Henry D. Thoreau 8

Henry D. Thoreau 8

"I cordially recommend Mr. Henry D. Thoreau, a graduate

of Harvard University in August, 1837, to the confidence

of such parents or guardians as may propose to employ him

as an instructor. I have the highest confidence in Mr.

Thoreau's moral character, and in his intellectual ability.

He is an excellent scholar, a man of energy and kindness,

and I shall esteem the town fortunate that secures his

services.

 

"R. WALDO EMERSON.

 

"CONCORD, _May 2, 1838_."

 

The acquaintance of Mr. Emerson with his young townsman had begun

perhaps a year before this date, and had advanced very fast toward

intimacy. It originated in this way: A lady connected with Mr.

Emerson's family was visiting at Mrs. Thoreau's while Henry was in

college, and the conversation turned on a lecture lately read in

Concord by Mr. Emerson. Miss Helen Thoreau surprised the visitor by

saying, "My brother Henry has a passage in his diary containing the

same things that Mr. Emerson has said." This remark being questioned,

the diary was produced, and, sure enough, the thought of the two

passages was found to be very similar. The incident being reported to

Mr. Emerson, he desired the lady to bring Henry Thoreau to see him,

which was soon done, and the intimacy began. It was to this same lady

(Mrs. Brown, of Plymouth) that Thoreau addressed one of his earliest

poems,--the verses called "Sic Vita," in the "Week on the Concord and

Merrimac," commencing:--

 

"I am a parcel of vain strivings, tied

By a chance bond together."

 

These verses were written on a strip of paper inclosing a bunch of

violets, gathered in May, 1837, and thrown in at Mrs. Brown's window

by the poet-naturalist. They show that he had read George Herbert

carefully, at a time when few persons did so, and in other ways they

are characteristic of the writer, who was then not quite twenty years

old.

 

It may be interesting to see what old Quincy himself said, in a

certificate, about his stubbornly independent pupil. For the same

Maine journey Cambridge furnished the Concord scholar with this

document:--

 

"HARVARD UNIVERSITY, CAMBRIDGE,

_March 26, 1838_.

 

"TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN,--I certify that Henry D. Thoreau,

of Concord, in this State of Massachusetts, graduated at

this seminary in August, 1837; that his rank was high as

a scholar in all the branches, and his morals and general

conduct unexceptionable and exemplary. He is recommended

as well qualified as an instructor, for employment in any

public or private school or private family.

 

"JOSIAH QUINCY,

 

"_President of Harvard University_."

 

It seems that there was question, at this time, of a school in

Alexandria, near Washington (perhaps the Theological Seminary for

Episcopalians there), in which young Thoreau might find a place; for

on the 12th of April, 1838, President Quincy wrote to him as follows:--

 

"SIR,--The school is at Alexandria; the students are said

to be young men well advanced in ye knowledge of ye Latin

and Greek classics; the requisitions are, qualification

and _a person who has had experience in school keeping_.

Salary $600 a year, besides washing and Board; duties to

be entered on ye 5th or 6th of May. If you choose to apply,

I will write as soon as I am informed of it. State to me

your experience in school keeping. Yours,

 

"JOSIAH QUINCY."

 

We now know that Thoreau offered himself for the place; and we know

that his journey to Maine was fruitless. He did, in fact, teach the

town grammar school in Concord for a few weeks in 1837, and in July,

1838, was teaching, at the Parkman house, in Concord. He had already,

as we have seen, though not yet twenty-one, appeared as a lecturer

before the Concord Lyceum. It is therefore time to consider him as a

citizen of Concord, and to exhibit further the character of that town.

 

* * * * *

 

_Note._--The Tutor mentioned on page 55 was Francis

Bowen, afterward professor at Harvard; the other "B." was

H. J. Bigelow, afterward a noted surgeon in Boston.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER III.

 

CONCORD AND ITS FAMOUS PEOPLE.

 

 

The Thoreau family was but newly planted in Concord, to which it

was alien both by the father's and the mother's side. But this wise

town adopts readily the children of other communities that claim its

privileges,--and to Henry Thoreau these came by birth. Of all the men

of letters that have given Concord a name throughout the world, he is

almost the only one who was born there. Emerson was born in Boston,

Alcott in Connecticut, Hawthorne in Salem, Channing in Boston, Louisa

Alcott in Germantown, and others elsewhere; but Thoreau was native

to the soil. And since his genius has been shaped and guided by the

personal traits of those among whom he lived, as well as by the hand

of God and by the intuitive impulses of his own spirit, it is proper

to see what the men of Concord have really been. It is from them we

must judge the character of the town and its civilization, not from

those exceptional, imported persons--cultivated men and women,--who

may be regarded as at the head of society, and yet may have no

representative quality at all. It is not by the few that a New England

town is to be judged, but by the many. Yet there were a Few and a Many

in Concord, between whom certain distinctions could be drawn, in the

face of that general equality which the institutions of New England

compel. Life in our new country had not yet been reduced to the ranks

of modern civilization--so orderly outward, so full of mutiny within.

