We Can Teach You
In June 1838, having failed to find a job teaching1 for someone else, Henry opened a small school of his own in the Thoreau home. “I have four scholars,2 and one more engaged,” he wrote to John the next month. He placed advertisements in the Yeoman’s Gazette, declaring that he had opened a school “for the reception of a limited number of pupils,3 of both sexes. . . . Instruction will be given in the usual English branches, and the studies preparatory to a college course. Terms—Six dollars per quarter.”
The number of pupils turned out to be even more limited than he had imagined. At first he had little success, but then John, with his extensive teaching experience, agreed to come aboard. After a shaky beginning the new school’s reputation spread quickly and each quarter brought new students. In February 1839 Henry and John moved their classes to the Academy School. Phineas Allen, who had taught Henry in his early youth—and whose essay assignments had resulted in his early hymn to the seasons—had departed Concord for a school in Northfield, near the Vermont border. Thus Henry was now teaching in the same school at which he had attended classes as a child.
Every new student of the Thoreau brothers was first interviewed by John.4 “You say you would like to enter our school,” he would say. “Why do you wish that?”
The child would list the courses that his parents wanted John and Henry to help him master, from solid geometry and algebra to classical languages and even such practical topics as surveying.
“If you really wish to study those things,” John would say pleasantly, “we can teach you, if you obey our rules and promise to give your mind to your studies. But,” he added firmly, “if you come to idle and play, or to see other boys study, we shall not want you for a pupil.”
His earnest, quiet tone impressed each youngster with the seriousness of the contract between student and teacher. “Do you promise, then, to do what we require?” asked John. “If so, we will do our best to teach you what we know ourselves.”
Naturally each child promised. And naturally each broke the promise at some point, only to face John’s and Henry’s disappointment, which was somehow as powerful an inhibitor as the ferule. Some students reported home5 that they couldn’t understand how a school that rejected corporal punishment still ran so efficiently. Remembering the trauma of his fortnight teaching after graduating from Harvard, Henry refused to whip children, as did gentle John. Each student understood assigned duties and generally executed them without much policing. The secret to a harmonious classroom seemed to be a small number of students and a relationship built upon mutual respect.
School was in session from half past eight6 in the morning until half past twelve. Following a lunch break, classes resumed from two until four in the afternoon, with a brief recess in both halves of the day. Just before a break ended, Henry would stride into the classroom in his quick purposeful way, ready for work. The moment the children came indoors he would launch into their Greek or Latin lesson, with little patience for students who demonstrated that they had not prepared for their work. John taught English topics downstairs and Henry Greek and Latin above, as well as mathematics.
For his rigorous ways, some of the students called Henry “Trainer Thoreau.” With the familiar site of volunteer militia drilling on public grounds, “trainer” had become a synonym for “militiaman,”7 especially during the periodic muster times. Some of the young scholars preferred John to Henry, finding Henry more rigid and less companionable. Other students were particularly fond of Henry. Sometimes, as he started home after the school day, one of the younger students would come up to him and take his hand and walk beside him to continue the day’s conversation. John maintained discipline in the classroom, but at recess he was out on the lawn with the students—wrestling with the older boys, turning somersaults. Solemn Henry could look out the window and see John walking across the grass on his hands, with a big grin on his upside-down face.
Solid geometry began the day upstairs. After Henry walked around proposing the problem from his textbook, students drew figures and wrote their demonstration of them on their slates. Then they brought their slate up to Henry’s desk for him to check their work. Geography followed morning recess. Henry used Roswell C. Smith’s 1835 Geography on the Productive System; for Schools, Academies, and Families. Unlike Jedediah Morse, whose popular first American geography text came out in 1784, Smith’s text included many maps and illustrations, some associated with his ranking of world cultures on a scale that progressed from “barbarous” to “enlightened.” Every week each student had to draw one map, and a half day in class was devoted to the task. One assignment required drawing maps of the states—almost rectangular Pennsylvania, tiny Rhode Island, their own Massachusetts flexing its arm out into the Atlantic. Cartographers often had to revise U.S. maps, such as adding the Arkansas Territory in 1836 and taking the Michigan Territory out of the Northwest Territory the next year.
Saturday morning was spent writing a new composition. The students worked in unlined writing books with marbled covers, another product created by the elder John Thoreau in his versatile shop. Henry read aloud8 some of the compositions, which resulted in laughter and chaffing between the students. Half wrote one day and half the next. Those students who boarded with the Thoreaus and had families out of town were permitted to alternate compositions with letters home.
