God and Nature Face to Face
In Early September 1837, Henry had received a letter from his Harvard chum James Richardson Jr., who had been in the First Church in Cambridge applauding Henry’s commencement conference with Henry Vose and Charles Wyatt Rice. “I hear,” wrote Richardson, “that you are comfortably located,1 in your native town, as the guardian of its children, in the immediate vicinity, I suppose, of one of our most distinguished Apostles of the Future—R. W. Emerson.”
Although he had quickly abandoned the role of guardian of Concord’s children, Henry saw more and more of the distinguished apostle. Before they were fellow villagers, he and Ralph Waldo Emerson had been crossing paths for years. Emerson had not only attended Harvard, beginning in 1818, but had lived in the same building. Emerson had spoken at Harvard more than once during Henry’s time there, and he had also given public lectures in Concord. They met as early as February 1835, when Emerson was among those examining Henry2 and other sophomores to determine how well they retained and understood Richard Whately’s 1828 book Elements of Rhetoric.
Soon after the publication of Emerson’s book-length essay Nature in September 1836, Henry went to the library at Harvard and checked out a new black-leather-bound copy. Often falling into the tone of Emerson’s Unitarian preaching days, its ninety-two pages comprised a manifesto for radical change in American life that had been provoking impassioned discussion for the last several months. It fed Henry’s growing passion for independence and for a personal relationship with the natural world.
Emerson was a calm and lyrical revolutionary. “Our age is retrospective,” he began. “The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?” Beginning to be called Transcendentalists, after a reference in Immanuel Kant’s 1781 Critique of Pure Reason, Emerson and his loose coalition of intellectual colleagues sought to establish the validity of each individual’s quest for an original relation to the universe. Emerson had been showered with praise and damnation for his argument on behalf of a spirituality inherent in each human being, an assertion that carried with it an implicit rejection of much of biblical Christianity. He had been preceded, however, by other thinkers such as the Reverend William Ellery Channing, who delivered his sermon “Likeness to God” eight years before Emerson published Nature, and by the idealism of the Romantic poets such as Coleridge and Wordsworth. Emerson’s beloved Harvard was sometimes denounced for serving as a breeding ground for radical freethinkers who wanted to reform both religion and society.
In 1832, only three years after becoming an assistant pastor of Boston’s Second Church, he had written in his journal, “I have sometimes thought3 that, in order to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated. In an altered age, we worship in the dead forms of our forefathers.” That year he resigned and had not held a church position since. In Nature he divided his study of attitudes about nature into eight sections that explored how human beings think of the world from which they come and upon which they depend: Nature, Commodity, Beauty, Language, Discipline, Idealism, Spirit, and finally a section on possible changes entitled Prospects. Emerson’s overall theme was that divinity was to be found throughout nature, and that nature included human beings. The divine was within all, not bottled up in a deity.
Henry eagerly devoured the book, from the vague epigraph by Plotinus (“Nature is but an image or imitation of wisdom, the last thing of the soul; nature being a thing which doth only do, but not know”) to the grand summation in the last section:
Adam called his house, heaven and earth;4 Caesar called his house, Rome; you perhaps call yours, a cobbler’s trade; a hundred acres of ploughed land; or a scholar’s garret. Yet line for line and point for point, your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names. Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions.
Henry especially embraced comments encouraging him in his independent and freethinking ways. Happily steeped in classical literature—he didn’t like to admit it, but he had been profoundly influenced by his Harvard years—Henry nonetheless shared the prevailing American doubts about decadent Old World literary values. It was a time of strident nationalism and on this point as on many others Henry joined the already established chorus. His natural bent was always toward scholar as much as naturalist, poet as much as social critic.
Some of Emerson’s phrases evolved almost into Henry’s mottoes: “To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.”
Earlier in 1837, Henry’s own writing—and Emerson’s clear influence on it—had come to the older man’s attention in a roundabout way.
