Henry D. Thoreau 13

Henry D. Thoreau 13

Forty years afterward, in 1838, Dr. Lowell's son, James Russell

Lowell, coming under college discipline, was sent to Concord to spend

a similar summer vacation, and wrote his class poem in that town.

 

Major Hosmer died in 1821, at the age of eighty-five. Mr. Samuel Hoar,

long the leader of the Middlesex County bar, who knew him in his later

life, once said,--

 

"In two respects he excelled any one I have ever known; he

was more entirely free from prejudice, and also the best

reader of men. So clear was his mind and so strong his

reasoning power, that I would have defied the most eloquent

pleader at the bar to have puzzled him, no matter how

skillfully he concealed the weak points of the case. I can

imagine him listening quietly, and saying in his slow way,

'It's a pity so many fine words should be wasted, for, you

see, the man's on the wrong side.'"

 

Another old lawyer of Concord, who first saw Major Hosmer when he was

a child of ten, and the Major was sixty years old, said,--

 

"I then formed an opinion of him in two respects that I

never altered: First, that he had the handsomest eyes I

ever saw; second, those eyes saw the inside of my head as

clearly as they did the outside."

 

He was for many years sheriff of the county, and it was the habit of

the young lawyers in term-time to get round his chair and ask his

opinion about their cases. Such was his knowledge of the common law,

and so well did he know the judges and jurymen, that when he said

to Mr. Hoar, "I fear you will lose your case," that gentleman said,

"from that moment I felt it lost, for I never knew him to make a

wrong guess." He was a Federalist of the old school, and in his eyes

Alexander Hamilton was the first man in America. His son held much the

same opinion of Daniel Webster.

 

Near by Major Hosmer's farm-house stood the old homestead and

extensive farm buildings of the Lee family, who at the beginning of

the Revolution owned one of the two or three great farms in Concord.

This estate has been owned and sold in one parcel of about four

hundred acres ever since it was first occupied by Henry Woodhouse

about 1650. It lies between the two rivers Assabet and Musketaquid,

and includes Nahshawtuc, or Lee's Hill, on which, in early days, was

an Indian village. The Lees inherited it from the original owner,

and held it for more than one hundred years, though it narrowly

escaped confiscation in 1775, its owner being a Tory. Early in the

present century it fell, by means of a mortgage, into the hands of

"old Billy Gray" (the founder of the fortunes that for two or three

generations have been held in the Gray family of Boston), was by him

sold to Judge Fay, of Cambridge, and by him, in 1822, conveyed to his

brother-in-law, Joseph Barrett, of Concord, a distant cousin of the

Humphrey Barrett, mentioned elsewhere. Joseph Barrett had been one

of Major Hosmer's deputies, when the old yeoman was sheriff, but now

turned his attention to farming his many acres, and deserves mention

here as one of the Concord farmers of two generations after the

battle, among whom Henry Thoreau grew up. Indeed, the Lee Farm was

one of his most accustomed haunts, since the river flowed round it

for a mile or two, and its commanding hill-top gave a prospect toward

the western and northwestern mountains, Wachusett and Monadnoc chief

among the beautiful brotherhood, whom Thoreau early saluted with a

dithyrambic verse:--

 

"With frontier strength ye stand your ground,

With grand content ye circle round,

(Tumultuous silence for all sound),

Ye distant nursery of rills,

Monadnoc and the Peterboro hills;

 

* * * * *

 

But special I remember thee,

Wachusett, who, like me,

Standest alone without society;

Thy far blue eye

A remnant of the sky."

 

Lee's Hill (which must be distinguished from Lee's Cliff, three

miles further up the main river), was the centre of this farm, and

almost of the township itself, and Squire Barrett, while he tilled

its broad acres (or left them untilled), might be called the centre

of the farmers of his county. He was for some years president of the

Middlesex Agricultural Society (before which, in later years, Emerson,

and Thoreau, and Agassiz gave addresses), and took the prize in the

plowing-match at its October cattle-show, holding his own plow, and

driving his oxen himself. Descending from the committee-room in dress

coat and ruffled shirt, he found his plow-team waiting for him, but

his rivals in the match already turning their furrows. Laying off

his coat, and fortifying himself with a pinch of maccaboy, while, as

his teamster vowed, "that nigh-ox had his eye on the 'Squire from

the time he hove in sight, ready to start the minute he took the

plow-handles,"--then stepping to the task, six feet and one inch in

height, and in weight two hundred and fifty pounds, the 'Squire began,

and before the field was plowed he had won the premium. He was one of

the many New England yeomen we have all known, who gave the lie to the

common saying about the sturdier bulk and sinew of our beer-drinking

cousins across the water. 'Squire Barrett could lift a barrel of cider

into a cart, and once carried on his shoulders, up two flights of

stairs, a sack containing eight bushels of Indian corn, which must

have weighed more than four hundred pounds. He was a good horseman,

an accomplished dancer, and in the hayfield excelled in the graceful

sweep of his scythe and the flourish of his pitchfork.

