American Men of Letters

HENRY D. THOREAU

Henry D. Thoreau.

American Men of Letters.

HENRY D. THOREAU.

BY

F. B. SANBORN.

REVISED EDITION.

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

The Riverside Press, Cambridge

Copyright, 1882,
By F. B. SANBORN.
All rights reserved.

Much do they wrong our Henry wise and kind,
Morose who name thee, cynical to men,
Forsaking manners civil and refined
To build thyself in Walden woods a den,—
Then flout society, flatter the rude hind.
We better knew thee, loyal citizen!
Thou, friendship's all-adventuring pioneer,
Civility itself wouldst civilize:
Whilst braggart boors, wavering 'twixt rage and fear,
Slave hearths lay waste, and Indian huts surprise,
And swift the Martyr's gibbet would uprear:
Thou hail'dst him great whose valorous emprise
Orion's blazing belt dimmed in the sky,—
Then bowed thy unrepining head to die.

A. BRONSON ALCOTT

Concord, January, 1882.

[PREFACE]

When, in 1879, I was asked by my friend Charles Dudley Warner to write the biography of Thoreau which follows, I was by no means unprepared. I had known this man of genius for the last seven years of his too short life; had lived in his family, and in the house of his neighbor across the way, Ellery Channing, his most intimate friend outside of that family; and had assisted Channing in the preparation and publication of his "Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist,"—the first full biography which appeared. Not very long after Thoreau's death Channing had written me these sentences, with that insight of the future which he often displayed:

"That justice can be done to our deceased brother by me, of course I do not think. But to you and to me is intrusted the care of his immediate fame. I feel that my part is not yet done, and cannot be without your aid. My little sketch must only serve as a note and advertisement that such a man lived,—that he did brave work, which must yet be given to the world. In the midst of all the cold and selfish men who knew this brave and devoted scholar and genius, why should not you be called on to make some sacrifices, even if it be to publish my sketch?"

This I was ready to do in 1864; and it was through my means that the volume, then much enlarged by Channing, was published in 1873, and again, with additions and corrections, in 1902.

I had also the great advantage of hearing from the mother and sister of Henry the affectionate side of his domestic life,—which indeed I had witnessed, both in his health and in his long mortal illness. From Emerson, who had a clear view of Thoreau's intellect and his moral nature, I derived many useful suggestions, though not wholly agreeing with him in some of his opinions. In March, 1878, after hearing Emerson read a few unpublished notes on Thoreau, made years before, I called on him one evening, and thus entered the event in my journal:—

"I was shown several of Thoreau's early papers; one a commentary on Emerson's 'Sphinx,' and another from his own translation of 'The Seven Against Thebes,' written at William Emerson's house on Staten Island in 1843. Of this episode in Thoreau's life (his tutorship for six months of William Emerson's three sons), Emerson told me that his brother and Henry were not men that could get along together: 'each would think whatever the other did was out of place.' This was said to imply that Thoreau's poem 'The Departure' could not have been written on his leaving Castleton in Staten Island. I had shown Emerson these verses (first printed by me, at Sophia Thoreau's wish, in the Boston 'Commonwealth' of 1863), whereupon he said:—

"I think Thoreau had always looked forward to authorship as his work in life, and finding that he could write prose well, he soon gave up writing verse, in which he was not willing to be patient enough to make the lines smooth and flowing. These verses are smoother than he usually wrote; but I have now no recollection of seeing them before, nor of any circumstances in which they may have been written.' Alluding to Judge Hoar's marked dislike of Thoreau, Emerson said, 'There was no bow in Henry; he never sought to please his hearers or his friends.' Thomas Cholmondeley, the nephew of Scott's friend Richard Heber, meeting Henry at dinner at Emerson's, to whom Cholmondeley had letters in 1854, and expressing to his host the wish to see more of him, Emerson said he told the Englishman, 'If you wish to see Thoreau, go and board at his mother's house; she will be glad to take you in, and there you can meet him every day. He did so,' added Emerson, 'and you know the result.' ... This led to further mention of Mrs. Thoreau, who, Emerson said, 'was a person of sharp and malicious wit,' of whose sayings he read me some instances from his Journals. Among these was her remark to Mrs. Emerson, 'Henry is very tolerant'; adding 'Mr. Emerson has been talking so much with Henry that he has learnt Henry's way of thinking and talking.' Emerson went on to me:—

"'I had known Henry slightly when in college; the scholarship from which he drew an income while there (a farm at Pullen Point in Chelsea) was the one that I and my brothers, William and Edward, had enjoyed while we were at college. But my first intimate acquaintance with Henry began after his graduation in 1837. Mrs. Brown, my wife's sister, who then boarded with the Thoreau family in the Parkman house, where the Library now stands, used to bring me his verses (the "Sic Vita" and others), and tell me of his entries in his Journal. Here is the Index to my Journals, in which Thoreau's name appears perhaps fifty times, perhaps more.'"

Thus far my Journal of 1878.

I was myself introduced to Thoreau by Emerson, March 28, 1855, in the Concord Town Hall, one evening, just before a lecture there by Emerson. From that time until Henry's death, May 6, 1862, I saw him every few days, unless he or I was away from Concord, and for more than two years I dined with him daily at his mother's table, in the house opposite to Ellery Channing's. I thus came to know all the surviving members of his kindred,—his eccentric uncle, Charles Dunbar, his two aunts on each side, Jane and Maria Thoreau, and Louisa and Sophia Dunbar (both older than Mrs. Thoreau), and the descendants in Maine of his aunt Mrs. Billings, long since dead. His sister Helen and his brother John I never knew, but learned much about them from their mother and sister; for neither Henry nor his father often spoke of them. Sophia also placed in my hands after Henry's death several of his poems, which I printed in the "Commonwealth," and Emerson gave me other manuscripts of Thoreau which had lodged with him while he was editing the "Dial." He had urged Sophia to leave all the MSS. with me, but her pique against Channing at the time prevented this,—she knowing him to be intimate with me.

With all this preparation, I received from Mr. Blake, to whom Sophia had bequeathed them in 1876, the correspondence of Thoreau and his college essays, with some other papers of Henry's and his own, but without the replies from the family to Henry's affectionate letters. Even his own to his mother and sisters had been withheld from publication by Emerson in 1865, when a small collection of Thoreau's Letters and Poems was edited by Emerson. This omission Sophia regretted, as she told me; and finding them now in my hands, though I made use of their contents in writing the biography, I withheld them from full publication, foreseeing that I should probably have occasion to edit the letters in full at some later time; and I made but sparing use of the early essays.

