Henry D. Thoreau 10

Henry D. Thoreau 10

He took Mr. Emerson about with him in his chaise when a boy, and in

passing each house he would tell the story of its family, dwelling

especially on the nine church-members who had made a division in the

church in the time of his predecessor; every one of the nine having

come to bad fortune or a bad end. "The late Dr. Gardiner," says Mr.

Emerson, "in a funeral sermon on some parishioner, whose virtues did

not readily come to mind, honestly said, 'He was good at fires.' Dr.

Ripley had many virtues, and yet, even in his old age, if the firebell

was rung, he was instantly on horseback, with his buckets and bag." He

had even some willingness, perhaps not equal to the zeal of the Hindoo

saint, to extinguish the Orthodox fires of hell, which had long blazed

in New England,--so that men might worship God with less fear. But

he had small sympathy with the Transcendentalists when they began to

appear in Concord. When Mr. Emerson took his friend Mr. Alcott to see

the old doctor, he gave him warning that his brilliant young kinsman

was not quite sound in the faith, and bore testimony in particular

against a sect of his own naming, called "Egomites" (from _ego_ and

_mitto_), who "sent themselves" on the Lord's errands without any due

call thereto. Dr. Channing viewed the "apostles of the newness" with

more favor, and could pardon something to the spirit of liberty which

was strong in them. The occasional correspondence between the Concord

shepherd of his people and the great Unitarian preacher is full of

interest. In February, 1839, when he was eighty-eight years old and

weighed down with infirmities, he could still lift up his voice in

testimony. He then wrote to Dr. Channing:--

 

"Broken down with the infirmities of age, and subject to

fits that deprive me of reason and the use of my limbs, I

feel it a duty to be patient and submissive to the will of

God, who is too wise to err, and too good to injure. My

mind labors and is oppressed, viewing the present state

of Christianity, and the various speculations, opinions,

and practices of the passing period. Extremes appear to be

sought and loved, and their novelty gains attention. You,

sir, appear to retain and act upon the sentiment of the

Latin phrase,--

 

"'Est modus in rebus, sunt certi denique fines.'

 

"The learned and estimable Norton appears to me to have

weakened his hold on public opinion and confidence by his

petulance or pride, his want of candor and charity."

 

Six years earlier, Dr. Channing had written to Dr. Ripley almost as if

replying to some compliment like this, and expressed himself thus, in

a letter dated January 22, 1833,--

 

"I thank God for the testimony which you have borne to

the usefulness of my writings. Such approbation from one

whom I so much venerate, and who understands so well the

wants and signs of the times, is very encouraging to me.

If I have done anything towards manifesting Christianity

in its simple majesty and mild glory I rejoice, and I am

happy to have contributed anything towards the satisfaction

of your last years. It would gratify many, and would do

good, if, in the quiet of your advanced age, you would look

back on the eventful period through which you have passed,

and would leave behind you, or give now, a record of the

changes you have witnessed, and especially of the progress

of liberal inquiry and rational views in religion."[2]

 

Dr. Ripley's prayers were precise and undoubting in their appeal for

present providences. He prayed for rain and against the lightning,

"that it may not lick up our spirits;" he blessed the Lord for

exemption from sickness and insanity,--"that we have not been tossed

to and fro until the dawning of the day, that we have not been a

terror to ourselves and to others." One memorable occasion, in the

later years of his pastorate, when he had consented to take a young

colleague, is often remembered in his parish, now fifty years after

its date. The town was suffering from drought, and the farmers from

Barrett's Mill, Bateman's Pond, and the Nine-Acre Corner had asked

the minister to pray for rain. Mr. Goodwin (the father of Professor

Goodwin, of Harvard University) had omitted to do this in his morning

service, and at the noon intermission Dr. Ripley was reminded of the

emergency by the afflicted farmers. He told them courteously that Mr.

Goodwin's garden lay on the river, and perhaps he had not noticed how

parched the uplands were; but he entered the pulpit that afternoon

with an air of resolution and command. Mr. Goodwin, as usual, offered

to relieve the doctor of the duty of leading in prayer, but the old

shepherd, as Mr. Emerson says, "rejected his offer with some humor,

and with an air that said to all the congregation, 'This is no time

for you young Cambridge men; the affair, sir, is getting serious; I

will pray myself.'" He did so, and with unusual fervor demanded rain

for the languishing corn and the dry grass of the field. As the story

goes, the afternoon opened fair and hot, but before the dwellers in

Nine-Acre Corner and the North Quarter reached their homes a pouring

shower rewarded the gray-haired suppliant, and reminded Concord that

the righteous are not forsaken. Another of Mr. Emerson's anecdotes

bears on this point:--

 

"One August afternoon, when I was in his hayfield, helping

him, with his man, to rake up his hay, I well remember his

pleading, almost reproachful looks at the sky, when the

thunder-gust was coming up to spoil his hay. He raked very

fast, then looked at the cloud, and said, 'We are in the

Lord's hand,--mind your rake, George! we are in the Lord's

hand;' and seemed to say, 'You know me; this field is

mine,--Dr. Ripley's, thine own servant.'"

