Henry D. Thoreau 9

Henry D. Thoreau 9

"A large and generous man, who, on our moors,

Built up his thought (though with an Indian tongue,

And fittest to have sung at Persian feasts),

Yet dwelt among us as the sage he was,--

Sage of his days,--patient and proudly true;

Whose word was worth the world, whose heart was pure.

Oh, such a heart was his! no gate or bar;

The poorest wretch that ever passed his door

Welcome as highest king or fairest friend."

 

This genius, in one point of view so solitary, but in another so

universal and social, soon made itself felt as an attractive force,

and Concord became a place of pilgrimage, as it has remained for

so many years since. When Theodore Parker left Divinity Hall, at

Cambridge, in 1836, and began to preach in Unitarian pulpits, he fixed

his hopes on Concord as a parish, chiefly because Emerson was living

there. It is said that he might have been called as a colleague for

Dr. Ripley, if it had not been thought his sermons were too learned

for the Christians of the Nine-Acre Corner and other outlying hamlets

of the town. In 1835-36 Mr. Alcott began to visit Mr. Emerson in

Concord, and in 1840 he went there to live. Margaret Fuller and

Elizabeth Peabody, coadjutors of Mr. Alcott in his Boston school,

had already found their way to Concord, where Margaret at intervals

resided, or came and went in her sibylline way. Ellery Channing, one

of the nephews of Dr. Channing, the divine, took his bride, a sister

of Margaret Fuller, to Concord in 1843; and Hawthorne removed thither,

upon his marriage with Miss Peabody's sister Sophia, in 1842. After

noticing what went on about him for a few years, in his seclusion at

the Old Manse, Hawthorne thus described the attraction of Concord, in

1845:

 

"It was necessary to go but a little way beyond my

threshold before meeting with stranger moral shapes of men

than might have been encountered elsewhere in a circuit

of a thousand miles. These hobgoblins of flesh and blood

were attracted thither by the wide-spreading influence

of a great original thinker, who had his earthly abode

at the opposite extremity of our village. His mind acted

upon other minds of a certain constitution with wonderful

magnetism, and drew many men upon long pilgrimages to

speak with him face to face. Young visionaries, to whom

just so much of insight had been imparted as to make life

all a labyrinth around them, came to seek the clew that

should guide them out of their self-involved bewilderment.

Gray-headed theorists, whose systems, at first air, had

finally imprisoned them in an iron framework, traveled

painfully to his door, not to ask deliverance, but to

invite the free spirit into their own thralldom. People

that had lighted on a new thought, or a thought that they

fancied new, came to Emerson, as the finder of a glittering

gem hastens to a lapidary to ascertain its quality and

value."

 

The picture here painted still continued to be true until long after

the death of Thoreau; and the attraction was increased at times by the

presence in the village of Hawthorne himself, of Alcott, and of others

who made Concord their home or their haunt. Thoreau also was resorted

to by pilgrims, who came sometimes from long distances and at long

intervals, to see and talk with him.

 

There was in the village, too, a consular man, for many years the

first citizen of Concord,--Samuel Hoar,--who made himself known abroad

by sheer force of character and "plain heroic magnitude of mind." It

was of him that Emerson said, at his death in November, 1856,--

 

"He was a man in whom so rare a spirit of justice visibly

dwelt that if one had met him in a cabin or in a forest

he must still seem a public man, answering as sovereign

state to sovereign state; and might easily suggest Milton's

picture of John Bradshaw, that he 'was a consul from whom

the fasces did not depart with the year, but in private

seemed ever sitting in judgment on kings.' He returned from

courts or congresses to sit down with unaltered humility,

in the church or in the town-house, on the plain wooden

bench, where Honor came and sat down beside him."

 

In his house and in a few others along the elm-planted street, you

might meet at any time other persons of distinction, beauty, or

wit,--such as now and then glance through the shining halls of cities,

and, in great centres of the world's civilization, like London or

Paris, muster

 

"In solemn troops and sweet societies,"

 

which are the ideal of poets and fair women, and the envy of all who

aspire to social eminence. Thoreau knew the worth of this luxury, too,

though, as a friend said of him, "a story from a fisher or hunter was

better to him than an evening of triviality in shining parlors, where

he was misunderstood."

 

There were not many such parlors in Concord, but there was and had

constantly been in the town a learned and social element, such as

gathers in an old New England village of some wealth and inherited

culture. At the head of this circle--which fell off on one side

into something like fashion and mere amusement, on another into the

activity of trade or politics, and rose, among the women especially,

into art and literature and religion--stood, in Thoreau's boyhood and

youth, a grave figure, yet with something droll about him,--the parish

minister and county Nestor, Dr. Ezra Ripley, who lived and died in the

"Old Manse."

 

Dr. Ripley was born in 1751, in Woodstock, Conn., the same town in

which Dr. Abiel Holmes, the father of the poet Holmes, was born. He

entered Harvard College in 1772, came with the students to Concord

in 1775, when the college buildings at Cambridge were occupied by

Washington and his army, besieging Boston, and graduated in 1776.

Among his classmates were Governor Gore, Samuel Sewall, the second

chief-justice of Massachusetts of that name, and Royal Tyler, the

witty chief-justice of Vermont. Governor Gore used to say that in

college he was called "Holy Ripley," from his devout character. He

settled in Concord in 1778, and at the age of twenty-nine married the

widow of his last predecessor, Rev. William Emerson (and the daughter

of his next predecessor, Rev. Daniel Bliss), who was at their marriage

ten years older than her husband, and had a family of five children.

