A Biography of the Friendship of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson

When Ralph Waldo Emerson moved to Concord, Massachusetts, in October 1834, he was thirty-one years old and boarding with his step-grandfather in the Old Manse. His first wife had died from tuberculosis. He had travelled to Europe where he met Thomas Carlyle, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He had begun to give public lectures. When he moved into his own home, Bush, the following year, he was remarried, financially independent, and about to have his first book, Nature, published. That same year the seventeen-year-old Concord-born Henry David Thoreau was attending Harvard College.

Stories vary as to how and when they met, but one story Emerson told is this:

My first intimacy with Henry began after his graduation in 1837. Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Emerson’s sister from Plymouth, then boarded with Mrs. Thoreau and her children in the Parkman house, where the Library now stands, and saw the young people every day. She would bring me verses of Henry’s,—the “Sic Vita,” for instance, which he had thrown into Mrs. Brown’s window, tied round a bunch of violets gathered in his walk,—and once a passage out of his Journal, which he had read to Sophia Thoreau, who spoke of it to Mrs. Brown as resembling a passage in one of my Concord lectures.¹

Emerson was generous with both time and money, and his assistance to the young Thoreau was no exception. Emerson loaned Thoreau money in May to travel to Maine to look for a teaching position, accompanied by his personal recommendation: “I cordially recommend Mr. Henry D. Thoreau, a graduate of Harvard University in August, 1837, to the confidence of such parents or guardians as may propose to employ him as an instructor. I have the highest confidence in Mr. Thoreau’s moral, character and in his intellectual ability. He is an excellent scholar, a man of energy and kindness, and I shall esteem the town fortunate that secures his services.”² He also wrote to Josiah Quincy, president of Harvard College, trying to secure some financial aid for Thoreau by attributing his lower academic standing to illness rather than any other cause.

Thoreau’s interest in Emerson was also increasing. Having borrowed and read Emerson’s Nature from the college library twice while attending Harvard, he purchased a copy to give to his classmate William Allen, calling it, in an echo of Robert Burns’s “Epistle to a Young Friend,” “neither a sang nor a sermon.”³ He sang Emerson’s “Concord Hymn” in the choir at the dedication of the Obelisk at Concord’s North Bridge in July 1837. And then on August 31 Emerson delivered the Phi Beta Kappa address to Thoreau’s graduating class at Harvard. “The American Scholar” was hailed by Oliver Wendell Holmes as America’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence.”⁴ It spoke of and to “Man Thinking,” not an intellectual and academic cerebration, but a thinking with the entirety of soul and self-trust, culminating in the triad, “We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds.”⁵

At the time of his graduation, Thoreau was not yet keeping a journal, so his immediate reaction to his Harvard commencement is not known, but when he gave his first public lecture the following spring in Concord, he revisited the memory: “One goes to a cattle-show expecting to find many men and women assembled, and beholds only working oxen and neat cattle. He goes to a commencement thinking that there at least he may find the men of the country; but such, if there were any, are completely merged in the day, and have become so many walking commencements, so that he is fain to take himself out of sight and hearing of the orator, lest he lose his own identity in the nonentities around him.”⁶

Whether he felt himself losing his identity at his commencement, or whether this was in reaction to or in fear of his falling into the pull of Emerson’s orbit, it was something with which Emerson would agree, and which he made explicit in his address: “I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.”⁷

Friends and followers came to Concord to meet with Emerson, often commenting on Thoreau as an Emerson wannabe. Among those present in July 1838 was James Russell Lowell, briefly suspended from Harvard, who found it “exquisitely amusing” to see how Thoreau “imitates Emerson’s tone and manner. With my eyes shut I shouldn’t know them apart.”⁸ A decade later Lowell was even more stringently satirical in A Fable for Critics, in which he wrote,

        There comes ——, for instance; to see him’s rare sport,

        Tread in Emerson’s tracks with legs painfully short;

        How he jumps, how he strains, and gets red in the face,

        To keep step with the mystagogue’s natural pace!

        He follows as close as a stick to a rocket,

        His fingers exploring the prophet’s each pocket.

        Fie, for shame, brother bard; with good fruit of your own,

        Can’t you let neighbor Emerson’s orchards alone?⁹

But Lowell wasn’t alone in seeing Thoreau adopting Emersonian characteristics. David Haskins Greene, Thoreau’s Harvard classmate, was

quite startled by the transformation that had taken place in him. His short figure and general caste of countenance were, of course, unchanged; but in his manners, in the tones and inflections of his voice, in his modes of expression, even in the hesitations and pauses of his speech, he had become the counterpart of Mr. Emerson. Mr. Thoreau’s college voice bore no resemblance to Mr. Emerson’s, and was so familiar to my ear that I could readily have identified him by it in the dark. I was so much struck with the change, and with the resemblance in the respects referred to between Mr. Emerson and Mr. Thoreau, that I remember to have taken the opportunity as they sat near together, talking, of listening to their conversation with closed eyes, and to have been unable to determine with certainty which was speaking. It was a notable instance of unconscious imitation.¹⁰

Frank Sanborn, educator, reformer, and journalist, shortly after his move to Concord in 1853 dismissed Thoreau as “a sort of pocket edition of Mr. Emerson, as far as outward appearance goes, in coarser binding and with woodcuts instead of the fine steel-engravings of Mr. Emerson. He is a little under size, with a huge Emersonian nose . . . He dresses very plainly, wears his collar turned over like Mr. Emerson. . . . He talks like Mr. Emerson and so spoils the good things which he says; for what in Mr. Emerson is charming, becomes ludicrous in Thoreau, because an imitation.”¹¹ One journalist, on hearing his talk on “White Beans and Walden Pond,” thought Thoreau “might very probably attain to a more respectable rank, if he were satisfied to be himself, Henry D. Thoreau, and not aim to be Ralph Waldo Emerson or any body else.”¹²

If this was something Emerson himself recognized in the early days of their friendship—“I am very familiar with all his thoughts,—they are my own quite originally drest.”¹³—he soon became exasperated by the comparison which would persist long after Thoreau’s death. Emerson defended his friend: “I am sure he is entitled to stand quite alone on his proper merits. There might easily have been a little influence from his neighbors on his first writings: He was not quite out of college, I believe, when I first saw him: but it is long since I, and I think all who knew him, felt that he was the most independent of men in thought and in action.”¹⁴ Emerson had no patience for narrow views of Thoreau. “Now and then I come across a man that scoffs at Thoreau,” he told Pendleton King in 1870, “and thinks him affected. For example, Mr. James Russell Lowell is constantly making flings at him. I have tried to show him that Thoreau did things that no one could have done without high powers; but to no purpose.”¹⁵

Thoreau’s mother also saw a resemblance, although with a more maternal reference—“How much Mr. Emerson does talk like my Henry.”¹⁶

Emerson and Thoreau would take long walks together, boat on the river, have discussions alone or with others in Emerson’s circle in Emerson’s study or around the dinner table with family. On October 22, 1837, during one of their many exchanges, Emerson tried to think of people who kept journals. He could only name the French essayist Michel de Montaigne, his neighbor Amos Bronson Alcott, his aunt Mary Moody Emerson, and himself. “Beside these,” he wrote the next day, “I did not last night think of another.”¹⁷ It was at this time that he asked Thoreau the question that became the first entry in Thoreau’s two-million-word journal: “‘What are you doing now?’ he asked. ‘Do you keep a journal?’ So I make my first entry to-day.”¹⁸

The journal, for both writers, was an integral part of their process. Thoreau’s journal contains around two million words, Emerson’s over three million. For both men, journals were the work of a lifetime but not their life’s work. They laid the groundwork for the lectures and essays and books that were to follow. When Thoreau and Emerson combed their journals for material, it mattered little when, where, or even what circumstance had prompted an entry, as long as the text reflected the theme of what they were currently writing. “It is surely foolish,” Emerson expressed in his journal, “to adhere rigidly to the order of time in putting down one’s thoughts, and to neglect the order of thought. I put like things together.”¹⁹

Emerson considered his journal his “Savings Bank. I grow richer because I have somewhere to deposit my earnings; and fractions are worth more to me because corresponding fractions are waiting here that shall be made integers by their addition.”²⁰ It was similar for Thoreau. “Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg,” he wrote, “by the side of which more will be laid. Thoughts accidentally thrown together become a frame in which more may be developed and exhibited. Perhaps this is the main value of a habit of writing, of keeping a journal,—that so we remember our best hours and stimulate ourselves.”²¹

Their work habits, however, were quite different. Emerson wrote that Thoreau “knew but one secret, which was to do one thing at a time, and though he has his evenings for study, if he was in the day inventing machines for sawing his plumbago, he invents wheels all the evening and night also; and if this week he has some good reading and thoughts before him, his brain runs on that all day, whilst pencils pass through his hands.” Emerson found in himself “an opposite facility or perversity, that I never seem well to do a particular work until another is due. I cannot write the poem, though you give me a week, but if I promise to read a lecture the day after to-morrow, at once the poem comes into my head and now the rhymes will flow. And let the proofs of the Dial be crowding on me from the printer, and I am full of faculty how to make the lecture.”²²

At the end of 1837 Lidian Emerson wrote that her husband had “taken to Henry with great interest,” finding him uncommon “in mind and character.”²³ It was these moments of uncommonness and originality, mixed with Thoreau’s contrariness, that often interested Emerson.

At the “teacher’s meeting” last night, my good Edmund Hosmer, after disclaiming any wish to difference Jesus from a human mind, suddenly seemed to alter his tone, and said that Jesus made the world and was the Eternal God. Henry Thoreau merely remarked that “Mr. Hosmer had kicked the pail over.” I delight much in my young friend, who seems to have as free and erect a mind as any I have ever met. He told as we walked this afternoon a good story about a boy who went to school with him, Wentworth, who resisted the school mistress’s command that the children should bow to Dr. Heywood and other gentlemen as they went by, and when Dr. Heywood stood waiting and cleared his throat with a Hem, Wentworth said, “You need n’t hem, Doctor. I shan’t bow.”²⁴

In December 1837 Emerson shared a discovery with Thoreau. The previous year he had “found a new musical instrument which I call the ice-harp. A thin coat of ice covered a part of the pond, but melted around the edge of the shore. I threw a stone upon the ice which rebounded with a shrill sound, and falling again and again, repeated the note with pleasing modulation. I thought at first it was the ‘peep, peep’ of a bird I had scared. I was so taken with the music that I threw down my stick and spent twenty minutes in throwing stones single or in handfuls on this crystal drum.”²⁵ “My friend tells me,” Thoreau wrote, “he has discovered a new note in nature, which he calls the Ice-Harp.”²⁶

In the following spring Thoreau described their friendship.

        Two sturdy oaks I mean, which side by side

            Withstand the winter’s storm,

            And, spite of wind and tide,

            Grow up the meadow’s pride,

                For both are strong.

        Above they barely touch, but, undermined

            Down to their deepest source,

            Admiring you shall find

            Their roots are intertwined

                Insep’rably.²⁷

Comments about Emerson began to appear in Thoreau’s journal, but Emerson’s journal began to hold statements and stories by Thoreau, some of which Thoreau would include later in his own writings, such as the “good story” Emerson noted in September 1838 about Deacon Parkman “who lived in the house he now occupies, and kept a store close by. He hung out a salt fish for a sign, and it hung so long and grew so hard, black and deformed, that the deacon forgot what thing it was, and nobody in town knew, but being examined chemically it proved to be salt fish. But duly every morning the deacon hung it on its peg.”²⁸ A decade later this story would be incorporated into Walden.

Even in the early years of the friendship, there were times when the assumed roles of Emerson as mentor and Thoreau as student were inverted. Their influence was, from the very beginning, mutual. Emerson recognized that “our receptivity is unlimited; and, with the great, our thoughts and manners easily become great.”²⁹ Things Thoreau said or did would impress Emerson to the point that they would find their way into his work, from early essays written shortly after they met to those written after Thoreau’s death. As he confessed to his journal, “Have I said it before in these pages? then I will say it again, that it is a curious commentary on society that the expression of a devout sentiment by any young man who lives in society strikes me with surprise and has all the air and effect of genius.”³⁰ One such moment came as he thought of his “brave Henry here who is content to live now, and feels no shame in not studying any profession, for he does not postpone his life, but lives already,—pours contempt on these crybabies of routine and Boston. He has not one chance but a hundred chances.”³¹ Thoreau’s ideas inform the writing of Emerson’s seminal essay, “Self-Reliance”: “He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not ‘studying a profession,’ for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances.”³²

“My good Henry Thoreau made this else solitary afternoon sunny with his simplicity and clear perception,” Emerson wrote in 1838, part of which he would later incorporate into his essay on “New England Reformers.”

How comic is simplicity in this double-dealing, quacking world. Everything that boy says makes merry with society, though nothing can be graver than his meaning. I told him he should write out the history of his college life, as Carlyle has his tutoring. We agreed that the seeing the stars through a telescope would be worth all the astronomical lectures. Then he described Mr. Quimby’s electrical lecture here, and the experiment of the shock, and added that “college corporations are very blind to the fact that the twinge in the elbow is worth all the lecturing.”³³

“Montaigne is spiced throughout with rebellion,” Emerson wrote, “as much as Alcott or my young Henry Thoreau.”³⁴ It was an aspect of Thoreau’s personality that intrigued him as much as it at times exasperated him. In a letter to Margaret Fuller in early 1839, Emerson referred to Thoreau as “my protestor,”³⁵ an idea he’d expressed in a recent lecture, “The Protest,” in which he made several direct references to ideas born of their conversations. The young who “alone have dominion of the world, for they walk in it with a free step,” and the “impatient youth” who is “galled . . . by the first infractions of his right,”³⁶ came from a walk to Walden Pond the previous November during which Thoreau

complained of the proprietors who compelled him, to whom, as much as to any, the whole world belonged, to walk in a strip of road and crowded him out of all the rest of God’s earth. He must not get over the fence: but to the building of that fence he was no party. Suppose, he said, some great proprietor, before he was born, had bought up the whole globe. So he had been hustled out of nature. Not having been privy to any of these arrangements, 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.³⁷

Thoreau’s argument over private ownership versus public use of land was a lifelong one. More than a decade later Emerson recorded in his journal how Thoreau ignored the question of property because he

could go wherever woods and waters were, and no man was asked for leave—once or twice the farmer withstood, but it was to no purpose,—he could as easily prevent the sparrows or tortoises. It was their land before it was his, and their title was precedent. . . .

Moreover the very time at which he used their land and water (for his boat glided like a trout everywhere unseen,) was in hours when they were sound asleep. Long before they were awake he went up and down to survey like a sovereign his possessions, and he passed onward, and left them before the farmer came out of doors.³⁸

The right of the citizen to have more land available for public use culminated in Thoreau’s 1859 journal statement: “Each town should have a park, or rather a primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres, where a stick should never be cut for fuel, a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation.”³⁹ Emerson “defended . . . the good institution” of private ownership, “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.”⁴⁰ Their discussions on this topic formed the central dialogue found in Emerson’s essay “The Conservative,” in which Emerson points out the fundamental differences between the reformer, modeled after Thoreau, and the conservative, a role that Emerson sometimes reluctantly found himself adopting.

Of course conservatism always has the worst of the argument, is always apologizing, pleading a necessity, pleading that to change would be to deteriorate: it must saddle itself with the mountainous load of the violence and vice of society, must deny the possibility of good, deny ideas, and suspect and stone the prophet; whilst innovation is always in the right, triumphant, attacking, and sure of final success. Conservatism stands on man’s confessed limitations, reform on his indisputable infinitude; conservatism on circumstance, liberalism on power; one goes to make an adroit member of the social frame, the other to postpone all things to the man himself; conservatism is debonair and social, reform is individual and imperious. We are reformers in spring and summer, in autumn and winter we stand by the old; reformers in the morning, conservers at night.⁴¹

Alcott may have captured the essence of this dilemma, as Thoreau noted in his journal: “Alcott spent the day with me yesterday. He spent the day before with Emerson. He observed that he had got his wine and now he had come after his venison. Such was the compliment he paid me.”⁴² Alcott often compared the two, noting in his journal in 1852 after attending Emerson’s lecture “Wealth” that “there are finer things to be said in praise of Poverty, which it takes a person superior to Emerson even to say worthily. Thoreau is the better man, perhaps, to celebrate that estate.”⁴³

While Emerson found Thoreau’s constant aspect of reform and rebellion tedious—“Always some weary captious paradox to fight you with . . .”⁴⁴—Thoreau saw a man he doubted “could trundle a wheelbarrow through the streets, because it would be out of character.”⁴⁵ Thoreau delighted in the story that Emerson, Louis Agassiz, and a few others

broke some dozens of ale-bottles, one after another, with their bullets, in the Adirondack country, using them for marks! It sounds rather Cockneyish. He says that he shot a peetweet for Agassiz, and this, I think he said, was the first game he ever bagged. He carried a double-barrelled gun,—rifle and shotgun,—which he bought for the purpose, which he says received much commendation,—all parties thought it a very pretty piece. Think of Emerson shooting a peetweet (with shot) for Agassiz, and cracking an ale-bottle (after emptying it) with his rifle at six rods! They cut several pounds of lead out of the tree.⁴⁶

On the last day of August 1839, Thoreau and his brother, John, made a two-week river excursion from Concord, Massachusetts, to Concord, New Hampshire. Emerson applauded the two brothers with approbation tinged with wistfulness after they returned from their excursion: “Now here are my wise young neighbors who, instead of getting, like the wordmen, into a railroad-car, where they have not even the activity of holding the reins, have got into a boat which they have built with their own hands, with sails which they have contrived to serve as a tent by night, and gone up the Merrimack to live by their wits on the fish of the stream and the berries of the wood.”⁴⁷

Later that month Emerson wrote his brother William that George Ripley and others were reviving “at this time the old project of a new journal,”—what would become The Dial: A Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion—“for the exposition of absolute truth, but I doubt a little if it reach the day,” insisting, with a sweep of self-deception, that he “will never be editor, though I am counted on as a contributor.”⁴⁸ As he told Margaret Fuller, “I believe we all feel much alike in regard to this Journal; we all wish it to be, but do not wish to be in any way personally responsible for it.”⁴⁹

The Dial would also serve as a receptacle for the writings of those Emerson wanted to help and whose work he might want to promote. He knew, however, the limitations of the “fine people” who would write for this journal and whose work would appear “nowhere else,” but in Thoreau he saw a different potential: “My Henry Thoreau will be a great poet for such a company, and one of these days for all companies.”⁵⁰ He saw Thoreau as a contributor, providing him with an outlet for his early writings, and later, when Emerson did become editor, as an apprentice, positioning Thoreau as his assistant.