Boarders at the Thoreau house included Lucy Jackson Brown, from Plymouth.5 She was the sister of Emerson’s wife, Lydia Jackson Emerson, whom Emerson called Lidian. In 1834, two years after resigning his position as minister of the Second Unitarian Church in Boston, Emerson had moved up the turnpike to Concord. After her husband spent their money6 and abandoned her, Mrs. Brown moved to the village with her two children. At first Lidian was glad to have her nearby, because her presence made Concord less boring in comparison with festive Plymouth. But Lucy spent almost six months living with the newlywed Emersons, and the strain was too much for all of them. When Lidian next encouraged her sister to return to Concord, she did not invite Lucy and the children to live with her, so they moved into the Thoreau boardinghouse. There she met Henry.
Mrs. Brown was famously kindhearted and encouraging to young people. She became friends first with Sophia and gradually with her siblings. When, in the spring of 1837, Mrs. Brown and Sophia went to hear the lively and charismatic Emerson speak about manners—repeating a talk he had already presented in Boston—Sophia leaned close to whisper that Emerson’s comments reminded her strongly of some paragraphs that Henry had written recently. Back home she dug out the passage and showed it to Mrs. Brown. Struck by the similarity to her brother-in-law’s philosophy—she did not know that Henry had just read Nature and was thinking aloud in imitation of it—Mrs. Brown took the writing to Lidian. Her sister was known for her reliable generosity and charitable interest in neighbors. About once a week during winter, for example, a boy would pull a large sled along the snowy, horse-shoe-patterned Concord streets, stopping at the homes of Lidian’s friends to deliver a still-warm pie.
The Emersons lived in a plain, white two-story house7 called Bush, set at an angle to the road, with tall chestnuts in the backyard and one side shielded by a small grove of fir and pine trees. It was just past the eastern edge of the village, beyond the Unitarian meetinghouse and across from the primary school, where elm-lined Main Street diverged into the Lexington Road and the Cambridge Turnpike—where the British had marched in April of 1775. In the V of the intersection Emerson owned an apple orchard. They had bought the house only two years earlier, with money from Emerson’s first wife’s estate, and were still planting trees and flowers. Residing with them was Emerson’s colorful and fervently religious mother, Ruth Haskins Emerson.
Lidian in turn showed Henry’s writing to Emerson. Always interested in young people, and already establishing a habit of mentoring young men, the thirty-four-year-old Emerson invited Henry to come meet him the next time he was back in Concord. Soon Henry did so.
They were a study in contrasts. Emerson was a slim six feet tall and carried himself with the air of a gentleman, his dark hair parted high on the left and half covering his ears; Henry shorter by a few inches, long-armed, with unkempt light brown hair. Even Emerson’s aquiline nose seemed more refined, quite unlike Henry’s beak. Only his narrow sloping shoulders resembled Emerson’s. Emerson was naturally graceful, Henry awkwardness personified. Yet they were immediately drawn to each other and soon began a habit of regular conversations and walks.
Discomfited around girls his own age, Henry was often drawn to older women who treated him kindly and whose intelligence and quirky wit could match his own. He seems to have been attracted, possibly romantically, to the smart and pretty thirty-nine-year-old Mrs. Brown, with her dark hair and slightly pointed chin. One day in May, during a walk through the warm spring woods and fields of Concord, he gathered a wild bouquet for her—several fresh purple blossoms of violets, as well as sheep sorrel. To farmers, sorrel was a weed. Its young leaves, clustered at the base below an almost leafless stem of tiny red flowers, were egg-shaped, but as the plant grew the leaves became more pointed like an arrowhead. Henry admired the way by mid-June its tiny blossoms could paint a field red.
He wrapped the bouquet in a piece of paper on which he had written a romantically melancholy poem. Then he tied the bundle with a wisp of straw and tossed it through the open window of Mrs. Brown’s room in the boardinghouse. The verses distilled out of the bouquet and its wrapping every ounce of symbolism a bookish, nature-loving nineteen-year-old could find, as if the bouquet itself were the poem:
Sic Vita
I am a parcel of vain strivings tied
By a chance bond together,
Dangling this way and that, their links
Were made so loose and wide,
Methinks,
For milder weather.
A bunch of violets without their roots,
And sorrel intermixed,
Encircled by a wisp of straw
Once coiled about their shoots,
The law
By which I’m fixed . . .
