Henry D. Thoreau 4

Henry D. Thoreau 4

"DANIEL WEBSTER."

 

No doubt the old statesman was thinking, as he wrote, not only of

his father, Captain Ebenezer Webster ("with a complexion," said

Stark, under whom he fought at Bennington, "that burnt gunpowder

could not change"), of his mother and his brethren, but also of Grace

Fletcher,--and echoing in his heart the verse of Wordsworth:--

 

"Among thy mountains did I feel

The joy of my desire;

And she I cherished turned her wheel

Beside a cottage fire.

Thy mornings showed, thy nights concealed,

The bowers where Lucy played;

And thine, too, is the last green field

That Lucy's eyes surveyed."

 

It was no such deep sentiment as this which Louisa Dunbar had

inspired in young Webster's breast; but he walked and talked with

her, took her to drive in his chaise up and down the New Hampshire

hills, and no doubt went with her to church and to prayer-meeting.

She once surprised me by confiding to me (as we were talking about

Webster in the room where Henry Thoreau afterwards died, and where

there hung then an engraving by Rowse of Webster's magnificent head)

"that she regarded Mr. Webster, under Providence, as the means of

her conversion." Upon my asking how, she said that, in one of their

drives,--perhaps in the spring of 1804,--he had spoken to her so

seriously and scripturally on the subject of religion that her

conscience was awakened, and she soon after joined the church, of

which she continued through life a devout member. Her friendship for

Mr. Webster also continued, and in his visits to Concord, which were

frequent from 1843 to 1849, he generally called on her, or she was

invited to meet him at the house of Mr. Cheney, where, among social

and political topics, Webster talked with her of the old days at

Boscawen and Salisbury.

 

Cynthia Dunbar, the mother of Henry Thoreau, was born in Keene, N. H.,

in 1787, the year that her father died. Her husband, John Thoreau,

who was a few months younger than herself, was born in Boston. When

Henry Thoreau first visited Keene, in 1850, he made this remark:

"Keene Street strikes the traveler favorably; it is so wide, level,

straight, and long. I have heard one of my relatives who was born and

bred there [Louisa Dunbar, no doubt] say that you could see a chicken

run across it a mile off." His mother hardly lived there long enough

to notice the chickens a mile off, but she occasionally visited her

native town after her marriage in 1812, and a kinswoman (Mrs. Laura

Dunbar Ralston, of Washington, D. C.), now living, says, "I recollect

Mrs. Thoreau as a handsome, high-spirited woman, half a head taller

than her husband, accomplished, after the manner of those days, with

a voice of remarkable power and sweetness in singing." She was fond

of dress, and had a weakness, not uncommon in her day, for ribbons,

which her austere friend, Miss Mary Emerson (aunt of R. W. Emerson),

once endeavored to rebuke in a manner of her own. In 1857, when Mrs.

Thoreau was seventy years old, and Miss Emerson eighty-four, the

younger lady called on the elder in Concord, wearing bonnet-ribbons of

a good length and of a bright color,--perhaps yellow. During the call,

in which Henry Thoreau was the subject of conversation, Miss Emerson

kept her eyes shut. As Mrs. Thoreau and her daughter Sophia rose to

go, the little old lady said, "Perhaps you noticed, Mrs. Thoreau, that

I closed my eyes during your call. I did so because I did not wish to

look on the ribbons you are wearing, so unsuitable for a child of God

and a person of your years."

 

In uttering this reproof, Miss Emerson may have had in mind the

clerical father of Mrs. Thoreau, Rev. Asa Dunbar, whom she was old

enough to remember. He was settled in Salem as the colleague of Rev.

Thomas Barnard, after a long contest which led to the separation of

the First Church there, and the formation of the Salem North Church

in 1772. The parishioners of Mr. Dunbar declared their new minister

"admirably qualified for a gospel preacher," and he seems to have

proved himself a learned and competent minister. But his health was

infirm, and this fact, as one authority says, "soon threw him into

the profession of the law, which he honorably pursued for a few years

at Keene." Whether he went at once to Keene on leaving Salem in 1779

does not appear, but he was practicing law there in 1783, and was also

a leading Freemason. His diary for a few years of his early life--a

faint foreshadowing of his grandson's copious journals--is still in

existence, and indicates a gay and genial disposition, such as Mrs.

Thoreau had. His only son, Charles Dunbar, who was born in February,

1780, and died in March, 1856, inherited this gaiety of heart, but

also that lack of reverence and discipline which is proverbial in

New England for "ministers' sons and deacons' daughters." His nephew

said of him, "He was born the winter of the great snow, and he died

in the winter of another great snow,--a life bounded by great snows."

At the time of Henry Thoreau's birth, Mrs. Thoreau's sisters, Louisa

and Sarah, and their brother Charles were living in Concord, or not

far off, and there Louisa Dunbar died a few years before Mrs. Thoreau.

Her brother Charles, who was two years older than Daniel Webster, was

a person widely known in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and much

celebrated by Thoreau in his journals. At the time of his death, I

find the following curious entries, in Thoreau's journal for April 3,

1856:--

 

"People are talking about my uncle Charles. George Minott

[a sort of cousin of the Thoreaus] tells how he heard Tilly

Brown once asking him to show him a peculiar inside lock

in wrestling. 'Now, don't hurt me,--don't throw me hard.'