Margaret Fuller was The Dial’s first editor, and Emerson tried to encourage her about Thoreau’s work, though eventually needing to concede, “I do not like his piece very well, but I admire this perennial threatening attitude, just as we like to go under an overhanging precipice,” he wrote her in early 1842.⁵¹ The majority of Thoreau’s Dial contributions would not be published until Emerson took on the editorship, at which point his friend’s work had some, although a very limited, distribution.

In the spring of 1840 Emerson had been working on pieces that would form his first series of Essays. In June he was finishing up his essay on friendship, which he would place in the center of his book, as Thoreau would do when placing his own friendship essay in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Emerson’s essay contains the realization with which he wrestled his entire life: “Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables.”⁵²

He was writing so much that he told Fuller he had “become a scrivener.”⁵³ At the end of June, Emerson and Thoreau visited the Cliffs at Fair Haven for what Emerson called their “villeggiatura,” a country holiday, perhaps a well-deserved break from his book. Emerson’s journal entry for that date started with a view of his surroundings—“I saw nothing better than the passage of the river by the dark clump of trees that line the bank in one spot for a short distance”—before commenting on friendship.

We chide the citizen because, with all his honest merits, he does not conceive the delicacies and nobility of friendship, but we cannot forgive the poet if he does not substantiate his fine romance by the municipal virtues of justice, fidelity and pity. . . .

I think we must give up this superstition of company to spend weeks and fortnights. Let my friend come and say that he has to say, and go his way. Otherwise we live for show. That happens continually in my house, that I am expected to play tame lion by readings and talkings to the friends. The rich live for show: I will not.⁵⁴

Thoreau’s journal at this same time shows a yearning combined with disappointment. Entries leading up to their holiday were anticipative and sanguine. “We will warm us at each other’s fire,” he wrote,⁵⁵ followed two days later by “Our friend’s is as holy a shrine as any God’s, to be approached with sacred love and awe. Veneration is the measure of Love.”⁵⁶ But subsequently he wrote, “Of all phenomena, my own race are the most mysterious and undiscoverable. For how many years have I striven to meet one, even on common manly ground, and have not succeeded!”⁵⁷ He had begun to see, as he would say in a different context, “the interval between our hopes and their fulfillment.”⁵⁸

Feeling out of step with Emerson, Thoreau wrote the first version of what would evolve into his most renowned quotation about the different drummer.

A man’s life should be a stately march to a sweet but unheard music, and when to his fellows it shall seem irregular and inharmonious, he will only be stepping to a livelier measure, or his nicer ear hurry him into a thousand symphonies and concordant variations. There will be no halt ever, but at most a marching on his post, or such a pause as is richer than any sound, when the melody runs into such depth and wildness as to be no longer heard, but implicitly consented to with the whole life and being. He will take a false step never, even in the most arduous times, for then the music will not fail to swell into greater sweetness and volume, and itself rule the movement it inspired.⁵⁹

In February of 1841 he wrote,

        Wait not till I invite thee, but observe

        I’m glad to see thee when thou com’st.⁶⁰

Emerson’s poem “The Sphinx” was published in the first issue of The Dial. In March Thoreau began a long journal entry analyzing Emerson’s poem stanza by stanza, sometimes using the poem as a starting point for a more personal inquiry. Emerson wrote in his poem,

        Have I a lover

            Who is noble and free?—

        I would he were nobler

            Than to love me.

        Eterne alternation

            Now follows, now flies;

        And under pain, pleasure,—

            Under pleasure, pain lies.

        Love works at the centre,

            Heart-heaving alway;

        Forth speed the strong pulses

            To the borders of day.⁶¹

After reading these lines Thoreau wrote, “In friendship each will be nobler than the other, and so avoid the cheapness of a level and idle harmony. Love will have its chromatic strains,—discordant yearnings for higher chords,—as well as symphonies. Let us expect no finite satisfaction.”⁶²

In mid-March 1841 Emerson gave copies of Essays to family and friends, including Thoreau, likely prompting Thoreau’s poem “Friendship”—one of several given that title—written that month.

        Now we are partners in such legal trade,

        We’ll look to the beginnings, not the ends,

        Nor to pay-day, knowing true wealth is made

        For current stock and not for dividends.⁶³

There was consideration in early 1841 of the Alcotts moving in with the Emersons, but such plans were dropped—much to Abigail “Abba” Alcott’s relief—when Samuel May, Abba’s brother, promised to provide for the family. With this prospect out of the way, Emerson invited Thoreau to move in with them and Thoreau agreed. In exchange for room and board, Thoreau would provide a few hours of “what labor he chooses to do.”⁶⁴ Emerson’s cook at the time did not understand or appreciate the arrangement, saying that Thoreau wasn’t “worth his porridge to do the chores.”⁶⁵ For Emerson, however, he was “a very skilful laborer and I work with him as I should not without him.”⁶⁶ Such an arrangement—one Thoreau instead of six Alcotts—must have seemed fortuitous to both the Emersons.

In addition to physical labor, though, Thoreau was given opportunities that would be beneficial to a young writer, and these would have been part of Emerson’s plan from the first in inviting Thoreau into his household: working on The Dial, proofing Emerson’s texts, being fully integrated into Emerson’s intellectual and literary circle. Shortly after his move, Thoreau wrote in his journal,

At R.W.Es.

The charm of the Indian to me is that he stands free and unconstrained in Nature, is her inhabitant and not her guest, and wears her easily and gracefully. But the civilized man has the habits of the house. His house is a prison, in which he finds himself oppressed and confined, not sheltered and protected. He walks as if he sustained the roof; he carries his arms as if the walls would fall in and crush him, and his feet remember the cellar beneath. His muscles are never relaxed. It is rare that he overcomes the house, and learns to sit at home in it, and roof and floor and walls support themselves, as the sky and trees and earth.

It is a great art to saunter.⁶⁷

From Emerson’s description, “Henry Thoreau is coming to live with me and work with me in the garden and teach me to graft apples,”⁶⁸ Margaret Fuller reduced Thoreau to simply Emerson’s “working-man this year.”⁶⁹ Emerson, however, thought of him in broader terms, describing him to Thomas Carlyle as “a poet whom you may one day be proud of;—a noble, manly youth, full of melodies and inventions,”⁷⁰ and to his brother as “a scholar and a poet and as full of buds of promise as a young apple tree.”⁷¹

Emerson suffered from periods of unidentified complaints. “We have all been feebler folk,”⁷² he wrote of his family, and more specifically about himself, that he had “been such a hypochondriac lately with my indispositions.”⁷³ Although he looked forward to when “the South Wind returns,—the woods and fields and my garden will heal me,”⁷⁴ he saw Thoreau as a “great benefactor and physician to me,” and expected “now to be suddenly well and strong though I have been a skeleton all the spring until I am ashamed.”⁷⁵

When the two friends boated on the Concord River that summer, Emerson described “my valiant Thoreau” as “the good river-god” who

introduced me to the riches of his shadowy, starlit, moonlit stream, a lovely new world lying as close and yet as unknown to this vulgar trite one of the streets and shops as death to life, or poetry to prose. Through one field only we went to the boat and then left all time, all science, all history, behind us, and entered into Nature with one stroke of a paddle. Take care, good friend! I said, as I looked west into the sunset overhead and underneath, and he with his face toward me rowed towards it,—take care; you know not what you do, dipping your wooden oar into this enchanted liquid, painted with all reds and purples and yellows, which glows under and behind you. Presently this glory faded, and the stars came and said, “Here we are”; began to cast such private and ineffable beams as to stop all conversation.⁷⁶

Thoreau eagerly awaited correspondence when the friends were apart. Lidian wrote to her husband and emphasized that “Henry seems joyful when there is news from you.”⁷⁷

As their friendship progressed, Emerson became ever more anticipatory of what Thoreau would accomplish, and although he recognized that “all the fine souls have a flaw which defeats every expectation they excite,” he also found that “to have awakened a great hope in another, is already some fruit is it not?”⁷⁸ Even in the early days Emerson exacted high expectations of what he had hoped to discover in Thoreau, telling him “that his freedom is in the form, but he does not disclose new matter. . . . But if the question be, what new ideas has he thrown into circulation, he has not yet told what that is which he was created to say.”⁷⁹

By October Emerson was indicating a nascent strain in their relationship, admiring Thoreau as “a person of extraordinary health and vigor, of unerring perception, and equal expression,” but acknowledging that “yet he is impracticable, and does not flow through his pen or (in any of our legitimate aqueducts) through his tongue.”⁸⁰ Thoreau felt a hindrance in the progress of their friendship, writing a poem that winter titled “Delay in Friendship,” which asks,

        Wilt thou not wait for me my friend,

        Or give a longer lease?⁸¹

Thoreau understood Emerson’s position and intent in his kindnesses and help, but at times he also may have misconstrued them.

        But he goes unappeased

        Who is on kindness bent.⁸²

He may have felt that Emerson demanded something greater, had an expectation that could not be fulfilled. Thoreau was trying to establish his own voice, a voice of defiant self-reliance that asked, “If I am not I, who will be?”⁸³

Whatever temporary impasse these friends may have been experiencing, something unexpected brought them a shared and overpowering grief when the beginning of 1842 saw tragedy strike both the Thoreau and Emerson families. “I begin my letter,” Lidian wrote her sister, “with the strange sad news that John Thoreau has this afternoon left this world.”⁸⁴ John had cut his left-hand thumb while stropping his razor on New Year’s Day. Not thinking it serious, he replaced the missing skin and bandaged it. Although within a few days it began to cause him pain, not until January 8 did he actually remove the bandage. The flesh was foul smelling, discolored, and darkened. Gangrene had set in.

The skin had already begun to mortify when John visited Dr. Josiah Bartlett that Saturday evening. The Concord physician examined and redressed the wound. Although his father, also Dr. Josiah Bartlett, had written a pamphlet in 1808 on tetanus and the use of amputation as a cure, Bartlett did not find any reason for concern. There are no medical records to explain why he was not alarmed. On his way home John began to experience pain in various parts of his body. He was barely able to complete the one-third-mile walk. By morning his jaw was stiff. Excruciating spasms that evening confirmed the onset of lockjaw. Thoreau was called home from the Emersons’.

On Monday, the doctor told John that it was too late for anything to be done, and that his death would be quick but painful. “Is there no hope?” he asked. The doctor replied simply, “None,” to which John said, “The cup that my Father gives me, shall I not drink it?” Lidian reported that John retained “his senses and some power of speech to the last. He said from the first he knew he should die—but was perfectly quiet and trustful—saying that God had always been good to him and he could trust Him now. His words and behavior throughout were what Mr. Emerson calls manly—even great.”⁸⁵

Later that day John took leave of his family, all but his brother. Henry remained when everyone else had left the room. He sat down and talked, as John had asked him to do, about nature and poetry. “I shall be a good listener,” he said with what strength and humor he could muster, “for it is difficult for me to interrupt you.” The next day, in his final hour, John looked at his brother with what Thoreau described as a “transcendental smile full of Heaven,”⁸⁶ although it was likely the risus sardonicus caused by muscle spasms. Henry returned a smile. This was the last that passed between them. John died on Tuesday afternoon at 2:00 in his brother’s arms.

In the evening Thoreau walked the half mile to Emerson’s house to see his friend, “but no one else,” as Lidian wrote. One does not know, one can only imagine, the conversation that took place behind the closed doors of Emerson’s study. The death of Thoreau’s brother could only have stirred memories of Emerson’s own fraternal losses. His brother Edward died in 1834 and, more parallel to Thoreau’s loss, Charles in 1836. He had described Charles to Lidian as “my noble friend who was my ornament my wisdom and my pride. . . . How much I saw through his eyes. I feel as if my own were very dim.”⁸⁷ Passages from Charles’s journals were printed in The Dial, and Emerson paid tribute to both brothers in his poem “Dirge.”

What was said in the privacy of Emerson’s study is not recorded in the journals or correspondence of either man, although parts of it may have been conveyed to Lidian, who wrote,

He says John took leave of all the family on Monday with perfect calmness and more than resignation. It is a beautiful fate that has been granted him and I think he was worthy of it. At first it seemed not beautiful but terrible. Since I have heard particulars and recollected all the good I have heard of him I feel as if a pure spirit had been translated.⁸⁸

When Lidian later asked Thoreau “if this sudden fate gave any shock to John when he first was aware of his danger,” he answered, “None at all.”⁸⁹ It had been John’s belief that he would die early.⁹⁰

The following morning Thoreau returned to Bush to get his clothes, unsure when he would return as a member of the Emerson household. Before noon he was back on Main Street with his family. Lidian loved “him for the feeling he showed and the effort he made to be cheerful. He did not give way in the least but his whole demeanour was that of one struggling with sickness of heart.”⁹¹ This sickness of heart with which Thoreau struggled would soon surface in a way that caused considerable alarm to his family and friends.

Edward Emerson remembered being told that the “shock, the loss, and the sight of his brother’s terrible suffering at the end, for a time overthrew Henry so utterly that . . . he sat still in the house, could do nothing, and his sisters led him out passive to try to help him.”⁹² Thoreau’s depression soon manifested itself physically. On Saturday, January 22, Emerson returned to Concord from Boston, where he had delivered the last lecture of his series “On the Times,” only to find his friend “ill and threatened with lockjaw! his brother’s disease. It is strange—unaccountable—yet the symptoms seemed precise and on the increase. You may judge we were all alarmed and I not the least who have the highest hopes of this youth.”⁹³

By Monday Emerson could write that Thoreau’s “affection be it what it may, is relieved essentially, and what is best, his own feeling of better health established.”⁹⁴ It was a slow process. “I must confess,” Thoreau wrote in his journal, “there is nothing so strange to me as my own body. I love any other piece of nature, almost, better.”⁹⁵ A month later Lidian was writing that “Henry is better—nearly well. But his headache or the cause of it, made his eyes so weak that he did not read or write much for two days or more.”⁹⁶ Good health still wasn’t totally restored. In March Thoreau wrote that he had been “confined to my chamber for a month with a prolonged shock of the same disorder—from close attention to, and sympathy with him, which I learn is not without precedent.”⁹⁷ A year later, on the anniversary of John’s death, Thoreau asked in his journal, “What am I at present?” He answered, “A diseased bundle of nerves standing between time and eternity like a withered leaf that still hangs shivering on its stem.”⁹⁸

The relief Emerson experienced over his friend’s returning health that January was brief. Waldo, Emerson’s five-year-old son, showed signs of scarlet fever. It began with a soreness of the throat and a fever. Eruptions on the skin appeared, similar to measles but occurring more rapidly, yet following the eruptions the fever did not begin to subside as with measles. Waldo’s skin took on broad patches of the vivid red color that gave the disease its name. Seizures were followed by delirium. His “sweet and wonderful boy,” Emerson wrote Carlyle, was “hurried out of my arms in three short days by Scarlatina.”⁹⁹

When Alcott sent his daughter, the nine-year-old Louisa, to ask after Waldo’s health, it would be one of her earliest remembrances of Emerson and one she would not forget. He came to the door looking “so worn with watching, and changed by sorrow, that I was startled, and could only stammer out my message.” He simply answered, “Child, he is dead,” and closed the door. Louisa ran home to tell her family the news. She later recollected that it was “my first glimpse of a great grief; but I never have forgotten the anguish that made a familiar face so tragical, and gave those few words more pathos than the sweet lamentation of” Emerson’s poetic requiem for his son, “Threnody.”¹⁰⁰

For a period following Waldo’s death, Emerson saw the world only in relation to his son. “What he looked upon is better,” he wrote on January 30, “what he looked not upon is insignificant.” On waking he found that the sun had risen as usual “with all his light, but the landscape was dishonored by this loss. For this boy, in whose remembrance I have both slept and awaked so oft, decorated for me the morning star, the evening cloud, how much more all the particulars of daily economy.”¹⁰¹

Until this time Emerson had relied on his intellect to carry him through a crisis. Even the death of his first wife, Ellen, and his brother Charles had not brought him to this place. The pretense, based on his previous experiences of death, was shaken; he had once confessed, “if my wife, my child, my mother, should be taken from me, I should still remain whole, with the same capacity of cheap enjoyment from all things. I should not grieve enough, although I love them.”¹⁰² Now, however, he admitted simply in his journal, “The wisest knows nothing.”¹⁰³ The ideas expressed in his essay “Compensation”—“The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character.”¹⁰⁴—did little to assuage the pain he was currently feeling. In an undated, and later cancelled, journal entry from 1843, Emerson wrote down Lidian’s wish that she had never been born, followed by her statement with which he must have been in agreement, “I do not see how God can compensate me for the sorrow of existence.”¹⁰⁵ He could not anticipate a return to the comfort expressed in his poem “Give All to Love,” in which he wrote that

        When half-gods go,

        The gods arrive.¹⁰⁶

In an effort to capture what he had lost, Emerson began to collect little bits of Waldo’s conversations in his journal. It was his way of dealing with the dead and the dying, and he would do it again when Margaret Fuller drowned, and later when Thoreau was dying. He remembered the fanciful names Waldo gave to the parts of the toy house he was always building, such as the Interspeglium and the Coridaga. Once when Waldo asked if there were other countries besides the United States and his father began to name them, Thoreau commented on the boy’s large way of speech that offered questions that “did not admit of an answer; they were the same which you would ask yourself.” When it happened to thunder while Waldo was blowing his willow whistle, he said that his music “makes the thunder dance.”

