Solid Seasons Read online

  At the “teacher’s meeting” last night, my good Edmund Hosmer, after disclaiming any wish to difference Jesus from a human mind, suddenly seemed to alter his tone, and said that Jesus made the world and was the Eternal God. Henry Thoreau merely remarked that “Mr. Hosmer had kicked the pail over.” I delight much in my young friend, who seems to have as free and erect a mind as any I have ever met. He told as we walked this afternoon a good story about a boy who went to school with him, Wentworth, who resisted the school mistress’s command that the children should bow to Dr. Heywood and other gentlemen as they went by, and when Dr. Heywood stood waiting and cleared his throat with a Hem, Wentworth said, “You need n’t hem, Doctor. I shan’t bow.”24

  In December 1837 Emerson shared a discovery with Thoreau. The previous year he had “found a new musical instrument which I call the ice-harp. A thin coat of ice covered a part of the pond, but melted around the edge of the shore. I threw a stone upon the ice which rebounded with a shrill sound, and falling again and again, repeated the note with pleasing modulation. I thought at first it was the ‘peep, peep’ of a bird I had scared. I was so taken with the music that I threw down my stick and spent twenty minutes in throwing stones single or in handfuls on this crystal drum.”25 “My friend tells me,” Thoreau wrote, “he has discovered a new note in nature, which he calls the Ice-Harp.”26

  In the following spring Thoreau described their friendship.

  Two sturdy oaks I mean, which side by side

  Withstand the winter’s storm,

  And, spite of wind and tide,

  Grow up the meadow’s pride,

  For both are strong.

  Above they barely touch, but, undermined

  Down to their deepest source,

  Admiring you shall find

  Their roots are intertwined

  Insep’rably.27

  Comments about Emerson began to appear in Thoreau’s journal, but Emerson’s journal began to hold statements and stories by Thoreau, some of which Thoreau would include later in his own writings, such as the “good story” Emerson noted in September 1838 about Deacon Parkman “who lived in the house he now occupies, and kept a store close by. He hung out a salt fish for a sign, and it hung so long and grew so hard, black and deformed, that the deacon forgot what thing it was, and nobody in town knew, but being examined chemically it proved to be salt fish. But duly every morning the deacon hung it on its peg.”28 A decade later this story would be incorporated into Walden.

  Even in the early years of the friendship, there were times when the assumed roles of Emerson as mentor and Thoreau as student were inverted. Their influence was, from the very beginning, mutual. Emerson recognized that “our receptivity is unlimited; and, with the great, our thoughts and manners easily become great.”29 Things Thoreau said or did would impress Emerson to the point that they would find their way into his work, from early essays written shortly after they met to those written after Thoreau’s death. As he confessed to his journal, “Have I said it before in these pages? then I will say it again, that it is a curious commentary on society that the expression of a devout sentiment by any young man who lives in society strikes me with surprise and has all the air and effect of genius.”30 One such moment came as he thought of his “brave Henry here who is content to live now, and feels no shame in not studying any profession, for he does not postpone his life, but lives already,—pours contempt on these crybabies of routine and Boston. He has not one chance but a hundred chances.”31 Thoreau’s ideas inform the writing of Emerson’s seminal essay, “Self-Reliance”: “He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not ‘studying a profession,’ for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances.”32

  “My good Henry Thoreau made this else solitary afternoon sunny with his simplicity and clear perception,” Emerson wrote in 1838, part of which he would later incorporate into his essay on “New England Reformers.”

  How comic is simplicity in this double-dealing, quacking world. Everything that boy says makes merry with society, though nothing can be graver than his meaning. I told him he should write out the history of his college life, as Carlyle has his tutoring. We agreed that the seeing the stars through a telescope would be worth all the astronomical lectures. Then he described Mr. Quimby’s electrical lecture here, and the experiment of the shock, and added that “college corporations are very blind to the fact that the twinge in the elbow is worth all the lecturing.”33

  “Montaigne is spiced throughout with rebellion,” Emerson wrote, “as much as Alcott or my young Henry Thoreau.”34 It was an aspect of Thoreau’s personality that intrigued him as much as it at times exasperated him. In a letter to Margaret Fuller in early 1839, Emerson referred to Thoreau as “my protestor,”35 an idea he’d expressed in a recent lecture, “The Protest,” in which he made several direct references to ideas born of their conversations. The young who “alone have dominion of the world, for they walk in it with a free step,” and the “impatient youth” who is “galled . . . by the first infractions of his right,”36 came from a walk to Walden Pond the previous November during which Thoreau

  complained of the proprietors who compelled him, to whom, as much as to any, the whole world belonged, to walk in a strip of road and crowded him out of all the rest of God’s earth. He must not get over the fence: but to the building of that fence he was no party. Suppose, he said, some great proprietor, before he was born, had bought up the whole globe. So he had been hustled out of nature. Not having been privy to any of these arrangements, he does not feel called on to consent to them, and so cuts fishpoles in the woods without asking who has a better title to the wood than he.37

  Thoreau’s argument over private ownership versus public use of land was a lifelong one. More than a decade later Emerson recorded in his journal how Thoreau ignored the question of property because he

  could go wherever woods and waters were, and no man was asked for leave—once or twice the farmer withstood, but it was to no purpose,—he could as easily prevent the sparrows or tortoises. It was their land before it was his, and their title was precedent. . . .

  Moreover the very time at which he used their land and water (for his boat glided like a trout everywhere unseen,) was in hours when they were sound asleep. Long before they were awake he went up and down to survey like a sovereign his possessions, and he passed onward, and left them before the farmer came out of doors.38

  The right of the citizen to have more land available for public use culminated in Thoreau’s 1859 journal statement: “Each town should have a park, or rather a primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres, where a stick should never be cut for fuel, a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation.”39 Emerson “defended . . . the good institution” of private ownership, “as a scheme, not good, but the best that could be hit on for making the woods and waters and fields available to wit and worth, and for restraining the bold, bad man.”40 Their discussions on this topic formed the central dialogue found in Emerson’s essay “The Conservative,” in which Emerson points out the fundamental differences between the reformer, modeled after Thoreau, and the conservative, a role that Emerson sometimes reluctantly found himself adopting.

  Of course conservatism always has the worst of the argument, is always apologizing, pleading a necessity, pleading that to change would be to deteriorate: it must saddle itself with the mountainous load of the violence and vice of society, must deny the possibility of good, deny ideas, and suspect and stone the prophet; whilst innovation is always in the right, triumphant, attacking, and sure of final success. Conservatism stands on man’s confessed limitations, reform on his indisputable infinitude; conservatism on circumstance, liberalism on power; one goes to make an adroit member of the social frame, the other to postpone all things to the man himself; conservatism is debonair and social, reform is individual and imperious. We are reformers in spring and summer, in autumn and winter we stand by the old; r
eformers in the morning, conservers at night.41

  Alcott may have captured the essence of this dilemma, as Thoreau noted in his journal: “Alcott spent the day with me yesterday. He spent the day before with Emerson. He observed that he had got his wine and now he had come after his venison. Such was the compliment he paid me.”42 Alcott often compared the two, noting in his journal in 1852 after attending Emerson’s lecture “Wealth” that “there are finer things to be said in praise of Poverty, which it takes a person superior to Emerson even to say worthily. Thoreau is the better man, perhaps, to celebrate that estate.”43