On the other hand, I perceived that the character and genius of Thoreau could not be well understood unless some knowledge was had of the Concord farmers, scholars, and citizens, among whom he had spent his days, and who have furnished a background for that scene of authorship which the small town of Concord has presented for now more than seventy years. Therefore, having access to the records and biographies of the Concord "Social Circle," then in preparation for the public, and to many other records of the past in New England, I sketched therefrom the character of our interesting community, which gave color and tone to the outlines of this thoughtful scholar's career. But I held back for the "Familiar Letters" the more intimate details of Thoreau's self-devoted life, and did not draw heavily on the thirty-odd volumes of the Journals, to which, at Worcester, Mr. Blake gave me free access. It was then his purpose to bring out these Journals much earlier and more fully than was done, until Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. published their admirable edition in fourteen volumes, a few years ago, after Mr. Blake's death.

The success of my biography, written under these limitations, has more than justified reasonable expectations. It was popular from the first, and is still widely read, and called for by a generation of readers quite distinct from those for whom it was originally written. Since the spring of 1882, when it was published, many details of Thoreau's life and that of his ancestors have become known by an examination of his copious manuscripts, of the papers of his Loyalist ancestors, and his father's relatives in the island of Jersey; and by the publication of some twenty-five volumes from Thoreau's own hand. He never employed an amanuensis, and he seems to have carefully preserved the large mass of his manuscripts which accumulated during his literary life of some twenty-five years. The exceptions to this remark were the copies of his earlier verses, which he told me, in his last illness, he had destroyed, because they did not meet Emerson's approval, and those pages of his Journals which he had issued in printed books or magazine articles. Fragments of his youthful verses were kept, however, by some of his family, and still exist. From all these sources many things have come to light concerning his ancestry and the minor events of his life, which I hope eventually to give the world in a final biography that will serve as a sequel to this one. The greatly enhanced reputation which Thoreau now enjoys, as compared with his fame in 1882, seems to warrant a detail which was not then needful, and which even the "Familiar Letters" does not furnish. Much misconception of his character and the facts of his life still prevails; and singular statements have been made in text-books, as to his origin and training. One authority described Thoreau as descended from "farmer folk" in Connecticut, who were recent immigrants from France. So far as I know, not a single ancestor of his ever dwelt in Connecticut; they were all merchants; and though his Thoreau ancestors spoke French, or a patois of it, in Jersey, there is no evidence that any of them had lived in France for more than five centuries.

This initial authentic biography, with its few errors corrected, now comes forth in a new edition, which will long be found useful, in the manner indicated, and I hope, may be received as the earlier edition has been, with all the favor which its modest aim deserves.

F. B. S.

Concord, Mass., October 8, 1909.

[CONTENTS.]

HENRY D. THOREAU.

[CHAPTER I.]
BIRTH AND FAMILY.

There died in a city of Maine, on the river Penobscot, late in the year 1881, the last member of a family which had been planted in New England a little more than a hundred years before, by a young tradesman from the English island of Jersey, and had here produced one of the most characteristic American and New English men of genius whom the world has yet seen. This lady, Miss Maria Thoreau, was the last child of John Thoreau, the son of Philip Thoreau and his wife, Marie le Galais, who, a hundred years ago, lived in the parish of St. Helier, in Jersey. This John Thoreau was born in that parish, and baptized there in the Anglican church, in April, 1754; he emigrated to New England about 1773, and in 1781 married in Boston Miss Jane Burns, the daughter of a Scotchman of some estate in the neighborhood of Stirling Castle, who had emigrated earlier to Massachusetts, and had here married Sarah Orrok, the daughter of David Orrok, a Massachusetts Quaker. Jane (Burns) Thoreau, the granddaughter of David Orrok, and the grandmother of Henry David Thoreau, died in Boston, in 1796, at the age of forty-two. Her husband, John Thoreau, Sr., removed from Boston to Concord, in 1800, lived in a house on the village square, and died there in 1801. His mother, Marie le Galais, outlived him a few weeks, dying at St. Helier, in 1801. Maria Thoreau, granddaughter and namesake of Marie le Galais, died in December, 1881, in Bangor, Maine.

From the recollections of this "aunt Maria," who outlived all her American relatives by the name of Thoreau, Henry Thoreau derived what information he possessed concerning his Jersey ancestors. In his journal for April 21, 1855, he makes this entry:—

"Aunt Maria has put into my hands to-day for safe-keeping three letters from Peter Thoreau (her uncle), directed to 'Miss Elizabeth Thoreau, Concord, near Boston,' and dated at Jersey, respectively, July 1, 1801, April 22, 1804, and April 11, 1806; also a 'Vue de la ville de St. Helier,' accompanying the first letter. The first is in answer to one from my aunt Elizabeth, announcing the death of her father (my grandfather). He states that his mother (Marie (le Galais) Thoreau) died June 26, 1801, the day before he received aunt Elizabeth's letter, though not till after he had heard from another source of the death of his brother, which was not communicated to his mother. 'She was in the seventy-ninth year of her age,' he says, 'and retained her memory to the last. She lived with my two sisters, who took the greatest care of her.' He says that he had written to my grandfather about his oldest brother (who died about a year before), but had got no answer,—had written that he left his children, two sons and a daughter, in a good way: 'The eldest son and daughter are both married and have children; the youngest is about eighteen. I am still a widower. Of four children I have but two left,—Betsey and Peter; James and Nancy are both at rest.' He adds that he sends 'a view of our native town.'

"The second of these letters is sent by the hand of Captain John Harvey, of Boston, then at Guernsey. On the 4th of February, 1804, he had sent aunt Elizabeth a copy of the last letter he had written (which was in answer to her second), since he feared she had not received it. He says that they are still at war with the French; that they received the day before a letter from her 'uncle and aunt Le Cappelain of London;' complains of not receiving letters, and says, 'Your aunts, Betsey and Peter join with me,' etc. According to the third letter (April 11, 1806), he had received by Capt. Touzel an answer to that he sent by Capt. Harvey, and will forward this by the former, who is going via Newfoundland to Boston. 'He expects to go there every year; several vessels from Jersey go there every year.' His nephew had told him, some time before, that he met a gentleman from Boston, who told him he saw the sign 'Thoreau and Hayse' there, and he therefore thinks the children must have kept up the name of the firm. 'Your cousin John is a lieutenant in the British service; he has already been in a campaign on the Continent; he is very fond of it.' Aunt Maria thinks the correspondence ceased at Peter's death, because he was the one who wrote English."

These memoranda indicate that the grandfather of Henry Thoreau was the younger son of a family of some substance in Jersey, which had a branch in London and a grandson in the army that fought under Wellington against Napoleon; that the American Thoreau engaged in trade in Boston, with a partner, and carried on business successfully for years; and that there was the same pleasant family feeling in the English and French Thoreaus that we shall see in their American descendants. Miss Maria Thoreau, in answer to a letter of mine, some years ago, sent me the following particulars of her ancestry, some of which repeat what is above stated by her nephew:—

"Bangor, March 18, 1878.

"Mr. Sanborn.

"Dear Sir,—In answer to your letter, I regret that I cannot find more to communicate. I have no earlier record of my grandparents, Philippe Thoreau and Marie Le Gallais, than a certificate of their baptism in St. Helier, Jersey, written on parchment in the year 1773. I do not know what their vocation was. My Father was born in St. Helier in April, 1754, and was married to Jane Burns in Boston, in 1781. She died in that city in the year 1796, aged forty-two years. My sister Elizabeth continued my Father's correspondence with his brother, Uncle Peter Thoreau, at St. Helier, for a number of years after Father's decease, and in one of his letters he speaks of the death of grandmother, Marie Le Gallais, as taken place so near the time intelligence reach'd them of Father's death, in 1801, it was not communicated to her. Father removed to Concord in 1800, and died there, of consumption. I do not know at what time he emigrated to this country, but have been told he was shipwreck'd on the passage, and suffered much. I think he must have left a large family circle, as Uncle Peter in his letters refers to aunts and cousins, two of which, aunts Le Cappelain and Pinkney, resided in London, and a cousin, John Thoreau, was an officer in the British army.

"Soon after Father's arrival in Boston, probably, he open'd a store on Long Wharf, as documents addressed to 'John Thoreau, merchant,' appear to signify, and one subsequently purchased 'on King Street, afterward called State Street.' And now I will remark in passing that Henry's father was bred to the mercantile line, and continued in it till failure in business; when he resorted to pencil-making, and succeeded so well as to obtain the first medal at the Salem Mechanics' Fair. I think Henry could hardly compete with his father in pencil-making, any more than he, with his peculiar genius and habits, would have been willing to spend much time in such 'craft.' His father left no will, but a competency, at least, to his family, and what was done relative to the business after his death was accomplished by his daughter Sophia. I mention this to rectify Mr. Page's mistake relating to Henry.

"And now, as I have written all I can glean of Father's family, I will turn to the maternal side, of which it appears, in religious belief, they were of the Quaker persuasion. But I was sorry to see, by good old great-great-grandfather Tillet's will, that slavery was tolerated in those days in the good State of Massachusetts, and handed down from generation to generation. My great-grandmother (Tillet) married David Orrok; her daughter, Sarah Orrok, married Mr. Burns, a Scotch gentleman. At what time he came to this country, or married, I cannot ascertain, but have often been told, to gain the consent to it of grandmother's Quaker parents, he was obliged to doff his rich apparel of gems and ruffles, and conform to the more simple garb of his Quaker bride. On a visit to his home in Scotland he died, in what year is not mentioned. Before my father's decease, a letter was received from the executor of grandfather's estate, dated Stirling, informing him there was property left to Jane Burns, his daughter in America, 'well worth coming after.' But Father was too much out of health to attend to the getting it; and the letter, subsequently put into a lawyer's hands by Brother, then the only heir, was lost.

"It has been said I inherit more of the traits of my foreign ancestry than any of my family,—which pleases me. Probably the vivacity of the French and the superstition of the Scotch may somewhat characterize me,—which it is to be hop'd the experience of an octogenarian may suitably modify. But this is nothing, here nor there. And now that I have written all that is necessary, and perhaps more, I will close, with kind wishes for health and happiness. Yours respectfully,

"Maria Thoreau."

It would be hard to compress more family history into a short letter, and yet leave it so sprightly in style as this. Of the four children of Maria Thoreau's brother John and Cynthia Dunbar,—John, Helen, Henry, and Sophia,—the two eldest, John and Helen, were said to be "clear Thoreau," and the others, Henry and Sophia, "clear Dunbar;" though in fact the Thoreau traits were marked in Henry also. Let us see, then, who and what were the family of Henry Thoreau's mother, Cynthia Dunbar, who was born in Keene, N. H., in 1787. She was the daughter of Rev. Asa Dunbar, who was born at Bridgewater, Mass., in 1745; graduated at Harvard College in 1767 (a classmate of Sir Thomas Bernard and Increase Sumner); preached for a while at Bedford, near Concord, in 1769, when he was "a young candidate, newly begun to preach;" settled in Salem in 1772; resigned his pastorate in 1779; and removed to Keene just at the close of the Revolution, where he became a lawyer, and died, a little upwards of forty-two, in 1787. He married before 1775, Miss Mary Jones, the daughter of Col. Elisha Jones, of Weston, a man of wealth and influence in his town, who died in 1776. Mrs. Mary (Jones) Dunbar long outlived the husband of her youth; in middle life she married a Concord farmer, Jonas Minott, whom she also outlived; and it was in his house that her famous grandson was born in July, 1817. Mrs. Minott was left a widow for the second time in 1813, when she was sixty-five years old, and in 1815 she sent a petition to the Grand Lodge of Masons in Massachusetts, which was drawn up and indorsed by her pastor, Dr. Ripley, of Concord, and which contains a short sketch of Henry Thoreau's maternal grandfather, from whom he is said to have inherited many qualities. Mrs. Minott's petition sets forth "that her first husband, Asa Dunbar, Esq., late of Keene, N. H., was a native of Massachusetts; that he was for a number of years settled in the gospel ministry at Salem; that afterwards he was a counselor-at-law; that he was Master of a Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons at Keene, where he died; that in the cause of Masonry he was interested and active; that through some defection or misfortune of that Lodge she has suffered loss, both on account of what was due to him and to her, at whose house they held their meetings; that in the settlement of the estate of her late husband, Jonas Minott, Esq., late of Concord, she has been peculiarly unfortunate, and become very much straitened in the means of living comfortably; that being thus reduced, and feeling the weight of cares, of years, and of widowhood to be very heavy, after having seen better days, she is induced, by the advice of friends, as well as her own exigencies, to apply for aid to the benevolence and charity of the Masonic fraternity." At the house of this decayed gentlewoman, about two years after the date of this petition, Henry Thoreau was born. She lived to see him running about, a sprightly boy, and he remembered her with affection. One of his earliest recollections of Concord was of driving in a chaise with his grandmother along the shore of Walden Pond, perhaps on the way to visit her relatives in Weston, and thinking, as he said afterward, that he should like to live there.

Ellery Channing, whose life of his friend Henry is a mine of curious information on a thousand topics, relevant and irrelevant, and who often traversed the "old Virginia road" with Thoreau before the house in which he was born was removed from its green knoll to a spot further east, where it now stands, thus pictures the brown farm-house and its surroundings: "It was a perfect piece of our old New England style of building, with its gray, unpainted boards, its grassy, unfenced door-yard. The house is somewhat isolate and remote from thoroughfares; on the Virginia road, an old-fashioned, winding, at length deserted pathway, the more smiling for its forked orchards, tumbling walls, and mossy banks. About it are pleasant sunny meadows, deep with their beds of peat, so cheering with its homely, hearth-like fragrance; and in front runs a constant stream through the centre of that great tract sometimes called 'Bedford levels,'—the brook a source of the Shawsheen River." (This is a branch of the Merrimac, as Concord River is, but flows into the main stream through Andover, and not through Billerica and Lowell, as the Concord does.) The road on which it stands, a mile and a half east of the Fitchburg railroad station, and perhaps a mile from Thoreau's grave in the village cemetery, is a by-path from Concord to Lexington, through the little town of Bedford. The farm-house, with its fields and orchard, was a part of Mrs. Minott's "widow's thirds," on which she was living at the date of her grandson's birth (July 12, 1817), and which her son-in-law, John Thoreau, was "carrying on" for her that year.