Often, after morning prayers, either Henry or John spoke briefly on a subject about to be studied or on the larger pleasures of learning. Henry yearned to instill in the students a delight in knowledge as much as he wanted to drill them in a particular subject. Vividly he explained one of his favorite themes, the seasons—their source in the tilt and rotation of the Earth and its revolution around the sun, their relationship to the changing lives of animals and people throughout the year, their parade of strikingly different forms of beauty. Such talks made learning seem central to the enjoyment of life rather than some kind of adornment—and, Henry hoped, it set a tone for the school day.
Henry liked to talk about such topics as the glorious design of the universe, which he felt was visible in every detail of nature. He spoke of his own belief9 in a wise and kind power watching over human lives. Explicitly invoking William Paley’s watchmaker analogy from his Harvard days, he asked the students to envision walking into a shop and finding spread out on a bench the pinions, springs, and wheels of a pocket watch. He wondered aloud if they could imagine such an intricate mechanism assembled by chance. This old argument was new to the children in a village school.
As more students enrolled and the school earned an erratic profit, Henry and John purchased a large slate blackboard. Since the turn of the century, American schools had been adopting this innovation, especially after the availability of trains that could safely transport such large items. Writing or drawing on a blackboard provided the first means of demonstration to an entire group of students and was considered a great technological advance in education. Teachers no longer had to repeat an assignment for every student, chalking words or equations on each slate. After they acquired the blackboard, Henry taught a class in natural philosophy, which students such as George Keyes particularly liked. Henry had his students diagram animals and plants on the board, and, apportioning his time and advice to their enthusiasm, he was quick to encourage any interest they demonstrated by careful attention to such matters as correlation and labeling.
Some of the school’s other popular innovations concerned fresh air, both indoors and out. Recess was a half hour, not the usual ten minutes. Windows were left open when weather permitted. While they had autonomy, Henry and John weren’t about to subject themselves or their students to the stifling, foul atmosphere still common in most schools.
Henry’s quirks contributed to the unpredictability of school hours. He disliked profanity, for example, and devised memorable ways to quell its use among the older students. “Boys,” he would say in his half-serious, half-satirical tone, “if you went to talk business with a man, and he persisted in thrusting words having no connection with the subject into all parts of every sentence—” he considered an example and interrupted himself to exclaim, “Boot-jack, for instance!” and then resumed, “—wouldn’t you think he was taking a liberty with you, and trifling with your time, and wasting his own?” Over the next few minutes, to the delight of the students, he emphasized his point by speaking on some innocent topic but suddenly interjecting a random “Boot-jack!” into his sentences.
When not teaching school, Henry continued to walk in the woods with Emerson, discussing art and nature and society, taking the world apart and trying to imagine putting it back together a different way. One afternoon in November 1838, they strolled to Walden Pond together. Along the way, Henry complained that although the world belonged to him as much as to anyone, landowners crowded him out of most of God’s earth, compelling him to walk in a narrow strip of road. Although he had not participated in building their fences, he must not cross their fields. Suppose, he said to Emerson, that prior to their birth some hugely powerful man had bought the entire globe and thus fenced everyone else completely out of nature.
“Not having been privy10 to any of these arrangements,” Emerson wrote in his journal that evening,
he does not feel called on to consent to them, and so cuts fishpoles in the woods without asking who has a better title to the wood than he. I defended, of course, the good institution as a scheme, not good, but the best that could be hit on for making the woods and waters and fields available to wit and worth, and for restraining the bold, bad man. At all events, I begged him, having this maggot of Freedom and Humanity in his brain, to write it out into good poetry and so clear himself of it. He replied, that he feared that that was not the best way, that in doing justice to the thought, the man did not always do justice to himself, the poem ought to sing itself: if the man took too much pains with the expression, he was not any longer the Idea himself.
During the spring of 1839, John and Henry invested a week in building a wooden boat. From tapered bow to three-and-a-half-foot beam to stern, it was fifteen feet long. Like a fisherman’s dory, it had a flat keel and a shallow draft—a strong vessel but heavy, not very maneuverable, reflecting its quick and unskilled creation. They painted it symbolic colors, wedding sky and water to earth through a blue border and gunwale above a green hull. Then they erected two masts in it, one of which could double as a camp tent-pole. Two pairs of oars completed their preparations for later in the year, when they would be ready to launch.
Henry looked over the ungainly vessel and had to admit to himself that he and John had paid little attention to the design advice of nature itself. He thought of the grace of fish, the way their tails guide humans in how to sculpt and place a rudder, how their fins tell where to lock oars. The same analogy applied to birds: the tapered beak and head demonstrating a prow native to the element it negotiates, the wings showing how sails can seduce wind. Henry felt that a well-made boat ought to be an elegant amphibious creature, fish below and bird above—a mythological hybrid.