  While Emerson found Thoreau’s constant aspect of reform and rebellion tedious—“Always some weary captious paradox to fight you with . . .”44—Thoreau saw a man he doubted “could trundle a wheelbarrow through the streets, because it would be out of character.”45 Thoreau delighted in the story that Emerson, Louis Agassiz, and a few others

  broke some dozens of ale-bottles, one after another, with their bullets, in the Adirondack country, using them for marks! It sounds rather Cockneyish. He says that he shot a peetweet for Agassiz, and this, I think he said, was the first game he ever bagged. He carried a double-barrelled gun,—rifle and shotgun,—which he bought for the purpose, which he says received much commendation,—all parties thought it a very pretty piece. Think of Emerson shooting a peetweet (with shot) for Agassiz, and cracking an ale-bottle (after emptying it) with his rifle at six rods! They cut several pounds of lead out of the tree.46

  On the last day of August 1839, Thoreau and his brother, John, made a two-week river excursion from Concord, Massachusetts, to Concord, New Hampshire. Emerson applauded the two brothers with approbation tinged with wistfulness after they returned from their excursion: “Now here are my wise young neighbors who, instead of getting, like the wordmen, into a railroad-car, where they have not even the activity of holding the reins, have got into a boat which they have built with their own hands, with sails which they have contrived to serve as a tent by night, and gone up the Merrimack to live by their wits on the fish of the stream and the berries of the wood.”47

  Later that month Emerson wrote his brother William that George Ripley and others were reviving “at this time the old project of a new journal,”—what would become The Dial: A Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion—“for the exposition of absolute truth, but I doubt a little if it reach the day,” insisting, with a sweep of self-deception, that he “will never be editor, though I am counted on as a contributor.”48 As he told Margaret Fuller, “I believe we all feel much alike in regard to this Journal; we all wish it to be, but do not wish to be in any way personally responsible for it.”49

  The Dial would also serve as a receptacle for the writings of those Emerson wanted to help and whose work he might want to promote. He knew, however, the limitations of the “fine people” who would write for this journal and whose work would appear “nowhere else,” but in Thoreau he saw a different potential: “My Henry Thoreau will be a great poet for such a company, and one of these days for all companies.”50 He saw Thoreau as a contributor, providing him with an outlet for his early writings, and later, when Emerson did become editor, as an apprentice, positioning Thoreau as his assistant.

  Margaret Fuller was The Dial’s first editor, and Emerson tried to encourage her about Thoreau’s work, though eventually needing to concede, “I do not like his piece very well, but I admire this perennial threatening attitude, just as we like to go under an overhanging precipice,” he wrote her in early 1842.51 The majority of Thoreau’s Dial contributions would not be published until Emerson took on the editorship, at which point his friend’s work had some, although a very limited, distribution.

  In the spring of 1840 Emerson had been working on pieces that would form his first series of Essays. In June he was finishing up his essay on friendship, which he would place in the center of his book, as Thoreau would do when placing his own friendship essay in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Emerson’s essay contains the realization with which he wrestled his entire life: “Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables.”52

  He was writing so much that he told Fuller he had “become a scrivener.”53 At the end of June, Emerson and Thoreau visited the Cliffs at Fair Haven for what Emerson called their “villeggiatura,” a country holiday, perhaps a well-deserved break from his book. Emerson’s journal entry for that date started with a view of his surroundings—“I saw nothing better than the passage of the river by the dark clump of trees that line the bank in one spot for a short distance”—before commenting on friendship.

  We chide the citizen because, with all his honest merits, he does not conceive the delicacies and nobility of friendship, but we cannot forgive the poet if he does not substantiate his fine romance by the municipal virtues of justice, fidelity and pity. . . .

  I think we must give up this superstition of company to spend weeks and fortnights. Let my friend come and say that he has to say, and go his way. Otherwise we live for show. That happens continually in my house, that I am expected to play tame lion by readings and talkings to the friends. The rich live for show: I will not.54

  Thoreau’s journal at this same time shows a yearning combined with disappointment. Entries leading up to their holiday were anticipative and sanguine. “We will warm us at each other’s fire,” he wrote,55 followed two days later by “Our friend’s is as holy a shrine as any God’s, to be approached with sacred love and awe. Veneration is the measure of Love.”56 But subsequently he wrote, “Of all phenomena, my own race are the most mysterious and undiscoverable. For how many years have I striven to meet one, even on common manly ground, and have not succeeded!”57 He had begun to see, as he would say in a different context, “the interval between our hopes and their fulfillment.”58

  Feeling out of step with Emerson, Thoreau wrote the first version of what would evolve into his most renowned quotation about the different drummer.

  A man’s life should be a stately march to a sweet but unheard music, and when to his fellows it shall seem irregular and inharmonious, he will only be stepping to a livelier measure, or his nicer ear hurry him into a thousand symphonies and concordant variations. There will be no halt ever, but at most a marching on his post, or such a pause as is richer than any sound, when the melody runs into such depth and wildness as to be no longer heard, but implicitly consented to with the whole life and being. He will take a false step never, even in the most arduous times, for then the music will not fail to swell into greater sweetness and volume, and itself rule the movement it inspired.59

  In February of 1841 he wrote,

  Wait not till I invite thee, but observe

  I’m glad to see thee when thou com’st.60

  Emerson’s poem “The Sphinx” was published in the first issue of The Dial. In March Thoreau began a long journal entry analyzing Emerson’s poem stanza by stanza, sometimes using the poem as a starting point for a more personal inquiry. Emerson wrote in his poem,

  Have I a lover

  Who is noble and free?—

  I would he were nobler

  Than to love me.

  Eterne alternation

  Now follows, now flies;

  And under pain, pleasure,—

  Under pleasure, pain lies.

  Love works at the centre,

  Heart-heaving alway;

  Forth speed the strong pulses

  To the borders of day.61

  After reading these lines Thoreau wrote, “In friendship each will be nobler than the other, and so avoid the cheapness of a level and idle harmony. Love will have its chromatic strains,—discordant yearnings for higher chords,—as well as symphonies. Let us expect no finite satisfaction.”62

  In mid-March 1841 Emerson gave copies of Essays to family and friends, including Thoreau, likely prompting Thoreau’s poem “Friendship”—one of several given that title—written that month.

  Now we are partners in such legal trade,

  We’ll look
to the beginnings, not the ends,

  Nor to pay-day, knowing true wealth is made

  For current stock and not for dividends.63

  There was consideration in early 1841 of the Alcotts moving in with the Emersons, but such plans were dropped—much to Abigail “Abba” Alcott’s relief—when Samuel May, Abba’s brother, promised to provide for the family. With this prospect out of the way, Emerson invited Thoreau to move in with them and Thoreau agreed. In exchange for room and board, Thoreau would provide a few hours of “what labor he chooses to do.”64 Emerson’s cook at the time did not understand or appreciate the arrangement, saying that Thoreau wasn’t “worth his porridge to do the chores.”65 For Emerson, however, he was “a very skilful laborer and I work with him as I should not without him.”66 Such an arrangement—one Thoreau instead of six Alcotts—must have seemed fortuitous to both the Emersons.

  In addition to physical labor, though, Thoreau was given opportunities that would be beneficial to a young writer, and these would have been part of Emerson’s plan from the first in inviting Thoreau into his household: working on The Dial, proofing Emerson’s texts, being fully integrated into Emerson’s intellectual and literary circle. Shortly after his move, Thoreau wrote in his journal,

  At R.W.Es.

  The charm of the Indian to me is that he stands free and unconstrained in Nature, is her inhabitant and not her guest, and wears her easily and gracefully. But the civilized man has the habits of the house. His house is a prison, in which he finds himself oppressed and confined, not sheltered and protected. He walks as if he sustained the roof; he carries his arms as if the walls would fall in and crush him, and his feet remember the cellar beneath. His muscles are never relaxed. It is rare that he overcomes the house, and learns to sit at home in it, and roof and floor and walls support themselves, as the sky and trees and earth.