One time he asked Lidian, “Mamma, may I have this bell which I have been making, to stand by the side of my bed?”

“Yes,” his mother answered, “it may stand there.”

“But Mamma,” Waldo suggested, “I am afraid it will alarm you. It may sound in the middle of the night, and it will be heard all over the town; it will be louder than ten thousand hawks; it will be heard across the water, and in all the countries. It will be heard all over the world. It will sound like some great glass thing which falls down and breaks all to pieces.”¹⁰⁷

The following month Emerson wrote to his childless friend Carlyle: “You can never sympathize with me; you can never know how much of me such a young child can take away.”¹⁰⁸

Although Emerson wrote in “Experience” that “Grief too will make us idealists. In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,—no more. I cannot get it nearer to me,”¹⁰⁹ Margaret Fuller saw a loneliness that remained. Two years after Waldo’s death she wrote Emerson, “I know you are not a ‘marker of days’ nor do in any way encourage those useless pains which waste the strength needed for our nobler purposes, yet it seems to me this season can never pass without opening anew the deep wound. . . . I miss him when I go to your home, I miss him when I think of you there; you seem to me lonely as if he filled you to a place which no other ever could in any degree.” She exhibited an understanding and perspective rare for the mid-nineteenth century. She recognized that “Little Edith has been injured in my affections by being compared with him. . . . I do not like to have her put in his place or likened to him; that only makes me feel that she is not the same and do her injustice.” Even more to the point she told her friend, “I hope you will have another son, for I perceive that men do not feel themselves represented to the next generation by daughters, but I hope, if you do, there will be no comparisons made . . .”¹¹⁰

Emerson’s reply reflected none of Fuller’s concerns for his other children, living or yet to be born. Instead he wrote of his still-present pain, telling Fuller that when Lidian said, “‘It is two years today—’ I only heard the bell-stroke again. I have had no experiences no progress to put me into better intelligence with my calamity than when it was new.”¹¹¹

When Emerson’s house burned thirty years later, friends and neighbors worked hurriedly to save what they could. Emerson collected together the letters of his first wife, Ellen, along with Waldo’s clothes that he had kept. He was not making a desperate effort to save those relics of lost loved ones. It was the opposite. His daughter described how her father gathered those personal objects and then “deliberately threw them into the fire.”¹¹² With those gestures Emerson threw the last vestiges of Ellen and Waldo into the burning Bush.

When Emerson was lecturing in New York a few months after Waldo died, Lidian wrote him, including “an extract from a letter Henry sent this week to” her sister, Lucy Jackson Brown. “I did not know it was there till I had written some lines—but will not tear it from the sheet since you may like it as well as I do—and if so it will cheer your loneliness.”¹¹³ Thoreau wrote,

As for Waldo, he died as the mist rises from the brook, which the sun will soon dart his rays through. Do not the flowers die every autumn? He had not even taken root here. I was not startled to hear that he was dead; it seemed the most natural event that could happen. His fine organization demanded it, and nature gently yielded its request. It would have been strange if he had lived. Neither will nature manifest any sorrow at his death, but soon the note of the lark will be heard down in the meadow, and fresh dandelions will spring from the old stocks where he plucked them last summer.¹¹⁴

Lidian asked Thoreau to send Emerson

a letter by this opportunity—and he seems quite ready to do so. He had a sick headache about the time you went away, and has not been quite well since,—has had a cold and weak eyes—and some return of spasmodic affection. But is very bright and interesting and beguiles what time he can do nought else in with playing on the flute. He finds that exercise, which he hoped would be a relief—only increases his ails—so that I have begged him not to feel the care of the wood—and have had Colombe to work one day upon it—as we were in need both of green and dry hard wood.¹¹⁵

On March 11 Henry wrote a long letter that contained some thoughts on death.

Nature is not ruffled by the rudest blast—The hurricane only snaps a few twigs in some nook of the forest. The snow attains its average depth each winter, and the chicadee lisps the same notes. The old laws prevail in spite of pestilence and famine. No genius or virtue so rare and revolutionary appears in town or village, that the pine ceases to exude resin in the wood, or beast or bird lays aside its habits.

How plain that death is only the phenomenon of the individual or class. Nature does not recognize it, she finds her own again under new forms without loss. Yet death is beautiful when seen to be a law, and not an accident—It is as common as life. Men die in Tartary, in Ethiopia—in England—in Wisconsin. And after all what portion of this so serene and living nature can be said to be alive? Do this year’s grasses and foliage outnumber all the past?

Every blade in the field—every leaf in the forest—lays down its life in its season as beautifully as it was taken up. It is the pastime of a full quarter of the year. Dead trees—sere leaves—dried grass and herbs—are not these a good part of our life? And what is that pride of our autumnal scenery but the hectic flush—the sallow and cadaverous countenance of vegetation—its painted throes—with the November air for canvas—

When we look over the fields are we not saddened because these particular flowers or grasses will wither—for the law of their death is the law of new life. Will not the land be in good heart because the crops die down from year to year? The herbage cheerfully consents to bloom, and wither, and give place to a new.

So is it with the human plant. We are partial and selfish when we lament the death of the individual, unless our plaint be a paean to the departed soul, and a sigh as the wind sighs over the fields, which no shrub interprets into its private grief.

One might as well go into mourning for every sere leaf—but the more innocent and wiser soul will snuff a fragrance in the gales of autumn, and congratulate Nature upon her health.

After I have imagined thus much will not the Gods feel under obligations to make me realize something as good?¹¹⁶

The naturalness of dying expressed here, in relation to both recent deaths, would resurface when Thoreau was redacting “Autumnal Tints” on his deathbed: “How many flutterings before they rest quietly in their graves! They that soared so loftily, how contentedly they return to dust again, and are laid low, resigned to lie and decay at the foot of the tree, and afford nourishment to new generations of their kind, as well as to flutter on high! They teach us how to die.”¹¹⁷

Thoreau prefaced his letter with a nod to the impasse they had reached in their relationship, the difficulty of speaking about personal matters face-to-face, by saying that

there seems to be no occasion why I who have so little to say to you here at home should take pains to send you any of my silence in a letter—Yet since no correspondence can hope to rise above the level of those homely speechless hours, as no spring ever bursts above the level of the still mountain tarn whence it issued—I will not delay to send a venture. As if I were to send you a piece of the house-sill—or a loose casement rather. Do not neighbors sometimes halloo with good will across a field, who yet never chat over a fence?¹¹⁸

Thoreau thought Emerson’s coolness and reserve was “because his love for me is waxing and not waning. . . . Heaven is to come. I hope this is not it.”¹¹⁹ Emerson was aware of his own coolness, confessing in his journal in 1843, “It is a pathetic thing to meet a friend prepared to love you, to whom yet, from some inaptitude, you cannot communicate yourself with that grace and power which only love will allow.”¹²⁰ There was an explosion of writing about friendship as Thoreau tried to work it out in his journal. “Words should pass between friends as the lightning passes from cloud to cloud.” He didn’t want

friends to feed and clothe our bodies,—neighbors are kind enough for that,—but to do the like offices to ourselves. We wish to spread and publish ourselves, as the sun spreads its rays; and we toss the new thought to the friend, and thus it is dispersed. Friends are those twain who feel their interests to be one. Each knows that the other might as well have said what he said. All beauty, all music, all delight springs from apparent dualism but real unity. My friend is my real brother. I see his nature groping yonder like my own. Does there go one whom I know? then I go there.

The field where friends have met is consecrated forever. Man seeks friendship out of the desire to realize a home here. As the Indian thinks he receives into himself the courage and strength of his conquered enemy, so we add to ourselves all the character and heart of our friends. He is my creation. I can do what I will with him. There is no possibility of being thwarted; the friend is like wax in the rays that fall from our own hearts.

The friend does not take my word for anything, but he takes me. He trusts me as I trust myself. We only need be as true to others as we are to ourselves, that there may be ground enough for friendship.¹²¹

In April Emerson asked Thoreau to write a review of some scientific surveys of Massachusetts he had been reading. He told Fuller that he had “set Henry Thoreau on the good track of giving an account of them in the Dial, explaining to him the felicity of the subject for him as it admits of the narrative of all his woodcraft, boatcraft and fishcraft.” It was his constant wish to bring Thoreau’s work to a wider audience, and “as private secretary to the President of the Dial, his works and fame may go out into all lands, and, as happens to great Premiers, quite extinguish the titular Master.”¹²² Thoreau’s “Natural History of Massachusetts” was published in the next issue of The Dial.

As 1842 drew to a close, Thoreau, Emerson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne had a skating party on the frozen meadow next to the Old Manse. Sophia Hawthorne described Thoreau’s “dithyrambic dances and Bacchic leaps on the ice—very remarkable, but very ugly, methought. Next him followed Mr. Hawthorne who, wrapped in his cloak, moved like a self-impelled Greek statue, stately and grave. Mr. Emerson closed the line, evidently too weary to hold himself erect, pitching headforemost, half lying on the air.”¹²³

In his “Address Delivered Before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge,” Emerson noted, “It is already beginning to indicate character and religion to withdraw from the religious meetings.”¹²⁴ Thoreau signed off from the First Parish Church in Concord at the beginning of 1841, writing simply to the clerk, “I do not wish to be considered a member of the First Parish in this town.”¹²⁵ God was not to be found in the formal tenets of organized religion. God was not to be found confined between the walls of a church with a ministerial mediator. God was not to be found weekly on Sundays with the Sabbatarians.

As Emerson wrote in his Divinity College address, “In how many churches, by how many prophets, tell me, is man made sensible that he is an infinite Soul; that the earth and heavens are passing into his mind; that he is drinking forever the soul of God?”¹²⁶ Or as he wrote later in “Politics”: “The wise man . . . needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is a prophet.”¹²⁷

“The strains of a more heroic faith vibrate through the week days and the fields than through the Sabbath and the Church,” Thoreau wrote. “To shut the ears to the immediate voice of God, and prefer to know him by report will be the only sin.”¹²⁸ So when Emerson’s mother came home from church in January 1843 to report to Lidian that she had been astonished to see Thoreau, not only sitting in church that Sabbath day, but in Emerson’s pew, it was quite a surprise. Lidian then reported the story to her husband, who was away on a lecture tour. It is possible that Thoreau was in some way conciliating Lidian, who “had a conversation with him a few days since on his heresies—but had no expectation of so speedy a result,”¹²⁹ but Thoreau also seemed to take some relish in substituting for Emerson when the opportunity arose. Whatever his reasons for sitting in Emerson’s pew, a little over a week later he was writing to his friend, “The best way to correct a mistake is to make it right.”¹³⁰

Lidian described in a letter to her husband the happy domestic scene he was missing. “It is ‘after dinner,’” she wrote,

and your peerless Edith is looking most beautifully as she dances with Henry or lays her innocent head on his music-box that she may drink yet deeper of its sweetness. Now am I interrupted by an exclamation from all present—the cherub face appears above the screen for Uncle Henry takes care that Edie shall take as high flights in Papa’s absence as ever—she rides on his shoulder or is held high up in the air—I think he adds to her happiness, and she no less to his. I wish you had seen her this morning.¹³¹

Lidian went on to recount the popping of the corn: “I brought the warming pan into the dining-room and the corn was quickly shelled into it and held over the fire by Henry who was master of ceremonies—and enjoyed the frolic as well as any child of us all. When the snapping was heard in full chorus I with my napkin lifted the hot cover the pan was taken off and the corn flew over the rug and the children like a snow storm.”¹³²

In the first week of February Lidian described Thoreau recovering from an unspecified illness, and that he “has so far improved in health as to be quite able, as he thinks, to shovel snow once more, deep though it be. He has made very handsome paths from both doors and the great blocks of snow lie on each side attesting that they were no trifle to dispose of—I don’t know that I ever saw the snow deeper on a level.” She told Emerson that Thoreau was not going to write him at this time, “has deferred writing with my consent till you have answered his first one.”¹³³

Emerson had told Lidian how occupied he was, previously saying that he had “received with great contentment Henry’s excellent letter but what kept me from writing to you kept me from him.”¹³⁴ In a letter to Thoreau he wrote, “I think that some letter must have failed for I cannot have let ten days go by without writing home. I have kept no account but am confident that that cannot be.”¹³⁵ Emerson was lecturing in Philadelphia, then was in New York visiting his brother William. While he was away Thoreau gave one of his earliest lectures in Concord, “The Life and Character of Sir Walter Raleigh,” and Emerson enthusiastically urged Lidian to “not fail to tell me every particular concerning Henry’s lecture when that comes—and the brightest star of the winter shed its clear beams on that night!”¹³⁶ Lidian wrote that

Henry’s Lecture pleased me much—and I have reason to believe others liked it. Henry tells me he is so happy as to have received Mr. Keye’s suffrage and the Concord paper has spoken well of it. I think you would have been a well pleased listener. I should like to hear it two or three times more. Henry ought to be known as a man who can give a Lecture. You must advertise him to the extent of your power. A few Lyceum fees would satisfy his moderate wants—to say nothing of the improvement and happiness it would give both him and his fellow creatures if he could utter what is “most within him”—and be heard.¹³⁷

When Thoreau did write, possibly without waiting for a letter from Emerson, he told of the family that “it will inform you of the state of all if I only say that I am well and happy in your house here in Concord,” and made only a passing mention to his talk, though referencing Emerson’s wish for a bright starlit night: “I lectured this week. It was as bright a night as you could wish. I hope there were no stars thrown away on the occasion.”¹³⁸

Days passed without further correspondence. “I think you have made Henry wait a reasonable—or unreasonable time for an answer to his letter,” Lidian wrote.¹³⁹ Emerson did write Thoreau on that same day, but only on business matters. Thoreau also wrote that day, with an overt nod to their disrupted correspondence,

As the packet still tarries, I will send you some thoughts, which I have lately relearned, as the latest public and private news.

How mean are our relations to one another! Let us pause till they are nobler. A little silence, a little rest, is good. It would be sufficient employment only to cultivate true ones.

The richest gifts we can bestow are the least marketable. We hate the kindness which we understand. A noble person confers no such gift as his whole confidence: none so exalts the giver and the receiver; it produces the truest gratitude. Perhaps it is only essential to friendship that some vital trust should have been reposed by the one in the other. I feel addressed and probed even to the remote parts of my being when one nobly shows, even in trivial things, an implicit faith in me. When such divine commodities are so near and cheap, how strange that it should have to be each day’s discovery! A threat or a curse may be forgotten, but this mild trust translates me. I am no more of this earth; it acts dynamically; it changes my very substance. I cannot do what before I did. I cannot be what before I was. Other chains may be broken, but in the darkest night, in the remotest place, I trail this thread. Then things cannot happen. What if God were to confide in us for a moment! Should we not then be gods?

How subtle a thing is this confidence! Nothing sensible passes between; never any consequences are to be apprehended should it be misplaced. Yet something has transpired. A new behavior springs; the ship carries new ballast in her hold. A sufficiently great and generous trust could never be abused. It should be cause to lay down one’s life,—which would not be to lose it. Can there be any mistake up there? Don’t the gods know where to invest their wealth? Such confidence, too, would be reciprocal. When one confides greatly in you, he will feel the roots of an equal trust fastening themselves in him. When such trust has been received or reposed, we dare not speak, hardly to see each other; our voices sound harsh and untrustworthy. We are as instruments which the Powers have dealt with. Through what straits would we not carry this little burden of a magnanimous trust! Yet no harm could possibly come, but simply faithlessness. Not a feather, not a straw, is entrusted; that packet is empty. It is only committed to us, and, as it were, all things are committed to us.