Theirs, in contrast, was just a boat. But it would serve for the freedom and adventure that awaited them downriver. They installed wheels on one end of the hull so they could roll the boat around waterfalls or other obstructions. Then they christened it, naturally, with an Indian name: the Musketaquid. Wherever they traveled, the prow would praise their own Meadow River.
Soon after John and Henry finished the boat, their students were enjoying sailing or rowing on the river or across Walden Pond. Often the Thoreau brothers’ natural history studies were continued under the sky, and at least once a week Henry or John took students on an excursion. Their walks led them around one of the ponds such as Walden or Bateman’s or off through the woods and meadows.
On one nature ramble with students, Henry was walking with his eyes on the ground, as he often did, when suddenly he stopped and knelt. He plucked a tiny plant and held it up to the nearest student, Henry Warren,11 and asked him if he could see it.
“Yes,” the boy replied. “What about it?”
Henry took a magnifying glass out of his pocket and showed him how the Lilliputian plant looked through it, that it was a perfect flower at the height of its blooming season—one that happened to be too small for most people to notice. Henry explained that because of his attention to the large and small plants in this region, year after year, he now understood their blooming schedule so well that by seeing the flowers around him he would be able to tell, without calendar or almanac, the month of the year. He made it clear that this seemingly arcane knowledge was available to anyone who was curious and patient.
He used these outings in part to teach about the land’s inhabitants before the arrival of white settlers. The students’ own little village might be two centuries old, but he didn’t want their sense of its history to cease only that far back. Naturally some of the students began to share Henry and John’s interests. Young Thomas Hosmer,12 for example, grew fascinated by Indian lore and accompanied the brothers on expeditions in search of the past. Once he found a chunk of white-speckled dark gray stone that must have weighed fifty pounds. Henry and John examined it and pronounced it the same imported flint of which most local spearheads and arrows were made. They explained to Thomas that the closest site where such rock could be found naturally was around Norwich, Connecticut, more than a hundred miles to the southwest, almost to Long Island Sound. Some industrious Indians had brought with them the material for many arrows.
Another time, Thomas was exploring the bluff above the Great Meadows and found what appeared to be a man-made hollow like an amphitheater. He brought Henry there and showed him. “This is artificial,” Henry said with excitement, “made by the Indians. And,” he added as he looked around, “we ought to find evidences of their fires here.” As they dug, they unearthed not only charcoal but prized relics such as a mortar and pestle.
Henry began to watch the riverbanks and hills for any hint of Indian legacy. Once when he took students downstream to the Great Meadows, past Ball’s Hill and the Carlisle Bridge, he pointed out a flat, open area on the riverbank and said that it seemed a likely spot to have once held an Indian fishing village.13 He could imagine, he said, where they would have built their campfires. “We cannot find one today,” he remarked to the students, “because we have no spade. But the next time we come, I will see if that was the place of habitation.”
A week later, when he brought a boatload of students this way, he remembered to bring along a spade. After they pulled the boat out of reach of the lapping current, the troop walked a short distance along the bank to the area Henry had pointed out the week before. “Do you see anything here,” he asked, “that would be likely to attract Indians to this place?”
As the students dutifully looked around for clues, one boy began with the obvious: “Why, here is the river for their fishing!”
Another mentioned that the nearby forest would have provided ample game.
“Well. . .” Both were good points, but Henry nudged further. “Is there anything else?” He pointed out a rivulet that he said must surely trickle from a nearby spring. Such a source would provide cooler water in summer than could be found in the rivers or ponds.
They moved farther inland. Henry scanned the ground carefully before finally stabbing it with the shovel. The blade sank easily into the soil without encountering an obstruction. Henry tried again, moved, again placed his shoe on the butt of the spade and dug. Some of the boys were skeptical about their teacher’s ability to predict the location of Indian camps—until they heard the blade suddenly strike a rock or some other buried object. Triumphantly, Henry moved forward a foot or two and tried again. More success. He kept moving, establishing the perimeter of a circle, and dug deeper. Soon he unearthed a cluster of worn red stones and pointed out that in places they had been blackened by a fire. Before he and the students returned to the boat, he respectfully covered up the forgotten campfire, returning it to the earth’s archive, the lost history of these people who haunted his imagination.
In June of 1839, the widow Mrs. Joseph Ward and her daughter Miss Prudence Ward, the Thoreau boarders who had co-founded the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society, had visitors. Another of Mrs. Ward’s daughters, Mrs. Caroline Sewall, journeyed from Scituate to visit her mother and sister, bringing along her son Edmund. Late in the afternoon of Monday, the seventeenth of June, their coach arrived in time for them to share supper at the Thoreau table.
For Caroline, it was a homecoming14 of sorts. When Mrs. Ward had first moved to Concord, both Caroline and Prudence lived with her. Caroline, however, soon met the handsome and romantic young Edmund Quincy Sewall, who was studying divinity with Reverend Ripley in the Manse. They married and moved to Scituate. Reverend Ripley had preached Sewall’s ordination sermon back in 1819. Their famously beautiful daughter Ellen (named after Ellen Douglas, the heroine of Walter Scott’s hugely popular 1810 narrative poem “The Lady of the Lake”) was sixteen, and their handsome and lively son Edmund eleven.
Many literate young people kept diaries. By the time of his arrival in Concord at the age of nine, Edmund was writing in one often,15 as well as scribbling many letters to relatives and friends. One early entry documented his attendance at an antislavery lecture by the renowned abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Afterward, he noted, he contributed ninepence to a fund-raising offering, and he recalled his favorite witticisms by the speaker.
Intelligent and spirited, Edmund came from a bookish family and was unusually familiar with literature. At an early age he had enjoyed Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist. In the spring of 1838 he had begun reading each of the nineteen monthly installments of Dickens’s new novel The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, whose young hero is cast into hazard and farce by the death of his father. Nickleby was still running when Edmund visited Concord. A fan of epic poetry, he also reveled in the beauty and perils of Walter Scott’s 1808 poem Marmion, about the sixteenth-century battle between the kingdoms of Scotland and England at Flodden Field in Northumberland, as well as Scott’s poem that had inspired Ellen’s name. Edmund’s father was in the habit of reading aloud to the family in the evenings. By the age of eight Edmund had heard William H. Prescott’s three-volume History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic and even Carlyle’s epic of the French Revolution, with its horrific visions of Sophoclean reversals of fortune.
Mrs. Ward and Prudence had often written to Caroline about the goings-on at their boardinghouse, and thus she and Edmund were quite familiar with the Thoreau family. The boy was immediately popular. Henry and John took the Wards and Sewalls on a Concord River expedition in the boat they had built. It was too small for the party, so while Edmund’s mother and aunt sat in the boat with him, Henry and John and a boy who was boarding at the house walked along opposite shores. Edmund was disappointed that the wind was so weak the boat’s sail was useless. Then Henry led Prudence and Caroline back home along the riverside paths, while John and the boarder and Edmund rowed on to the north branch of the river. Along the shore they came across a moored boat that John recognized as belonging to a Mr. Haynes, and a moment later they heard the report of a rifle from the woods. John moored his own boat and led the boys to meet Haynes, who was a famous marksman in the region. Accompanied by two hunting dogs, Haynes was firing his rifle at a dollar-sized target about fifty yards away—and never failing to hit it.
Later Henry took Edmund and other boys to the rocky promontory nicknamed the Dover Cliffs. Dense plant growth surrounded an exposed stone peak. Edmund and another boy climbed up as far as they could along a rocky fissure, and Edmund rolled down a stone and had the satisfaction of watching the frightened boys below leap out of the way. While the others walked back to the village, Henry took Edmund to Walden Pond. As they rowed across the water, Henry showed how it was so clear the bottom was visible even at depths of eight or ten feet. He warned Edmund that in most places four steps into the water would bring it over his head.
Henry found Edmund’s wide-eyed curiosity and eager intelligence captivating. The boy and his mother left Concord on Saturday, the twenty-second of June, and on that day Henry scribbled in his journal about what Edmund symbolized to him, without actually saying much about the real boy:
I have within the last few days16 come into contact with a pure, uncompromising spirit, that is somewhere wandering in the atmosphere, but settles not positively anywhere. Some persons carry about them the air and conviction of virtue, though they themselves are unconscious of it, and are even backward to appreciate it in others. Such it is impossible not to love; still is their loveliness, as it were, independent of them, so that you may seem not to lose it when they are absent, for when they are near it is like an invisible presence which attends you.
Two days later, Henry wrote a poem into his journal under the title “Sympathy.” The conventional thirteen stanzas were self-conscious imitation of the classical elegiac mode,17 flavored with Virgil and Milton and other authors Henry had studied at Harvard and read on his own, but anchored in his momentary infatuation with Edmund Sewall:
Lately alas I knew a gentle boy,18
Whose features all were cast in Virtue’s mould,
As one she had designed for Beauty’s toy,
But after manned him for her own strong-hold . . .
So was I taken unawares by this,
I quite forgot my homage to confess;
Yet now am forced to know, though hard it is,
I might have loved him, had I loved him less . . .
Emerson liked elegy and had great patience for vague poetic philosophizing, and he was always eager to praise the potential of young writers, even to the point of raising unrealistic expectations. “Last night,” he wrote in his journal on the first of August, “came to me19 a beautiful poem from Henry Thoreau, ‘Sympathy.’ The purest strain, and the loftiest, I think, that has yet pealed from this unpoetic American forest.”