Staten Island
Henry was busy in early 1843, but mostly with tasks he did not find satisfying. Halfway through his twenties, he was making little money and attracting almost no attention as a writer. Although he submitted a sheaf for Emerson’s consideration, the pages of the eleventh issue of The Dial, published early in January, contained none of Henry’s own poems—but then the preceding issue had included eight. The new issue welcomed only Henry’s workaday translation of part of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, which Emerson had requested, as well as a compilation of another writer’s work.
Emerson kept his library available to his protégé. Among the many Eastern texts on those shelves, Henry had found and enjoyed Sir William Jones’s Institutes of Hindu Law; or, The Ordinances of Menu. . . Comprising the Indian System of Duties, Religious and Civil. It was such an ancient work that Menu was said to have been the son or grandson of Brahma. In July 1842, Emerson had launched in The Dial what he described as “a series of ethnical scriptures,” for which he asked Henry to gather a bouquet of Jones’s translations. Henry read German, French, Latin, and Greek, but not Sanskrit, so he did not attempt his own version. Like Jones’s vast 1796 translation, Henry’s nine-page selection, titled simply “The Laws of Menu,” presented Menu’s thoughts in categories such as Temperance, Devotion, and Teaching. Henry’s selections ranged from “The resignation of all pleasures is far better than the attainment of them” to “He must eat without distraction of mind.” Under the heading God, Henry included an Emersonian exclamation: “Thus the man, who perceives in his own soul the supreme soul present in all creatures, acquires equanimity toward them all, and shall be absorbed at last in the highest essence, even that of the Almighty himself.”
January did see the appearance of Henry’s first essay to be published anywhere other than the Dial—“A Walk to Wachusett,” in a year-old monthly periodical, the Boston Miscellany of Literature and Fashion, which survived for only one more issue. It described a four-day trek that Henry had made with Richard Fuller, Margaret Fuller’s youngest brother and Henry’s junior by seven years, who was on holiday from Harvard. Carrying strong walking staffs, Richard and Henry had wandered through the hop fields of Acton and Stow, crossed the shallow but rapid Nashua River and the misnamed Stillwater, and climbed Mount Wachusett, the tallest peak in Massachusetts until the mountains rose in the west beyond the Connecticut River. “No incidents worthy of note1 occurred during this pilgrimage,” Richard wrote in his own notebook, but Henry turned the excursion into a Wordsworthian ode to the mythic nourishment of being outdoors. He filled it with vivid, joyful details: their splashing like children through every rill that crossed their path, moonlight bright enough through their tent roof to create an all-night twilight inside, auger holes patterning the trunks in a sugar maple wood. Unable to keep his mind in one track, reveling in his associative way of thinking, Henry alluded to writers from Homer to Samuel Johnson. Amid garnishes of his own poetry, he worked in a tribute to himself: “But special I remember thee, / Wachusett, who like me / Standest alone without society.” He was already making notes for an essay about walking in wintertime. He was discovering that he enjoyed using an outdoor ramble as a unifying cord on which to string his thoughts.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was growing fond of his new neighbor, critiqued the Wachusett essay in his journal, comparing Henry’s writing to a lake’s reflective ability:
He is a good writer—at2 least, he has written one good article, a rambling disquisition on Natural History in the last Dial,—which, he says, was chiefly made up from journals of his own observations. Methinks this article gives a very fair image of his mind and character—so true, minute, and literal in observation, yet giving the spirit as well as letter of what he sees, even as a lake reflects its wooded banks, showing every leaf, yet giving the wild beauty of the whole scene;—then there are passages in the article of cloudy and dreamy metaphysics, partly affected, and partly the natural exhalations of his intellect;—and also passages where his thoughts seem to measure and attune themselves into spontaneous verse, as they rightfully may, since there is real poetry in him. There is a basis of good sense and moral truth, too, throughout the article, which also is a reflection of his character; for he is not unwise to think and feel, however imperfect in his own mode of action. On the whole, I find him a healthy and wholesome man to know.