The kindness I have longest remembered has been of this sort,—the sort unsaid; so far behind the speaker’s lips that almost it already lay in my heart. It did not have far to go to be communicated. The gods cannot misunderstand, man cannot explain. We communicate like the burrows of foxes, in silence and darkness, under ground. We are undermined by faith and love. How much more full is Nature where we think the empty space is than where we place the solids!—full of fluid influences. Should we ever communicate but by these? The spirit abhors a vacuum more than Nature. There is a tide which pierces the pores of the air. These aerial rivers, let us not pollute their currents. What meadows do they course through? How many fine mails there are which traverse their routes! He is privileged who gets his letter franked by them.

I believe these things.¹⁴⁰

When Thoreau did finally receive letters from his friend, he joyously wrote, “My dear Friend,—I got your letters, one yesterday and the other to-day, and they have made me quite happy.”¹⁴¹ Feeling confident again in their friendship, Thoreau could write in all honesty, “Do not think that my letters require as many special answers. I get one as often as you write to Concord,” urging Emerson to “make haste home before we have settled all the great questions, for they are fast being disposed of.”¹⁴²

When his “A Walk to Wachusett” was published in the January 1843 issue of the Boston Miscellany of Literature and Fashion, Thoreau had trouble getting paid by the publisher. “Did I tell you,” Lidian wrote her husband, “that Bradbury & Soden have refused to pay Henry more than two thirds of the money they promised for his ‘Walk to W,’ and that they postpone the payment even of that? Will it not do for you to call on your return through Boston and demand it for him?”¹⁴³ Emerson did his best, writing Thoreau, “I am sorry to say that when I called on Bradbury & Soden nearly a month ago, their partner in their absence informed me that they could not pay you at present any part of their debt on account of the Boston Miscellany. . . . I shall not fail to refresh their memory at intervals.”¹⁴⁴ Thoreau soon told Emerson not to “think of Bradbury & Soden any more. . . . I see that they have given up their shop here.”¹⁴⁵

While Emerson was still in New York, Thoreau wrote to him about his “long kindness” and his own unexpressed gratitude that he had been Emerson’s “pensioner for nearly two years, and still left free as under the sky.”¹⁴⁶ Realizing his position and the obligations he owed to their friendship, as well as perhaps feeling the weight of such obligations, it was now time to move on, though not without asking Emerson’s assistance. Thoreau wrote in early March that he had been “meditating some other method of paying debts than by lectures and writing which will only do to talk about. If anything of that ‘other’ sort should come to your ears in N.Y. will you remember it for me?”¹⁴⁷

Emerson suggested to his brother that Thoreau might make an excellent tutor for his three children—the youngest, Charles, still an infant; three-year-old Haven; but principally seven-year-old Willie. William Emerson agreed. It would give Thoreau not only a paid position for which he was well qualified but also access to the New York publishers and editors. On returning to Concord Emerson discussed the idea with Thoreau. He explained that it was more Willie himself than his grammar and geography that would be subject to Thoreau’s influence; he should take the boy to the woods as well as into the city. For that he would get lodging and board, firewood when needed, and one hundred dollars per annum. Thoreau had found a position he wished to sustain, “to be the friend and educator of a boy, and one not yet subdued by schoolmasters.”¹⁴⁸

Perhaps he might be able to perform some clerical work in William Emerson’s office, or for someone Emerson knew, to supplement his income until he could obtain some literary work in the city. Such was Thoreau’s hope. For all concerned, this was an auspicious and welcome opportunity. Elizabeth Hoar sent him an inkstand as a token; Prudence Ward gave him a small microscope.

Emerson wrote his brother a brief caveat based on his own experiences. Thoreau “is a bold and a profound thinker,” he wrote, “though he may easily chance to pester you with some accidental crotchets and perhaps a village exaggeration of the value of facts.”¹⁴⁹ Emerson had confessed as much to Hawthorne, who wrote in his journal around this time, “Mr. Emerson appears to have suffered some inconveniency from his experience of Mr. Thoreau as an inmate.”¹⁵⁰ But Emerson concluded his warning with the promise that “if you should content each other,” Willie would soon come “to value him for his real power to serve and instruct him. I shall eagerly look, though not yet for some time, for tidings how you speed in this new relation.”¹⁵¹

Thoreau visited Hawthorne before leaving, going out on the river with him in the Musketaquid, the boat Thoreau had sold him in the fall. Hawthorne was glad on Thoreau’s account, as he is “physically out of health, and, morally and intellectually, seems not to have found exactly the guiding clue; and in all these respects, he may be benefitted by his removal.” It was on everyone’s mind but only Hawthorne expressed it on paper: “Also, it is one step towards a circumstantial position in the world.” But on his own account, the introverted and sometimes reclusive Hawthorne would have preferred that Thoreau stay, “he being one of the few persons, I think, with whom to hold intercourse is like hearing the wind among the boughs of a forest-tree.”¹⁵²

Elizabeth Hoar told Emerson that “I love Henry, but do not like him.”¹⁵³ As he struggled with his own relationship with Henry, this may have seemed like a motto to their own friendship. “Young men, like Henry Thoreau, owe us a new world, and they have not acquitted the debt,” Emerson wrote in his journal. “For the most part, such die young, and so dodge the fulfilment.”¹⁵⁴ Perhaps in New York Thoreau would not be able to dodge what Emerson thought he owed the world.

Emerson was confident about this new episode in his young friend’s life, writing to his brother, “And now goes our brave youth into the new house, the new connexion, the new City. I am sure no truer and no purer person lives in wide New York.”¹⁵⁵ Henry was missed. Waldo wrote him, “You will not doubt that you are well remembered here, by young, older, and old people and your letter to your mother was borrowed and read with great interest, pending the arrival of direct accounts and of later experiences especially in the city.”¹⁵⁶

Away from home Henry realized not just what he owed to Waldo, but also to Lidian. “I believe a good many conversations with you were left in an unfinished state, and now indeed I don’t know where to take them up,” he wrote her.

I think of you as some elder sister of mine, whom I could not have avoided,—a sort of lunar influence,—only of such age as the moon, whose time is measured by her light. You must know that you represent to me woman. . . . I thank you for your influence for two years. I was fortunate to be subjected to it, and am now to remember it. It is the noblest gift we can make; what signify all others that can be bestowed? You have helped to keep my life “on loft,” as Chaucer says of Griselda, and in a better sense. You always seemed to look down at me as from some elevation—some of your high humilities—and I was the better for having to look up. I felt taxed not to disappoint your expectation; for could there be any accident so sad as to be respected for something better than we are? It was a pleasure even to go away from you, as it is not to meet some, as it apprised me of my high relations; and such a departure is a sort of further introduction and meeting. Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.¹⁵⁷

Thoreau reminded Lidian to not think

fate is so dark there, for even here I can see a faint reflected light over Concord. . . .

I have hardly begun to live on Staten Island yet; but, like the man who, when forbidden to tread on English ground, carried Scottish ground in his boots, I carry Concord ground in my boots and in my hat,—and am I not made of Concord dust? I cannot realize that it is the roar of the sea I hear now, and not the wind in Walden woods. I find more of Concord, after all, in the prospect of the sea, beyond Sandy Hook, than in the fields and woods.¹⁵⁸

Sometimes his homesickness manifested itself physically. “I have been sick ever since I came here—rather unaccountably, what with a cold, bronchitis, acclimation etc.—still unaccountably.”¹⁵⁹ He was disappointed in what little of New York he had seen so far. He tried to write something for The Dial but wasn’t sure he could “finish an account of a winter’s walk in Concord in the midst of a Staten Island summer.”¹⁶⁰ When he did finish it, it was too late for immediate publication, but Emerson offered to hold on to it, for which Thoreau was grateful. “As for the ‘Winter’s Walk,’” Thoreau wrote, “I should be glad to have it printed in the D. if you think it good enough, and will criticise it—otherwise send it to me and I will dispose of it.”¹⁶¹ Emerson found the essay full of Thoreau’s “old fault of unlimited contradiction. . . . it makes me nervous and wretched to read it, with all its merits.”¹⁶² When the next issue of The Dial was being sent to the printer, Emerson wrote to Thoreau that he

had some hesitation about it, notwithstanding its faithful observation and its fine sketches of the pickerel-fisher and of the woodchopper, 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. By pretty free omissions, however, I have removed my principal objections.¹⁶³

When James Russell Lowell omitted one sentence from Thoreau’s essay “Chesuncook” in 1858, Thoreau was uncompromisingly vehement when he said that the “editor has, in this case, no more right to omit a sentiment than to insert one, or put words into my mouth.”¹⁶⁴ In relation to “A Winter’s Walk” and Emerson’s edits, he was much more forgiving. Whether simply from this happening earlier in his writing career, or out of deference to his friend, he wrote Emerson, “I doubt if you have made more corrections in my manuscript than I should have done ere this, though they may be better; but I am glad you have taken any pains with it.”¹⁶⁵

“I don’t like the city better, the more I see it, but worse,” Thoreau wrote after months in New York. “I am ashamed of my eyes that behold it. It is a thousand times meaner than I could have imagined. . . . The pigs in the street are the most respectable part of the population.”¹⁶⁶ One highlight, however, was the theologian Henry James, about whom Emerson had said “you must not fail to visit.”¹⁶⁷ Thoreau found in James someone who

makes humanity seem more erect and respectable. . . . He is a man, and takes his own way, or stands still in his own place. I know of no one so patient and determined to have the good of you. It is almost friendship, such plain and human dealing. I think that he will not write or speak inspiringly; but he is a refreshing forward-looking and forward-moving man, and he has naturalized and humanized New York for me. He actually reproaches you by his respect for your poor words. I had three hours’ solid talk with him, and he asks me to make free use of his house.¹⁶⁸

But he was not happy with his situation.

I do not feel myself especially serviceable to the good people with whom I live, except as inflictions are sanctified to the righteous. And so, too, must I serve the boy. I can look to the Latin and mathematics sharply, and for the rest behave myself. But I cannot be in his neighborhood hereafter as his Educator, of course, but as the hawks fly over my own head. I am not attracted toward him but as to youth generally. He shall frequent me, however, as much as he can, and I’ll be I.¹⁶⁹

When he received a letter from Lidian in June, he started reading it but decided to go

to the top of the hill at sunset, where I can see the ocean, to prepare to read the rest. It is fitter that it should hear it than the walls of my chamber. . . . I am almost afraid to look at your letter. . . .

You seem to me to speak out of a very clear and high heaven, where any one may be who stands so high. Your voice seems not a voice, but comes as much from the blue heavens as from the paper.¹⁷⁰

It is clear from his answer to Lidian that they shared an emotional intimacy that each sometimes failed to find in Emerson, and that there was a confidence and trust that, again, they missed in Emerson. “My dear friend,” Thoreau wrote her, “it was very noble in you to write me so trustful an answer. It will do as well for another world as for this.” They were connected. “I think I know your thoughts without seeing you, and as well here as in Concord. You are not at all strange to me.” She confided to him about her “sad hours,” the result of some physical ailment. In closing he expressed the “joy your letter gives me,” and sent his “love to my other friend and brother, whose nobleness I slowly recognize.”¹⁷¹

In September, among other local news, Emerson lamented the conditions of the Irish laborers who had come to lay down the tracks for the railroad that would be extending past Walden Pond to Fitchburg.

Now the humanity of the town suffers with the poor Irish, who receives but sixty, or even fifty cents, for working from dark till dark, with a strain and a following up that reminds one of negro-driving. Peter Hutchinson told me he had never seen men perform so much; he should never think it hard again if an employer should keep him at work till after sundown. But what can be done for their relief as long as new applicants for the same labor are coming in every day? These of course reduce the wages to the sum that will suffice a bachelor to live, and must drive out the men with families. The work goes on very fast.¹⁷²

Thoreau may not have felt Emerson’s sympathy went far enough. Although he didn’t do it, Emerson briefly contemplated selling his home in Concord. Thoreau told his friend, “The 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.”¹⁷³

In mid-November Thoreau was in Concord to spend Thanksgiving with his family and to give a lecture. He was back in New York the first week of December, but his brief visit home may have been an overwhelming reminder of what he was missing; in two weeks he returned home to Concord for good. He asked Emerson to tie up any loose ends with his brother; Emerson sent William thanks from Thoreau “for the purse and says that the Pindar he will return through me, and says that he left nothing of any value at all in his chamber. You will please use your discretion with any matters found there.”¹⁷⁴

Although the New York adventure did not yield the results everyone had hoped for, Thoreau did have two pieces published outside The Dial—“A Walk to Wachusett” in the Boston Miscellany of Literature and Fashion and “Paradise (to be) Regained” in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review. “I could heartily wish,” Emerson wrote his friend while still in New York, “that this country, which seems all opportunity, did actually offer more distinct and just rewards of labor to that unhappy class of men who have more reason and conscience than strength of back and of arm.”¹⁷⁵ Soon Thoreau would enter a new phase in his writing career, a prolific period in which he wrote, or began to write, his two most famous works: Walden and “Civil Disobedience.”

“It matters not how small the beginning may seem to be,” Thoreau wrote in “Civil Disobedience.”¹⁷⁶ His move to Walden Pond on July 4, 1845, was just such a small beginning. His noting of the event was inauspicious. “Yesterday I came here to live,”¹⁷⁷ he wrote in his journal the next day. That he moved on the anniversary of American independence has been touted as Thoreau’s own day of independence, which may be little more than academic mythologizing. A more personal reason may have prompted his timing, and his claim that its falling on Independence Day was an “accident”¹⁷⁸ is more truth than literary device. Thoreau went to Walden Pond to write a book commemorating his brother. By moving in on the fourth of July he would awaken to see the sun rise on his new life at the Pond on the morning of what would have been John’s thirtieth birthday.

Walden Woods was marginal land. Not arable, it was good only for woodlots. The land on which Thoreau built his house was one of Emerson’s lots, and he was able to live on his friend’s land in exchange for the same type of labor and help he gave when living in the Emerson household. The woods were also home to people who, in their own way, were marginal to Concord society: the Irish building the railroad, the formerly enslaved, alcoholics, those simply called lurkers, and now Henry David Thoreau. It was no wonder people made “very particular inquiries” concerning his life there.¹⁷⁹ When people asked what he was doing there, he presented a lecture, “A History of Myself,” before the Concord Lyceum. This became the foundation for Walden.

Thoreau woke with the sun, and his days might include a morning bath in the pond, a period for reading and writing, hoeing his bean field, a long walk through the woods botanizing and observing, a second bath or afternoon swim. He might row out on the pond or the river, playing his flute, visit friends and family in Concord, or receive visitors at his house by the Pond, take a night walk, and occasionally answer the call of Emerson.

During his first winter at the Pond, out from under Emerson’s roof, Thoreau began writing brief assessments of Emerson in his journal, such as: “Emerson does not consider things in respect to their essential utility, but an important partial and relative one, as works of art perhaps. His probes pass one side of their centre of gravity. His exaggeration is of a part, not of the whole.”¹⁸⁰

In a year’s time Thoreau completed a draft of his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, which Emerson was already touting as “a seven days’ voyage in as many chapters, pastoral as Isaak Walton, spicy as flagroot, broad and deep as Menu.”¹⁸¹ Emerson admired what the two Thoreau brothers had done. They were not an example of those “students of words” Emerson criticized in “New England Reformers” who are

shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing. We cannot use our hands, or our legs, or our eyes, or our arms. We do not know an edible root in the woods, we cannot tell our course by the stars, nor the hour of the day by the sun. It is well if we can swim and skate. We are afraid of a horse, of a cow, of a dog, of a snake, of a spider.¹⁸²

He saw in the Thoreau brothers two who would “read God directly.”¹⁸³ “Experience,” Emerson wrote, “is hands and feet to every enterprise.”¹⁸⁴ As he said in “The American Scholar,” “So much only of life as I know by experience, so much of the wilderness have I vanquished and planted, or so far have I extended my being, my dominion. I do not see how any man can afford . . . to spare any action in which he can partake.”¹⁸⁵

Thoreau believed in the benefits of old shoes. New shoes were commonly too narrow, but an old shoe that had formed to the idiosyncrasies of your foot, that was synonymous with comfort. As he noted in his journal, “King James loved his old shoes best. Who does not?”¹⁸⁶ After visiting the cobbler in Concord in July of 1846, Thoreau was met by Sam Staples. Edward Emerson described Staples as one who “rose through the grades of bar-tender, clerk, constable and jailer, deputy-sheriff, representative to the General Court, auctioneer, real-estate agent, and gentleman-farmer, to be one of the most valued and respected fathers of the village-family.”¹⁸⁷

Staples was finishing his term as the tax collector that year. Since he needed to either collect any outstanding taxes or, as a consequence for his failure to do so, pay them himself, he attempted to collect from Thoreau. Thoreau refused on principle. Neither a volunteerist nor a no-government man, it was a matter of personal protest in which he refused to pay a tax to a government that allowed for slavery. So Staples arrested him.

Thoreau was introduced to his cellmate. Hugh Connell was an Irishman a few years younger than Thoreau. He was accused of burning Israel Hunt’s barn in the neighboring town of Sudbury and was awaiting trial. “As near as I could discover,” Thoreau wrote in “Civil Disobedience,” “he had probably gone to bed in a barn when drunk, and smoked his pipe there; and so a barn was burnt.”¹⁸⁸ Thoreau’s sympathy may have partly stemmed from his own accidental burning of hundreds of acres of woodland two years before, for which he escaped any fine or imprisonment, and only occasionally suffered hearing the words “burnt woods” whispered behind his back. Connell, however, poor and foreign, lacking the friends and standing that Thoreau enjoyed, did not get off as lightly.