Mrs. Minott, a few years before Dr. Ripley's petition in her behalf, came near having a more distinguished son-in-law, Daniel Webster, who, like the young Dunbars, was New Hampshire born, and a year or two older than Mrs. Minott's daughter, Louisa Dunbar. He had passed through Dartmouth College a little in love with two or three of the young ladies of Hanover, and had returned to his native town of Salisbury, N. H., when he met in Boscawen, near by, Miss Louisa, who, like Miss Grace Fletcher, whom he married a few years afterward, was teaching school in one of the New Hampshire towns. Miss Dunbar made an impression on Webster's heart, always susceptible, and, had the fates been propitious, he might have called Henry Thoreau nephew in after years; but the silken tie was broken before it was fairly knit. I suspect that she was the person referred to by one of Webster's biographers, who says, speaking of an incident that occurred in January, 1805: "Mr. Webster, at that time, had no thought of marrying; he had not even met the lady who afterward became his wife. He had been somewhat interested in another lady, who is occasionally referred to in his letters, written after he left college, but who was not either of those whom he had known at Hanover. But this affair never proceeded very far, and he had entirely dismissed it from his mind before he went to Boston in 1804." In January, 1806, about the time of his father's death, Webster wrote to a college friend, "I am not married, and seriously am inclined to think I never shall be," though he was then a humble suitor to Grace Fletcher.

Louisa Dunbar was a lively, dark-haired, large-eyed, pleasing young lady, who had perhaps been educated in part at Boscawen, where Webster studied for college, and afterwards was a school-teacher there. She received from him those attentions which young men give to young ladies without any very active thoughts of marriage; but he at one time paid special attentions to her, which might have led to matrimony, perhaps, if Webster had not soon after fallen under the sway of a more fascinating school-teacher, Miss Grace Fletcher, of Hopkinton, N. H., whom he first saw at the door of her little school-house in Salisbury, not far from his own birthplace. A Concord matron, a neighbor and friend of the Dunbars and Thoreaus, heard the romantic story from Webster's own lips forty years afterward, as she was driving with him through the valley of the Assabet: how he was traveling along a New Hampshire road in 1805, stopped at a school-house to ask a question or leave a message, and was met at the door by that vision of beauty and sweetness, Grace Fletcher herself, to whom he yielded his heart at once. From a letter of Webster's to this Concord friend (Mrs. Louisa Cheney) I quote this description of his native region, which has never been printed:—

"Franklin, N. H., September 29, '45.

"Dear Mrs. Cheney,—You are hardly expecting to hear from me in this remote region of the earth. Where I am was originally a part of Salisbury, the place of my birth; and, having continued to own my father's farm, I sometimes make a visit to this region. The house is on the west bank of Merrimac River, fifteen miles above Concord (N. H.), in a pleasant valley, made rather large by a turn in the stream, and surrounded by high and wooded hills. I came here five or six days ago, alone, to try the effect of the mountain air upon my health.

"This is a very picturesque country. The hills are high, numerous, and irregular,—some with wooded summits, and some with rocky heads as white as snow. I went into a pasture of mine last week, lying high up on one of the hills, and had there a clear view of the White Mountains in the northeast, and of Ascutney, in Vermont, back of Windsor, in the west; while within these extreme points was a visible scene of mountains and dales, lakes and streams, farms and forests. I really think this region is the true Switzerland of the United States.

"I am attracted to this particular spot by very strong feelings. It is the scene of my early years; and it is thought, and I believe truly, that these scenes come back upon us with renewed interest and more strength of feeling as we find years running over us. White stones, visible from the window, and close by, mark the grave of my father, my mother, one brother, and three sisters. Here are the same fields, the same hills, the same beautiful river, as in the days of my childhood. The human beings which knew them now know them no more. Few are left with whom I shared either toil or amusement in the days of youth. But this is melancholy and personal, and enough of it. One mind cannot enter fully into the feelings of another in regard to the past, whether those feelings be joyous or melancholy, or, which is more commonly the case, partly both. I am, dear Mrs. Cheney, yours truly,

"Daniel Webster."

No doubt the old statesman was thinking, as he wrote, not only of his father, Captain Ebenezer Webster ("with a complexion," said Stark, under whom he fought at Bennington, "that burnt gunpowder could not change"), of his mother and his brethren, but also of Grace Fletcher,—and echoing in his heart the verse of Wordsworth:—

"Among thy mountains did I feel
The joy of my desire;
And she I cherished turned her wheel
Beside a cottage fire.
Thy mornings showed, thy nights concealed,
The bowers where Lucy played;
And thine, too, is the last green field
That Lucy's eyes surveyed."

It was no such deep sentiment as this which Louisa Dunbar had inspired in young Webster's breast; but he walked and talked with her, took her to drive in his chaise up and down the New Hampshire hills, and no doubt went with her to church and to prayer-meeting. She once surprised me by confiding to me (as we were talking about Webster in the room where Henry Thoreau afterwards died, and where there hung then an engraving by Rowse of Webster's magnificent head) "that she regarded Mr. Webster, under Providence, as the means of her conversion." Upon my asking how, she said that, in one of their drives,—perhaps in the spring of 1804,—he had spoken to her so seriously and scripturally on the subject of religion that her conscience was awakened, and she soon after joined the church, of which she continued through life a devout member. Her friendship for Mr. Webster also continued, and in his visits to Concord, which were frequent from 1843 to 1849, he generally called on her, or she was invited to meet him at the house of Mr. Cheney, where, among social and political topics, Webster talked with her of the old days at Boscawen and Salisbury.

Cynthia Dunbar, the mother of Henry Thoreau, was born in Keene, N. H., in 1787, the year that her father died. Her husband, John Thoreau, who was a few months younger than herself, was born in Boston. When Henry Thoreau first visited Keene, in 1850, he made this remark: "Keene Street strikes the traveler favorably; it is so wide, level, straight, and long. I have heard one of my relatives who was born and bred there [Louisa Dunbar, no doubt] say that you could see a chicken run across it a mile off." His mother hardly lived there long enough to notice the chickens a mile off, but she occasionally visited her native town after her marriage in 1812, and a kinswoman (Mrs. Laura Dunbar Ralston, of Washington, D. C.), now living, says, "I recollect Mrs. Thoreau as a handsome, high-spirited woman, half a head taller than her husband, accomplished, after the manner of those days, with a voice of remarkable power and sweetness in singing." She was fond of dress, and had a weakness, not uncommon in her day, for ribbons, which her austere friend, Miss Mary Emerson (aunt of R. W. Emerson), once endeavored to rebuke in a manner of her own. In 1857, when Mrs. Thoreau was seventy years old, and Miss Emerson eighty-four, the younger lady called on the elder in Concord, wearing bonnet-ribbons of a good length and of a bright color,—perhaps yellow. During the call, in which Henry Thoreau was the subject of conversation, Miss Emerson kept her eyes shut. As Mrs. Thoreau and her daughter Sophia rose to go, the little old lady said, "Perhaps you noticed, Mrs. Thoreau, that I closed my eyes during your call. I did so because I did not wish to look on the ribbons you are wearing, so unsuitable for a child of God and a person of your years."

