. “The other day,” Henry wrote5 in his journal on the nineteenth, “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. So might all our lives be picturesque if they were free enough, but mean relations and prejudices intervene to shut out the sky, and we never see a man as simple and distinct as the man-weathercock on a steeple.” Then the sounds of the night reminded him of his and John’s time on the Merrimack the year before—especially of a distant drummer beating his slow ancient rhythm across miles and centuries. For days or even weeks, the effect of this time with Ellen cast a glow over Henry’s life. Romantic and susceptible deep within his shell, he walked the fields under moonlight, thinking that even the lowing of cattle sounded friendlier than usual.
Too soon Ellen was gone. And when she left, John did, too, following her to Scituate. In July he went again—still without Henry, this time accompanying the Wards to the beautiful region. In 1837 the painter Thomas Doughty had immortalized Scituate’s dramatic coastline, featuring one of the balanced boulders that stood on end as if tossed by giants. Like his older colleagues Asher B. Durand and Thomas Cole, Doughty celebrated the fresh American landscape.
During the War of 1812, locals claimed, the Scituate lighthouse keeper was away when his two daughters spied a British warship anchored nearby and two skiffs of redcoats rowing toward shore. The older daughter grabbed a fife and launched into the kind of martial airs that would accompany a mustering militia. Fearing that colonists were massing to attack, the redcoats retreated—and Scituate still bragged about its “Army of Two.” By the time John and Ellen strolled on the beach,6 the lighthouse was in poor repair, its brass tarnished and its glass smoked black. Ellen’s aunt accompanied them as chaperone, but obligingly leaned against a rock and waited so they could speak privately. During their stroll, John asked Ellen to marry him. She was surprised. Possibly merely caught up in the excitement of the visit and the romance of the moment, the eighteen-year-old said yes.
Almost immediately she had doubts, but she didn’t have to face them long. When she returned home, her mother pointedly asked if John had said anything interesting. Yes, Ellen said, he proposed. Her mother was not pleased. Although the Reverend and Mrs. Sewall had trusted Henry and John as teachers for Edmund and Ellen, they were not going to accept one of them as a son-in-law. The Thoreau family was known to be alarmingly progressive in political and religious matters. Sewall was an old-fashioned Unitarian minister, firmly ensconced in the church that Emerson had fled years earlier; he was no Transcendentalist. Her father would not approve of this match, Ellen’s mother insisted. She wielded the threat of his ill health, which had a powerful effect on his affectionate daughter. Ellen reversed her decision.
John returned to Concord on the nineteenth. That evening Henry wrote in the privacy of his room, “These two days that I have not written7 in my Journal, set down in the calendar as the 17th and 18th of July, have been really an aeon in which a Syrian empire might rise and fall.” John’s report of Ellen’s refusal may have improved Henry’s mood, because he added, “Night is spangled with fresh stars.”
John’s modest income may have been a factor in Ellen’s parents’ decision; possibly they wanted their daughter to avoid the financial woes that had plagued their own marriage. Three nights after his return to Concord, following an overture about poverty’s virtues surpassing the alleged convenience of riches, John confided his disappointment to his own journal, with an apparently sarcastic aside about not being “crossed in love.”
Tonight I feel doleful,8 somewhat lachrymose, and desponding “Bluey.” not absolutely suicidal, but viewing the world at a discount disposed to part with my lease of life for a very small “bonus.” Can say with truth I think this is the vilest world I have ever been in. I’m getting to be ferocious; rather hope that no small children will come in my way just now; wouldn’t be responsible. “bereaved Father,” “distressed Mother” have very little weight with me at this instant— Don’t feel very wicked neither, am not in debt, not crossed in love or anything of that sort, but still don’t feel quite right.
Then, suffering from indigestion (“things in my chemical laboratory don’t assimilate kindly”), he distracted himself by complaining at length in his journal about a pudding concocted by the cooks in what he called the Kitchen Cabinet, after the mocking nickname for President Andrew Jackson’s new cabinet of cronies following a Washington scandal in the early 1830s.
Soon, however, in his gentlemanly way, John sent Ellen a crystal for her collection.
After she was forced to renounce her acceptance of John, Ellen Sewall was sent to or chose to visit her uncle Henry’s home in Watertown, on the Black River near Lake Ontario in northern New York. Uncle Henry’s daughter, Ellen’s first cousin Mary, had attended boarding school with her. Back in Concord, however, Aunt Prudence kept Ellen updated with information about the Thoreaus. Thus Henry learned her address in Watertown.
On the first of November he wrote in his journal as if speaking directly to Ellen or drafting a letter to her:
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 everything, and you too are helping it.
A few days later, while Ellen was staying in Watertown, she received a romantic letter from Henry,9 who asked her to marry him. He had learned about Indians, played the flute, and taught school as his brother did, and now he proposed to the woman who had refused John’s offer of marriage.
This time Ellen consulted her father10 immediately and his response was predictable. He insisted that she reply at once to Henry and explain—with no possibility of misunderstanding—that she absolutely would not marry him. Ellen agreed with and understood the need for such a plan. That evening, although heartsick, she sat down and wrote a firm no to Henry. She had greatly enjoyed the company of both Thoreau brothers, and she realized that these proposals and her replies might end the easy communication between them.
Soon she was writing to Aunt Prudence in Concord, advising her to not allude to the proposal in letters. Perhaps, she suggested, Prudence could send a letter or two via Mother or Edmund until the family scandal cooled off. Then she added,
I do feel so sorry H. wrote to me. It was such a pity. Though I would rather have it so than to have him say the same things on a beach or anywhere else. If I had only been at home so that Father could have read the letter himself and have seen my answer, I should have liked it better. But it is all over now.
Two months later, Henry was writing in his journal, “When we are amiable,11 then is love in the gale, and in sun and shade, and day and night; and to sigh under the cold, cold moon for a love unrequited is to put a slight upon nature; the natural remedy would be to fall in love with the moon and the night, and find our love requited.”
In her letters Ellen often asked Prudence about Henry. The next summer, eight months after his proposal, she read aloud some of his poems to friends of hers. They liked best “The Assabet,” which began with the happy line, “Up this pleasant stream let’s row.” Later that day she wrote in her diary,
That is the first piece Henry gave me12 in “days long passed,” “in years not worth remembering.” I wonder if his thoughts ever wander back to those times when the hours sped so pleasantly and we were so happy. I think they do. I little thought then that he cared so much as subsequent events have proved.—But to quit this painful theme.