Staples left. The door was locked. Connell showed Thoreau where to hang his hat, “and how he managed matters there” while Thoreau “pumped my fellow-prisoner as dry as I could, for fear I should never see him again.”¹⁸⁹ Word travelled. Soon someone came and paid Thoreau’s tax to Staples’s daughter, Ellen, while her father was out.¹⁹⁰ Although Thoreau should have been released, Staples had already removed his boots by the time Ellen told him about the paid debt. He decided to let his prisoner remain in jail for the night.

Breakfast came—a pint of chocolate with brown bread. Thoreau ate what he could, leaving some bread, which Connell seized with instructions that he should save it up for lunch or dinner. When Connell was let out to work at haying in a neighboring field, that was the last Thoreau saw of him. It is unlikely he knew that Connell soon served five years in prison for arson. Although Thoreau was angry at the intervention of his anonymous taxpayer, and Staples’s insistence that he leave the jail, he and his jailer “were always good friends,” Edward Emerson wrote.¹⁹¹

The next day Alcott and Emerson had a long discussion about the incarceration. Alcott wrote in his journal about his “earnest talk with Emerson dealing with civil powers and institutions, arising from Thoreau’s going to jail for refusing to pay his tax.” Alcott said that Emerson “thought it mean and skulking, and in bad taste,”¹⁹² a summation that has unfairly stuck to Emerson. He wrote page after page in his journal of arguments both for and against Alcott’s position, and what presumably was Thoreau’s.

In one passage Emerson showed a complete understanding and, ultimately, a sense of pride in his friend’s stand.

These—rabble—at Washington are really better than the sniveling opposition. They have a sort of genius of a bold and manly cast, though Satanic. They see, against the unanimous expression of the people, how much a little well-directed effrontery can achieve, how much crime the people will bear, and they proceed from step to step, and it seems they have calculated but too justly upon your Excellency, O Governor Briggs. Mr. Webster told them how much the war cost, that was his protest, but voted the war, and sends his son to it. They calculated rightly on Mr. Webster. My friend Mr. Thoreau has gone to jail rather than pay his tax. On him they could not calculate. The Abolitionists denounce the war and give much time to it, but they pay the tax.¹⁹³

“Don’t run amuck against the world,” Emerson wrote, briefly considering the position that if the state “means you well”—if ninety parts of what it does is for good and “ten parts for mischief”—then you “cannot fight heartily for a fraction.” The falsity of this justification was apparent as he continued, “The Abolitionists ought to resist and go to prison in multitudes on their known and described disagreements from the state. . . . I should heartily applaud them.”¹⁹⁴

Ultimately Emerson took issue with those abolitionists who spoke for freeing the enslaved but were not willing to give up a lifestyle that directly supported the institutions they condemned: cotton, rum, shipping. “In the particular,” he wrote, “it is worth considering that refusing payment of the state tax does not reach the evil so nearly as many other methods within your reach.” It was “your coat, your sugar” that kept people in chains. “Yet these”—and he must have seen he was criticizing himself in this as well—“you do not stick at buying.”¹⁹⁵ In another entry he wrote, “Your objection, then, to the State of Massachusetts is deceptive. Your true quarrel is with the state of Man.”¹⁹⁶

On July 26 Thoreau spent two hours talking with Alcott, the one person in Concord most likely to understand. Alcott had gone through a similar arrest in January 1843. His wife wrote the following entry in Alcott’s journal: “A day of some excitement, as Mr. Alcott had refused to pay his town tax and they had gone through the form of taking him to jail. After waiting some time to be committed, he was told it was paid by a friend.” Alcott later explained it this way:

Staples, the town collector, called to assure me that he should next week advertize my land to pay for the tax, unless it was paid before that time. Land for land, man for man. I would, were it possible, know nothing of this economy called “the State,” but it will force itself upon the freedom of the free-born and the wisest bearing is to over-bear it, let it have its own way, the private person never going out of his way to meet it. It shall put its hand into a person’s pocket if it will, but I shall not put mine there on its behalf.¹⁹⁷

Charles Lane, the British social reformer, voluntarist, and friend of Alcott, was not an easy man to like. His haughty arrogance turned many away from him, both inside the Alcott family, Abba and Louisa May, and outside, Thoreau and Emerson. Emerson wrote that Lane’s “nature and influence do not invite mine, but always freeze me.”¹⁹⁸ His account of Alcott’s arrest for The Liberator, however, must have been stimulating to Thoreau. Lane wrote that Alcott, being

convinced that the payment of the town tax involved principles and practices most degrading and injurious to man, he had long determined not to be a voluntary party to its continuance. . . .

To the county jail, therefore, Mr. Alcott went, or rather was forced by the benignant State and its delicate instrument. . . .

This act of non-resistance, you will perceive, does not rest on the plea of poverty. For Mr. Alcott has always supplied some poor neighbor with food and clothing to a much higher amount than his tax. Neither is it wholly based on the iniquitous purposes to which the money when collected is applied. For part of it is devoted to education, and education has not a heartier friend in the world than Bronson Alcott. But it is founded on the moral instinct which forbids every moral being to be a party, either actively or permissively, to the destructive principles of power and might over peace and love.¹⁹⁹

Thoreau gave two lectures in Concord in 1848, possibly two parts of the same lecture. “The Relation of the Individual to the State” and “The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation to the State” explained his actions and principles to his curious neighbors. Elizabeth Peabody, planning the first issue of her Aesthetic Papers in early 1849, asked Thoreau to contribute a manuscript after hearing about one of the lectures. He wrote Peabody on April 5 that he would send “the article in question before the end of next week.” His offering “the paper to your first volume only” was moot. The journal folded after its initial issue.

A week after Thoreau’s arrest the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society held their second celebration of West Indian Emancipation at Thoreau’s house at Walden Pond. People spoke from his doorway, including Emerson. Previously Emerson had read his address “On the Anniversary of the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies” at the August 1844 meeting of the Society, where Frederick Douglass was also to speak. Because abolitionists had been outspoken about the clergy, they were denied use of the First Parish, and the weather prevented the use of the meadow next to the Old Manse. The Town Hall was then decided on. The town selectmen, however, would not direct the sexton to ring the meeting-house bell to alert people of the change in venue. Thoreau, “seeing the timidity of one unfortunate youth, who dared not touch the bell rope, took hold of it with a strong arm; and the bell, (though set in its own way,) pealed forth its summons right merrily.”²⁰⁰ Nearly twenty years later Emerson recalled the event. “I have never recorded a fact, which perhaps ought to have gone into my sketch of ‘Thoreau,’ that . . . when I read my Discourse on Emancipation [in the British West Indies], in the Town Hall, in Concord, and the selectmen would not direct the sexton to ring the meeting-house bell, Henry went himself, and rung the bell at the appointed hour.”²⁰¹

In “The Method of Nature” Emerson asked, “Shall we not quit our companions, as if they were thieves and pot-companions, and betake ourselves to some desert cliff of Mount Katahdin, some unvisited recess of Moosehead Lake, to bewail our innocency and to recover it, and with it the power to communicate again with these sharers of a more sacred idea?”²⁰² So when Thoreau was invited to accompany his cousin George Thatcher, who was in the lumber business in Maine and would be traveling to look at some property, he took the opportunity to make an excursion away from Walden, away from Concord, away from friends. While visiting a lumber camp, Thoreau found a copy of Emerson’s address “On the Anniversary of the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies.”²⁰³ Emerson was never far away.

In the summer of 1846 Emerson imagined a retreat of his own. He showed his selected site to both Thoreau and Alcott; Thoreau drew a diagram of a small house to which Alcott added “another story, as a lookout.”²⁰⁴ Although these plans were not brought to fruition, Emerson did not abandon the idea of a personal sanctuary. The following summer he decided to build a small summerhouse in the field next to Bush that could be used as a study. Thoreau, Alcott, and Emerson began cutting hemlocks for posts. Built organically from Alcott’s intuition rather than any architectural design, the house was “fashioned from gnarled limbs of pine, oak with knotty excrescences and straight trunks of cedar, a fantastic but pleasing structure. . . . feeling its way up, as it were, dictated at each step by the suggestion of the crooked bough that was used and necessarily often altered. . . . Thoreau drove the nails, and drove them well, but as Mr. Alcott made the eaves curve upward for beauty, and lined the roof with velvet moss and sphagnum, Nature soon reclaimed it.”²⁰⁵ While working with Alcott, Thoreau felt “he was nowhere, doing nothing.”²⁰⁶ Emerson’s mother called it “The Ruin.” Emerson referred to it as “Tumbledown-Hall.”²⁰⁷ In the fall Thoreau wrote to Emerson,

Alcott has heard that I laughed and so set the people a laughing at his arbor, though I never laughed louder than when on the ridge pole. But now I have not laughed for a long time, it is so serious. He is very grave to look at. . . . As for the building I feel a little oppressed when I come near it, it has so great a disposition to be beautiful. It is certainly a wonderful structure on the whole, and the fame of the architect will endure as long—as it shall stand.²⁰⁸

Miraculously completed, it remained standing—another miracle—but was so drafty and visited by mosquitoes from the nearby meadow that Emerson was unable to use it.

As Thoreau re-read Emerson’s Essays in his house at Walden Pond during his second winter, he felt “that they were not poetry—that they were not written exactly at the right crisis though inconceivably near to it.”²⁰⁹ Thoreau attempted to assess who and what Emerson was.

Emerson again is a critic, poet, philosopher, with talent not so conspicuous, not so adequate to his task; but his field is still higher, his task more arduous. Lives a far more intense life; seeks to realize a divine life; his affections and intellect equally developed. Has advanced farther, and a new heaven opens to him. Love and Friendship, Religion, Poetry, the Holy are familiar to him. The life of an Artist; more variegated, more observing, finer perception; not so robust, elastic; practical enough in his own field; faithful, a judge of men. There is no such general critic of men and things, no such trustworthy and faithful man. More of the divine realized in him than in any. A poetic critic, reserving the unqualified nouns for the gods.²¹⁰

“Emerson has special talents unequalled,” he wrote as he realized what Emerson’s true gift was. “His personal influence upon young persons greater than any man’s. In his world every man would be a poet, Love would reign, Beauty would take place, Man and Nature would harmonize.”²¹¹ In this role Emerson would continue to promote Thoreau’s writings to others, writing to Thomas Carlyle in February 1847, “You are yet to read a good American book made by this Thoreau, and which shortly is to be printed, he says.”²¹² “Mrs. Ripley and other members of the opposition,” he wrote to Margaret Fuller, perhaps because he felt she was one of the opposition, “came down the other night to hear Henry’s Account of his housekeeping at Walden Pond, which he read as a lecture, and were charmed with the witty wisdom which ran through it all.”²¹³

When Thoreau’s manuscript had been completed, Emerson enlisted his brother William to use his connections to find a publisher, but more to the purpose he wrote to Evert Duyckinck, one of the leading editors of the day in the New York literary scene, about Thoreau’s

book of extraordinary merit, which he wishes to publish. It purports to be the account of “An Excursion on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” which he made some time ago in company with his brother, in a boat built by themselves. The book contains about the same quantity of matter for printing as Dicken’s Pictures of Italy. I have represented to Mr. Thoreau, that his best course would undoubtedly be, to send the book to you, to be printed by Wiley & Putnam, that it may have a good edition and wide publishing.

This book has many merits. It will be as attractive to lovers of nature, in every sense, that is, to naturalists, and to poets, as Isaak Walton. It will be attractive to scholars for its excellent literature, and to all thoughtful persons for its originality and profoundness. The narrative of the little voyage, though faithful, is a very slender thread for such big beads and ingots as are strung on it. It is really a book of the results of the studies of years.

Would you like to print this book into your American Library? It is quite ready, and the whole can be sent you at once. It has never yet been offered to any publisher. If you wish to see the MS. I suppose Mr. Thoreau would readily send it to you. I am only desirous that you should propose to him good terms, and give his book the great advantages of being known which your circulation ensures.

Mr. Thoreau is the author of an Article on Carlyle, now printed and printing in Graham’s last and coming Magazine, and some papers in the Dial; but he has done nothing half so good as his new book. He is well known to Mr. Hawthorne also.²¹⁴

Although Wiley & Putnam declined to publish the book at any financial risk to themselves, Duyckinck did use his influence to help garner interest. He put a notice in The Literary World, which he edited: “Henry D. Thoreau, Esq., whose elaborate paper on Carlyle, now publishing in Graham’s Magazine, is attracting considerable attention, has also completed a new work of which reports speak highly. It will probably be soon given to the public.”²¹⁵

When Emerson made his first voyage to Europe in 1831, he was a young widower who had resigned his ministerial profession. He went at the urging of friends who hoped it would restore his fragile physical and mental health. Having met Wordsworth and Coleridge, and, most important, Thomas Carlyle, Emerson’s world changed, although he did not yet know in what way. His European journal shows a receptive mind, newly and continuously sparked and animated by all he experienced. People, places, and perspectives opened new ways of thinking and observing the world around him. His second voyage was at the invitation of his European friends, and although he did not like travelling and felt that long journeys did not “yield a fair share of reasonable hours,”²¹⁶ he eventually and reluctantly agreed. During his first visit, he wanted to meet certain people. On his second visit, people wanted to meet him.

Before going, however, there was this question: who would take care of his family and his house in his absence? When Emerson asked Thoreau at the end of August if he were willing to move back to the Emerson house during the lecture tour, it would have been surprising had Thoreau given any answer other than yes. Based on how seminal we have historically made his time at Walden Pond, it was extraordinary how quickly Thoreau packed his bags and moved back into the town of Concord. Emerson was not sailing from Boston on the packet ship Washington Irving until October 5, yet Thoreau, rather than “suck out all the marrow”²¹⁷ of his time there, left Walden precipitously on September 6, one month before he was needed in the Emerson household.

Although Thoreau could, in all probability, have returned to Walden Pond after Emerson returned from Europe, there was no reason to do so. “What is once well done,” he wrote, “is done forever.”²¹⁸ There was no need to go back. He had, as he said, “several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.”²¹⁹ It was now time for the writer’s “long probation.”²²⁰ It was the time when, as Emerson said, “experience is converted into thought.”²²¹ Thoreau described the process in a letter to H.G.O. Blake.

Let me suggest a theme for you: to state to yourself precisely and completely what that walk over the mountains amounted to for you,—returning to this essay again and again, until you are satisfied that all that was important in your experience is in it. . . . Going up there and being blown on is nothing. We never do much climbing while we are there, but we eat our luncheon, etc., very much as at home. It is after we get home that we really go over the mountain, if ever. What did the mountain say? What did the mountain do?²²²

Ultimately it is not the climbing of the mountain but the understanding of what that experience on the mountain means that is crucial. Similarly, his two years at Walden Pond, or his one night in jail, was in the end not as momentous and as transformative as the writing about those events. It was then that John Thoreau’s son, Henry, who walked around Concord and made pencils and surveyed land, became Thoreau, and turned a few local and personal experiences into something universally representative and profoundly significant. “Perhaps he fell,” as Emerson said all of us do, “into his way of living, without forecasting it much, but approved and confirmed it with later wisdom.”²²³

Sometime in the fall of 1847, forty-five-year-old Sophia Ford,²²⁴ who had joined the Alcott household two years earlier as tutor to the children, fell in love with Thoreau and proposed marriage. Thoreau was not flattered, confiding to Emerson,

I have had a tragic correspondence, for the most part all on one side, with Miss Ford. She did really wish to—I hesitate to write—marry me. That is the way they spell it. Of course I did not write a deliberate answer. How could I deliberate upon it? I sent back as distinct a no as I have learned to pronounce after considerable practice, and I trust that this no has succeeded. Indeed, I wished that it might burst, like hollow shot, after it had struck and buried itself and make itself felt there. There was no other way. I really had anticipated no such foe as this in my career.²²⁵

Though she continued to correspond with Thoreau, he did not answer her letters and in one instance burned one immediately on reading it.²²⁶ Ford, remaining true to her belief that their souls were twins and that they would unite in the spirit world,²²⁷ continued unmarried until her death nearly forty years later.

Thoreau’s letters to Emerson in Europe were often filled with mundane and necessary points of business in regard to Emerson’s property, but he also regaled him with stories of his family, and how he, “such a hermit as I am” found “the experiment” as head of Emerson’s household “good for society, so I do not regret my transient nor my permanent share in it.” He found that “Lidian and I make very good housekeepers,” and that Edward “very seriously asked me, the other day, ‘Mr. Thoreau, will you be my father?’ I am occasionally Mr. Rough-and-tumble with him that I may not miss him, and lest he should miss you too much. So you must come back soon, or you will be superseded.”²²⁸

“I suppose you will like to hear of my book,” Thoreau wrote Emerson toward the end of 1847, “though I have nothing worth writing about it. Indeed, for the last month or two I have forgotten it, but shall certainly remember it again.” Publishers declined to release the book at any risk to themselves, though some were willing to print it if the author accepted the risk. “If I liked the book well enough, I should not delay; but for the present I am indifferent. I believe this is, after all, the course you advised,—to let it lie.”²²⁹

Emerson replied, “But lest I should not say what is needful . . . I am not of opinion that your book should be delayed a month. I should print it at once, nor do I think that you would incur any risk in doing so that you cannot well afford. It is very certain to have readers and debtors here as well as there.”²³⁰ Emerson’s encouragement may have pushed Thoreau to accept an offer from James Munroe & Co., publisher of The Dial in its final year, to print it at Thoreau’s risk—which, when the book failed to sell, took him several years to pay.