In January, Henry received a package at the Emerson house, which he opened with Lidian watching. Richard Fuller had sent him a music box,3 probably as a thank-you for tutoring help on his Harvard application and other work. On its lid gleamed a romantic painting of Switzerland’s mountain-ringed Lake Lucerne, which reminded Henry of the ponds around Harvard. The summer before, shortly after he met the Hawthornes,4 Henry had visited them with the express purpose of borrowing their own music box—only to have Sophia immediately suggest that she lend it to him. Now he had one of his own.
Henry was thrilled. Lidian thought she had never seen such childlike joy on an adult’s face as when Henry opened the gift. He carefully wound it and they listened to its festive airs. Then suddenly Henry decided he must play it for his mother and sisters, and he rushed out to the Thoreau house. Lidian described the scene to Emerson in a letter, adding, “My heart really warmed with sympathy,5 and admiration at his whole demeanour on the occasion—and I like human nature better than I did.”
The Wachusett essay, like Henry’s contributions to The Dial, earned no money. The Thoreau family pressure for gainful employment6 must have been stronger than ever, now that John had been gone a year. In February, restless Henry wrote to ask Emerson to keep an eye out for employment for him outside Concord. He was not going to be able to survive on odd jobs.
Emerson received Henry’s letter on Staten Island, where he was visiting his brother William, who was County Judge of Richmond Court. The father of three—the oldest a precocious and busy seven-year-old—William had an urgent personal interest in both education and child tending. Emerson suggested to his brother that the young firebrand of Concord, an experienced teacher, would make a fine tutor for Willie and might also be helpful with the other children, or at least with three-year-old Haven if not with baby Charley.
William agreed and Emerson brought home a job offer. By mid-March, Emerson was writing to his brother, “I have to say that Henry listens7 very willingly to your proposition. He thinks it exactly fit for him & he very rarely finds offers that do fit him.” Henry’s mentor served not only as reference and agent; he even discussed each point with Henry and wrote up the details of the agreement in letters to William. “He says that it is such a relation as he wishes to sustain, to be the friend & educator of a boy, & one not yet subdued by schoolmasters. I have told him that you wish to put the boy and not his grammar & geography under good and active influence that you wish him to go to the woods & to go to the city with him & do all he can for him—”
Henry accepted, to begin his role as tutor on the first of May. Via Emerson, his brother and Henry worked out a deal: a modest but reasonable salary of one hundred dollars per annum, plus board and lodging; a room in which to study, one provided with a fireplace during cold months; and, unlike at Bush, no requirement of physical labor, because Henry feared that at the moment his health was not up to it. The loss of John, followed by a long bout with bronchitis during the winter, had prompted Henry to describe himself as “a diseased bundle of nerves8 standing between time and eternity like a withered leaf.”
He asked for twenty dollars in advance, which Emerson offered to supply before his trip. Later he gave Henry seven dollars9 more for traveling expenses and advanced him a further ten against his stipend from William. Also Henry begged Emerson to ask his brother if he might need clerical help, and he promised to clean up his sloppy handwriting enough to accomplish it. Emerson conveyed the question, emphasizing that Henry wanted such extra employment only until he could “procure for himself literary labor from some quarter in New York.” Henry was going to the big city with dreams of finally getting more of his words published.
When Henry’s friends learned to their surprise that he would be migrating to Staten Island, they responded with affection. Although Lidian Emerson said that she didn’t want to have to get by without her assistant, she understood that in his mid-twenties Henry certainly needed both remunerative employment and experience in the larger world. Prudence Ward, Ellen Sewall’s aunt, gave Henry a microscope to aid him in peering deeply into nature’s secrets. Elizabeth Hoar brought him an inkstand and one of the newfangled steel pens, although she expressed misgivings about the latter, unsure if Henry preferred to write with a quill. “We have become better acquainted10 within the two past years than in our whole life as schoolmates and neighbors before,” she wrote; “and I am unwilling to let you go away without telling you that I, among your other friends, shall miss you much, and follow you with remembrance and all best wishes and confidence.”