In uttering this reproof, Miss Emerson may have had in mind the clerical father of Mrs. Thoreau, Rev. Asa Dunbar, whom she was old enough to remember. He was settled in Salem as the colleague of Rev. Thomas Barnard, after a long contest which led to the separation of the First Church there, and the formation of the Salem North Church in 1772. The parishioners of Mr. Dunbar declared their new minister "admirably qualified for a gospel preacher," and he seems to have proved himself a learned and competent minister. But his health was infirm, and this fact, as one authority says, "soon threw him into the profession of the law, which he honorably pursued for a few years at Keene." Whether he went at once to Keene on leaving Salem in 1779 does not appear, but he was practicing law there in 1783, and was also a leading Freemason. His diary for a few years of his early life—a faint foreshadowing of his grandson's copious journals—is still in existence, and indicates a gay and genial disposition, such as Mrs. Thoreau had. His only son, Charles Dunbar, who was born in February, 1780, and died in March, 1856, inherited this gaiety of heart, but also that lack of reverence and discipline which is proverbial in New England for "ministers' sons and deacons' daughters." His nephew said of him, "He was born the winter of the great snow, and he died in the winter of another great snow,—a life bounded by great snows." At the time of Henry Thoreau's birth, Mrs. Thoreau's sisters, Louisa and Sarah, and their brother Charles were living in Concord, or not far off, and there Louisa Dunbar died a few years before Mrs. Thoreau. Her brother Charles, who was two years older than Daniel Webster, was a person widely known in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and much celebrated by Thoreau in his journals. At the time of his death, I find the following curious entries, in Thoreau's journal for April 3, 1856:—

"People are talking about my uncle Charles. George Minott was they were all double, and I have heard that he lost about all of them by the time he was twenty-one. Ever since I knew him he could swallow his nose. He had a strong head, and never got drunk; would drink gin sometimes, but not to excess. Did not use tobacco, except snuff out of another's box, sometimes; was very neat in his person; was not profane, though vulgar."

This was the uncle who, as Thoreau said in "Walden," "goes to sleep shaving himself, and is obliged to sprout potatoes in a cellar Sundays in order to keep awake and keep the Sabbath." He was a humorous, ne'er-do-weel character, who, with a little property, no family, and no special regard for his reputation, used to move about from place to place, a privileged jester, athlete, and unprofessional juggler. One of his tricks was to swallow all the knives and forks and some of the plates at the tavern table, and then offer to restore them if the landlord would forgive him the bill. I remember this worthy in his old age, an amusing guest at his brother-in-law's table, where his nephew plied him with questions. We shall find him mentioned again, in connection with Daniel Webster's friendship for the Dunbar family.

Thoreau's mother had this same incessant and rather malicious liveliness that in Charles Dunbar took the grotesque form above hinted at. She was a kindly, shrewd woman, with traditions of gentility and sentiments of generosity, but with sharp and sudden flashes of gossip and malice, which never quite amounted to ill-nature, but greatly provoked the prim and commonplace respectability that she so often came in contact with. Along with this humorous quality there went also an affectionate earnestness in her relation with those who depended on her, that could not fail to be respected by all who knew the hard conditions that New England life, even in a favored village like Concord, then imposed on the mother of a family, where the outward circumstances were not in keeping with the inward aspiration.

"Who sings the praise of woman in our clime?
I do not boast her beauty or her grace:
Some humble duties render her sublime,
She, the sweet nurse of this New England race,
The flower upon the country's sterile face;
The mother of New England's sons, the pride
Of every house where those good sons abide."

Her husband was a grave and silent, but inwardly cheerful and social person, who found no difficulty in giving his wife the lead in all affairs. The small estate he inherited from his father, the first John Thoreau, was lost in trade, or by some youthful indiscretions, of which he had his quiet share; and he then, about 1823, turned his attention to pencil-making, which had by that time become a lucrative business in Concord. He had married in 1812, and he died in 1859. He was a small, deaf, and unobtrusive man, plainly clad, and "minding his own business;" very much in contrast with his wife, who was one of the most unceasing talkers ever seen in Concord. Her gift in speech was proverbial, and wherever she was the conversation fell largely to her share. She fully verified the Oriental legend, which accounts for the greater loquacity of women by the fact that nine baskets of talk were let down from heaven to Adam and Eve in their garden, and that Eve glided forward first and secured six of them. Old Dr. Ripley, a few years before his death, wrote a letter to his son, towards the end of which he said, with courteous reticence, "I meant to have filled a page with sentiments. But a kind neighbor, Mrs. Thoreau, has been here more than an hour. This letter must go in the mail to-day." Her conversation generally put a stop to other occupations; and when at her table Henry Thoreau's grave talk with others was interrupted by this flow of speech at the other end of the board, he would pause, and wait with entire and courteous silence, until the interruption ceased, and then take up the thread of his own discourse where he had dropped it; bowing to his mother, but without a word of comment on what she had said.

Dr. Ripley was the minister of Concord for half a century, and in his copious manuscripts, still preserved, are records concerning his parishioners of every conceivable kind. He carefully kept even the smallest scrap that he ever wrote, and among his papers I once found a fragment, on one side of which was written a pious meditation, and on the other a certificate to this effect: "Understanding that Mr. John Thoreau, now of Chelmsford, is going into business in that place, and is about to apply for license to retail ardent spirits, I hereby certify that I have been long acquainted with him, that he has sustained a good character, and now view him as a man of integrity, accustomed to store-keeping, and of correct morals." There is no date, but the time was about 1818. Chelmsford is a town ten miles north of Concord, to which John Thoreau had removed for three years, in the infancy of Henry. From Chelmsford he went to Boston in 1821, but was successful in neither place, and soon returned to Concord, where he gave up trade and engaged in pencil-making, as already mentioned.