Dr. Ripley's own children were three in number: the Reverend Samuel

Ripley, born May 11, 1783; Daniel Bliss Ripley, born August 1, 1784;

and Miss Sarah Ripley, born August 8, 1789. When this daughter died,

not long after her mother, in 1826, breaking, says Mr. Emerson, "the

last tie of blood which bound me and my brothers to his house," Dr.

Ripley said to Mr. Emerson, "I wish you and your brothers to come to

this house as you have always done. You will not like to be excluded;

I shall not like to be neglected." He died himself in September, 1841.

 

Of Dr. Ripley countless anecdotes are told in his parish, and he was

the best remembered person, except Thoreau himself, who had died in

Concord, till Emerson; just as his house, described so finely by

Hawthorne in his "Mosses," is still the best known house in Concord.

It was for a time the home of Mr. Emerson, and there, it is said, he

wrote his first book, "Nature," concerning which, when it came out

anonymously, the question was asked, "Who is the author of 'Nature'?"

The reply was, of course, "God and Ralph Waldo Emerson." The Old Manse

was built about 1766 for Mr. Emerson's grandfather, then minister

of the parish, and into it he brought his bride, Miss Phebe Bliss

(daughter of Rev. Daniel Bliss, of Concord, and Phebe Walker, of

Connecticut). Miss Mary Emerson, youngest child of this marriage, used

to say "she was in arms at the battle of Concord," because her mother

held her up, then two years old, to see the soldiers from her window;

and from his study window her father saw the fight at the bridge. It

was the scene of many of the anecdotes, told of Dr. Ripley, some of

which, gathered from various sources, may here be given; it was also,

after his death, one of the resorts of Thoreau, of Margaret Fuller,

of Ellery Channing, of Dr. Hedge, and of the Transcendentalists in

general. His parishioners to this day associate Dr. Ripley's form

"with whatever was grave and droll in the old, cold, unpainted,

uncarpeted, square-pewed meeting-house, with its four iron-gray

deacons in their little box under the pulpit; with Watts's hymns;

with long prayers, rich with the diction of ages; and, not less, with

the report like musketry from the movable seats."[1] One of these

"iron-gray deacons," Francis Jarvis, used to visit the Old Manse with

his children on Sunday evenings, and his son, Dr. Edward Jarvis, thus

describes another side of Dr. Ripley's pastoral character:--

 

"Among the very pleasant things connected with the Sabbaths

in the Jarvis family were the visits to Dr. Ripley in the

evening. The doctor had usually a small levee of such

friends as were disposed to call. Deacon Jarvis was fond

of going there, and generally took with him one of the

children and his wife, when she was able. There were at

these levees many of the most intelligent and agreeable men

of the town,--Mr. Samuel Hoar, Mr. Nathan Brooks, Mr. John

Keyes, Deacon Brown, Mr. Pritchard, Major Burr, etc. These

were extremely pleasant gatherings. The little boys sat

and listened, and remembered the cheerful and instructive

conversation. There were discussions of religion and

morals, of politics and philosophy, the affairs of the

town, the news of the day, the religious and social gossip,

pleasant anecdotes and witty tales. All were in their best

humor. Deacon Jarvis [adds his son], did not go to these

levees every Sunday night, though he would have been glad

to do so, had he been less distrustful. When his children,

who had no such scruples, asked him to go and take them

with him, he said he feared that Dr. Ripley would not like

to see him so frequently."

 

According to Mr. Emerson, Dr. Ripley was "a natural gentleman; no

dandy, but courtly, hospitable, and public spirited; his house open

to all men." An old farmer who used to travel thitherward from Maine,

where Dr. Ripley had a brother settled in the ministry, used to say

that "no horse from the Eastern country would go by the doctor's

gate." It was one of the listeners at his Sunday evening levees, no

doubt, who said (at the time when Dr. Ripley was preparing for his

first and last journey to Baltimore and Washington, in the presidency

of the younger Adams) "that a man who could tell a story so well was

company for kings and for John Quincy Adams."

 

When P. M., after his release from the State Prison, had the

effrontery to call on Dr. Ripley, as an old acquaintance, as they

were talking together on general matters, his young colleague, Rev.

Mr. Frost, came in. The doctor presently said, "Mr. M., my brother

and colleague, Mr. Frost, has come to take tea with me. I regret very

much the causes (very well known to you), which make it impossible

for me to ask you to stay and break bread with us." Mr. Emerson, his

grandson (by Dr. Ripley's marriage with the widow of Rev. William

Emerson) relates that he once went to a funeral with Dr. Ripley, and

heard him address the mourners. As they approached the farm-house the

old minister said that the eldest son, who was now to succeed the

deceased father of a family in his place as a Concord yeoman, was in

some danger of becoming intemperate. In his remarks to this son, he

presently said,--

 

"Sir, I condole with you. I knew your great-grandfather;

when I came to this town, in 1778, he was a substantial

farmer in this very place, a member of the church, and an

excellent citizen. Your grandfather followed him, and was

a virtuous man. Now your father is to be carried to his

grave, full of labors and virtues. There is none of that

old family left but you, and it rests with you to bear up

the good name and usefulness of your ancestors. If _you_

fail--Ichabod!--the glory is departed. Let us pray."