A few months earlier, however, Elizabeth had confessed to Emerson, “I love Henry, but I do not like him.”11 As Henry prepared for Staten Island, other friends were expressing similar doubts. Emerson waited until Henry’s job was settled before warning his brother about the new tutor’s personality: “I am sure no truer & no purer person12 lives in wide New York; & he is a bold and a profound thinker though he may easily chance to pester you with some accidental crotchets and perhaps a village exaggeration of the value of facts.” He filed a similar complaint with Hawthorne, who wrote in his diary about a visit from Emerson: “Mr. Thoreau was discussed,13 and his approaching departure; in respect to which we agreed pretty well; but Mr. Emerson appears to have suffered some inconveniency from his experience of Mr. Thoreau as an inmate. It may well be that such a sturdy and uncompromising person is fitter to meet occasionally in the open air, than to have as a permanent guest at table and fireside.”
One person who was disappointed to learn of Henry’s pending departure was a new friend who was in the process of moving to Concord. Emerson had introduced Henry to Ellery Channing, a nephew of the prominent Unitarian theologian, in December 1840, and during Channing’s later visits to Concord they had become friends. He had looked into renting various Concord residences, especially after marrying Margaret Fuller’s sister Ellen in 1842. Spring 1843 found Henry supervising and assisting in work to make the Red Lodge, a small cottage on the Cambridge Turnpike, habitable for the Channings—everything from newly plastering around the chimney to moving the privy from behind the barn. In his mid-twenties, Channing was a poet of little renown but, in the eyes of Emerson and other Transcendentalists, great potential. Pampered as a child and gifted with supreme confidence in his own talent, Channing was notoriously self-indulgent and unreliable, but he and Henry were becoming steadily closer friends when he learned of Henry’s departure.
On the evening of April 7, Hawthorne had just picked up his pen to write in his journal when Henry knocked on the door of the parsonage. Ten months into his marriage and still love-struck, Hawthorne was lonely but not particularly in the mood for company. A few hours earlier, Sophia had climbed into a wagon that carried her to the stage house for a journey to Boston to visit her sister Mary, who was about to marry. Previously, they had spent only one night apart, late in the fall when Hawthorne went on a two-day trek with Emerson and was thrilled to see Sophia upon his return—“the first time that I ever came home14 in my life,” he commented to his journal, “for I never had a home before.”
The past few weeks had been a difficult time. Sophia’s pregnancy had ended in a miscarriage after she fell while cavorting on the ice. Their dream of having a child was lost, possibly forever. Only four days before Henry came to their door, they had stood together at a window of Hawthorne’s study, peering sadly out at the world. Sophia took off her ring and scratched a melancholy reassurance on the window pane: “Man’s accidents are God’s purposes.”15 Then Hawthorne took the ring and etched his name and the year and added, “The smallest twig leans clear against the sky. Composed by my wife and written with her diamond,” as they watched the golden sun go down.
Now, always both reveling in solitude and inventing little symbolic gestures about his marriage, Hawthorne had thought to avoid conversing with others during Sophia’s absence—but Henry’s arrival wrecked this plan. Hawthorne was also sweaty and tired. After affectionately watching from the doorstep until Sophia’s wagon had rattled around the curve of Monument Street toward the north end of the village near the courthouse, he had vigorously sawed wood to distract himself. Following his solitary dinner he lay down with a copy of The Dial, suspecting that its wordy pages would not prevent a nap. Thinking about Sophia’s journey, however, diverted him, and he had given up and turned to his journal when Henry arrived to return a book and to deliver his news. Under his arm he carried like a child his beloved music box for the entertainment of the Hawthornes during his absence.
Hawthorne expressed his genuine happiness at Henry’s prospects. Both were facing an urgent need for money. Naturally Henry was not earning much as an occasional surveyor or handyman. And despite Hawthorne’s growing fame, and the eagerness of periodicals such as the Democratic Review and Graham’s to publish his moody, elegant stories (and essays disguised as stories), he was receiving no payment16 for his work. Again and again magazines promised respectable payment and never sent it, no matter how many times the author begged or cajoled.