 

In course of time (1840) Mr. Alcott, with his wife (a daughter of

Colonel May, of Boston), and those daughters who have since become

celebrated, came to live in the Hosmer cottage not far from 'Squire

Barrett's, and under the very eaves of Major Hosmer's farm-house, to

which in 1761 came the fair and willful Lucy Barnes. The portly and

courtly 'Squire, who knew Colonel May, came to call on his neighbors,

and had many a chat with Mrs. Alcott about her Boston kindred, the

Mays, Sewalls, Salisburys, etc. His civility was duly returned by Mrs.

Alcott, who, when 'Squire Barrett was a candidate for State Treasurer

in 1845, was able, by letters to her friends in Boston, to give him

useful support. He was chosen, and held the office till his death in

1849, when Thoreau had just withdrawn from his Walden hermitage, and

was publishing his first book, "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack."

 

Thoreau's special friend among the farmers was another character,

Edmund Hosmer, a scion of the same prolific Hosmer stock, who died in

1881. Edmund Hosmer, with Mr. Alcott, George Curtis and his brother

Burrill, and other friends, helped Thoreau raise the timbers of his

cabin in 1845, and was often his Sunday visitor in the hermitage. Of

him it is that mention is made in "Walden," as follows:--

 

"On a Sunday afternoon, if I chanced to be at home, I

heard the crunching of the snow, made by the step of a

long-headed farmer, who from far through the woods sought

my house, to have a social 'crack;' one of the few of his

vocation who are 'men on their farms;' who donned a frock

instead of a professor's gown, and is as ready to extract

the moral out of church or state as to haul a load of

manure from his barn-yard. We talked of rude and simple

times, when men sat about large fires in cold, bracing

weather, with clear heads; and when other dessert failed,

we tried our teeth on many a nut which wise squirrels have

long since abandoned,--for those which have the thickest

shells are commonly empty."

 

Edmund Hosmer, who was a friend of Mr. Emerson also, and of whom

George Curtis and his brother hired land which they cultivated for

a time, has been celebrated in prose and verse by other Concord

authors. I suppose it was he of whom Emerson wrote thus in his

apologue of Saadi, many years ago:--

 

"Said Saadi,--When I stood before

Hassan the camel-driver's door,

I scorned the fame of Timour brave,--

Timour to Hassan was a slave.

In every glance of Hassan's eye

I read rich years of victory.

And I, who cower mean and small

In the frequent interval

When wisdom not with me resides,

Worship Toil's wisdom that abides.

I shunned his eyes--the faithful man's,

I shunned the toiling Hassan's glance."

 

Edmund Hosmer was also, in George Curtis's description of a

conversation at Mr. Emerson's house in 1845, "the sturdy farmer

neighbor, who had bravely fought his way through inherited

embarrassments to the small success of a New England husbandman, and

whose faithful wife had seven times merited well of her country." And

it may be that he was Ellery Channing's

 

"Spicy farming sage,

Twisted with heat and cold and cramped with age,

Who grunts at all the sunlight through the year,

And springs from bed each morning with a cheer.

Of all his neighbors he can something tell,

'Tis bad, whate'er, we know, and like it well!

The bluebird's song he hears the first in spring,--

Shoots the last goose bound south on freezing wing."

 

Hosmer might have sat, also, for the more idyllic picture of the

Concord farmer, which Channing has drawn in his "New England":--

 

"This man takes pleasure o'er the crackling fire,

His glittering axe subdued the monarch oak;

He earned the cheerful blaze by something higher

Than pensioned blows.--he owned the tree he stroke,

And knows the value of the distant smoke,

When he returns at night, his labor done,

Matched in his action with the long day's sun."

 

Near the small farm of Edmund Hosmer, when Mr. Curtis lived with him

and sometimes worked on his well-tilled acres, lay a larger farm,

which, about the beginning of Thoreau's active life, was brought from

neglect and barrenness into high cultivation by Captain Abel Moore,

another Concord farmer, and one of the first, in this part of the

country, to appreciate the value of our bog-meadows for cultivation

by ditching and top-dressing with the sand which Nature had so

thoughtfully ridged up in hills close by. Under the name of "Captain

Hardy," Emerson celebrated this achievement of his townsman, upon

which the hundreds who in summer strolled to the School of Philosophy

in Mr. Alcott's orchard, gazed with admiration,--bettered as it had

been by the thirty years' toil and skill bestowed upon it since by

Captain Moore's son and grandson. Emerson said: