[91] The club with which Thoreau here makes merry was the Saturday Club, meeting at Parker's Hotel in Boston the last Saturday in each month, of which Emerson, Agassiz, Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell, Henry James, and other men of letters were members. Thoreau, though invited, never seems to have met with them, as Channing did, on one memorable occasion, at least, described by Mr. James in a letter cited in the Memoir of Bronson Alcott, who also occasionally dined with this club. The conversation at Emerson's next mentioned was also memorable for the vigor with which Miss Mary Emerson, then eighty-four years old, rebuked Mr. James for what she thought his dangerous Antinomian views concerning the moral law.
[92] This was Tuckerman's Ravine at the White Mountains, where Thoreau met with his mishap in the preceding July.
[93] He was looking after the manufacture of fine plumbago for the electrotypers, which was the family business after pencil-making grew unprofitable. The Thoreaus had a grinding-mill in Acton, and a packing-shop attached to their Concord house. "Parker's society," mentioned at the close of the letter, was the congregation of Theodore Parker, then in Italy, where he died in May, 1860.
[94] He was invited to a gathering of John Brown's friends at the grave in the Adirondack woods. "Mr. Sanborn's case" was an indictment and civil suit against Silas Carleton et als. for an attempt to kidnap F. B. Sanborn, who had refused to accept the invitation of the Senate at Washington to testify in the John Brown investigation.
[95] This is the excursion described by Thoreau in a subsequent letter,—lasting six days, and the first that Channing had made which involved "camping out." It was also Thoreau's last visit to this favorite mountain; but Channing continued to go there after the death of his friend; and some of these visits are recorded in his poem "The Wanderer." The last one was in September, 1869, when I accompanied him, and we again spent five nights on the plateau where he had camped with Thoreau. At that time, one of the "two good spruce houses, half a mile apart," mentioned by Thoreau, was still standing, in ruins,—the place called by Channing "Henry's Camp," and thus described:—
We built our fortress where you see
Yon group of spruce-trees, sidewise on the line
Where the horizon to the eastward bounds,—
A point selected by sagacious art,
Where all at once we viewed the Vermont hills,
And the long outline of the mountain-ridge,
Ever renewing, changeful every hour.
See The Wanderer (Boston, 1871), p. 61.
[96] See Thoreau's Journal, Dec. 3, 1859. Merriam mentioned Thoreau's name to him, but never guessed who his companion was.
[97] This was Thoreau's last visit to Monadnock, and the one mentioned in the note of August 3, and in Channing's Wanderer.
[98] The Prince of Wales (now King Edward VII), then visiting America with the Duke of Newcastle.
[99] Now termed pneumonia.