From that time, about 1823, till his death in 1859, John Thoreau led a plodding, unambitious, and respectable life in Concord village, educating his children, associating with his neighbors on those terms of equality for which Concord is famous, and keeping clear, in a great degree, of the quarrels, social and political, that agitated the village. Mrs. Thoreau, on the other hand, with her sister Louisa and her sisters-in-law, Sarah, Maria, and Jane Thoreau, took their share in the village bickerings. In 1826, when Dr. Lyman Beecher, then of Boston, Dr. John Todd, then of Groton, and other Calvinistic divines succeeded in making a schism in Dr. Ripley's parish, and drawing off Trinitarians enough to found a separate church, the Thoreaus generally seceded, along with good old Deacon White, whose loss Dr. Ripley bewailed. This contention was sharply maintained for years, and was followed by the antimasonic and antislavery agitation. In the latter Mrs. Thoreau and her family engaged zealously, and their house remained for years headquarters for the early abolitionists and a place of refuge for fugitive slaves. The atmosphere of earnest purpose, which pervaded the great movement for the emancipation of the slaves, gave to the Thoreau family an elevation of character which was ever afterward perceptible, and imparted an air of dignity to the trivial details of life. By this time, too,—I speak of the years from 1836 onward till the outbreak of the civil war,—the children of Mrs. Thoreau had reached an age and an education which made them noteworthy persons. Helen, the oldest child, born in 1812, was an accomplished teacher. John, the elder son, born in 1814 was one of those lovely and sunny natures which infuse affection in all who come within their range; and Henry, with his peculiar strength and independence of soul, was a marked personage among the few who would give themselves the trouble to understand him. Sophia, the youngest child, born in 1819, had, along with her mother's lively and dramatic turn, a touch of art; and all of them, whatever their accidental position for the time, were superior persons. Living in a town where the ancient forms survived in daily collision or in friendly contact with the new ideas that began to make headway in New England about 1830, the Thoreaus had peculiar opportunities, above their apparent fortunes, but not beyond their easy reach of capacity, for meeting on equal terms the advancing spirit of the period.

The children of the house, as they grew up, all became school-teachers, and each displayed peculiar gifts in that profession. But they were all something more than teachers, and becoming enlisted early in the antislavery cause, or in that broader service of humanity which "plain living and high thinking" imply, they gradually withdrew from that occupation,—declining the opportunities by which other young persons, situated as they then were, rise to worldly success, and devoting themselves, within limits somewhat narrow, to the pursuit of lofty ideals. The household of which they were loving and thoughtful members (let one be permitted to say who was for a time domesticated there) had, like the best families everywhere, a distinct and individual existence, in which each person counted for something, and was not a mere drop in the broad water-level that American society tends more and more to become. To meet one of the Thoreaus was not the same as to encounter any other person who might happen to cross your path. Life to them was something more than a parade of pretensions, a conflict of ambitions, or an incessant scramble for the common objects of desire. They were fond of climbing to the hill-top, and could look with a broader and kindlier vision than most of us on the commotions of the plain and the mists of the valley. Without wealth, or power, or social prominence, they still held a rank of their own, in scrupulous independence, and with qualities that put condescension out of the question. They could have applied to themselves, individually, and without hauteur, the motto of the French chevalier:—

"Je suis ni roi, ni prince aussi,
Je suis le seigneur de Coucy."

"Nor king, nor duke? Your pardon, no;
I am the master of Thoreau."

They lived their life according to their genius, without the fear of man or of "the world's dread laugh," saying to Fortune what Tennyson sings:—

"Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel with smile or frown,—
With that wild wheel we go not up nor down;
Our hoard is little, but our hearts are great.
Smile, and we smile, the lords of many lands;
Frown, and we smile, the lords of our own hands,—
For man is man, and master of his fate."

[CHAPTER II.]
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH.

Concord, the Massachusetts town in which Thoreau was born, is to be distinguished from the newer but larger town of the same name which became the capital of New Hampshire about the time the first American Thoreau made his appearance in "old Concord." The latter, the first inland plantation of the Massachusetts Colony, was bought of the Indians by Major Willard, a Kentish man, and Rev. Peter Bulkeley, a Puritan clergyman from the banks of the Ouse in Bedfordshire, and was settled under their direction in 1635. Mr. Bulkeley, from whom Mr. Emerson and many of the other Concord citizens of Thoreau's day were descended, was the first minister of the town, which then included the present towns of Concord, Acton, Bedford, Carlisle, and Lincoln; and among his parishioners were the ancestors of the principal families that now inhabit these towns. Concord itself, the centre of this large tract, was thought eligible for settlement because of its great meadows on the Musketaquid or Meadow River. It had been a seat of the Massachusetts Indians, and a powerful Sachem, Tahattawan, lived between its two rivers, where the Assabet falls into the slow-gliding Musketaquid. Thoreau, the best topographer of his birthplace, says:—

"It has been proposed that the town should adopt for its coat of arms a field verdant, with the Concord circling nine times round. I have read that a descent of an eighth of an inch in a mile is sufficient to produce a flow. Our river has probably very near the smallest allowance. But wherever it makes a sudden bend it is shallower and swifter, and asserts its title to be called a river. For the most part it creeps through broad meadows, adorned with scattered oaks, where the cranberry is found in abundance, covering the ground like a mossbed. A row of sunken dwarf willows borders the stream on one or both sides, while at a greater distance the meadow is skirted with maples, alders, and other fluviatile trees, overrun with the grape-vine, which bears fruit in its season, purple, red, white, and other grapes."

From these river-grapes, by seedling cultivation, a Concord gardener, in Thoreau's manhood, bred and developed the Concord grape, which is now more extensively grown throughout the United States than any other vine, and once adorned, in vineyards large and small, the hillsides over which Thoreau rambled. The uplands are sandy in many places, gravelly and rocky in others, and nearly half the township is now covered, as it has always been, with woods of oak, pine, chestnut, and maple. It is a town of husbandmen, chiefly, with a few mechanics, merchants, and professional men in its villages; a quiet region, favorable to thought, to rambling, and to leisure, as well as to that ceaseless industry by which New England lives and thrives. Its population in 1909 approaches 5,000, but at Thoreau's birth it did not exceed 2,000. There are few great estates in it, and little poverty; the mode of life has generally been plain and simple, and was so in Thoreau's time even more than now. When he was born, and for some years afterward, there was but one church, and the limits of the parish and the township were the same. At that time it was one of the two shire towns of the great county of Middlesex,—Cambridge, thirteen miles away, being the other. It was therefore a seat of justice and a local centre of trade,—attracting lawyers and merchants to its public square much more than of late years.