On May 26, 1849, Thoreau went into Boston to pick up copies of his first book. In early June Theodore Parker invited Emerson to review A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers for his The Massachusetts Quarterly. Emerson declined, saying, “I am not the man to write the Notice of Thoreau’s book. I am of the same clan and parish. You must give it to a good foreigner.” He then suggested possible reviewers who might do justice to the book: “E. P. Whipple has good literary insulation and is a superior critic. Will he not try his hand on this? If not, will not Starr King? If not the one or the other, why not send it to the New Yorkers, to Henry James, Parke Goodwin, or C. Dana? The book has rare claims, and we must have an American claim and ensign marked on it before it goes abroad for English opinions.”²³¹ It was ultimately reviewed for Parker’s journal by James Russell Lowell, who continued his condemnations of the author. Thoreau, “like most solitary men,” Lowell wrote, “exaggerates the importance of his own thoughts.”²³²

Thoreau was frustrated and disillusioned that Emerson had not, in his mind, done what he ought to support his first book. In the fall Thoreau wrote, among pages of strongly worded invective about friends, the more succinct, “I had a friend, I wrote a book, I asked my friend’s criticism, I never got but praise for what was good in it—my friend became estranged from me and then I got blame for all that was bad,—and so I got at last the criticism which I wanted.”²³³ It is unlikely that Thoreau knew all that Emerson had done to promote the book, nor that Emerson knew of Thoreau’s criticisms; Thoreau confided to his journal concerns he would not voice to his friend. In spite of it all, when Munroe sent Thoreau the unsold copies of his book, he met the occasion with humor. Four years after publication, Munroe wrote to him asking what should be done with the books, and Thoreau

had them all sent to me here, and they have arrived today by express, filling the man’s wagon,—706 copies out of an edition of 1000 which I bought of Munroe four years ago and have been ever since paying for, and have not quite paid for yet. The wares are sent to me at last, and I have an opportunity to examine my purchase. They are something more substantial than fame, as my back knows, which has borne them up two flights of stairs to a place similar to that to which they trace their origin. . . . I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.²³⁴

In November 1847 Lidian sent her husband a description of a domestic scene, complete with stage directions—“The three children and Mama at the worktable. Eddy on Mama’s lap”—followed by some dialogue.

        Eddy. Write to Father I am a good Boy.

        Edie. I want Father to come home. . . . Mr. Thoreau puts

        Eddy in a chair, and then takes Eddy up in it, and carries

        it about the room. . . . Mr. Thoreau jumps us every night.

        Eddy. Mother, and tell him Mr. Thoreau jumped a chair

        over me tonight!²³⁵

In December Waldo wrote Henry a letter that began with an appreciation for all he was doing.

It is one of the best things connected with my coming hither that you could and would keep the homestead, that fireplace shines all the brighter, and has a certain permanent glimmer therefor. Thanks, evermore thanks for the kindness which I well discern to the youth of the house, to my darling little horseman of pewter, leather, wooden, rocking and what other breeds, destined, I hope, to ride Pegasus yet, and I hope not destined to be thrown, to Edith who long ago drew from you verses which I carefully preserve, and to Ellen who by speech and now by letter I find old enough to be companionable, and to choose and reward her own friends in her own fashions.²³⁶

Henry was grateful for the letter.

My Dear Friend,

I thank you for your letter. I was very glad to get it—And I am glad again to write to you. However slow the steamer, no time intervenes between the writing and the reading of thoughts, but they come freshly to the most distant port.

I am here still, and very glad to be here—and shall not trouble you with my complaints because I do not fill my place better. I have had many good hours in the chamber at the head of the stairs—a solid time, it seems to me.²³⁷

Emerson’s first letter to his friend in the new year opened with adulation before reporting on a talk he had heard. “Let who or what pass,” he wrote, “there stands the dear Henry,—if indeed any body had a right to call him so,—erect, serene, and undeceivable. So let it ever be!”²³⁸ Earlier that month Thoreau wrote that not only had he “read a part of the story of my excursion to Ktaadn to quite a large audience of men and boys, the other night, whom it interested,” but “I have also written what will do for a lecture on Friendship.”²³⁹

Between completion of the first draft and its eventual publication, Thoreau had opportunity to revise and expand his first book. His essay on friendship was placed in the Wednesday chapter of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers as a central theme. He wrote it in part out of loss, looking back at the friendship he had enjoyed with his brother, but also out of hope, looking at the potential of his friendship with Emerson. Drawing journal passages out of the more than a decade he and Emerson shared, he wrote of the expectations, disappointments, and possibilities of what he thought true friendship might still present.

“There are few even whom I should venture to call earnestly by their most proper names,” Thoreau wrote in A Week. “A name pronounced is the recognition of the individual to whom it belongs. He who can pronounce my name aright, he can call me, and is entitled to my love and service.”²⁴⁰ With that idea in mind he addressed a letter to Emerson in February in a new way: “Dear Waldo,—For I think I have heard that that is your name . . . Whatever I may call you, I know you better than I know your name.” He continued with thanks for what Emerson’s essays meant to him. “I believe I never thanked you for your lectures, one and all, which I have heard formerly read here in Concord. I know I never have. There was some excellent reason each time why I did not; but it will never be too late. I have had that advantage, at least, over you in my education.”²⁴¹

Lidian had been unwell for a month, but Emerson had not known until Thoreau finally informed him of her slow recovery.

Lidian is too unwell to write to you and so I must tell you what I can about the children, and herself. I am afraid she has not told you how unwell she is, today perhaps we may say—has been. She has been confined to her chamber four or five weeks, and three or four weeks, at least to her bed—with the jaundice, accompanied with constant nausea, which makes life intolerable to her. This added to her general ill health has made her very sick. She is as yellow as saffron. The Doctor, who comes once a day does not let her read (nor can she now) nor hear much reading. She has written her letters to you till recently sitting up in bed—but he said that he would not come again if she did so. She has Abby and Almira to take care of her, and Mrs. Brown to read to her, and I also occasionally have something to read or to say. The Doctor says she must not expect to “take any comfort of her life” for a week or two yet.²⁴²

Toward the end of March things had come to a sudden impasse, with a slowly recovering Lidian writing her husband, “Henry is well, but won’t write to you. I suppose because you don’t write to him.”²⁴³ But letters crossed in the mails. As Lidian’s letter was crossing the ocean, a letter from Waldo was on its way to Henry, beginning, “Your letter was very welcome.”²⁴⁴ Whatever may have caused this lapse is not clear from any extant correspondence. In May Thoreau wrote, “I am glad to find that you are expecting a line from me, since I have a better excuse for sending this hard scrawl.”²⁴⁵ When Emerson sailed home in July, landing in Boston at the end of the month, Thoreau lost no time in leaving Bush and moving back to his family’s house.

Emerson was, perhaps they both were, cautious about renewing their friendship to its previous level after Emerson’s return from Europe. “Henry Thoreau is like the wood-god,” Emerson wrote shortly after his return, “who solicits the wandering poet and draws him into ‘antres vast and desarts idle,’ and bereaves him of his memory, and leaves him naked, plaiting vines and with twigs in his hand. Very seductive are the first steps from the town to the woods, but the end is want and madness.”²⁴⁶ It took some time before whatever issues they had experienced were resolved, or forgiven, or forgotten.

Thoreau was writing in his journal that he did “not feel permanently related to any one,”²⁴⁷ and “When we separate finally and completely from one who has been our friend we separate with content—and without grief—as gently and naturally as night passes into day.”²⁴⁸ But Emerson did not show any similar concern that their friendship was permanently ruptured. He continued to do what he could for Thoreau’s career. “I was at South Danvers,” Emerson wrote Thoreau in early 1850,

and promised Mr. C. Northend, Secretary of the Lyceum, to invite you for Monday 18th Feb. to read a lecture to his institution. I told him there were two lectures to describe Cape Cod, which interested him and his friends, and they hoped that the two might somehow be rolled into one to give them some sort of complete story of the journey. I hope it will not quite discredit my negotiation if I confess that they heard with joy that Concord people laughed till they cried, when it was read to them. . . . They will pay your expenses, and $10.00. . . . Do go if you can.²⁴⁹

Any internal conflict they were feeling toward each other may have been more on Thoreau’s side. With Emerson, there remained a complete trust. “I leave town tomorrow,” he wrote in 1850, “and must beg you, if any question arises between Mr. Bartlett and me, in regard to boundary lines, to act as my attorney, and I will be bound by any agreement you shall make.”²⁵⁰ When tragedy struck, any differences, real or imagined, were put aside.

On May 17, 1850, Margaret Fuller, her husband, Giovanni Ossoli, and their young son, Angelo, boarded the ship Elizabeth in Italy, heading home to America. The ship ran aground as it approached Fire Island off the coast of New York on July 19. Fuller, her husband, and their child all drowned. Emerson sent Thoreau to discover what remains he could, whether corporeal or literary. By the time news had reached Concord and Thoreau had reached Fire Island, there was little hope of recovering either. Thoreau wrote to Emerson from Fire Island, describing the wreck and what little he found.

I am writing this at the house of Smith Oakes, within one mile of the wreck. He is the one who rendered the most assistance. . . . Mr. Oakes and wife tell me (all the survivors came or were brought directly to their house) that the ship struck at 10 minutes after 4 AM. and all hands, being mostly in their night clothes made haste to the forecastle—the water coming in at once. There they remained, the passengers in the forecastle, the crew above it doing what they could. Every wave lifted the forecastle roof and washed over those within. The first man got ashore at 9, many from 9 to noon—. At floodtide about 3½ o’clock when the ship broke up entirely, they came out of the forecastle and Margaret sat with her back to the foremast with her hands over her knees—her husband and child already drowned—a great wave came and washed her off. . . .

I have visited the child’s grave. . . .

In the meanwhile I shall do what I can to recover property and obtain particulars hereabouts.²⁵¹

Thoreau wrote to H.G.O. Blake on his return about “a button which I ripped off the coat of the Marquis of Ossoli, on the seashore, the other day. Held up, it intercepts the light,—an actual button,—and yet all the life it is connected with is less substantial to me, and interests me less, than my faintest dream. Our thoughts are the epochs in our lives: all else is but as a journal of the winds that blew while we were here.”²⁵² The importance of thought over all else, including human companionship, seemed to form from the loss he witnessed on Fire Island, as well as his perceived loss of his friendship with Emerson.

About a month after he returned from Fire Island, Thoreau told Emerson that people were less interesting than Nature.²⁵³ “I do not know but a pine wood,” Thoreau wrote in his journal, “is as substantial and as memorable a fact as a friend. I am more sure to come away from it cheered, than from those who come nearest to being my friends.”²⁵⁴ Nature became a substitute for what he failed to find on a personal level.

I love nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There a different kind of right prevails. In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness. If this world was all man, I could not stretch myself, I should lose all hope. He is constraint, she is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world. She makes me content with this. None of the joys she supplies is subject to his rules and definitions. What he touches he taints. In thought he moralizes. One would think that no free, joyful labor was possible to him. How infinite and pure the least pleasure of which Nature is basis, compared with the congratulation of mankind! The joy which Nature yields is like that afforded by the frank words of one we love.²⁵⁵

This idea culminated in his 1857 statement that “All nature is my bride.”²⁵⁶ Early in the next year he wrote that it had been “long since a human friend has met me with such a glow” as he found in the Andromeda,”²⁵⁷ and that “a man’s relation to Nature must come very near to a personal one . . . when human friends fail or die, she must stand in the gap to him.”²⁵⁸

From 1851 on, Thoreau’s journal became a more fully realized part of not only his writing but also his life, and he began to see that a more introspective and thoughtful life might be more beneficial than what he found in society. “My acquaintances will sometimes wonder why,” he wrote, “I will impoverish myself by living aloof from this or that company, but greater would be the impoverishment if I should associate with them.”²⁵⁹ “Associate reverently and as much as you can with your loftiest thoughts,” he wrote early in 1852. “My thoughts are my company.”²⁶⁰

Emerson continued to find it “an inexcusable fault” that Thoreau “is insignificant here in the town. He speaks at Lyceum or other meeting but somebody else speaks and his speech falls dead and is forgotten. He rails at the town doings and ought to correct and inspire them.”²⁶¹ Thoreau did not take his talent far enough, being dismissed by Emerson as “a boy, and will be an old boy. Pounding beans is good to the end of pounding Empires, but not, if at the end of years, it is only beans.”²⁶² He was wanting “a little ambition,” Emerson wrote in 1851, and “instead of being the head of American engineers, he is captain of a huckleberry party.”²⁶³

Thoreau continued to struggle with their relationship.

Ah, I yearn toward thee, my friend, but I have not confidence in thee. We do not believe in the same God. I am not thou; thou art not I. We trust each other to-day, but we distrust to-morrow. Even when I meet thee unexpectedly, I part from thee with disappointment. Though I enjoy thee more than other men, yet I am more disappointed with thee than with others. I know a noble man; what is it hinders me from knowing him better? I know not how it is that our distrust, our hate, is stronger than our love. Here I have been on what the world would call friendly terms with one fourteen years, have pleased my imagination sometimes with loving him; and yet our hate is stronger than our love. Why are we related, yet thus unsatisfactorily? We almost are a sore to one another. Ah, I am afraid because thy relations are not my relations. Because I have experienced that in some respects we are strange to one another, strange as some wild creature. Ever and anon there will come the consciousness to mar our love that, change the theme but a hair’s breadth, and we are tragically strange to one another. We do not know what hinders us from coming together. But when I consider what my friend’s relations and acquaintances are, what his tastes and habits, then the difference between us gets named. I see that all these friends and acquaintances and tastes and habits are indeed my friend’s self. In the first place, my friend is prouder than I am,—and I am very proud, perchance.²⁶⁴

Together they spoke about the isolation of the individual. “It would be hard to recall the rambles of last night’s talk with Henry Thoreau,” Emerson noted in October 1851,

But we stated over again, to sadness almost, the eternal loneliness. I found that though the stuff of Tragedy and of Romances is in a moral union of two superior persons, and the confidence of each in the other, for long years, out of sight and in sight, and against all appearances, is at last justified by victorious proof of probity to gods and men, causing a gush of joyful emotion, tears, glory, or what-not,—though there be for heroes this moral union, yet they, too, are still as far off as ever from an intellectual union, and this moral union is for comparatively low and external purposes, like the coöperation of a ship’s crew or of a fire-club. But how insular and pathetically solitary are all the people we know!²⁶⁵

“In regard to my friends,” Thoreau wrote at the end of the year, “I feel that I know and have communion with a finer and subtler part of themselves which does not put me off when they put me off, which is not cold to me when they are cold, not till I am cold. I hold by a deeper and stronger tie than absence can sunder.”²⁶⁶ Throughout this period of perplexity, Thoreau stood by a certain “if you don’t know what’s wrong, I’m not going to tell you” stance, feeling like his “difficulties with my friends are such as no frankness will settle.”

Others can confess and explain; I cannot. It is not that I am too proud, but that is not what is wanted. Friendship is the unspeakable joy and blessing that results to two or more individuals who from constitution sympathize; and natures are liable to no mistakes, but will know each other through thick and thin. Between two by nature alike and fitted to sympathize there is no veil and there can be no obstacle. Who are the estranged? Two friends explaining.

I feel sometimes as if I could say to my friends, “My friends, I am aware how I have outraged you, how I have seemingly preferred hate to love, seemingly treated others kindly and you unkindly, sedulously concealed my love, and sooner or later expressed all and more than all my hate.” I can imagine how I might utter something like this in some moment never to be realized. But let me say frankly that at the same time I feel, it may be with too little regret, that I am under an awful necessity to be what I am. If the truth were known, which I do not know, I have no concern with those friends whom I misunderstand or who misunderstand me.

In the same entry Thoreau began to put blame on himself.

The fates only are unkind that keep us asunder, but my friend is ever kind. I am of the nature of stone. It takes the summer’s sun to warm it.

My acquaintances sometimes imply that I am too cold; but each thing is warm enough of its kind. Is the stone too cold which absorbs the heat of the summer sun and does not part with it during the night? Crystals, though they be of ice, are not too cold to melt, but it was in melting that they were formed. Cold! I am most sensible of warmth in winter days. It is not the warmth of fire that you would have, but everything is warm and cold according to its nature. It is not that I am too cold, but that our warmth and coldness are not of the same nature; hence when I am absolutely warmest, I may be coldest to you. Crystal does not complain of crystal any more than the dove of its mate. You who complain that I am cold find Nature cold. To me she is warm. My heat is latent to you. Fire itself is cold to whatever is not of a nature to be warmed by it. A cool wind is warmer to a feverish man than the air of a furnace. That I am cold means that I am of another nature.²⁶⁷

“It is not words that I wish to hear or to utter,” he wrote, “but relations that I seek to stand in.”²⁶⁸ By the end of 1851 he told himself to “treat your friends for what you know them to be. Regard no surfaces. Consider not what they did, but what they intended. Be sure, as you know them you are known of them again.” After again blaming himself for their rift, Thoreau “sought an opportunity to make atonement, but the friend avoided me, and, with kinder feelings even than before, I was obliged to depart.” At last he found his way through.