 

In his later years Dr. Ripley was much distressed by a schism in his

church, which drew off to a Trinitarian congregation several of his

oldest friends and parishioners. Among the younger members who thus

seceded, seventy years ago, were the maiden aunts of Thoreau, Jane and

Maria,--the last of whom, and the last of the name in America, has

died recently, as already mentioned. Thoreau seceded later, but not

to the "Orthodox" church,--as much against the wish of Dr. Ripley,

however, as if he had. In later years, Thoreau's church (of the

Sunday Walkers) was recognized in the village gossip; so that when I

first spent Sunday in Concord, and asked my landlord what churches

there were, he replied, "The Unitarian, the Orthodox, and the Walden

Pond Association." To the latter he professed to belong, and said

its services consisted in walking on Sunday in the Walden woods. Dr.

Ripley would have viewed such rites with horror, but they have now

become common. His Old Manse, which from 1842 to 1846 was occupied

by Hawthorne, was for twenty years (1847-1867) the home of Mrs.

Sarah Ripley, that sweet and learned lady, and has since been the

dwelling-place of her children, the grandchildren of Dr. Ripley. Near

by stands now the statue of the Concord Minute-Man of 1775, marking

the spot to which the Middlesex farmers came

 

"In sloven dress and broken rank,"

 

and where they stood when in unconscious heroism they

 

"Fired the shot heard round the world,"

 

and drove back the invading visitor from their doorsteps and

cornfields.

 

Dr. Ripley, however, seldom repelled a visitor or an invader, unless

he came from too recent an experience in the state prison, or offered

to "break out" his path on a Sunday, when he had fancied himself

too much snow-bound to go forth to his pulpit. The anecdote is

characteristic, if not wholly authentic. One Sunday, after a severe

snow-storm, his neighbor, the great farmer on Ponkawtassett Hill, half

a mile to the northward of the Old Manse, turned out his ox-teams and

all his men and neighbors to break a path to the meeting-house and

the tavern. Wallowing through the drifts, they had got as far as Dr.

Ripley's gate, while the good parson, snugly blocked in by a drift

completely filling his avenue of ash-trees, thought of nothing less

than of going out to preach that day. The long team of oxen, with much

shouting and stammering from the red-faced farmer, was turned out of

the road and headed up the avenue, when Dr. Ripley, coming to his

parsonage door, and commanding silence, began to berate Captain B.

for breaking the Sabbath and the roads at one stroke,--implying, if

not asserting, that he did it to save time and oxen for his Monday's

work. Angered at the ingratitude of his minister, the stammering

farmer turned the ten yoke of cattle round in the doctor's garden, and

drove on to the village, leaving the parson to shovel himself out and

get to meeting the best way he could. Meanwhile, the teamsters sat in

the warm bar-room at the tavern, and cheered themselves with punch,

flip, grog, and toddy, instead of going to hear Dr. Ripley hold forth;

and when he had returned to his parsonage they paraded their oxen

and sleds back again, past his gate, with much more shouting than at

first. This led to a long quarrel between minister and parishioner,

in course of which, one day, as the doctor halted his chaise in

front of the farmer's house on the hill, the stammering captain came

forward, a peck measure in his hand, with which he had been giving his

oxen their meal, and began to renew the unutterable grievance. Waxing

warm, as the doctor admonished him afresh, he smote with his wooden

measure on the shafts of the chaise, until his gentle wife, rushing

forth, called on the neighbors to stop the fight which she fancied was

going on between the charioteer of the Lord and the foot-soldier.

 

Despite these outbursts, and his habitual way of looking at all things

"from the parochial point of view," as Emerson said of him, he was

also a courteous and liberal-minded man, as the best anecdotes of

him constantly prove. He was the sovereign of his people, managing

the church, the schools, the society meetings, and, for a time,

the Lyceum, as he thought fit. The lecturers, as well as the young

candidates for school-keeping--Theodore Parker, Edward Everett, and

the rest--addressed themselves to him, and when he met Webster, then

the great man of Massachusetts, it was on equal terms.

 

Daniel Webster was never a lyceum lecturer in Concord, and he did not

often try cases there, but was sometimes consulted in causes of some

pecuniary magnitude. When Humphrey Barrett died (whose management of

his nephew's estate will be mentioned in the next chapter), his heir

by will (a young man without property, until he should inherit the

large estate bequeathed him), found it necessary to employ counsel

against the heirs-at-law, who sought to break the will. His attorney

went to Mr. Webster in Boston and related the facts, adding that his

client could not then pay a large fee, but might, if the cause were

gained, as Mr. Webster thought it would be. "You may give me one

hundred dollars as a retainer," said Webster, "and tell the young man,

from me, that when I win his case I shall send him a bill that will

make his hair stand on end." It so happened, however, that Webster was

sent to the Senate, and the case was won by his partner.

 

In the summer of 1843, while Thoreau was living at Staten Island,

Webster visited Concord to try an important case in the county court,

which then held sessions there. This was the "Wyman Trial," long

famous in local traditions, Webster and Choate being both engaged in

the case, and along with them Mr. Franklin Dexter and Mr. Rockwood

Hoar, the latter a young lawyer, who had been practicing in the

Middlesex courts for a few years, where his father, Mr. Samuel Hoar,

was the leader of the bar. Judge Allen (Charles Allen of Worcester)

held the court, and the eminent array of counsel just named was for

the defense.

 

The occasion was a brilliant one, and made a great and lasting

sensation in the village. Mr. Webster and his friends were entertained

at the houses of the chief men of Concord, and the villagers crowded

the court-house to hear the arguments and the colloquies between the

counsel and the court. Webster was suffering from his usual summer

annoyance, the "hay catarrh," or "rose cold," which he humorously described afterward in a letter to a friend in Concord: