Henry D. Thoreau 6

Henry D. Thoreau 6

Perpetuity, indeed, and hereditary transmission of everything that by

nature and good sense can be inherited, are among the characteristics

of Concord. The Heywood family has been resident in Concord for two

hundred and fifty years or so, and in that time has held the office

of town clerk, in lineal succession from father to son, for one

hundred years at least. The grandson of the first John Heywood filled

the office (which is the most responsible in town, and generally

accompanied by other official trusts) for eighteen years, beginning in

1731; his son held the place with a slight interregnum for thirteen

years; his nephew, Dr. Abiel Heywood, was town clerk from 1796 to

1834 without a break, and Dr. Heywood's son, Mr. George Heywood, was

the town clerk for thirty-odd years after March, 1853.

 

Of the dozen ministers who, since 1635, have preached in the parish

church, five were either Bulkeleys or Emersons, descendants of the

first minister, or else connected by marriage with that clerical line;

and the young minister who, in the year 1882, accepted the pastorate

of Rev. Peter Bulkeley, is a descendant, and bears the same name. Mr.

Emerson himself, the great clerk of Concord, which was his lay parish

for almost half a century after he ceased to preach in its pulpit,

counted among his ancestors four of the Concord pastors, whose united

ministry covered a century; while his grandmother's second husband,

Dr. Ripley, added a half century more to the family ministry. For this

ancestral claim, quite as much as for his gift of wit and eloquence,

Mr. Emerson was chosen, in 1835, to commemorate by an oration the two

hundredth anniversary of the town settlement. In this discourse he

said:--

 

"I have had much opportunity of access to anecdotes

of families, and I believe this town to have been the

dwelling-place, in all times since its planting, of pious

and excellent persons, who walked meekly through the paths

of common life, who served God and loved man, and never

let go their hope of immortality. I find our annals marked

with a uniform good sense. I find no ridiculous laws,

no eavesdropping legislators, no hanging of witches, no

ghosts, no whipping of Quakers, no unnatural crimes. The

old town clerks did not spell very correctly, but they

contrived to make pretty intelligible the will of a free

and just community."

 

Into such a community Henry Thoreau, a free and just man, was born.

Dr. Heywood, above-named, was the first town clerk he remembered, and

the one who entered on the records the marriage of his father and

mother, and the birth of all the children. He cried the banns of John

Thoreau and Cynthia Dunbar in the parish meeting-house; and he was the

last clerk who made this Sunday outcry.

 

He thus proclaimed his own autumnal nuptials in 1822, when he

married for the first time at the age of sixty-three. The banns were

cried at the opening of the service, and this compelled the town

clerk to be a more regular attendant in the meeting-house than his

successors have found necessary. Dr. Heywood's pew was about half-way

down the broad aisle, and in full view of the whole congregation,

whether in the "floor pews" or "up in the galleries." Wearing his

old-fashioned coat and small-clothes, the doctor would rise in his

pew, deliberately adjust his spectacles, and look about for a moment,

in order to make sure that his audience was prepared; then he made

his proclamation with much emphasis of voice and dignity of manner.

There was a distinction, however, in the manner of "publishing the

banns" of the white and the black citizens; the former being "cried"

in the face of the whole congregation, and the latter simply "posted"

in the meeting-house porch, as was afterwards the custom for all.

Dr. Heywood, from a sense of justice, or some other proper motive,

determined on one occasion to "post" a white couple, instead of giving

them the full benefit of his sonorous voice; but, either because they

missed the _éclat_ of the usual proclamation, or else felt humiliated

at being "posted like niggers in the porch," they brought the town

clerk to justice forthwith, and he was forced for once to yield to

popular outcry, and join in the outcry himself. After publishing his

own banns, and just before the wedding, he for the first time procured

a pair of trousers,--having worn knee-breeches up to that time, as

Colonel May (the father-in-law of Mr. Alcott) and others had thought

it proper to wear them. When Dr. Heywood told his waggish junior,

'Squire Brooks, of the purchase, and inquired how young gentlemen

put their trousers on, his legal neighbor advised him that they were

generally put on over the head.

 

Dr. Heywood survived amid "this age loose and all unlaced," as Marvell

says, until 1839, having practiced medicine, more or less, in Concord

for upward of forty years, and held court there as a local justice for

almost as long. Dr. Isaac Hurd, who was his contemporary, practiced

in Concord for fifty-four years, and in all sixty-five years; and Dr.

Josiah Bartlett, who accompanied and succeeded Dr. Hurd, practiced in

Concord nearly fifty-eight years; while the united medical service of

himself and his father, Dr. Josiah Bartlett of Charlestown, was one

hundred and two years.

 

Dr. Bartlett himself was one of the most familiar figures in Concord

through Thoreau's life-time, and for fifteen years after. To him have

been applied, with more truth, I suspect, than to "Mr. Robert Levet, a

Practiser in Physic," those noble lines of Dr. Johnson on his humble

friend:--

 

"Well tried through many a varying year,

See Levet to the grave descend,

Officious, innocent, sincere,

_Of every friendless name the friend_."