I am resolved to know that one centrally, through thick and thin, and though we should be cold to one another, though we should never speak to one another, I will know that inward and essential love may exist even under a superficial cold, and that the law of attraction speaks louder than words. My true relation this instant shall be my apology for my false relation the last instant. I made haste to cast off my injustice as scurf. I own it least of anybody, for I have absolutely done with it. Let the idle and wavering and apologizing friend appropriate it. Methinks our estrangement is only like the divergence of the branches which unite in the stem.²⁶⁹

Although Thoreau still felt that he was “peacefully parting company with the best friend I ever had, by each pursuing his proper path,” he also saw that “it is possible that we may have a better understanding now than when we were more at one. Not expecting such essential agreement as before. Simply our paths diverge.”²⁷⁰ It was a moment of resignation and acceptance, and he was ready to accept a new period in his friendship with Emerson.

At the beginning of 1852 Thoreau was showing an uncharacteristic reserve and restraint. When Emerson shared a letter from the sculptor Horatio Greenough on making architectural ornaments have a “core of truth, a necessity and hence a beauty,” Thoreau responded that it was fine from Greenough’s point of view but “little better than the common dilettantism.” He was “afraid,” he admitted to his journal, “I should say hard things if I said more.”²⁷¹ In his journal he put the harsher criticisms he would not utter to Emerson, still fluctuating between placing responsibility outward, stating that Emerson is “too grand for me,”²⁷² and inward: “If I have not succeeded in my friendships, it was because I demanded more of them and did not put up with what I could get; and I got no more partly because I gave so little.”²⁷³

When Thoreau asked in his journal in August 1852, “Are my friends aware how disappointed I am?”²⁷⁴ the answer was painfully clear. During this period Thoreau was constantly writing of his personal turmoil about their friendship, while Emerson was, in comparison, relatively silent about it. He continued to recognize that Thoreau “gives me, in flesh and blood and pertinacious Saxon belief, my own ethics. He is far more real, and daily practically obeying them, than I; and fortifies my memory at all times with an affirmative experience which refuses to be set aside.”²⁷⁵ There is little, however, to show Emerson experiencing any sort of crisis similar to Thoreau’s. He did suffer annoyances with Thoreau, such as his disposition “to maximize the minimum,” which Emerson scorned by saying, “that will take him some days.”²⁷⁶ Thoreau, Emerson noted, “sturdily pushes his economy into houses and thinks it the false mark of the gentleman that he is to pay much for his food. He ought to pay little for his food. Ice,—he must have ice!”²⁷⁷ “Henry Thoreau says he values,” Emerson wrote, “only the man who goes directly to his needs; who, wanting wood, goes to the woods and brings it home; or to the river, and collects the drift, and brings it in his boat to his door, and burns it: not him who keeps shop, that he may buy wood. One is pleasing to reason and imagination; the other not.”²⁷⁸ “Henry is military,” Emerson concluded.

He seemed stubborn and implacable; always manly and wise, but rarely sweet. One would say that, as Webster could never speak without an antagonist, so Henry does not feel himself except in opposition. He wants a fallacy to expose, a blunder to pillory, requires a little sense of victory, a roll of the drums, to call his powers into full exercise.²⁷⁹

One afternoon, finding Thoreau complaining of “Clough or somebody that he or they recited to every one at table the paragraph just read by him and by them in the last newspaper and studiously avoided everything private,” Emerson sardonically quipped, “I should think he was complaining of one H.D.T.”²⁸⁰

Perhaps Emerson avoided the despair that Thoreau felt because each of Emerson’s acquaintances contributed only one part of the whole that made up his family of friends. “I find in my platoon,” he wrote, “contrasted figures; as, my brothers, and Everett, and Caroline, and Margaret, and Elizabeth, and Jones Very, and Sam Ward, and Henry Thoreau, and Alcott, and Channing. Needs all these and many more to represent my relations.”²⁸¹

At the end of 1853 after Emerson had delivered his lecture “The Anglo-American,” Thoreau told him that he regretted “that whatever was written for a lecture, or whatever succeeded with the audience was bad.” Emerson defended his position: “I am ambitious to write something which all can read, like Robinson Crusoe. . . . Henry objected, of course, and vaunted the better lectures which only reached a few persons.”²⁸² In “Life without Principle,” Thoreau reiterated his stance, “If you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go down perpendicularly.”²⁸³ At supper with the Emersons one evening, Edith asked Thoreau whether “his lecture would be a nice interesting story, such as she wanted to hear, or whether it was one of those old philosophical things that she did not care about?” Thoreau turned to her, and then “bethought himself,” Emerson said, seeing him “trying to believe that he had matter that might fit Edith and Edward, who were to sit up and go to the lecture, if it was a good one for them.”²⁸⁴

When Walden was published in August 1854, Emerson praised his friend’s book, writing to one person that “it is cheerful, sparkling, readable, with all kinds of merits, and rising sometimes to very great heights,” and joking that the “little pond sinks in these very days as tremulous at its human fame.”²⁸⁵ In June 1855 Emerson began soliciting money for the Alcott Fund—a life annuity to help support the ever-struggling Alcott Family—something that prompted the self-sufficient Thoreau to ask “fairly enough, when is it that the man is to begin to provide for himself?”²⁸⁶

“It is curious,” Emerson wrote with a heightened sense of annoyance in 1856, “that Thoreau goes to a house to say with little preface what he has just read or observed, delivers it in lump, is quite inattentive to any comment or thought which any of the company offer on the matter, nay, is merely interrupted by it, and, when he has finished his report departs with precipitation.”²⁸⁷ “If I knew only Thoreau,” he said around the same time,

I should think coöperation of good men impossible. Must we always talk for victory, and never once for truth, for comfort, and joy? Centrality he has, and penetration, strong understanding, and the higher gifts,—the insight of the real, or from the real, and the moral rectitude that belongs to it; but all this and all his resources of wit and invention are lost to me, in every experiment, year after year, that I make, to hold intercourse with his mind. Always some weary captious paradox to fight you with, and the time and temper wasted.²⁸⁸

On a walk with Emerson in the spring of 1857 Thoreau demonstrated how to cut a strip of bark from a white birch “to show how a naturalist would make the best box to carry a plant or other specimen requiring care, and thought the woodman would make a better hat of birch-bark than of felt,—hat, with cockade of lichens thrown in. I told him the Birkebeiners of the Heimskringla had been before him.” The next day Emerson noted in his journal, “We will make a book on walking, ’t is certain, and have easy lessons for beginners. ‘Walking in ten Lessons.’”²⁸⁹

In early 1858 Emerson wrote that he was “specially sensible” of Thoreau’s merits as a surveyor, “as he has just now by better surveying quite innocently made 60 rods of woodland for me, and left the adjacent lot, which he was measuring, larger than the deed gave it. There’s a surveyor for you!”²⁹⁰ Emerson’s faith in Thoreau’s surveying skills let his friend play a practical joke on him later that year when Sam Staples bought Kettell Farm next to the Emerson home. Thoreau ran the lines for him and found that a ditch Staples had dug, following the line of Emerson’s orchard and meadow, was incorrectly located. What was thought by all to be part of Emerson’s land was actually his new neighbor’s property. Although the error was to no one’s blame or discredit, Thoreau found it an opportunity to tease his friend.

“We’ll call Emerson down and show it to him,” he said. Staples had no interest in the issue and told Thoreau to “let it be as is,” but Thoreau insisted, “I’ll get Emerson down.” Thoreau went up to the house and got Emerson to follow him down to the property line.

Standing on the border of the two properties, Thoreau taunted his friend, “I didn’t think this of you, Mr. Emerson, stealing so much land of Staples here.” Emerson was troubled by the dispute, offering right away to buy the land from Staples, who would hear none of it.

“I dug the ditch there supposing the hedge was the line,” Staples said. “‘Twan’t your fault. ’Twas the man you bought of showed you where to put the hedge. Let it be as the ditch is now.” Thoreau delighted in the joke.²⁹¹ In his next book Emerson wrote, “Every man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat him. But a day comes when he begins to care that he do not cheat his neighbor.”²⁹²

John Brown visited Concord for the first time in March 1857. While the New-York Tribune carried many pro-Brown reports of his exploits, stories of the Pottawatomie Massacre had also been in circulation for the past year. How much the Concordians knew, or believed, of his past is irrelevant. Brown was clear in his intentions for the future. “He believes in two articles,—two instruments, shall I say?—the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence,” Emerson wrote, “and he used this expression in a conversation here concerning them, ‘Better a whole generation of men, women and children should pass away by a violent death than that one word of either should be violated in this country.’”²⁹³ And Thoreau wrote it was Brown’s “peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave. I agree with him. They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but no others.”²⁹⁴ Both Emerson and Thoreau accepted that violence was not always to be avoided, and they had been readied for Brown’s visit by such circumstances as the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act and return of the fugitive Anthony Burns to slavery.

When Brown returned to Concord two years later, he had “added a flowing beard, which gives the soldierly air, and port of an apostle,” Alcott said, and he had “the martyr’s temper and purpose.”²⁹⁵ It was five months before his raid on Harper’s Ferry. Thoreau and Emerson were both firmly in support of his plans, although they did not know the exact nature of what those would be. Alcott noted that some “contribute something in aid of his plans without asking particulars.”²⁹⁶ It may not have mattered. When the news of what Brown had done came to Concord in October, Thoreau wrote in his journal, “I do not complain of any tactics that are effective of good, whether one wields the quill or the sword, but I shall not think him mistaken who quickest succeeds to liberate the slave. I will judge of the tactics by the fruits.”²⁹⁷

Both friends were in complete accord over what they deemed a selfless act of personal sacrifice for the sake of humanity. Thoreau wrote that the crucifixion of Christ and the hanging of John Brown “are the two ends of a chain which is not without its links. He is not Old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light.”²⁹⁸ And Emerson agreed, calling Brown “that new saint than whom none purer or more brave was ever led by love of men into conflict and death,—the new saint awaiting his martyrdom, and who, if he shall suffer, will make the gallows glorious like the cross.”²⁹⁹

Thoreau lectured on “The Character and Actions of Capt. John Brown” at the end of October in Concord. Emerson said it was read “with great force and effect, and though the audience was of widely different parties, it was heard without a murmur of dissent.”³⁰⁰ When Emerson heard that Frederick Douglass might not be able to speak in Boston due to his connection with Brown, he lost no time in promoting Thoreau as a replacement, writing to the organizer of the lecture series, Charles W. Slack, “I understand that there is some doubt about Mr. Douglass’s keeping his engagement for Tuesday next. If there is a vacancy, I think you cannot do a greater public good than to send for Mr. Thoreau, who has read last night here a discourse on the history and character of Captain John Brown, which ought to be heard or read by every man in the Republic.”³⁰¹

John Brown was executed on December 2, 1859. A service for him was held in the Concord Town Hall, where Emerson and Thoreau among others read “appropriate passages from Brown’s words, from the poets, and from the Scriptures.”³⁰² That same day Frank Sanborn, one of Brown’s Secret Six financial supporters, received a message that one of Brown’s sons was in Boston. After hastily getting to Boston, Sanborn found instead Francis Jackson Merriam, who had joined Brown’s army, avoided arrest, and escaped to Canada, but soon returned to Boston “to raise another expedition against the slave-holders. He was quite unfit to lead or even join in such an affair, being weak in body and almost distracted in mind; and I insisted that he should return at once to Canada.”³⁰³ Agreeing, Merriam mistakenly took a train that brought him no farther than Concord, arriving at Sanborn’s door, wanted, with a reward out for his arrest. Sanborn went to Emerson and asked for the loan of his horse and a covered wagon, to be made ready at sunrise. He then went to Thoreau to ask him to drive the wagon from Emerson’s house to Sanborn’s, to take a “Mr. Lockwood” to the station in South Acton and put him on board a train bound for Canada. Neither Emerson nor Thoreau had any prior knowledge of the reasons for this clandestine adventure, but trusting Sanborn, and the need for secrecy, agreed to what they could only have suspected was an illegal situation.

Merriam, according to Sanborn, “was in a flighty state of mind, and though he had agreed to go back to Canada, and knew his own life depended on it, could not keep to that purpose. He insisted to Mr. Thoreau that he must see Mr. Emerson before he left Concord, must lay before him the plan of invading the South, and must consult him also about certain moral and religious questions that troubled his mind.”³⁰⁴ Thoreau listened, all the while continuing on toward South Acton, with Merriam growing suspicious.

“I don’t know but you are Emerson,” he said. “Are you? You look somewhat like him.”

“No,” Thoreau assured him, “I am not.”

“Well, then,” Merriam cried, jumping out of the wagon, “I am going back to Concord.”

Merriam questioned Thoreau several more times before he told himself, “But then Emerson wouldn’t lie.” Thoreau was able to get Merriam back on the wagons then safely boarded on the train, and was soon reporting to Sanborn that “Mr. Lockwood had taken passage for Montreal.”³⁰⁵

The next day memorial services for John Brown were held at the Music Hall in Boston, where Emerson read his essay “Morals,” which was not written for this occasion but must have seemed as if it had been, with Emerson telling his audience:

Great men serve us, as insurrections do, in tyrannical governments. The world would run into endless routine, and forms incrust forms, till the life was gone. But the perpetual supply of new genius shocks us with thrills of life. It happens now and then in the ages, that a soul is born which has no weakness of self; which offers no impediment to the divine spirit; which comes down into nature as if only for the benefit of souls; and all its thoughts are perceptions of things as they are, without any infirmity of earth.³⁰⁶

At the end of 1859 Caroline Dall came to Concord to lecture on “Lives of Noted Women.” Taking tea with the Emersons and a few others beforehand, she asked who might come out to hear her. A woman lecturing was not common.

Sanborn asked, “I suppose that Thoreau will come?”

“No. I saw him this morning,” Emerson replied, before sharing one of Thoreau’s sweepingly dismissive exaggerations, “He says women never have anything to say.” Emerson had become used to such remarks. He had noted more than a decade earlier that “Thoreau sometimes appears only as a gendarme, good to knock down a cockney with, but,” he continued, “without that power to cheer and establish which makes the value of a friend.”³⁰⁷ Thoreau, too, was “aware of his stubborn contradictory attitude into which almost any conversation threw him,” Emerson wrote in his journal after Thoreau died.³⁰⁸

Margaret Fuller had published her “The Great Lawsuit. Man versus Men. Woman versus Women” in the July 1843 Dial. It was the precursor to her 1845 book Women in the Nineteenth Century, which Dall would call “doubtless the most brilliant, complete, and scholarly statement ever made upon this subject.”³⁰⁹ Fuller’s tract placed the position of women as clearly and undeniably parallel with that of the enslaved. Thoreau, who Emerson said “will never like anything,” wrote that it was “a noble piece, rich extempore writing, talking with pen in hand.”³¹⁰ Emerson saw that it “will teach us all to revise our habits of thinking on this head.”³¹¹

Partway through her lecture that evening Dall noticed a man enter wearing a green baize jacket, “who looked like a working man . . . and seated himself on the end of the very last bench by the door.” Her habit was to speak to the furthest person in the room, who was now, although she didn’t then know it, Thoreau. As she mingled after the lecture, she overheard Emerson say to the man, “Why, Thoreau, I thought you was not coming,” to which he replied, “But this woman had something to say!” He told her afterwards, Dall recalled, “that he had been on the river all day and dropped in on his way home to see what I looked like and ‘had to say.’ I thought it a pleasant victory then, for he waited to persuade me to remain over the next day and spend it at his home with himself, his mother and sister. It was a day I shall never forget, filled to the brim with charming talk.”³¹²

Thoreau’s opinion about women has often been considered misogynistic. He derived “no pleasure from talking with a young woman half an hour simply because she has regular features.”³¹³ The reason he talked with any person, male or female, was for the intellect he found there. This he had found in Dall, Fuller, and Emerson’s aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, of whom he wrote,

She is singular, among women at least, in being really and perseveringly interested to know what thinkers think. She relates herself surely to the intellectual where she goes. . . . In short, she is a genius, as woman seldom is, reminding you less often of her sex than any woman whom I know.³¹⁴

Emerson, too, had respect for the acuity of women. Women often made up his circle when meeting for conversation. It was a superior mind which attracted them, no matter in whom it was embodied, and such minds were not easily found. “Superior women are rare anywhere, as superior men are,” Emerson said.³¹⁵ On the issue of whether women should have the vote, Emerson’s answer was simple: “’T is idle to refuse them a vote on the ground of incompetency. I wish our masculine voting were so good that we had any right to doubt their equal discretion. They could not easily give worse votes, I think, than we do.”³¹⁶ Emerson easily dismissed the male-centered perspective when he wrote, “If women feel wronged, then they are wronged.”³¹⁷

