My Friend’s Little Brother
By then a tall and personable twelve-year-old, Edmund Sewall returned to Concord for the spring 1840 quarter with the Thoreau brothers. When he arrived on a snowy evening in March, nine months had passed since he first visited Concord and inspired Henry’s poem “Sympathy.” This time he boarded with the Thoreaus and slept with John in the same room in which the boy and his mother had stayed the year before.
Although his courses were rigorous, Edmund enjoyed them. “A very pleasant schoolmaster,”1 he called Henry, in a letter home. He liked that in this handsome schoolhouse every student had an individual seat. He dived into geography, Latin, geometry, and composition, and he kept a journal in the writing book his aunt gave him.2 When Henry advised him to write about a topic with which he was unfamiliar, Edmund chose eagles and ostriches. “I cunningly took half a sheet of paper to write on,” he bragged to his journal, “so on the whole I managed to fill out my pages.”
Although homesick—he dreamed about his family and even about the pail that he used at home to fetch milk—Edmund enjoyed living with the Thoreaus. He tagged along when John went to the post office and to Shattuck’s store, where slight twenty-five-year-old John climbed on the scale and was found to weigh only a hundred and seventeen pounds. John ordered clams from Boston and cooked them for Edmund in a little vessel called a monkey. They visited the dour stone jail with its tall spiked wall, behind the Middlesex Hotel in the center of town.
One snowy day, Henry took Edmund and another student walking through a small, deep valley that Henry called Laurel Glen because of the luxuriant plants growing there. On their way home, Henry saw a slate-colored sparrow.3 It was one of his favorite birds, chubby and dark gray with a lighter bill, sometimes called a snowbird because often it returned with winter. He admired its cheerful jingling song, which he could hear from indoors. Henry wanted to examine the bird more closely, so he shot it with his shotgun, and he and the boys took the silent corpse with them. He may have wanted to demonstrate his marksmanship as well. At the pond he set a snowball on a post and blasted it, too, with the shotgun.
On another outing, John and Edmund and some other boys were caught in heavy rain. They huddled beneath hemlock branches, but still had to hide under their umbrellas. During a lull in the rain, John went out and returned with a large wood tortoise. He had also shot a towhee to show the boys. It was a dramatically patterned robin-sized songbird with a black hood, white waistcoat, and rich russet sides—a bird whose cheerful call of drink-your-teeeaaaaa was far more melodious than the sharp two-syllable exclamation towhee, or the sound that had provided its other name, chewink. After they examined it, John threw the bird into the river.
Henry took Edmund into the office of the Whig newspaper Yeoman’s Gazette, where they watched a compositor set type. A descendant of Concord’s first regular paper,4 the Middlesex Gazette, it had been founded on the Mill Dam in 1816. Then they went to the shop of Mr. Bratt, the gunsmith, who took time out of regulating a rifle’s sights to show them around. Edmund admired a rifle that he hinted about in a letter home to his parents: “one nice little one just big enough for a boy of my size.”
Henry and John believed in hands-on education, and probably they also enjoyed free assistance. As Henry plowed the potato garden, Edmund helped sow it. Students were even brought along after school to watch as Henry and John tarred the bottom of their boat with a mixture of half a pound of tallow to four pounds of resin. Later, when the boat developed a leak, Edmund and two other boys were assigned the task of patching it. After they dumped out the water and dried the boat, they heated an iron at Farrar’s Blacksmith Shop, which was across the road behind the school, and used it to melt tar to patch the leak.
Frequently Edmund, like the adults who guided him, went to hear a lecturer at the Concord Lyceum. Once a phrenologist was scheduled to explain the predictive abilities of the shape of the head, but he arrived late. While impatiently waiting, Edmund stared in fascination at the phrenologist’s equipment, especially the upper half of the skull of a British soldier that had been unearthed at Lincoln. A Minuteman’s bullet had drilled a sharp hole in the cranium.
In early April, Emerson delivered a lecture on literature at the Lyceum. Henry invited Edmund and two other students. Afterward, twenty-two-year-old Henry considered how he might apply Emerson’s thoughts to his own yearning life. “How shall I help myself?”5 he scrawled in his journal. He knew almost instinctively that the answer lay within himself. “By withdrawing into the garret,” he replied, “and associating with spiders and mice, determining to meet myself face to face sooner or later. Completely silent and attentive I will be this hour, and the next, and forever.”
Edmund Sewall, however, was only half Henry’s age. “I was not at all interested,”6 he wrote of Emerson’s lecture. “He is a tall man with piercing blue eyes.”
In contrast to the well-educated Edmund Sewall was another good student, a bright but impoverished ten-year-old farm boy named Horace Hosmer. He was the younger brother of Benjamin and Joseph Hosmer from rural Derby’s Bridge, Henry and John’s childhood friends.7 It was Ben who had felled the angry ox with a single stone from his sling roughly a decade earlier. Horace came to school eager for knowledge. At a young age he had learned the alphabet from his mother’s Testament, after which his sister tutored him. Most storybooks for children were dreary, but Horace was given an illustrated edition of John Bunyan’s seventeenth-century allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress, one of the few diversions that pious families permitted their children on a Sunday. Afterward Horace looked at the hills of Monadnock and Wachusett and saw the Delectable Mountains, imagined battling the giant Despair before scaling Doubting Castle, and felt at home in the Valley of Humiliation.
When his father walked the shy bumpkin to the Thoreau brothers’ school in 1840, Horace was a stranger even to the village except for glimpses of it while walking to church. They entered through the door on the eastern side to find John’s desk facing them from across the room. Boys were seated mostly to John’s left and girls to his right.
John greeted Horace warmly and took him under his wing. “I want you to be a good boy and study,” he said pleasantly, “because you are my friend’s little brother.”
Students came from diverse backgrounds. The quiet, pale fifteen-year-old who sat directly behind him turned out to be George Hoar, a son of Samuel Hoar. Two Cuban-born boys, Andrew and Alexander Beath, sat in the row against the south wall, to Hoar’s right. Several brothers and sisters came together—Sherman and Almira Tuttle, Gorham and Martha Bartlett. Hosmer cousins were scattered around. Horace often ate with the Thoreaus after school, as did other students who boarded with them. He was charmed by Henry’s talkative and welcoming mother, and he considered Mr. Thoreau more refined, good-hearted, and well-spoken than the coarse and vulgar men he saw in other Concord families.
Surprised by his respect for his teachers, Horace didn’t whisper with his neighbors during the entire first term, and he didn’t notice other students whispering. Few sassed the Thoreaus, although neither teacher whipped, threatened, or even publicly reprimanded them. In fact Horace noticed that when John disciplined a child, he did it so quietly that other students seldom noticed.
Soon after Horace’s arrival, John called upon him twice in class but the boy didn’t reply. Worried that he was sulking, John quietly summoned Horace to his desk and asked him why he was ignoring his teacher.
Horace insisted that he had not heard his name spoken.
John peered closely at the boy and decided that he was telling the truth. As if in apology for questioning him in front of his classmates, John pulled out a couple of books to lend him—the Englishman Thomas Day’s 1780s catchall The History of Sandford and Merton, cobbled from his own stories and those of others, and Lazy Lawrence, a popular excerpt from The Parent’s Assistant, a 1796 collection of children’s stories by the progressive Anglo-Irish writer and educator Maria Edgeworth. Although she was often didactic herself, Edgeworth aimed for more realistic and entertaining stories than the solemn tracts that had harangued her own youth. Horace, who considered any text superior to reading the New Testament aloud to squirrels, went back to his seat and happily dived into Lazy Lawrence.
John liked to provide treats. Sometimes students would find in their desks a slice of tangy citron melon, with its mottled blue-and-green skin framing white flesh speckled with light brown seeds. The first time this happened, Horace worried that a fellow student had maliciously stashed food in his desk, but as he ate the juicy melon his opinion of John rose even higher.
The syllabus also included recent works such as John Wilson’s 1822 collection Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life. John thrilled Horace with his reading of Wilson’s stories. He rousingly brought to life Gilbert Ainslee, a character in the story “Moss-Side” who struck a chord in Horace’s imagination, perhaps because he reminded him of his father: “Labour, hard and unremitting, had been his lot in life.”
Early in the day came literature study, called “defining,” which Horace loved. Students had to recite and elaborate upon prose and poetical texts. One day they disastrously mangled William Cowper’s long poem “Needless Alarm.” After one hundred and thirty dull lines, Cowper’s moral appeared: “Beware of desperate steps. The darkest day / Live till to-morrow, will have passed away.” The students’ painfully labored attempt to decipher this poem ended when young Edward Wood offered his own cautious summary: “Look before you leap!”
At which point a tired and bored John jumped out of his chair, exclaiming, “Very good indeed!” and finally the village literary critics and their teacher were free to move on to another topic.