A Skating Party
Hawthorne and Henry got along well and soon became friends. The homely local boy taught the handsome author1 to watch for arrowheads—hidden stone splinters unearthed in plowing, crudely wrought in contrast to machined weapons but easily distinguishable from stones and earth. These relics romantically conjured for Hawthorne, as they did for Henry, a lost race.
Like Emerson and other advocates of Henry’s talent and potential, Hawthorne tried to draw attention to the odd young man who could garden, boat, or write with equal facility. Hawthorne knew that Epes Sargent, an editor and playwright in New York—his drama Velasco had been admired by Edgar Allan Poe—was preparing to launch his own periodical, Sargent’s New Monthly Magazine. “There is a gentleman in this town2 by the name of Thoreau,” Hawthorne wrote to Sargent by October, finally spelling Henry’s name correctly, “a graduate of Cambridge, and a fine scholar, especially in old English literature—but withal a wild, irregular, Indian-like sort of fellow, who can find no occupation in life that suits him. . . . He is somewhat tinctured with Transcendentalism. . . . The man has stuff in him to make a reputation of; and I wish that you might find it consistent with your interest to aid him in attaining that object.”
In the autumn of 1842, Henry wrote to a friend about John’s death,3 scribbled poems, and was elected, over his own feeble protests, curator of the Concord Lyceum, which meant that he would be responsible for attracting lecturers. He went to Alcott’s to meet the English utopian Charles Lane. He had the satisfaction of seeing eight of his poems published in the tenth issue of The Dial—one of which, “To the Maiden in the East,” he had written during his brief infatuation with Mary Russell. But few responded to Henry’s poetry with applause. In November, he submitted more poems to Emerson, who found the same faults that he had often confided to his journal or to friends: slipshod meter, near-miss rhymes, a roughness like a wooden post with the bark left on. Henry was not interested in polishing his poems to a formal gloss; he wanted to get the idea down and take aim at his next poetic target. “Last night,” Emerson wrote4 in his journal, “Henry Thoreau read me verses which pleased, if not by beauty of particular lines, yet by the honest truth, and by the length of flight and strength of wing; for most of our poets are only writers of lines or epigrams.”
Whatever his opinion of Henry’s poetic wings, Emerson rejected all of his new poems. At about this time, Henry became so despondent over his frustration with writing, and apparently over Emerson’s ongoing criticisms, that he gathered many of his poems and tossed them into a fire.
The winter of 1842–43 was a cold, difficult time in Concord, with the thermometer sinking to its lowest point in recent memory. Sometimes Hawthorne wrote until dinner at two, then slogged through the snow to the Athenæum to read until dark, with a stop at the post office. He was working hard. In Philadelphia, James Russell Lowell and Robert Carter had recently founded an intellectually ambitious literary periodical called The Pioneer. Unlike many magazines, it emphasized new American writing, not reprints of European work. Its first issue, dated January 1843, published Edgar Allan Poe’s feverish fantasy “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Unfortunately The Pioneer survived for only three issues, but during its brief life it published two of Hawthorne’s stories.
When Hawthorne wasn’t writing fiction, he was filling his notebook with ideas and observations. Like Emerson and Henry, like so many other intellectuals of the time, both Sophia and Nathaniel were longtime diarists. They took turns writing in a large notebook covered in bright marbled paper, its spine and corners bound in red leather. Like Henry’s journals, it was a volume built to last. Hawthorne’s entries varied from detailed notes about his new surroundings to quick jottings of ideas as they passed through his mind, such as “A letter, written a century or more ago,5 but which has never yet been unsealed.” He imagined someone picking up in the street a stray leaf from the book of Fate. “A stove,” one brief note read, “possessed by the Devil.” Soon he wrote a story narrated by the Concord town square’s water pump. He tended to jot a note and add a remark along the lines of “What moral could be drawn from this?” or “It might be made emblematical of something.”
Despite their hard work, the Hawthornes raced into winter like children. The first snowstorm found them in Sleepy Hollow just east of the square, where cut stalks of the summer’s field of Indian corn lay buried under snow. The newlyweds slid down hills together, their laughter echoing from the pyramidal chestnut trees and the knotted arms of the oaks that surrounded the hollow on all sides.
The Concord’s slow current froze quickly in winter, after flooding lowlands for miles, thus providing wide clean surfaces for skating. Ice-skating was as popular in winter as sleighing. At times both river and pond were covered with laughing skaters and the fields musical with the jingling bells of horse-drawn sleighs. In December, at the bottom of the Hawthornes’ orchard, the often flooded meadow transformed into an Arctic sea. After a day in which Hawthorne wrote while Sophia sewed or painted or read, they would spend a cozy hour together in his study before dressing warmly and venturing out to cavort through sunset and into twilight. Hawthorne skated in a way that his adoring wife thought majestic, as if he lost his terrestrial shyness and acquired heroic grace. Wrapped in his fluttering dark coat, he cut nimble, sweeping curves away from her across the ice, only to glide back on whispering skates and circle her and dart away again.
Sophia herself liked to run and slide on the ice instead of skating. Often they saw other skaters, always boys or young men, never women. Few women skated. When Dr. Josiah Bartlett’s wife’s sister, Sarah Alden Bradford, visited Concord in the early 1820s, she impressed the locals by skating with energy and grace, but Concord women were slow to follow her daring example, at least publicly.
One afternoon Henry and Emerson joined Hawthorne for a skating party. Sophia watched from the window as they paraded by on the river. At home on the ice from countless forays since childhood, Henry led the way with an energy and abandon that Sophia found both impressive and ungainly. As if suddenly ecstatic, he cavorted in what she soon described to a friend as “dithyrambic dances and Bacchic leaps.” Second in line was Hawthorne, gliding across the surface with his usual solemn grace, appearing to Sophia’s eyes like a Greek statue propelling itself. Then came Emerson, seeming half asleep, tilting forward at the waist until his top half was horizontal, as if he napped by reclining on the air itself. Soon, exhausted, Emerson came indoors to rest, joining Sophia by the window. He said that her husband reminded him of a tiger or satyr whose energy might be the death of an ordinary mortal such as himself. He beamed a kind smile at her. “Mr. Hawthorne is such an Ajax,6 who can cope with him!”
Every year Henry was thrilled anew7 to find how quickly he could travel on the river’s ice. He had come to know the transformed winter river—the marbled gray ice in the bays, the darker marbling where clear water pooled underneath. Where a crack crossed the surface, water sometimes oozed out and froze two or three inches thick in a space up to a few feet wide. Skating over these caused a jolt. After he got used to skates again each winter, Henry would soon recklessly race down even a foot-wide strip of ice between shore and water. He loved the freedom to follow the windings of a stream. He would whisper along on his skates and be surprised to reach a particular bend in the river or a tributary brook sooner than expected—with much less effort than trudging across snowy hills and through muddy bogs. Even brisk walkers on the shore seemed motionless while Henry flew across the ice. He felt as if he had winged feet, like Hermes.
Nor was this magical stage silent. The crack of the moving ice sounded one moment like aural chain lightning and the next like the call of a pigeon woodpecker—a-week, a-week. Once, as Henry skated across a stretch of river during a melt, a large area of ice forced up by the water settled on another section of ice, causing a crash and producing a small pond in the frozen river. Soon he learned that a couple of hours later, the next skater found the lines of Henry’s trail across the ice, saw them vanish into water, and then was astonished to find them reappear on the ice at the opposite side of the melt.
Often Henry saw fishermen dragging a sled across the surface of Fair Haven Pond, leaving behind a hole surrounded by white chips of ice that bounced the sunlight like mirrors. From a distance, the tableau of pickerel fishermen seemed epic, even though they merely stood with their hands deep in the pockets of heavy cloth dreadnaughts and stirred their underwater thoughts. Every year, as soon as the ice was hard enough to withstand a man’s weight, fishermen were out on the transformed water, even on Sundays. Heretically free himself on Sabbath mornings, Henry thought the fishermen performed their own kind of devotional, and he suspected that judgmental preachers dined on illicit pickerel come Monday.
One winter day, Henry was skating across the frozen surface of the pond when he saw ahead on the ice the vivid reddish-brown flash of a fox. Quickly he skated in its direction. When Henry slowed his pursuit, the fox sat on its dark haunches and barked at him in a way that made Henry think of descriptions he had read of young wolves. But the instant that Henry skated more quickly toward the fox, it leaped up and raced ahead at what seemed its top speed. Yet it never quite ran away. Experimentally, Henry stopped skating and waited. The fox also paused. It walked a dozen feet to one side, then sat down and aimed its black eyes and black-tipped ears at Henry and barked—a whispery nasal squawk most unlike a dog’s bark, as well as quite different from the mechanical gekkering of cubs or a vixen’s whine to her mate. Then it rose and trotted in another direction and sat down and barked again. It seemed held captive, a fixed distance away. But when Henry launched after it again, the fox was instantly up and running. Perhaps it enjoyed the game, too.
“Plainly the fox belongs8 to a different order of things from that which reigns in the village,” Henry remarked to his journal the next day. “Our courts, though they offer a bounty for his hide, and our pulpits, though they draw many a moral from his cunning, are in few senses contemporary with his free forest life.”
Henry was interested not only in the act of skating but in the natural history and symbolism of ice itself. He wanted not only to read the language of bird tracks imprinted in snow, which were like a cuneiform tablet of events waiting to be deciphered, but to try to understand the snow itself,9 its varieties and forms, its behavior. He loved water, river and stream and pond, rain and its colder manifestations. He paid as much attention to bubbles in the frozen surface of Walden Pond in February as he did to its reflections of red maples in October.
His interest was scientific, visceral, and symbolic. He read widely in the discoveries of his time. The thrilling revelations of the eighteenth century had ranged from astronomer William Herschel’s catalog of the impossibly vast cosmos above our heads to geologist James Hutton’s theories about the formation of the impossibly ancient earth beneath our feet. The new science of crystallization had linked the growth of the eternal stones to the growth of ephemeral ghosts such as hoarfrost, and glimpses of such creativity and pattern in physics inspired poetic nature lovers from Goethe to Emerson. Even Emmanuel Swedenborg, the controversial Swedish mystic who influenced Emerson and Transcendentalism and thus Henry, had studied crystallization.10 Before his midlife veer into mysticism, during which he claimed that the Second Coming had already taken place but had been apparent only to enlightened souls such as himself, Swedenborg focused considerable attention on analogies in nature. In his first book, in 1721, he argued that the branching and budding of plants is echoed in the hexagonal shapes of ice, from frost to snow, as well as in how salt crystals grow out of water.
This kind of pattern was more than metaphor. It teased Henry with a glimpse of the laws of creation. Mathematical predispositions in matter itself offered what a Transcendentalist would immediately see as evidence of hidden connection and kinship throughout the cosmos. It was like Swedenborg’s use of an ancient Stoic analogy, that nature in general worked much like a spider’s web: “For it consists, as it were,11 of infinite radii proceeding from a centre, and of infinite circles or polygons, such that nothing can happen in one which is not instantly known at the centre, and thus spreads throughout much of the web. Thus through contiguity and connection does nature play her part.”
In the first volume of the journal he opened after Emerson’s prompt in October 1837, Henry had spent considerable time describing the effects of hoarfrost and other icy architecture. It was one of the first topics to which he turned. He painstakingly examined what appeared to be frozen mist on leaves, the rectilinear fissures of frozen mud below ice melting in a roadbed, even crystallized rhubarb in the bottom of a bowl he had left outdoors in the autumn. When he found a mosaic of channels in the ice of Swamp Bridge Brook, which ran behind Farrar’s blacksmith shop on the edge of the village, he turned over a big section to find an upended city—Gothic steeples of mostly triangular prisms, with a more ancient civilization of ice below it. He found that every hole in a high bank near the Leaning Hemlocks on the Assabet River sported a phalanx of sparkling ice crystals. “In one place you might see12 minute ostrich feathers,” he wrote, “which seemed like the waving plumes of the warriors filing into the fortress, in another the glancing, fan-shaped banners of the Lilliputian host, and in another the needle-shaped particles, collected into bundles resembling the pine, might pass for a phalanx of spears. . . . I tried to fancy that there was a disposition in these crystallizations to take the forms of the contiguous foliage.”
He returned to this theme in his first published essay, “The Natural History of Massachusetts,” which had appeared in The Dial in July 1842, half a year before the skating party with Emerson and Hawthorne. That spring, after the deaths of John Thoreau and young Waldo, Emerson had acquired most of a series of massive scientific studies of Massachusetts. Separate volumes by various authors13 surveyed invertebrates, quadrupeds, herbaceous flowering plants, fish, birds, reptiles, and insects. “By what chance or lucid interval14 or kindly overruling,” Emerson had asked Margaret Fuller, “came our Legislature to give itself this bright vacation from Whig & Tory voting lists, from New Valuations, & Revised Statutes, and lend itself to be led for a time by the Boston Society of Natural History?” In April he assigned a review of this compendium to Henry, “explaining to him,” as he told Fuller, “the felicity of the subject for him as it admits of the narrative of all his woodcraft boatcraft & fishcraft. Henry is quite unable to labor lately since his sickness, & so must resign the garden into other hands,” and he added generously, “but as private secretary to the President of the Dial, his works & fame may go out into all lands and, as happens to great Premiers, quite extinguish the titular Master.”
As if this writing assignment had been a prescription from a doctor, Henry used the scientific tomes to launch a fortifying expedition into his own worldview, incorporating journal entries and other reading beyond the books under review. Always he found thinking about nature as invigorating and nutritious as experiencing nature. He even opened the essay with a passage from his journal written on the last day of 1841, the day before John cut his finger: “Books of natural history make the most cheerful winter reading. . .” He borrowed other journal entries and even casually sprinkled his own poems throughout. Eager to encourage his disciple, Emerson let him get away with it.
Henry addressed crystals and ice in various ways. He began with a survey of the beautiful forms of hoarfrost that adorned winter windows at dawn—“crystal botany,” he called this topic. “Nature is mythical and mystical always,” he wrote, “and works with the license and the extravagance of genius.” Henry’s poetic sensibility was being fueled in part by science, by his determination to see his world as clearly as possible, even if he still yearned to assign each phenomenon a metaphorical resonance: “In some places the ice-crystals were lying upon granite rocks, directly over crystals of quartz, the frost-work of a longer night, crystals of a longer period, but to some eye unprejudiced by the short term of human life, melting as fast as the former.” He expanded the idea through his growing sense of being surrounded by a world older than humans had first imagined, and even more mysterious in its natural functions than it seemed in fable and myth. Emerson’s thoughtful gesture in assigning this review had distracted Henry from grief and helped him concentrate on intellectual work. And in the writing of it Henry drew closer to his instinctive goal of unifying his life and thought through words.