Henry D. Thoreau 21

Henry D. Thoreau 21

"Is there no way of disabusing S. of the liking he has for

the verses I used to write? You probably know he is my only

patron, but that is no reason he should be led astray.

_There is no other test_ of the value of poetry, but its

popularity. My verses have never secured a single reader

but S. He really believes, I think, in those so-called

verses; but they are not good,--they are wholly unknown and

unread, and always will be. Mediocre poetry is worse than

nothing,--and mine is not even mediocre. I have presented

S. with the last set of those little books there is, to

have them bound, if he will. He can keep them as a literary

_curio_, and in his old age amuse himself with thinking,

'How could ever I have liked these?'"

 

Yet this self-disparaging poet was he who wrote,--

 

"If my bark sinks, 't is to another sea,"--

 

and who cried to his companions,--

 

"Ye heavy-hearted mariners

Who sail this shore,--

Ye patient, ye who labor,

Sitting at the sweeping oar,

And see afar the flashing sea-gulls play

On the free waters, and the glad bright day

Twine with his hand the spray,--

From out your dreariness,

From your heart-weariness,

I speak, for I am yours

On these gray shores."

 

It is he, also, who has best told, in prose and verse, what Thoreau

was in his character and his literary art. In dedicating to his

friend Henry, the poem called "Near Home," published in 1858, Channing

thus addressed him:--

 

"Modest and mild and kind,

Who never spurned the needing from thy door--

(Door of thy heart, which is a palace-gate);

Temperate and faithful,--in whose word the world

Might trust, sure to repay; unvexed by care,

Unawed by Fortune's nod, slave to no lord,

Nor coward to thy peers,--long shalt thou live!

Not in this feeble verse, this sleeping age,--

But in the roll of Heaven, and at the bar

Of that high court where Virtue is in place,

There thou shalt fitly rule, and read the laws

Of that supremer state,--writ Jove's behest,

And even old Saturn's chronicle;

Works ne'er Hesiod saw,--types of all things,

And portraitures of all--whose golden leaves,

Roll back the ages' doors, and summon up

Unsleeping truths, by which wheels on Heaven's prime."

 

In these majestic lines, suggestive of Dante, of Shakespeare, and of

Milton, yet fitting, by the force of imagination, to the simplicity

and magnanimity that Thoreau had displayed, one reads the secret of

that character which made the Concord recluse first declare to the

world the true mission of John Brown, whose friend he had been for a

few years. Of Alcott and of Hawthorne, of Margaret Fuller and Horace

Greeley, he had been longer the friend; and in the year before he

met Brown he had stood face to face with Walt Whitman in Brooklyn.

Mr. Alcott's testimony to Thoreau's worth and friendliness has been

constant.

 

"If I were to proffer my earnest prayer to the gods for the

greatest of all human privileges," he said one day, after

returning from an evening spent at Walden with Thoreau,

"it should be for the gift of a severely candid friend. To

most, the presence of such is painfully irksome; they are

lovers of present reputation, and not of that exaltation

of soul which friends and discourse were given to awaken

and cherish in us. Intercourse of this kind I have found

possible with my friends Emerson and Thoreau; and the

evenings passed in their society during these winter months

have realized my conception of what friendship, when great

and genuine, owes to and takes from its objects."

 

Not less emphatic was Thoreau's praise of Mr. Alcott, after these long

winter evenings with him in the hut:--

 

"One of the last of the philosophers," he writes in

"Walden,"--"Connecticut gave him to the world,--he peddled

first her wares, afterwards, as he declares, his brains.

These he peddles still, prompting God and disgracing man,

bearing for fruit his brain only, like the nut its kernel.

I think he must be the man of the most faith of any alive.

His words and attitude always suppose a better state of

things than other men are acquainted with, and he will be

the last man to be disappointed as the ages revolve. He

has no venture in the present. But though comparatively

disregarded now, laws unsuspected by most will take effect,

and masters of families and rulers will come to him for

advice. A true friend of man; almost the only friend of

human progress. He is perhaps the sanest man and has

the fewest crotchets of any I chance to know,--the same

yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow. Of yore we had sauntered

and talked, and effectually put the world behind us; for he

was pledged to no institution in it, freeborn, _ingenuus_.

Great Looker! great Expecter! to converse with whom was a

New England Night's Entertainment. Ah! such discourse we

had, hermit and philosopher, and the old settler I have

spoken of,--we three,--it expanded and racked my little

house."