They discussed the likely spiritual benefits of Henry’s move, then chatted about The Dial and Bronson Alcott. Hawthorne hated to see Henry leave, because he considered him, as he observed to his journal after his friend walked home, “one of the few persons, I think, with whom to hold intercourse is like hearing the wind among the boughs of a forest-tree; and with all this wild freedom, there is high and classic cultivation in him too.” But he knew that Henry had not yet found his own path. He seemed to lack what Hawthorne thought of as the “guiding clue” that would weave together his interests and ambitions. Also, the young man lacked a position in the world, and for that matter simply needed greater experience of the cosmos beyond Concord and Walden Pond. And there was the matter of Henry’s health. He seemed to be haunted by the Thoreau family curse of consumption. Perhaps a change of scenery from these boggy lowlands might improve his overall resistance and restore him to the level of energy he had demonstrated before his brother’s death, little more than a year ago. Hawthorne wound and rewound Henry’s music box until its charm paled.
A few days later, following a drenching rain that melted late snow and began breaking up the ice in the river, Hawthorne’s servant announced that Mr. Thoreau had returned. Henry suggested that he and Hawthorne make an expedition in the Pond Lily, and Hawthorne agreed. He was fresh from a morning of unsatisfying writing and a trek to the village to find their post box empty despite Sophia’s absence. He was restless because finally she was due back that night. Together he and Henry bailed out the boat’s accumulated rainwater—as well as seepage from a persistent leak—and rowed up the river, where they climbed a muddy hill of melting snow and admired the view. The flooded Concord River looked like an ocean. Large cakes of ice were drifting clumsily downriver like barges, and Henry and Hawthorne boyishly floated back to the parsonage aboard one. The boat built by Henry and John clunked along behind it, empty.
“Want a cab, sir?”17
It was the first sentence Henry heard as the big boat docked at a wharf on the southern tip of Manhattan Island on May 7, 1843. As he readied his bag and prepared to leap onto land, he ignored the many drivers calling from behind their muddied horses. He had journeyed with William Emerson’s wife, who was ending a month-long stay with her brother-in-law in Concord. They were arriving later than scheduled, in the middle of a busy Sunday morning, because low tide had run their boat aground on the Thames River near New London, Connecticut. Near the dock was Castle Garden (originally called Fort Castle), a round, three-tiered fort of red sandstone. Finished in 1811, along with the similar Castle Williams on the northwest point of Governors Island half a mile to the south, Castle Garden featured the innovative design of enclosed gun placements, visible only as castle-like lancet windows slotted into the lower circle. Along with other regional forts, including one on little Ellis Island, they had been intended to guard the harbor against British invasion, but they did not see action during what was being called the War of 1812.
“You want a cab, sir!”
This driver was telling, not asking. With his face carefully expressionless—his usual defense—Henry ignored him, too. Hunched in dirty coats, the phalanx of cab drivers sat atop their carts, resting their elbows on their knees and holding whip handles pointed like compass needles at the self-conscious young man in his country duds.
“You want a nice cab, sir,” confided a more courteous driver, and hazarded, “to take you to Fourth Street.”
Apparently they declined and took the ferry to Staten Island. The Snuggery, the Emersons’ house, turned out to be long and not tall, painted brown, with a garden including potted plants and a piazza around which grapevines flourished. Surrounded by woods, the house was halfway up a hill. When Henry faced northeast, he gazed across Upper Bay to New York City; northwest showed him Newark Bay and, closer, the busy ship-filled tidal strait that connected the two, the Kill van Kull—a name recalling the early Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam. If he turned southwest, he could see all the way across the bay to the north-pointing barrier spit of Sandy Hook, which protected the Lower Bay and the coast of Staten Island from Atlantic waves. One evening Henry climbed to the pinnacle of one Madame Grimes’s house and, as he turned around in a circle, he could see almost the entire island.
Judge William Emerson ran his household on a tight schedule: breakfast at half past six, lunch at noon, dinner at five. “From 9 to 2 or thereabouts I am the schoolmaster,” Henry wrote to his parents, “and at other times as much the pupil as I can be.” He taught mathematics and Latin and at the latter Willie proved precocious. At times his brothers, three-year-old Haven and two-year-old Charles, joined the class, occasionally accompanied by the young son of a family across the street. Yet Henry’s employment at the Snuggery turned out to be the least interesting part of his summer. He didn’t dislike young Willie; nor did he find him particularly appealing. To his own parents, Henry described Mr. and Mrs. Emerson as “not indeed of my kith or kin in any sense—but they are irreproachable and kind.” To Emerson he phrased it differently: “I do not feel myself especially serviceable18 to the good people with whom I live, except as inflictions are sanctified to the righteous.” Immediately upon arrival, he fell ill and had to renounce some of his obligations for a few days.
Over the next weeks, as usual, Henry paid more attention to the world around him than to the people around him. Tutoring was simply a job; his real interests lay elsewhere. “There are two things I hear19 and am aware I live in the neighborhood of,” Henry wrote to Emerson two weeks after his arrival, “—the roar of the sea and the hum of the city.”
The sea roared below the house. Henry loved the solitary beach, which seemed distant from any city. Skinny and quick and curious about everything outdoors, he prowled the shore like a sandpiper, past fishermen spreading their shad nets to dry in the bright spring sun, past long-tailed horseshoe crabs winding across the sand in their gleaming helmet-like shells. Here and there dead fish lay among flotsam and seaweed flung by the tide. Often the surf washed up larger creatures—the bloated, monstrous corpse of a pig or even a horse, their stench so rank it struck Henry as darkly luxuriant. He watched teams of grunting oxen splash in the surf as their drivers coaxed them to draw heavy boats out of water and across sand. Just offshore, clumsy fishing boats bobbed like toys, while beyond them sailing ships moved more gracefully until they sank below the horizon. “The sea seems very near from the hills,” Henry wrote to Emerson, “but it proves a long way over the plain, and yet you may be wet with the spray before you can believe that you are there.”
The hum of the city appealed to him far less. He claimed to be unimpressed by New York. He was disappointed with everything, he told Emerson, but then remarked in his provincial way that he had been disappointed before coming here. However, he added, “The crowd is something new,20 and to be attended to.” During the 1830s, despite cholera epidemics and the return of yellow fever, despite the disastrous fire of 1835 and the financial crash two years later, the population of New York City had leaped to well over three hundred thousand. Henry clomped in his country boots down the mostly cobblestone pavement of wide and sunlit Broadway.21 In the block between Chambers and Warren Streets, wooden blocks22 laid a few years earlier as an experimental roadbed were already showing too much wear to make them a feasible alternative to time-honored stone.
Henry found himself surrounded by flocks of fashionable women.23 No doubt he found such proximity disconcerting; back at the Emerson house, the maids had noticed that Henry could not even walk past them in the kitchen24 without blushing. Here rainbows of parasols twirled in delicate hands. The thrown-back hoods of the women’s colorful cloaks unveiled an intimate lining of a different hue. Every step afforded a distracting parade of satin or lace or silk—fluttering tassels and ribbons, peekaboo glimpses of stockings. Well-groomed young men of Henry’s age boasted beards under their chin, along the neck and throat, and many had turned down their shirt collar in a recent fashion trend. Dandies would promenade on the steps of a hotel, generously providing tourists an opportunity to admire their finery. “It must have a very bad influence25 on children,” Henry wrote to his mother, “to see so many human beings at once—mere herds of men.”