He struck his antagonist inside his knees with his feet,

and so deprived him of his legs. Edmund Hosmer remembers

his tricks in the bar-room, shuffling cards, etc.; he

could do anything with cards, yet he did not gamble. He

would toss up his hat, twirling it over and over, and

catch it on his head invariably. He once wanted to live

at Hosmer's, but the latter was afraid of him. 'Can't we

study up something?' he asked. Hosmer asked him into the

house, and brought out apples and cider, and uncle Charles

talked. 'You!' said he, 'I burst the bully of Haverhill.'

He wanted to wrestle,--would not be put off. 'Well, we

won't wrestle in the house.' So they went out to the yard,

and a crowd got round. 'Come, spread some straw here,'

said uncle Charles,--'I don't want to hurt him.' He threw

him at once. They tried again; he told them to spread more

straw, and he 'burst' him. Uncle Charles used to say that

he hadn't a single tooth in his head. The fact was they

were all double, and I have heard that he lost about all of

them by the time he was twenty-one. Ever since I knew him

he could swallow his nose. He had a strong head, and never

got drunk; would drink gin sometimes, but not to excess.

Did not use tobacco, except snuff out of another's box,

sometimes; was very neat in his person; was not profane,

though vulgar."

 

This was the uncle who, as Thoreau said in "Walden," "goes to sleep

shaving himself, and is obliged to sprout potatoes in a cellar Sundays

in order to keep awake and keep the Sabbath." He was a humorous,

ne'er-do-weel character, who, with a little property, no family, and

no special regard for his reputation, used to move about from place

to place, a privileged jester, athlete, and unprofessional juggler.

One of his tricks was to swallow all the knives and forks and some of

the plates at the tavern table, and then offer to restore them if the

landlord would forgive him the bill. I remember this worthy in his

old age, an amusing guest at his brother-in-law's table, where his

nephew plied him with questions. We shall find him mentioned again, in

connection with Daniel Webster's friendship for the Dunbar family.

 

Thoreau's mother had this same incessant and rather malicious

liveliness that in Charles Dunbar took the grotesque form above hinted

at. She was a kindly, shrewd woman, with traditions of gentility and

sentiments of generosity, but with sharp and sudden flashes of gossip

and malice, which never quite amounted to ill-nature, but greatly

provoked the prim and commonplace respectability that she so often

came in contact with. Along with this humorous quality there went also

an affectionate earnestness in her relation with those who depended

on her, that could not fail to be respected by all who knew the hard

conditions that New England life, even in a favored village like

Concord, then imposed on the mother of a family, where the outward

circumstances were not in keeping with the inward aspiration.

 

"Who sings the praise of woman in our clime?

I do not boast her beauty or her grace:

Some humble duties render her sublime,

She, the sweet nurse of this New England race,

The flower upon the country's sterile face;

The mother of New England's sons, the pride

Of every house where those good sons abide."

 

Her husband was a grave and silent, but inwardly cheerful and social

person, who found no difficulty in giving his wife the lead in all

affairs. The small estate he inherited from his father, the first

John Thoreau, was lost in trade, or by some youthful indiscretions,

of which he had his quiet share; and he then, about 1823, turned his

attention to pencil-making, which had by that time become a lucrative

business in Concord. He had married in 1812, and he died in 1859. He

was a small, deaf, and unobtrusive man, plainly clad, and "minding his

own business;" very much in contrast with his wife, who was one of

the most unceasing talkers ever seen in Concord. Her gift in speech

was proverbial, and wherever she was the conversation fell largely to

her share. She fully verified the Oriental legend, which accounts for

the greater loquacity of women by the fact that nine baskets of talk

were let down from heaven to Adam and Eve in their garden, and that

Eve glided forward first and secured six of them. Old Dr. Ripley, a

few years before his death, wrote a letter to his son, towards the end

of which he said, with courteous reticence, "I meant to have filled

a page with sentiments. But _a kind neighbor_, Mrs. Thoreau, has been

here more than an hour. This letter must go in the mail to-day." Her

conversation generally put a stop to other occupations; and when at

her table Henry Thoreau's grave talk with others was interrupted by

this flow of speech at the other end of the board, he would pause, and

wait with entire and courteous silence, until the interruption ceased,

and then take up the thread of his own discourse where he had dropped

it; bowing to his mother, but without a word of comment on what she

had said.

 

Dr. Ripley was the minister of Concord for half a century, and in

his copious manuscripts, still preserved, are records concerning his

parishioners of every conceivable kind. He carefully kept even the

smallest scrap that he ever wrote, and among his papers I once found

a fragment, on one side of which was written a pious meditation,

and on the other a certificate to this effect: "Understanding that

Mr. John Thoreau, now of Chelmsford, is going into business in that

place, and is about to apply for license to retail ardent spirits, I

hereby certify that I have been long acquainted with him, that he has

sustained a good character, and now view him as a man of integrity,

accustomed to store-keeping, and of correct morals." There is no date,

but the time was about 1818. Chelmsford is a town ten miles north of

Concord, to which John Thoreau had removed for three years, in the

infancy of Henry. From Chelmsford he went to Boston in 1821, but was

successful in neither place, and soon returned to Concord, where he

gave up trade and engaged in pencil-making, as already mentioned.