Two years earlier, in 1835, the year he settled in Concord and purchased Bush, Emerson had been asked to write a lecture celebrating Concord’s two centuries. Later, after trying several other speakers who turned out to be unavailable, the North Bridge Battle Monument Committee approached him about writing a poetic tribute to accompany the unveiling of the Concord Monument, a marble obelisk to commemorate the battle at the North Bridge, which launched the Revolutionary War. Reverend Ripley had donated land for it beside his venerable Manse (as some parsonages were called). Emerson planned his poem to be sung to the familiar strains of the “Old Hundred,” a hymn by Louis Bourgeois that dated back to the sixteenth-century Genevan Psalter. It acquired its nickname through association with the 100th Psalm (“Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands”), but its best known incarnation was in Thomas Ken’s beloved Anglican hymn “Praise God, from Whom All Blessings Flow.” It was in long meter, four lines of eight syllables each. Like most poets writing about military triumphs, Emerson promoted the battle to a symbolic level, celebrating victory over oppression and the founding of a new kind of government.
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled;
Here once the embattled farmers stood;
And fired the shot heard round the world . . .
Delays had pushed the celebration into 1837, enabling Henry’s and Emerson’s paths to cross in new ways. In June, just before the end of Henry’s senior year at Harvard, Emerson wrote a letter to the college’s president in praise of Henry’s scholarly and personal virtues. Josiah Quincy had found Henry a bit insubordinate and lax in his studies and Emerson defended him. He didn’t yet know him well, but he was generous in his support of talented young men.
Then on Independence Day Henry sang in the choir that performed the song Emerson called the “Concord Hymn.” Henry loved to sing. He sang alone and in groups, at home and in informal gatherings. Sometimes, like his father and brother, he accompanied others on a flute. On the fourth Samuel Hoar gave a speech,8 but Emerson himself was in Plymouth at the time. In his absence, his poem was first read aloud and then sung by Henry and the rest of the choir.
Emerson was becoming known as a writer and lecturer, but he had yet to build a reputation as a poet, so the response to his “Concord Hymn” was heartening. He had written about the bridge that he himself could see from the Manse, where he had lived briefly in 1834. From its second-floor window, Emerson’s grandmother had held up her daughter Mary, Emerson’s aunt, to see the redcoats approaching in 1775.
“Do you keep a journal?”9 Emerson asked Henry in late October 1837, a couple of months after his return to Concord.
Emerson believed passionately in the value of maintaining a diary, both for recording and analyzing experience and for working out thoughts prior to writing them up in more public form. He had maintained one off and on since entering Harvard in 1817, at the age of fourteen, and more and more frequently since his early twenties. One way Emerson mentored his various young charges was by encouraging them to be more like him. Like many of his Transcendentalist colleagues, Emerson esteemed friendship highly. The notion of ideal friendship, in fact, haunted his relationships with actual acquaintances. Only the day before discussing journals with Henry, Emerson had written vaguely in his own, “friendship is good which begins on sentiment10 & proceeds into all mutual convenience and alternation of great benefits.”
Henry did not regularly keep a journal, despite a passionate urge to write. For years, however, he had written occasional autobiographical notes and stabs at personal essays. In late 1834, as a sophomore at Harvard, he wrote for Professor Edward Tyrrell Channing an essay entitled “Shall We Keep Journals?”11 Henry began with a swipe at the frustrations of writing on demand for class: “As those pieces which the painter sketches for his own amusement in his leisure hours are often superior to his most elaborate productions, so it is that ideas often suggest themselves to us spontaneously, as it were, far surpassing in beauty those which arise in the mind upon applying ourselves to any particular subject.” Then he went on to quote Francis Bacon, the patron saint of short essays, and to enthuse about the possibility that a journal might serve as a vehicle of self-discovery and a way to maintain a kind of personal authenticity. If each person, he argued,
would occupy a certain portion of each day in looking back upon the time which has passed, and in writing down his thoughts and feelings, in reckoning up his daily gains, that he may be able to detect whatever false coins have crept into his coffers, and as it were, in settling accounts with his mind, not only would his daily experience be greatly increased, since his feelings and ideas would thus be more clearly defined, but he would be ready to turn over a new leaf, having carefully perused the preceding one, and would not continue to glance carelessly over the same page without being able to distinguish it from a new one.