 

Nor did Thoreau participate in such discourse at Walden alone, but

frequented Mr. Alcott's conversations at Mr. Emerson's house in

Concord, at Hawthorne's in Salem, at Marston Watson's in Plymouth, at

Daniel Ricketson's in New Bedford, and once or twice in Boston and New

York. With Mr. Alcott and Alice Carey, Thoreau visited Horace Greeley

at Chappaqua, in 1856, and with Mr. Alcott alone he called on Walt

Whitman in Brooklyn the same year.

 

Between Hawthorne and Thoreau, Ellery Channing was perhaps the

interpreter, for they had not very much in common, though friendly

and mutually respectful. The boat in which Thoreau made his voyage of

1839, on the Concord and Merrimac, came afterwards into Hawthorne's

possession, and was the frequent vehicle for Channing and Hawthorne as

they made those excursions which Hawthorne has commemorated. Channing

also has commemorated those years when Hawthorne spent the happiest

hours of his life in the Old Manse, to which he had removed soon after

his marriage in 1842:--

 

"There in the old gray house, whose end we see

Half peeping through the golden willow's veil,

Whose graceful twigs make foliage through the year,

My Hawthorne dwelt, a scholar of rare worth,

The gentlest man that kindly nature drew;

New England's Chaucer, Hawthorne fitly lives.

His tall, compacted figure, ably strung

To urge the Indian chase or guide the way,

Softly reclining 'neath the aged elm,

Like some still rock looked out upon the scene,

As much a part of nature as itself."

 

In July, 1860, writing to his sister Sophia, among the New Hampshire

mountains, Thoreau said:--

 

"Mr. Hawthorne has come home. I went to meet him the other

evening (at Mr. Emerson's), and found that he had not

altered, except that he was looking pretty brown after his

voyage. He is as simple and childlike as ever."

 

This was upon the return of Hawthorne from his long residence abroad,

in England, Portugal, and Italy. Thoreau died two years before

Hawthorne, and they are buried within a few feet of each other in the

Concord cemetery, their funerals having proceeded from the same parish

church near by.

 

Of Thoreau's relations with Emerson, this is not the place to speak in

full; it was, however, the most important, if not the most intimate,

of all his friendships, and that out of which the others mainly

grew. Their close acquaintance began in 1837. In the latter part of

April, 1841, Thoreau became an inmate of Mr. Emerson's house, and

remained there till, in the spring of 1843, he went for a few months

to be the tutor of Mr. William Emerson's sons at Staten Island.

In 1840, while teaching school in Concord, Thoreau seems to have

been fully admitted into that circle of which Emerson, Alcott, and

Margaret Fuller were the leaders. In May, 1840, this circle met, as

it then did frequently, at the house of Mr. Emerson, to converse on

"the inspiration of the Prophet and Bard, the nature of Poetry, and

the causes of the sterility of Poetic Inspiration in our age and

country." Mr. Alcott, in his diary, has preserved a record of this

meeting, and some others of the same kind. It seems that on this

occasion--Thoreau being not quite twenty-three years old, Mr. Alcott

forty-one, Mr. Emerson thirty-seven, and Miss Fuller thirty--all

these were present, and also Jones Very, the Salem poet, Dr. F. H.

Hedge, Dr. C. A. Bartol, Dr. Caleb Stetson, and Robert Bartlett of

Plymouth. Bartlett and Very were graduates of Harvard a year before

Thoreau, and afterwards tutors there; indeed, all the company except

Alcott were Cambridge scholars,--for Margaret Fuller, without entering

college, had breathed in the learned air of Cambridge, and gone beyond

the students who were her companions. I find no earlier record of

Thoreau's participation in these meetings; but afterward he was often

present. In May, 1839, Mr. Alcott had held one of his conversations

at the house of Thoreau's mother, but no mention is made of Henry

taking part in it. At a conversation in Concord in 1846, one April

evening, Thoreau came in from his Walden hermitage, and protested with

some vehemence against Mr. Alcott's declaration that Jesus "stood in

a more tender and intimate nearness to the heart of mankind than any

character in life or literature." Thoreau thought he "asserted this

claim for the fair Hebrew in exaggeration"; yet he could say in the

"Week," "It is necessary not to be Christian to appreciate the beauty and significance of the life of Christ."