Painfully missing the quiet paths of Walden, Henry slogged from office to office, from magazine to book publisher, yearning to find someone—anyone—who might dangle the carrot of potential publication. At the offices of the New Mirror, the New World, and Brother Jonathan, he was informed that they were already saturated with free contributions. The Knickerbocker claimed to be too poor to pay for anything. The Democratic Review cautiously expressed interest. Henry doggedly navigated the crowds, dodging a phalanx of gigs and shays, workaday hackney cabs, agile two-wheeled tilburies. Many private carriages were driven by coachmen, some of them Negro, a few actually dressed in formal livery like a military uniform. Hulking workmen carried or dragged blocks of ice, with insulating sawdust still clinging to its slippery surface, into rowdy taverns and dark basement-level oyster bars.
A year earlier, in the spring of 1842, Charles Dickens had walked these streets during his first visit to the United States. Having just turned thirty, Dickens was fresh from the triumph of his fifth novel, Barnaby Rudge, and was mobbed by Americans from his first appearance in Boston. He found New York City considerably less clean than Boston. He considered the Five Points area “in respect of filth and wretchedness” comparable to London’s own dismal Seven Dials neighborhood, which Dickens had written about as early as his collection Sketches by Boz in 1836. He admired Wall Street, examined the Lower Manhattan jail nicknamed the Tombs, found the streets disappointingly quiet in contrast to London’s, gawked at the almshouse and orphans’ farm, and worried over house fires that reddened the skyline every night. He also wrote at length about a denizen of the streets with whom Henry also became familiar. Everywhere Dickens had gone, everywhere Henry went, the streets were populated with vagabond swine—ugly brown creatures with black blotches—that prowled the island as if they owned it. Skinny-legged hogs and portly sows and round little piglets sauntered alone, in pairs, and in parties of half a dozen or more. Their sparsely haired backs looked poorly upholstered. Many pigs showed battle scars—missing ear, abbreviated tail. Roaming far and wide, they grunted alongside beaver-hatted walkers and squealed out of the way of sporty high-wheeled phaetons, and at sunset they could be seen migrating by the dozens toward wherever they slept.
Like the pigs, Henry wandered all over Manhattan. Desperate for cash, he even tried to sell a most unliterary periodical, American Agriculturist, door to door, once slogging through a drenching rain. Founded in New York City the year before and headquartered on Park Row, the magazine bore on its cover an optimistic montage of the fruits of modern husbandry—cows and pigs and sheep, crops from pumpkin to corn, and an arsenal of technologies such as steel plow, scythe, and watermill.
Henry watched ships disgorge hundreds upon hundreds of new immigrants.26 While waiting in quarantine on Staten Island for their ship to be cleaned, they stretched their limbs and peered westward toward a new horizon. In the city Henry saw sunburned immigrant families cooking their modest dinnera on the pavement. In his rambles he explored telegraph stations and borrowed books from the Mercantile Library Association. As usual, after a glance at a farm’s soil, Henry walked away with an Indian arrowhead in his pocket. He attended a sermon by Lucretia Mott, a renowned anti-slavery and women’s rights activist, where he admired the simplicity and sincerity of the service. Quaker women filing into the meetinghouse in their black bonnets and white kerchiefs reminded him of a flock of chickadees.
Helen wrote from Concord, asking Henry to help her locate a teaching position on Staten Island. Apparently he was unable to help, but he turned again to a poem he had written after John’s death and mailed a copy to Helen on the twenty-third of May. “In place of something fresher,”27 he added, “I send you the following verses from my Journal, written some time ago.” The poem began with the age-old question of the grieving: “Brother, where dost thou dwell?” and a stanza later posed a question equally ancient: “Are not the fates more kind / Than they appear?” Near the end he wondered aloud “Where chiefly shall I look / To feel thy presence near?” and decided that the answer would be outdoors, along the brook, in the voices of the birds. He thought of John’s agonizing pain in his last days and asked his spirit,
Is thy brow clear again
As in thy youthful years?
And was that ugly pain
The summit of thy fears?
Yet thou wast cheery still;
They could not quench thy fire;
Thou didst abide their will,
And then retire.
In June, Henry received an affectionate letter from Lidian. He took it to the top of the hill on the island and sat watching the sunset and looking down upon the ocean, where dozens of ships were heading out of the great harbor toward distant ports, and wrote an almost romantic reply.
You seem to speak28 out of a very clear and high heaven, where any one may be who stands so high. . . . The thought of you will constantly elevate my life; it will be something always above the horizon to behold, as when I look up at the evening star. . . . My actual life is unspeakably mean, compared with what I know and see that it might be. . . . What wealth is it to have such friends that we cannot think of them without elevation. . . . I send my love to my other friend and brother, whose nobleness I slowly recognize.
At times on Staten Island, caught up in his teaching and his writing, Henry felt disconnected from nature, a step back from it. He encountered too many people, too many houses, too much noise. Then out of the very ground beneath his feet erupted like dragons’ teeth a reminder of the mythical power of nature lurking behind everyday life. All over Staten Island—in field and lawn and cemetery—locusts crawled out of the earth29 and swarmed with biblical abandon. While walking around the island in the humid summer, admiring the redolent white magnolia blossoms and the waxy yellow cups of tulip tree flowers, Henry could see the locusts climbing shrub limbs, tangled in a dog’s fur, snapped up buzzing in the beaks of chickens.
These weren’t the annual crop of locusts whose thrumming buzz was part of the unheard music of summer. Those would not emerge until July. These were the seventeen-year periodical cicada—about half the size of the annual locusts, with huge red eyes and orange-veined wings that folded elegantly over their back. The young emerged from the ground a ghostly white but developed other colors within a couple of hours. After each molt, their hollow skins crunched underfoot and piled up at doorsills like snowdrifts. The locusts bored into twigs and killed them; by early July Henry could see clusters of twigs that from a distance resembled hanging chestnut blossoms. The locusts were loud, too, their buzzing Pha-r-r-aoh—Pha-r-r-aoh30 audible from well out on the water.
Like Rip Van Winkle, the Kaatskill man who slept through the Revolution in Washington Irving’s 1819 story, the locusts had returned to find their world different. When the larvae went underground back in 1826, Henry was nine years old and John eleven; John Quincy Adams was president, only the sixth since the Revolution. Through six thousand sunrises, the insects had incubated in the soil beneath the feet of New Yorkers. When they reappeared in July 1843, John Tyler was the tenth president, having succeeded Ol’ Tippecanoe, who died a month after his hard-won election, and Henry was turning twenty-six. Then the locusts were gone, not to return until 1860.
Meanwhile Emerson strolled his beloved Walden trails, watching the stirrings of railroad building with a skeptical eye. The Fitchburg Railroad was finally reaching Concord. Woods and fields were noisy with officious surveyors planting their red-flagged poles and triangulating their location with an elaborate tripod-mounted theodolite, its adjustable viewing tube balanced atop graded semicircles of brass. A long-established instrument for measuring both vertical and horizontal angles, refined in the late eighteenth century, the theodolite had become crucial in surveying. To Emerson the surveyors’ repeated calls of feet and inches became a constant song around Walden Pond. Elsewhere the railroad ties were already being laid in their unnaturally straight lines, including near Bronson Alcott’s house on Lexington Road. Daily Emerson witnessed the railroad’s need for trees: trees killed to make way for tracks, trees killed to shape into ties, trees killed to stoke forges, trees killed to fuel the trains themselves. It was unnerving, this dragon’s ravenous appetite. And he found many of the Irish laborers an insult to his eye and ear.
When Emerson complained about the profanation of his Eden,31 Henry sat in a cornfield on Staten Island, dipping his pen into the portable inkwell that Elizabeth Hoar had given him, and demonstrated that daily encounters with the hungry poor in New York had—at least temporarily—softened his view of humanity:
But no matter let them hack away—The32 sturdy Irish arms that do the work are of more worth than oak or maple. Methinks I could look with equanimity upon a long street of Irish cabins and pigs and children revelling in the genial Concord dirt, and I should still find my Walden wood and Fair Haven in their tanned and happy faces.
The Irish thronged Concord woods and town with their exotic accents. As they had done elsewhere in the railroad’s progress along the eastern coast, the workers built rough shanties near the surveyed lines. While Henry trod the streets of New York City, surrounded by Irish laborers fresh from the old country in their near-uniform of dull trousers and long-tailed blue coats, Nathaniel Hawthorne observed their arrival in Concord with the railroad. As he strolled a path at Walden, disgusted by the bleak gash of the railroad’s embankment, he came upon a makeshift village33 of these low huts. The Irish had built them under the spreading walnut and oak branches without clearing away trees. The huts had been slapped together with rough boards whose ends protruded haphazardly, and soil was piled against some of them almost to the roof, with weeds sprouting in these mounded burrows. A muddy hog snout poked from a ramshackle sty. Women washed clothing in wooden tubs, while whitened laundry fluttered above them from lines strung between trees. The huts were barely shelter from the elements, a place to steal enough hours of exhausted slumber to hold body and soul together while the workers hammered out the new path of commerce. Innocent of their future, children ran laughing through splashes of sunlight.
Writing was never far from Henry’s mind on Staten Island. With introductions from Emerson and others, he met the theologian Henry James and the newspaper editor Horace Greeley. Henry and Emerson corresponded often about work. In early September, amid chatty news about Channing and Elizabeth Hoar and other mutual friends, Emerson asked for more Greek translations for The Dial. Then he mentioned that he had been meaning to send Henry’s essay “A Winter Walk” to the printer for inclusion in the next issue, but that he had concerns about Henry’s writing style. “I had some hesitation about it, notwithstanding its faithful observation and its fine sketches of the pickerel-fisher and of the wood-chopper, on account of mannerism, an old charge of mine,—as if, by attention, one could get the trick of the rhetoric; for example, to call a cold place sultry, a solitude public, a wilderness domestic (a favorite word), and in the woods to insult over cities, whilst the woods, again, are dignified by comparing them to cities, armies, etc.” He added a significant remark: “By pretty free omissions, however, I have removed my principal objections.” Henry accepted the changes and the essay was scheduled.
Henry informed his parents about everything from the price of pantaloons ($2.25 per ready-made pair) and how well his stockings were holding up to his opinion of the preaching of a young clergyman. “I think of you all very often,”34 Henry wrote to his mother in midsummer, “and wonder if you are still separated from me only by so many miles of earth, or so many miles of memory.” He liked getting the news of lively events in Concord.35 A bank officer named Wyman had been charged with fraud, for example, and the attorney and statesman Daniel Webster had been retained in the case and was adding some celebrity to the Concord courthouse. “Methinks I should be content to sit at the back-door in Concord, under the poplar-tree, henceforth forever. Not that I am homesick at all,—for places are strangely indifferent to me,—but Concord is still a cynosure to my eyes, and I find it hard to attach it, even in imagination, to the rest of the globe, and tell where the seam is.”
Autumn crept in and turned toward winter. Thanksgiving was the most revered annual holiday in Concord. Many heads of household sought the largest turkey they could raise or buy or hunt. Plum pudding, cranberry sauce; figs and apples, nuts and raisins; mince, pumpkin, and squash pies—the hot, aromatic dishes kept coming, and leftovers lingered for days. Naturally Henry journeyed home from Staten Island to see his family for the holiday. Admitting to himself how much he had missed Concord, and how little he had enjoyed tutoring Emerson’s nephew, and how little he had accomplished in the offices of New York City periodicals, he decided to quit this job.
He visited Staten Island again only to gather his clothing and books and returned immediately to Concord. In mid-December, Emerson wrote to his brother William, “Henry T. thanks you for the purse36 and says that the Pindar he will return through me, & says that he left nothing of any value at all in his chamber. You will please use your discretion with any matters found there.”
Back home in Concord, Henry did not rejoin the Emerson household. He moved back to the Thoreau boardinghouse and again concentrated on pencils.37