More Beautiful than Useful
Gradually Henry overcame lack of discipline, shortage of funds, and illness to raise his Harvard points to 14,397 and his rank to nineteenth out of forty-three graduates in the Class of 1837. He was barely in the top half, but his acknowledged intelligence and writing skill were enough to get him invited to participate in the commencement proceedings. The two dozen or so students chosen to contribute were notified by the president’s freshman dogsbody, who instructed them to see Mr. Quincy himself for particulars. At his office each young man was handed a slip of paper with instructions, such as Jones—a disquisition,1 four minutes, or Brown—an English oration, twelve minutes. During summer term students worked up their presentation. They were expected to first deliver it before Professor Channing, who would help them vent its inflating rhetoric. Next they rehearsed. Then came a trip to the dusty shop of Ma’am Hyde in Dunster Street near the school, where fifty cents would rent for the day one of many aging black silk gowns that she stocked.
Soon Henry found himself declaring, “The characteristic of our epoch2 is perfect freedom—freedom of thought and action.” He liked to hold forth and on this day he was addressing his favorite theme—personal and intellectual freedom. “The indignant Greek, the oppressed Pole, the jealous American assert it,” he continued. “The skeptic no less than the believer, the heretic no less than the faithful child of the Church, have begun to enjoy it.”
Years of public discussion had cured him of stage fright. The Concord Academy Debating Society had served him well, and each year at Harvard he had participated in requisite exhibitions. He spoke calmly as he looked down at other members of the notoriously rowdy class, students from other grades, President Quincy, the twenty-seven professors and instructors and proctors who comprised the Harvard faculty, the governor, church officials, and other members of the audience. The host of the commencement was Cambridge’s still new First Parish Church. For this occasion it had been equipped with a speaker’s platform, from which Henry could look down at the center and side aisles3 and the box pews along the north and south walls.
Since before dawn, on this sweltering next-to-last day of August 1837—three months after the end of his senior year—covered handcarts and other vehicles,4 most driven by Negroes, had been rattling down the streets from Boston and surrounding the green fields of Cambridge Common. Few students partook of these foods and games, which were intended to provide sustenance and diversion to the jostling herd of locals who gawked at the proceedings. Harvard’s commencement was one of the town’s liveliest holidays. Early that morning, Massachusetts governor Edward Everett, escorted by cavalry, had departed the State House in Boston, driven in a fashionable barouche with facing seats behind the elevated driver.
Henry’s fellow students were a varied crew. They ranged from John Fenwick Eustis, scion of a Southern-born general and first in the class, to Manlius Stimson Clarke, earnest son of a poverty-haunted liberal clergyman. After an absence of two years serving as a merchant seaman, Cambridge-born Richard Henry Dana had returned and was graduating from Harvard’s law school. Following the summer holiday, students had returned for commencement, which was always scheduled for the last Wednesday in August. Class Day had taken place on the eighteenth of July, less than a week after Henry turned twenty. The valedictory mischief had been so besotted and disorderly that Josiah Quincy had already forbidden such carousal5 in the future.
Now, in contrast to the carnival-like commencement period, Henry and two other sweating graduates were presenting a formal debate—a conference, it was called: “The Commercial Spirit of Modern Times,6 Considered in its Influence on the Political, Moral, and Literary Character of a Nation.” The conference participants were listed as Charles Wyatt Rice of Brookfield, David Henry Thoreau of Concord—although sometimes he reversed the order of his given names—and Henry Vose of Dorchester. Friends for years with Vose, Henry8 also liked Rice, the son of a blacksmith,7 who had been a roommate first and then became a close friend. Before their turn arrived, the trio had had to sit through other speakers. It was customary for the best writer of Latin to deliver in the language of classical education an overture in which he flattered the governor, complimented professors, and joked about the girls present. Then came a paper on the religiously charged poetry of William Cowper and Edward Young, and finally an essay on “The Effect upon Literature of a Belief in Immortality.” After every few speakers,9 the college band struck up a yawn-preventing diversion. But the speeches were expected to drag on from nine in the morning until three or four in the afternoon, when Quincy began handing out diplomas, which were rolled and tied with a blue ribbon. Now and then restless audience members strolled outdoors and someone else wandered in to fill the empty seat.
Finally Henry and his partners rose to debate the idea of the new American commercial spirit that had arisen from the many changes during the decades since the war with England and the founding of the United States. “The winds and the waves are not enough for him,” Henry asserted of modern man; “he must needs ransack the bowels of the earth, that he may make for himself a highway of iron over its surface.” Ever since the successful performance of the pioneer steam locomotive Tom Thumb in 1830, when Henry was thirteen, trains had promised ever greater commercial possibilities that would further change society. And at this time dreamers were trying to perfect nothing less miraculous than instantaneous communication. Only a few months earlier, the English inventors Charles Wheatstone and Sir William Fothergill Cooke had patented something called an electric telegraph. Henry, who enjoyed engineering especially, liked to keep up to date about technology.
Some of Henry’s friends were former roommates who had spent enough time around him to get past his stoic façade. One, James Richardson,10 watched admiringly from the audience as Henry summed up their shared intellectual excitement about the prospects ahead for American men of this age. A younger friend was John Shepard Keyes,11 also from Concord Academy. Keyes was at Harvard that week for his entrance examinations, having ridden up from Concord the previous Sunday evening, lugging a carpetbag bulging with books, food, and an unrealistic certificate of moral character scribbled by the Concord minister Barzillai Frost. Henry had found his young townsman standing, with sagging bag in hand, at the college gates where the five o’clock mail coach dropped him. He took him up to his room in four-story red-brick Stoughton Hall, where Keyes stayed during this commencement weekend visit. Keyes was anxious about his upcoming days and awed by the venerable stone walls of Harvard, until a herd of Henry’s raucous classmates exploded into his room. Keyes enjoyed their tomfoolery. Fresh from the summer holiday, the seniors were loud in their casual disrespect for people whom Keyes had heard spoken of reverently over Concord dinner tables. When the fellow students learned that Keyes was also from Concord, Henry himself was chaffed for his provincial pride in his hometown.
Whatever his difficulties with real people, Henry found it easy to speak about humanity in the abstract. In his speech, thinking of telegraph wires and train tracks crossing the continent, Henry continued, “Man thinks faster and freer than ever before. He, moreover, moves faster and freer. He is more restless, because he is more independent than ever.” In writing and speaking, as in tramping the Massachusetts countryside, he sought a panoramic view. He liked to climb mountains and reduce civilization to a sandbox observed from Olympus. His side of the graduation debate was his farewell to college, where he had learned to read classical poets and contemporary German newspapers, where he had devoured economics and politics, but where he had seldom felt happy. As he spoke, he drew back from his fellow human beings more than he had in his classroom essays and imagined how human life would look through a telescope viewing Earth from somewhere out among the stars. A celestial observer would see the characteristics of this age, Henry decided, as scurry and bustle: “There would be hammering and chipping in one quarter; baking and brewing, buying and selling, money-changing and speechmaking in another.” He made explicit his contrarian view of such chaos: “This curious world which we inhabit is more wonderful than it is convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.”
After characterizing a lust for wealth as “unmanly,” Henry admitted grudgingly in his closing remarks, “The spirit we are considering is not altogether and without exception bad. We rejoice in it as one more indication of the entire and universal freedom that characterizes the age in which we live—as an indication that the human race is making one more advance in that infinite series of progressions which awaits it.”
After Rice, Vose, and Henry sat down, a young man rose to deliver his speech—a “literary disquisition,” the audience read in their catalogs, on “Modern Imitation of the Ancient Greek Tragedy.” The moment toward which Henry had been working for months was over. Four years of college were behind him. Like every other graduate in the room, he wondered what lay ahead.
Henry was not bound by the prohibitions that kept his mother and sisters from walking alone in the world. Unlike the more than two million slaves shackled in the South or the tens of thousands of Indians who were being pushed ever farther into the West, Henry had been able to attend college and earn a degree. He could go anywhere he chose in the New World or elsewhere, could see everything, learn anything. But he wasn’t going to use his own freedom to traverse the twenty-six states or the violent, exotic territories beyond. Certainly he wasn’t about to explore tropical islands or Himalayan plateaus. He was going back home to live with his parents.
Nearby that day as Henry spoke during commencement was his Concord schoolmate and recent roommate Charles Stearns Wheeler. Boyish and round-faced,12 the friendly son of a prosperous farmer, Wheeler was a brilliant scholar who ranked second in the graduating class—far ahead of Henry, who greatly admired him. After rooming together, they had been friends throughout their college years. One day in early October 1833, shortly after they met as freshmen, Henry evaded both morning and evening chapel to walk to Concord with Wheeler. It was almost twenty miles, and the long last two Henry limped in his stocking feet because his shoes had rubbed blisters. It took him three hours just to walk from Lincoln, and necessarily his visit home was brief, but he had great conversations with Wheeler. Although Wheeler was an insatiably curious young devourer of books, he was otherwise an unlikely chum for contentious Henry—always smiling, happy to obey the college rules.
Precocious and industrious, Wheeler had already worked in publishing for a couple of years, editing manuscripts, creating indexes, laboriously writing out fair copies. His early efforts on the Library of American Biography series led to editorial work with the writer and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose book Nature Henry had devoured after its publication in late 1836. The acclaimed Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle had been unable to arrange a book publisher for his semi-autobiographical novel Sartor Resartus, only to find an American champion in Emerson. Carlyle’s experimental tale thus first appeared between covers in the United States, with a preface by Emerson. It became available only because Wheeler spent many hours in the mansion on tree-lined Pearl Street that housed the handsome Boston Athenæum, painstakingly—and without pay—transcribing every word of Carlyle’s book from the dense two-column pages of London’s Fraser’s Magazine, its only previous publication.
Recently, during the break between the end of classes and commencement, Henry had spent a few weeks living with Wheeler13 in the rough summer hut he had built the year before under trees near the edge of Flint’s Pond, a large shallow lake a couple of miles southeast of Concord, near Lincoln. Wheeler invited various college chums to stay with him and his family, and often they slept in the shanty, although they ate at the family house. Henry enjoyed visiting the pond. He loved the miles of woodland, rich in flourishing plants and animals, between his home on Main Street and the shores of the pond—a solitary ramble in a garden larger than kings could afford. Flint’s Pond was shallow and Henry loved wading in it. Although the sand beneath his bare feet was soft, its sculpted ripples felt surprisingly firm. He admired the view of a reedy island cleverly in its midst dubbed Reed Island. He liked to climb the mountain beyond the lake and peer back across the woods that hid his route there. It looked like a painter’s landscape, tinted and faded by the air itself, romanticizing the view toward Concord and the mountains beyond, and providing an almost bird’s-eye view of his beloved Walden Pond, a mile and a half from Concord.
Even the rustling straw bunks in Wheeler’s cabin didn’t spoil Henry’s first taste of restful solitude, which contrasted greatly with the noise of the Thoreau boardinghouse. His family had moved from one abode to another throughout his life; he had never had a place to call home for long. The image of a lakeside cabin14 lingered in his mind.