 

It is mentioned by Tacitus, in his life of Agricola, that this noble

Roman lived as a child in Marseilles; "a place," he adds, "of Grecian

culture and provincial frugality, mingled and well blended." I have

thought this felicitous phrase of Tacitus most apposite for Concord

as I have known it since 1854, and as Thoreau must have found it from

1830 onward. Its people lived then and since with little display,

while learning was held in high regard; and the "plain living and high

thinking," which Wordsworth declared were gone from England, have

never been absent from this New England town. It has always been a

town of much social equality, and yet of great social and spiritual

contrasts. Most of its inhabitants have lived in a plain way for the

two centuries and a half that it has been inhabited; but at all times

some of them have had important connections with the great world of

politics, affairs, and literature. Rev. Peter Bulkeley, the founder

and first minister of the town, was a near kinsman of Oliver St. John,

Cromwell's solicitor-general, of the same noble English family that,

a generation or two later, produced Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke,

the brilliant, unscrupulous friend of Pope and Swift. Another of the

Concord ministers, Rev. John Whiting, was descended, through his

grandmother, Elizabeth St. John, wife of Rev. Samuel Whiting, of

Lynn, from this same old English family, which, in its long pedigree,

counted for ancestors the Norman Conqueror of England and some of his

turbulent posterity. He was, says the epitaph over him in the village

burying-ground, "a gentleman of singular hospitality and generosity,

who never detracted from the character of any man, and was a universal

lover of mankind." In this character some representative gentleman of

Concord has stood in every generation since the first settlement of

the little town.

 

The Munroes of Lexington and Concord are descended from a Scotch

soldier of Charles II.'s army, captured by Cromwell at the battle

of Worcester in 1651, and allowed to go into exile in America.

His powerful kinsman, General George Munro, who commanded for

Charles at the battle of Worcester, was, at the Restoration, made

commander-in-chief for Scotland.

 

Robert Cumming, father of Dr. John Cumming, a celebrated Concord

physician, was one of the followers of the first Pretender in 1715,

and when the Scotch rebellion of that year failed, Cumming, with some

of his friends, fled to New England, and settled in Concord and the

neighboring town of Stow.

 

Duncan Ingraham, a retired sea-captain, who had enriched himself

in the Surinam trade, long lived in Concord, before and after the

Revolution, and one of his grandchildren was Captain Marryatt, the

English novelist; another was the American naval captain, Ingraham,

who brought away Martin Kosta, a Hungarian refugee, from the clutches

of the Austrian government. While Duncan Ingraham was living in

Concord, a hundred years ago, a lad from that town, Joseph Perry,

who had gone to sea with Paul Jones, became a high naval officer in

the service of Catharine of Russia, and wrote to Dr. Ripley from the

Crimea in 1786 to inquire what had become of his parents in Concord,

whom he had not seen or heard from for many years. The stepson

of Duncan Ingraham, Tilly Merrick, of Concord, who graduated at

Cambridge in 1773, made the acquaintance of Sir Archibald Campbell,

when captured in Boston Harbor, that Scotch officer having visited

at the house of Mrs. Ingraham, Merrick's mother, while a prisoner in

Concord Jail. A few years later Merrick was himself captured twice on

his way to and from Holland and France, whither he went as secretary

or attaché to our commissioner, John Adams. The first time he was

taken to London; the second time to Halifax, where, as it happened,

Sir Archibald was then in command as Governor of Nova Scotia. Young

Merrick went presently to the governor's quarters, but was refused

admission by the sentinel,--while parleying with whom, Sir Archibald

heard the conversation, and came forward. He at once recognized his

Concord friend, greeted him cordially with "How do you do, my little

rebel?" and after taking good care of him, in remembrance of his

own experience in Concord, procured Merrick's exchange for one of

Burgoyne's officers, captured at Saratoga. Returning to America after

the war, Tilly Merrick went into an extensive business at Charleston,

S. C., with the son of Duncan Ingraham for a partner, and there became

the owner of large plantations, worked by slaves, which he afterwards

lost through reverses in business. Coming back to Concord in 1798,

with the remnants of his South Carolina fortune, and inheriting his

mother's Concord estate, he married a lady of the Minott family, and

became a country store-keeper in his native town. His daughter, Mrs.

Brooks, was for many years the leader of the antislavery party in

Concord, and a close friend of the Thoreaus, who at one time lived

next door to her hospitable house. Soon after Mr. Emerson fixed his home in Concord, in 1834, a new bond of connection between the town and the great world outside this happy valley began to appear,--the genius of that man whose like has not been seen in America, nor in the whole world in our century:--