Both men took the common conception that men were intellectual and women emotional—“We commonly say,” Emerson wrote, “Man represents Intellect; and Woman, Love.”³¹⁸—but they could also see that the world was not perfectly binary. As Thoreau put it, “Man is continually saying to woman, Why will you not be more wise? Woman is continually saying to man, Why will you not be more loving? It is not in their wills to be wise or to be loving; but, unless each is both wise and loving, there can be neither wisdom nor love.”³¹⁹ Emerson agreed with this androgynous approach to human nature. He wrote that there are, in each person, “mind and heart, Intellect and morals . . . One is the man, the other the woman. . . . These elements always coexist in every normal individual, but one predominates.”³²⁰ Or as he also wrote, “A highly endowed man with good intellect and good conscience is a Man-woman.”³²¹

In 1858 tragedy struck the Alcott family when Elizabeth Alcott—“Beth” of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women—died from scarlet fever. Thoreau and Emerson were pallbearers. Two years later they shared another, more celebratory event with the Alcotts. On May 23, 1860, eldest daughter Anna Alcott married John Pratt in the parlor at Orchard House. It was the thirtieth anniversary of her parents’ marriage. All the guests were reported to have kissed the bride, shared the wedding cake, and drunk the wedding wine. The Emersons gave them a silver cake basket as a wedding present. Thoreau’s name does not appear on Anna’s list of gifts.³²²

In August at the Emersons’, while Thoreau was entertaining the family with stories about Mount Monadnock, Emerson and their cat, Milcah, slipped away in pursuit of something. It was a bat hidden behind a picture in the dining room. When it flew off, Thoreau caught it, and while it struggled to escape, Lidian offered it her finger. “There, Batty,” she said, “you shall have something to bite if it will make you feel better, I’m sure.” The bat was held briefly under a glass dish while Thoreau identified it as a hoary bat and then set it free outside.³²³

The winter of 1860 was cold, wet, and snowy. Many people were ill, including Alcott, from whom Thoreau caught a cold when they were planning John Brown’s memorial service. “I took a severe cold about the 3 of Dec.,” Thoreau wrote in February 1861, “which at length resulted in a kind of bronchitis, so that I have been confined to the house ever since, excepting a very few experimental trips as far as the P.O. in some particularly mild noons.”³²⁴ Thoreau’s journal, often a barometer of his physical health, is blank from the 4th until the 22nd. Bronchitis, or chronic bronchitis, was a euphemism used for tuberculosis, and Ellery Channing was clear about the consumptive nature of Thoreau’s illness: “he is reduced much in stature.”³²⁵ Channing, who had begun reading medical texts and making a study of Thoreau’s condition, reported in April that

Henry’s bronchitis is very obstinate. It does not perceptibly mend; it is understood that the physician advises a warmer climate. I have still confidence that Henry may recover from this very obstinate attack, knowing how perfectly obstinate he also is. . . . Henry has lost much flesh . . . All air at all harsh affects him very much. He is also I judge far from strong as he had on Sunday morning last a fainting time. I say, I think he will recover, because he is a singular constitution and acts by himself, but if you were sick as he, I should not set your life at a pin’s fee.³²⁶

In May, Emerson dined with Thoreau and Horace Mann Jr., who were planning a trip to Minnesota for Thoreau’s health. The next day Emerson provided Thoreau with a “little list of names of good men whom you may chance to see” in case the travelers needed assistance of any sort.³²⁷ “I am still as much an invalid as when you and Theophilus Brown were here,” Thoreau wrote H.G.O. Blake before he left in mid-May,

if not more of one, and at this rate there is danger that the cold weather may come again, before I get over my bronchitis. The doctor accordingly tells me that I must “clear out” to the West Indies, or elsewhere,—he does not seem to care much where. But I decide against the West Indies, on account of their muggy heat in the summer, and the South of Europe, on account of the expense of time and money, and have at last concluded that it will be most expedient for me to try the air of Minnesota, say somewhere about St Paul. I am only waiting to be well enough to start. Hope to get off within a week or ten days.³²⁸

The excursion did little for Thoreau’s health. Robert Collyer, who Thoreau visited in Chicago, wrote that he would “pause with a pathetic patience to master the trouble in his chest.”³²⁹

In July Thoreau returned home to Concord from Minnesota. It was clear to him, as it was to everyone else, that whatever time was left in him was limited. On seeing him shortly after his return, Daniel Moncure Conway said Thoreau was “sadly out of health,”³³⁰ and Simon Brown had “no doubt but he is in the first stage of consumption.”³³¹ In a quietly prophetic passage Thoreau wrote Daniel Ricketson, “If I do not mend very quickly I shall be obliged to go to another climate again very soon.”³³²

He left the house infrequently. Special events would draw him out: a final visit in August to Daniel Ricketson in New Bedford, a send-off dinner, also in August, for Edward Emerson heading off to Harvard, and occasional visits with friends. Recalling Thoreau’s joy over his music box nearly twenty years earlier, the Hawthornes loaned him their own music box to soothe him during his final days.³³³

In September Channing was writing, with a significant underscoring, “He is no better.”³³⁴ He had “not the least faith in” Josiah Bartlett—the man who misdiagnosed the severity of John’s cut—as Thoreau’s physician, even though Thoreau “has and concludes to follow him. The doctor says there is nothing the matter with Henry’s lungs . . . but that it is all in his throat . . . I think he has made up his mind to sink or swim under the village Asclepius.”³³⁵

For a while into autumn, too weak to walk, Thoreau would take a ride in a wagon every other day or so, courtesy of his neighbor Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar. His journal, once the almost daily repository for his thoughts, contains fewer than a dozen entries after his July return, the final entry written in early November.

At the first of the new year, Alcott noted that it was “sad to find him failing and feeble. . . . But the most he may hope for is to prepare his manuscripts for others’ editing, and take his leave of them and us.”³³⁶ Channing found Thoreau “greatly decreased if it was possible in flesh. I do not think he weighs to-day but a very little and a few days since, his pulse was at 56.”³³⁷ Emerson felt “ever threatened by the decay of Henry Thoreau,” writing, “As we live longer, it looks as if our company were picked out to die first, and we live on in a lessening minority.”³³⁸ Preparing for the inevitable task of writing a eulogy, Emerson began to gather thoughts and memories about his friend.

As Thoreau declined, Emerson noted that he “remains erect, calm, self-subsistent, before me, and I read him not only truly in his Journal, but he is not long out of mind when I walk, and, as to-day, row upon the pond.”³³⁹ Despite his weakening, Thoreau always tried to participate in conversations. When Emerson told him about things happening beyond his window view, such as walking across Walden Pond on the ice on the first of April, Thoreau told him he had known the ice to hold as late as April 18. When Emerson reported of a purple finch he’d heard, Thoreau recalled hearing a blue snowbird on Monadnock. “Thoreau tells me,” Emerson wrote in his journal, that chickadees “are very sociable with wood-choppers, and will take crumbs from their hands.”³⁴⁰

Sam Staples told Emerson he had never “spent an hour with more satisfaction. Never saw a man dying with so much pleasure and peace. Thinks that very few men in Concord know Mr. Thoreau; finds him serene and happy.”³⁴¹ Emerson then recalled something Thoreau had said to him, something that could have been a summing up of their friendship.

Henry praised to me lately the manners of an old, established, calm, well-behaved river, as perfectly distinguished from those of a new river. A new river is a torrent; an old one slow and steadily supplied. What happens in any part of the old river relates to what befals in every other part of it. ’T is full of compensations, resources, and reserved funds.³⁴²

Thoreau died on the morning on May 8, 1862. His sister, Sophia, wrote that she could “never be grateful enough for the gentle, easy exit which was granted him. At seven o’clock Tuesday morning he became restless and desired to be moved . . . A little after eight he asked to be raised quite up, his breathing grew fainter and fainter, and without the slightest struggle, he left us at nine o’clock.”³⁴³

Emerson’s obituary for Thoreau was published the same day in the Boston Daily Advertiser.

He was a man of stoic temperament, highly intellectual, of a perfect probity, full of practical skill, an expert woodsman and boatman, acquainted with the use of tools, a good planter and cultivator, when he saw fit to plant, but without any taste for luxury, without the least ambition to be rich, or to be popular, and almost without sympathy in any of the common motives of men around him. He led the life of a philosopher, subordinating all other pursuits and so-called duties to his pursuit of knowledge and to his own estimate of duty. He was a man of firm mind and direct dealing, never disconcerted, and not to be bent by any inducement from his own course. He had a penetrating insight into men with whom he conversed, and was not to be deceived or used by any party, and did not conceal his disgust at any duplicity. As he was incapable of any the least dishonesty or untruth, he had nothing to hide, and kept his haughty independence to the end. And when we now look back at the solitude of this erect and spotless person, we lament that he did not live long enough for all men to know him.³⁴⁴

May 9, the day of Thoreau’s funeral, was clear and calm. The service was held at the First Parish Church, “a thing Henry would not have liked,” Louisa May Alcott wrote, “but Emerson said his sorrow was so great he wanted all the world to mourn with him.” There were those who said that Thoreau was an infidel who should not be buried from the church as he did not attend it in life, but she knew that “if ever a man was a real Christian it was Henry, and I think his own wise and pious thoughts read by one who loved him”—Bronson Alcott—“and whose own life was a beautiful example of religious faith, convinced many and touched the hearts of all.”³⁴⁵ Sophia felt that her brother was “honored” by such a public funeral from the church.³⁴⁶

“The death of friends,” Thoreau wrote, “should inspire us as much as their lives.”³⁴⁷ Emerson may have hoped that his eulogy, written out of a profound grief, would achieve what he said Thoreau’s did for John Brown when “his earnest eulogy of the hero was heard by all respectfully, by many with a sympathy that surprised themselves.”³⁴⁸ For the most part he succeeded, wanting to show his neighbors the Thoreau he knew and loved.

Emerson’s eulogy was delivered with a “broken, tender voice.”³⁴⁹ Sophia described it as an “address as no other man could have done. It is a source of great satisfaction that one so gifted knew and loved my brother and is prepared to speak such brave words about him at this time.”³⁵⁰ Annie Fields, wife of publisher James T. Fields, thought his address “made the simple ceremony one never to be forgotten,”³⁵¹ while Louisa May Alcott thought it was “good in itself but not appropriate to the time or place.”³⁵²

Gathering journal passages about Thoreau written over the vast expanse of their friendship, covering the best moments and the worst, reiterating his own hopes and disappointments, Emerson offered a full portrait. His loss did not allow him to gloss over the less agreeable aspects of Thoreau’s personality and disposition that he had experienced. Had the eulogy stayed in Concord, it may not have mattered, but publishing it in The Atlantic Monthly brought it to the world, cementing a portrait of Thoreau that even in our day is difficult to shake.

Out of the entirety of Emerson’s thoughtful and expansive eulogy, full of love, praise, and unbounded admiration, posterity has repeatedly quoted this as Emerson’s summation: “I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition. Wanting this, instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry-party.”³⁵³ But in the very next paragraph Emerson was unsure if these “foibles” he saw were “real or apparent”³⁵⁴ and continued on to recognize the best in his friend till he reached his true summation.

The country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost. It seems an injury that he should leave in the midst his broken task which none else can finish, a kind of indignity to so noble a soul that he should depart out of Nature before yet he has been really shown to his peers for what he is. . . . His soul was made for the noblest society; he had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of this world; wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home.³⁵⁵

Truth was always the cornerstone of whatever Emerson wrote, and this was no exception. Emerson learned later that people “were dissatisfied with my notice of him in the Atlantic after his death: they did not want me to place any bounds to his genius,”³⁵⁶ but he was paying the highest honor to his friend by acknowledging in an honest portrait something Thoreau said in his first book, “The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth.”³⁵⁷

In early June, Emerson and Alcott dined together, discussing “Thoreau a good deal.”³⁵⁸ Emerson had been reading Thoreau’s journal. He referred to one entry, from October 1852, in which Thoreau heard the laugh of the loon, calling, but never to be reached. It may have reminded him of his lost friend. Emerson wrote to his son Edward, “I saw yesterday a loon in Walden, but silent.”³⁵⁹ When the “Parker Fraternity” met in Boston at the end of the month, he read his piece that would soon appear in The Atlantic Monthly, expanded from the eulogy. Thoreau was never long out of Emerson’s thoughts.

At the beginning of July, Ellen was writing her brother Edward that “Father is constantly engaged now in writing and reading about Mr. Thoreau.”³⁶⁰ Emerson had been reading, among other things, selections from Thoreau’s journals prepared by Ellery Channing. “If we should ever print Henry’s journals,” Emerson wrote in his journal, “you may look for a plentiful crop of naturalists. Young men of sensibility must fall an easy prey to the charming of Pan’s pipe.”³⁶¹

One quotation in Channing’s selection stumped him—“Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”—and he thought it would be a good “question for a gameparty,” hoping the players might provide the solution to this conundrum. His daughter Ellen, however, understood it instantly “and considered it so self evident as to be not worth mentioning, and long afterward Mother said ‘Or a mouse.’ Then I explained to her that wasn’t the same thing, that it meant the milk was watered. Whereupon Father said he hadn’t thought of that before, of course that was right. I was amazed that he shouldn’t have seen it, but on trying the experiment I find that very few people do.”³⁶²

That summer Rebecca Harding Davis, whose Life in the Iron Mills had been published the previous year in The Atlantic Monthly, came to Concord to meet Hawthorne and others. Hawthorne warned Davis that when she met Emerson he would talk to her about his pears. “You may begin at Plato or the day’s news, and he will come around to pears.”³⁶³ But it wasn’t pears he wanted to talk about. It was Thoreau. “I wish Thoreau had not died before you came. He was an interesting study,” Emerson told her.

“Why?” she asked.

“Why? Thoreau?” Davis described Emerson hesitating, “thinking, going apparently to the bottom of the matter,” before he responded, “Henry often reminded me of an animal in human form. He had the eye of a bird, the scent of a dog, the most acute, delicate intelligence—but no soul. No.” Emerson shook his head. “Henry could not have had a human soul.”³⁶⁴

Emerson had such moments in which he grappled with the personality of Thoreau. While editing Thoreau’s correspondence for Letters to Various Persons, Emerson had removed the salutations and closings, but Sophia insisted “that all kind beginnings and endings of Mr. Thoreau’s letters, and little messages to friends being left out give a too cold idea of him, agreeing with the popular notion that he wanted affection.”³⁶⁵ In July 1864 Emerson began a new notebook, labelled “HT.” In collecting these pieces about his friend, he found that “Thoreau was with difficulty sweet.”³⁶⁶

His overall admiration of his friend’s work, however, continued to grow as he came to sincerely understand that in some ways Thoreau’s achievements were greater than his own. It was not humility but perception. When Sophia died in 1876, Thoreau’s manuscripts were passed on to H.G.O. Blake, to whom Emerson wrote, “I can well understand that he should vex tender persons by his conversation, but his books, I confide, must and will find a multitude of readers.”³⁶⁷ In reading Thoreau’s journals, Emerson rediscovered the true difference between himself and his friend.

I am very sensible of the vigor of his constitution. That oaken strength which I noted whenever he walked, or worked, or surveyed wood-lots, the same unhesitating hand with which a field-laborer accosts a piece of work, which I should shun as a waste of strength, Henry shows in his literary task. He has muscle, and ventures on and performs feats which I am forced to decline. In reading him, I find the same thought, the same spirit that is in me, but he takes a step beyond, and illustrates by excellent images that which I should have conveyed in a sleepy generality. ’T is as if I went into a gymnasium, and saw youths leap, climb, and swing with a force unapproachable,—though their feats are only continuations of my initial grapplings and jumps.³⁶⁸

Emerson had thought something similar a decade earlier. “Thoreau gives me,” he wrote in 1852, “in flesh and blood and pertinacious Saxon belief, my own ethics. He is far more real, and daily practically obeying them, than I; and fortifies my memory at all times with an affirmative experience which refuses to be set aside.”³⁶⁹

When it was proposed at a town meeting in 1874 to name a street for him, Emerson countered the idea by suggesting instead Thoreau Street, which was then adopted.³⁷⁰ Receiving a copy of Bedford’s Monthly Magazine containing a “very friendly notice of myself,” he found that the author

seems to me to have been misinformed. The only pain he gives me is in his estimate of Thoreau, whom he underrates. Thoreau was a superior genius. I read his books and manuscripts always with new surprise at the range of his topics and the novelty and depth of his thought. A man of large reading, of quick perception, of great practical courage and ability,—who grew greater every day, and, had his short life been prolonged, would have found few equals to the power and wealth of his mind.³⁷¹

Emerson lost no opportunity to read Thoreau’s works to others. At one gathering Emerson was asked “to read something, Shakespeare was suggested, but he collected a whole set of accounts of Mr. Thoreau from his old books and read them.”³⁷²

In October of 1878 Anne Burrows Gilchrist, the English writer and friend of Walt Whitman, visited Concord for a brief period, spending two evenings in the company of the seventy-five-year-old Emerson and his family. She wrote that his “memory fails somewhat as to recent names and topics, but as is usual in such cases, all the mental impressions that were made when he was in full vigour remain clear and strong.”³⁷³

As they chatted, Emerson called to Lidian in the next room, “What was the name of my best friend?”

“Henry Thoreau,” she answered.

“Oh, yes,” Emerson repeated. “Henry Thoreau.”³⁷⁴