 

He said more than once that for fifty years no severity of weather

had kept him from visiting his distant patients,--sometimes miles

away,--except once, and then the snow was piled so high that his

sleigh upset every two rods; and when he unharnessed and mounted his

horse, the beast, floundering through a drift, slipped him off over

his crupper. He was a master of the horse, and encouraged that proud

creature to do his best in speed. One of his neighbors mentioned

in his hearing a former horse of Dr. Bartlett's, which was in the

habit of running away. "By faith!" said the doctor (his familiar

oath), "I recollect that horse; he was a fine traveler, but I have no

remembrance that he ever ran away." When upwards of seventy, he was

looking for a new horse. The jockey said, "Doctor, if you were not so

old, I have a horse that would suit you." "Hm!" growled the doctor,

"don't talk to me about _old_. Let's see your horse;" and he bought

him, and drove him for eight years. He practiced among the poor with

no hope of reward, and gave them, besides, his money, his time, and

his influence. One day a friend saw him receiving loads of firewood

from a shiftless man to whom he had rendered gratuitous service in

sickness for twenty years. "Ah, doctor! you are getting some of your

back pay." "By faith! no; the fellow is poor, so I paid him for his

wood, and let him go."

 

Dr. Bartlett did not reach Concord quite in season to assist at the

birth of Henry Thoreau; but from the time his parents brought him

back to his native town from Boston, in 1823, to the day of Sophia

Thoreau's death, in 1876, he might have supplied the needed medical

aid to the family, and often did so. The young Henry dwelt in his

first tabernacle on the Virginia road but eight months, removing then

to a house on the Lexington road, not far from where Mr. Emerson

afterwards established his residence, on the edge of Concord village.

In the mean time he had been baptized by Dr. Ripley in the parish

church, at the age of three months; and his mother boasted that he

did not cry. His aunt, Sarah Thoreau, taught him to walk when he was

fourteen months old, and before he was sixteen months he removed to

Chelmsford, "next to the meeting-house, where they kept the powder,

in the garret," as was the custom in many village churches of New

England then. Coming back to Concord before he was six years old,

he soon began to drive his mother's cow to pasture, barefoot, like

other village boys; just as Emerson, when a boy in Boston, a dozen

years before, had driven his mother's cow where now the fine streets

and halls are. Thoreau, like Emerson, began to go to school in

Boston, where he lived for a year or more in Pinckney Street. But he

returned to Concord in 1823, and, except for short visits or long

walking excursions, he never left the town again till he died, in

1862. He there went on with his studies in the village schools, and

fitted for Harvard College at the "Academy," which 'Squire Hoar,

Colonel Whiting, 'Squire Brooks, and other magnates of the town had

established about 1820. This private school was generally very well

taught, and here Thoreau himself taught for a while in after years.

In his boyhood it had become a good place to study Greek, and in

1830, when perhaps Henry Thoreau was one of its pupils, Mr. Charles

Emerson, visiting his friends in Concord, wrote thus of what he saw

there: "Mr. George Bradford and I attended the Exhibition yesterday at

the Academy. We were extremely gratified. To hear little girls saying

their Greek grammar and young ladies read Xenophon was a new and very

agreeable entertainment." Thoreau must have been beginning his Greek

grammar about that time, for he entered college in 1833, and was then

proficient in Greek. He must also have gone, as a boy, to the "Concord

Lyceum," where he afterwards lectured every winter. Concord, as the

home of famous lawyers and active politicians, was always a place of

resort for political leaders, and Thoreau might have seen and heard

there all the celebrated congressmen and governors of Massachusetts,

at one time and another. He could remember the visit of Lafayette to

Concord in 1824, and the semi-centennial celebration of the Concord

Fight in 1825. In 1830 he doubtless looked forward with expectation

for the promised lecture of Edward Everett before the Lyceum,

concerning which Mr. Everett wrote as follows to Dr. Ripley (November

3, 1830):--

 

"I am positively forbidden by my physician to come to

Concord to-day. To obviate, as far as possible, the

inconvenience which this failure might cause the Lyceum, I

send you the lecture which I should have delivered. It is

one which I have delivered twice before; but my health has

prevented me from preparing another. Although _in print_,

as you see, it has _not been published_. I held it back

from publication to enable me, with propriety, to deliver

it at Concord. Should you think it worth while to have

it read to the meeting, it is at your service for that

purpose; and, should this be done, I would suggest, as it

is one hour and three quarters long, that some parts should

be omitted. For this reason I have inclosed some passages

in brackets, which can be spared without affecting the

context."

 

It would hardly occur to a popular lecturer now to apologize because

he had delivered his lecture twice before, or to send the copy

forward, when he could not himself be there to read it.

 

Mr. Emerson began to lecture in the Concord Lyceum before 1834, when

he came to reside in the town. In October of that year he wrote to

Dr. Ripley, declining to give the opening lecture, but offering to

speak in the course of the winter, as he did. During its first half

century he lectured nearly a hundred times in this Lyceum, reading

there, first and last, nearly all the essays he published in his

lifetime, and many that have since been printed. Thoreau gave his

first lecture there in April, 1838, and afterwards lectured nearly

every year for more than twenty years. On one occasion, very early in

his public career, when the expected lecturer of the Lyceum failed to

come, as Mr. Everett had failed, but had not been thoughtful enough

to send a substitute, Henry Thoreau and Mr. Alcott were pressed into

the service, and spoke before the audience in duet, and with opinions

extremely heretical,--both being ardent radicals and "come-outers."

A few years after this (in 1843), Wendell Phillips made his first

appearance before the Concord Lyceum, and spoke in a manner which

Thoreau has described in print, and which led to a sharp village

controversy, not yet quite forgotten on either side.