Henry had written these words at the age of seventeen and had not yet taken them to heart in a systematic way. Three years later, primed by Harvard with the resources and desire to communicate, he felt both a thirst for experience and ambition as a writer, so a nudge from an admired elder was precisely what he needed. The day that Emerson encouraged him, Henry acquired a large red folio, opened it to the first page, dipped a pen in a bottle of strong dark ink—probably some of the stock that his family made at home—and began to settle accounts with his mind. In his still rather adolescent scrawl, he wrote Oct. 22 and quoted his friend’s prompt to keep a journal. Then he centered in capital letters the word solitude and wrote under it, “To be alone12 I find it necessary to escape the present, to avoid myself. How could I be alone in the Roman emperor’s chamber of mirrors? I seek a garret.”
Over the next few weeks, the journal became Henry’s repository for the joy that spilled over from his ecstatic response to nature. “We have always,” he scrawled, “a resource in the skies.” He meditated upon the delights of paddling a gentle stream. Happily he wrote up his September experience on Fair Haven Hill with John and the finding of Tahatawan’s arrowhead. “Crossed the river today on the ice,” began one entry. He mentioned that a friend had discovered “a new note in nature, which he calls the Ice-Harp.” Pebbles tossed upon the surface of the pond had produced a musical melody because of the chambers of air underneath the ice, inspiring Henry to add, “Herein resides a tenth muse, and as he was the man to discover it probably the extra melody is in him.” Awakening to his own facility for language, and to the thrill of practicing a craft, Henry gloried in description itself. “The snow gives the landscape a washing-day appearance,” he noted one day. The Concord River was “the jugular vein of Musketaquid.” Describing dawn and sunrise, he noted that it began with “the gray twilight of the poets.”
He described in detail watching elegant and colorful wood ducks—sometimes called summer ducks—swimming under water some distance before resurfacing. But he couldn’t resist investing the scene with imagination: “Just before immersion they seemed to give each other a significant nod, and then, as if by a common understanding, ’t was heels up and head down in the shaking of a duck’s wing. When they reappeared, it was amusing to observe with what a self-satisfied, darn-it-how-he-nicks-’em air they paddled off to repeat the experiment.” Although he could be eloquent, often a phenomenon quickly inspired an immature symbolic interpretation. When dense fog limited his view to hazy mountaintops, Henry responded with a scrawled, “So when thick vapors cloud the soul, it strives in vain to escape from its humble working-day valley. . .”
Naturally thoughts about his ever-expanding reading poured into the journal as well. He casually included phrases from ancient Latin and Greek sources as well as contemporary German texts. He hiked through science and history, poetry and drama, religion and philosophy—at twenty, finding most of it still new and untrodden territory. “How cheering it is,” he observed, “after toiling through the darker pages of history,—the heartless and fluctuating crust of human rest and unrest,—to alight on the solid earth where the sun shines, or rest in the checkered shade.” Henry copied long passages from Goethe’s 1790 play about the sixteenth-century Italian poet Torquato Tasso, including the lines, “Often he ennobles what appeared to us as common, / And the prized is as nothing to him.” He was inching toward making such a philosophy his own, but often he simply responded to nature with delight. One November morning Henry rose at dawn, as usual, and peeked out above the frost on the window to find every eastward-facing window in nearby houses bouncing the sunrise light into his eyes. He wrote in his journal, “I am at home in the world.”
Now and then he added cryptic remarks suggesting his life was as troubled as that of most twenty-year-olds. On the evening of November 13, he stared out the window at the bright moon, which was a day past full, and wrote, “This shall be the test of innocence—if I hear a taunt, and look out on this friendly moon, pacing the heavens in queen-like majesty, with the accustomed yearning.” He was watching himself closely, advising himself on how to behave. The evening before, he had written, “I yet lack discernment to distinguish the whole lesson of to-day; but it is not lost,—it will come to me.”
Storing up investment in himself as entries in this journal fueled his literary ambitions. On the twenty-fifth of November 1837, he had the pleasure of seeing the Concord Yeoman’s Gazette print his first published words—an obituary for Miss Anna Jones, a survivor of the Revolutionary War who died at the age of eighty-six: “She was as it were, a connecting link between the past and the present—a precious relic of days which the man and patriot would not willingly forget. . . . Poverty was her lot,”13 Henry added, “but she possessed those virtues without which the rich are poor.”
Back home in the Thoreau boardinghouse in late 1837, Henry was free of his college routine for the first time in years. On Concord winter nights, he could light a tallow candle at the parlor fireplace and carry it upstairs in its tin candlestick to start his own fire, or heat a warming pan over the coals and slide it back and forth between sheets to make his cold bachelor bed more inviting. There was little more he could do. Henry recognized that his own century was a revolutionary time, especially in the technologies of everyday life and communication, but the changes were slow to affect the lives of most human beings. For millennia there had been no portable nighttime illumination beyond candles or a smoking rag wick in a bowl of animal oil or fat. Only half a century had passed since Frenchman Aimé Argand had introduced an efficient oil lamp that featured nestled brass cylinders—outside to feed oxygen to the wick, inside to feed it oil—and a glass chimney and metal wick holder. By the 1830s improvements in glass were providing lamps made mostly of blown glass. Whale oil had become the most popular fuel.
Still, every cold morning, after a night buried under many layers of cover, Henry would find the windows adorned with fernlike patterns of frost crystals. Frigid air seeped in around the bubble-warped glass panes. Usually any water left in the house would be frozen by morning, despite being left in a kettle hanging by the cold fireplace, near its pile of banked ashes. Fresh water would require an early-morning jaunt to the well, if it was sunk low enough in the ground to escape freezing.
Some domestic technologies had evolved, but while reading Virgil on these shivery nights, Henry found it satisfying to be reminded that the ancient Roman had lived a life much like his own. Across the eighteen and a half centuries since the death of Publius Virgilius Maro, the natural world had continued its predictable, nourishing rhythms. “Jam laeto turgent14 in palmite gemmae,” Corydon observes to Thyris in the Eclogues, and later “Strata jacent passim sua quâeque sub arbore poma.” Peering at the page of Latin in his school text, Henry dipped his pen in an inkwell and scribbled the lines down in his journal. “Now the buds swell on the joyful stem,” he later translated. “The apples lie scattered everywhere, each under its tree.” Two centuries before the birth of Christ, Cato described farming techniques in De re rura, and every day around Concord Henry could see the same rituals enacted.15 Then as now, farmers spread manure-rich compost over the ground and broke up the dry chunks with a mallet.
Sitting upstairs in his room, trying to marshal vagrant thoughts into a parade, he heard his sister Sophia or boarders banging out a tune on the piano in the parlor a couple of floors below. He hated the discord of scales and other practice, but he liked a coherent tune. He could even tolerate “The Battle of Prague,” the sonata by Bohemian composer František Kočvara that, since its publication in 1757, had become painfully familiar to every piano student of even moderate skill. From upstairs, Henry could hear the slow, hymnlike opening march, the labored attempt to evoke the general’s commands, the bugler’s and trumpeter’s optimistic clarion, dandified trills of the Prussian attack, even cannons and galloping cavalry.
A neighbor’s overheard burst of music16 could remind him of the Hindu Vedas’ archives of timelessness. All kinds of sound distracted Henry—crickets, whose chorus seemed anxious and made him wonder about the future; frogs, who sounded in contrast complacent, unworried in their ancient truce with time. He heard music in the clang of tools. He enjoyed working outdoors in part because random overheard sounds piqued his imagination. Trimming a branch by the pond, he might hear the splash of an oar and pause, his head tilted like a robin’s as he waited for another. Like a child he yelled simply to hear his own echo reply from the woods. As he walked, if his cane sparked noise from a stone he would strike it again to duplicate the sound. Naturally he talked about music in the kind of broad symbolic terms he applied to everything else. “A flitting maiden,” he called it, “who now lives just through the trees yonder, and now at an oriental distance.”
Around the house Henry could hear family members and the servant girl and boarders clomping on the stairs, opening and closing doors, rattling pots and pans and dishes in the kitchen, bantering over meals. When he thought about living in a cabin in the woods—a cabin such as the one he had stayed in with his Harvard chum Charles Stearns Wheeler—he didn’t have to contemplate the abandonment of civilized luxuries. Village life offered few conveniences that he would have to renounce, but the woods offered a luxury Henry had almost never experienced at home. It was summed up in the first word he wrote in his new journal: solitude.