Trade in Concord then was very different from what it has been since the railroad began to work its revolutions. In the old days, long lines of teams from the upper country, New Hampshire and Vermont, loaded with the farm products of the interior, stopped nightly at the taverns, especially in the winter, bound for the Boston market, whence they returned with a cargo for their own country. If a thaw came on, or there was bad sleighing in Boston, the drivers, anxious to lighten their loads, would sell and buy in the Concord public square, to the great profit of the numerous traders, whose little shops stood around or near it. Then, too, the hitching-posts in front of the shops had full rows of wagons and chaises from the neighboring towns fastened there all day long; while the owners looked over goods, priced, chaffered, and beat down by the hour together the calicoes, sheetings, shirtings, kerseymeres, and other articles of domestic need,—bringing in, also, the product of their own farms and looms to sell or exchange. Each "store" kept an assortment of "West India goods," dry goods, hardware, medicines, furniture, boots and shoes, paints, lumber, lime, and the miscellaneous articles of which the village or the farms might have need; not to mention a special trade in New England rum and old Jamaica, hogsheads of which were brought up every week from Boston by teams, and sold or given away by the glass, with an ungrudging hand. A little earlier than the period now mentioned, when Colonel Whiting (father of the late eminent lawyer, Abraham Lincoln's right-hand adviser in the law of emancipation, William Whiting, of Boston) was a lad in Concord village, "there were five stores and three taverns in the middle of the town, where intoxicating liquors were sold by the glass to any and every body; and it was the custom, when a person bought even so little as fifty cents' worth of goods, to offer him a glass of liquor, and it was generally accepted." Such was the town when John Thoreau, the Jerseyman, came there to die in 1800, and such it remained during the mercantile days of John Thoreau, his son, who was brought up in a house on the public square, and learned the business of buying and selling in the store of Deacon White, close by. Pencil-making, the art by which he earned his modest livelihood during Henry Thoreau's youth, was introduced into Concord about 1812 by William Munroe, whose son has in later years richly endowed the small free library from which Thoreau drew books, and to which he gave some of his own. In this handicraft, which was at times quite profitable, the younger Thoreaus assisted their father from time to time, and Henry acquired great skill in it; even to the extent, says Mr. Emerson, of making as good a pencil as the best English ones. "His friends congratulated him that he had now opened his way to fortune. But he replied that he should never make another pencil. 'Why should I? I would not do again what I have done once.'" Thoreau may have said this, but he afterward changed his mind, for he went on many years, at intervals, working at his father's business, which in time grew to be mainly the preparation of fine-ground plumbago for electrotyping. This he supplied to various publishers, and among others to the Harpers, for several years. But what he did in this way was incidental, and as an aid to his father, his mother, or his sister Sophia, who herself carried on the business for some time after the death of Henry in 1862. It was the family employment, and must be pursued by somebody.

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.

But to return to the childhood and youth of Thoreau. When he was three or four years old, at Chelmsford, on being told that he must die, as well as the men in the New England Primer, and having the joys of heaven explained to him, he said, as he came in from "coasting," that he did not want to die and go to heaven, because he could not carry his sled to so fine a place; for, he added, "the boys say it is not shod with iron, and not worth a cent." At the age of ten, says Channing, "he had the firmness of the Indian, and could repress his pathos, and had such seriousness that he was called 'judge.'" As an example of childish fortitude, it is related that he carried his pet chickens for sale to the tavern-keeper in a basket; whereupon Mr. Wesson told him to 'stop a minute,' and, in order to return the basket promptly, took the darlings out, and wrung their necks, one by one, before the boy's eyes, who wept inwardly, but did not budge. Having a knack at whittling, and being asked by a schoolmate to make him a bow and arrow, young Henry refused, not deigning to give the reason,—that he had no knife. "So through life," says Channing, "he steadily declined trying or pretending to do what he had no means to execute, yet forbore explanations." He was a sturdy and kindly playmate, whose mirthful tricks are yet remembered by those who frolicked with him, and he always abounded with domestic affection. While in college he once asked his mother what profession she would have him choose. She said, pleasantly, "You can buckle on your knapsack, dear, and roam abroad to seek your fortune;" but the thought of leaving home and forsaking Concord made the tears roll down his cheeks. Then his sister Helen, who was standing by, says Channing, "tenderly put her arm around him and kissed him, saying, 'No, Henry, you shall not go; you shall stay at home and live with us.'" And this, indeed, he did, though he made one or two efforts to seek his fortune for a time elsewhere.

His reading had been wide and constant while at school, and after he entered college at the age of sixteen. His room in Cambridge was in Hollis Hall; his instructors were such as he found there, but in rhetoric he profited much by the keen intelligence of Professor Channing, an uncle of his future friend and biographer, Ellery Channing. I think he also came in contact, while in college, with that singular poet, Jones Very, of Salem. He was by no means unsocial in college, though he did not form such abiding friendships as do many young men. He graduated in 1837. His expenses at Cambridge, which were very moderate, compared with what a poor scholar must now pay to go through college, were paid in part by his father, in part by his aunts and his elder sister, Helen, who had already begun to teach school; and for the rest he depended on his own efforts and the beneficiary funds of the college, in which he had some little share. I have understood that he received the income of the same modest endowment which had been given to William and Ralph Waldo Emerson when in college, some years before; and in other ways the generous thought of that most princely man, Waldo Emerson, was not idle in his behalf, though he knew Thoreau then only as the studious son of a townsman, who needed a friend at court. What Mr. Emerson wrote to Josiah Quincy, who was then president of Harvard College, in behalf of Henry Thoreau does not appear, except from the terms of old Quincy's reply; but we may infer it. Thoreau had the resource of school-keeping in the country towns, during the college vacation and the extra vacation that a poor scholar could claim; and this brought him, in 1835, to an acquaintance with that elder scholar, Brownson, who afterwards became a Catholic doctor of theology. He left college one winter to teach school at Canton, near Boston, where he was examined by Rev. Orestes A. Brownson, then a Protestant minister in Canton. He studied German and boarded with Mr. Brownson while he taught the school. In 1836, he records in his journal that he "went to New York with father, peddling." In his senior year, 1836-37, he was ill for a time, and lost rank with his instructors by his indifference to the ordinary college motives for study. This fact, and also that he was a beneficiary of the college, further appears from the letter of President Quincy to Mr. Emerson, as follows:—

"Cambridge, 25th June, 1837.

"My dear Sir,—Your view concerning Thoreau is entirely in consent with that which I entertain. His general conduct has been very satisfactory, and I was willing and desirous that whatever falling off there had been in his scholarship should be attributable to his sickness. He had, however, imbibed some notions concerning emulation and college rank which had a natural tendency to diminish his zeal, if not his exertions. His instructors were impressed with the conviction that he was indifferent, even to a degree that was faulty, and that they could not recommend him, consistent with the rule by which they are usually governed in relation to beneficiaries. I have always entertained a respect for and interest in him, and was willing to attribute any apparent neglect or indifference to his ill health rather than to wilfulness. I obtained from the instructors the authority to state all the facts to the Corporation, and submit the result to their discretion. This I did, and that body granted twenty-five dollars, which was within ten, or at most fifteen, dollars of any sum he would have received, had no objection been made. There is no doubt that, from some cause, an unfavorable opinion has been entertained, since his return after his sickness, of his disposition to exert himself. To what it has been owing may be doubtful. I appreciate very fully the goodness of his heart and the strictness of his moral principle; and have done as much for him as, under the circumstances, was possible. Very respectfully, your humble servant,

"Josiah Quincy.

"Rev. R. W. Emerson."

It is possible the college faculty may have had other grounds of distrust in Thoreau's case. On May 30, 1836, his classmate Peabody wrote him the following letter from Cambridge,—Thoreau being then at home, for some reason,—from which we may infer that the sober youth was not averse to such deeds as are there related:—

"The Davy Club got into a little trouble, the week before last, from the following circumstance: H. W. gave a lecture on Pyrotechny, and illustrated it with a parcel of fireworks he had prepared in the vacation. As you may imagine, there was some slight noise on the occasion. In fact, the noise was so slight that Tutor B. heard it at his room in Holworthy. This worthy boldly determined to march forth and attack the 'rioters.' Accordingly, in the midst of a grand display of rockets, etc., he stepped into the room, and, having gazed round him in silent astonishment for the space of two minutes, and hearing various cries of 'Intrusion!' 'Throw him over!' 'Saw his leg off!' 'Pull his wool!' etc., he made two or three dignified motions with his hand to gain attention, and then kindly advised us to 'retire to our respective rooms.' Strange to say, he found no one inclined to follow this good advice, and he accordingly thought fit to withdraw. There is, as perhaps you know, a law against keeping powder in the college buildings. The effect of Tutor B.'s intrusion was evident on the next Monday night, when H. W. and B. were invited to call and see President Quincy; and owing to the tough reasoning of Tutor B., who boldly asserted that 'powder was powder,' they were each presented with a public admonition.

"We had a miniature volcano at Webster's lecture, the other morning [this was Professor Webster, afterwards hanged for the murder of Dr. Parkman], and the odors therefrom surpassed all ever produced by Araby the Blest. Imagine to yourself all the windows and shutters of the lecture-room closed, and then conceive the delightful scent produced by the burning of nearly a bushel of sulphur, phosphoretted hydrogen, and other still more pleasant ingredients. As soon as the burning commenced, there was a general rush to the door, and a crowd collected there, running out every half minute to get a breath of fresh air, and then coming in to see the volcano. 'No noise nor nothing.' Bigelow and Dr. Bacon manufactured some 'laughing gas,' and administered it on the Delta. It was much better than that made by Webster. Jack Weiss took some, as usual; Wheeler, Jo Allen, and Hildreth each received a dose. Wheeler proceeded to dance for the amusement of the company, Jo jumped over the Delta fence, and Sam raved about Milton, Shakespeare, Byron, etc. He took two doses; it produced a great effect on him. He seemed to be as happy as a mortal could desire; talked with Shakespeare, Milton, etc., and seemed to be quite at home with them."

The persons named were classmates of Thoreau: one of them afterward Rev. John Weiss; Wheeler was of Lincoln, and died early in Germany, whither he went to study; Samuel Tenney Hildreth was a brother of Richard Hildreth, the historian, and also died young. The zest with which his classmate related these pranks to Thoreau seems to imply in his correspondent a mind too ready towards such things to please the learned faculty of Cambridge.

Mr. Quincy's letter was in reply to one which Mr. Emerson had written at the request of Mrs. Thoreau, who feared her son was not receiving justice from the college authorities. Thoreau graduated without much distinction, but with a good name among his classmates, and a high reputation for general scholarship. When he went to Maine, in May, 1838, to see if there was not some school for him to teach there, he took with him this certificate from his pastor, Dr. Ripley:—

"Concord, May 1, 1838.

"To the Friends of Education,—The undersigned very cheerfully hereby introduces to public notice the bearer, Mr. David Henry Thoreau, as a teacher in the higher branches of useful literature. He is a native of this town, and a graduate of Harvard University. He is well disposed and well qualified to instruct the rising generation. His scholarship and moral character will bear the strictest scrutiny. He is modest and mild in his disposition and government, but not wanting in energy of character and fidelity in the duties of his profession. It is presumed his character and usefulness will be appreciated more highly as an acquaintance with him shall be cultivated. Cordial wishes for his success, reputation, and usefulness attend him, as an instructor and gentleman.

"Ezra Ripley,
"Senior Pastor of the First Church in Concord, Mass.

"N. B.—It is but justice to observe here that the eyesight of the writer is much impaired."

Accompanying this artless document is a list of clergymen in the towns of Maine,—Portland, Belfast, Camden, Kennebunk, Castine, Ellsworth, etc.,—in the handwriting of the good old pastor, signifying that as young Thoreau traveled he should report himself to these brethren, who might forward his wishes. But even at that early date, I suspect that Thoreau undervalued the "D. D.'s" in comparison with the "chickadedees," as he plainly declared in his later years. Another certificate, in a firmer hand, and showing no token of impaired eyesight, was also carried by Thoreau in this first visit to Maine. It was this:—

"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:—

"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."

He took Mr. Emerson about with him in his chaise when a boy, and in passing each house he would tell the story of its family, dwelling especially on the nine church-members who had made a division in the church in the time of his predecessor; every one of the nine having come to bad fortune or a bad end. "The late Dr. Gardiner," says Mr. Emerson, "in a funeral sermon on some parishioner, whose virtues did not readily come to mind, honestly said, 'He was good at fires.' Dr. Ripley had many virtues, and yet, even in his old age, if the firebell was rung, he was instantly on horseback, with his buckets and bag." He had even some willingness, perhaps not equal to the zeal of the Hindoo saint, to extinguish the Orthodox fires of hell, which had long blazed in New England,—so that men might worship God with less fear. But he had small sympathy with the Transcendentalists when they began to appear in Concord. When Mr. Emerson took his friend Mr. Alcott to see the old doctor, he gave him warning that his brilliant young kinsman was not quite sound in the faith, and bore testimony in particular against a sect of his own naming, called "Egomites" (from ego and mitto), who "sent themselves" on the Lord's errands without any due call thereto. Dr. Channing viewed the "apostles of the newness" with more favor, and could pardon something to the spirit of liberty which was strong in them. The occasional correspondence between the Concord shepherd of his people and the great Unitarian preacher is full of interest. In February, 1839, when he was eighty-eight years old and weighed down with infirmities, he could still lift up his voice in testimony. He then wrote to Dr. Channing:—

"Broken down with the infirmities of age, and subject to fits that deprive me of reason and the use of my limbs, I feel it a duty to be patient and submissive to the will of God, who is too wise to err, and too good to injure. My mind labors and is oppressed, viewing the present state of Christianity, and the various speculations, opinions, and practices of the passing period. Extremes appear to be sought and loved, and their novelty gains attention. You, sir, appear to retain and act upon the sentiment of the Latin phrase,—

"'Est modus in rebus, sunt certi denique fines.'

"The learned and estimable Norton appears to me to have weakened his hold on public opinion and confidence by his petulance or pride, his want of candor and charity."

Six years earlier, Dr. Channing had written to Dr. Ripley almost as if replying to some compliment like this, and expressed himself thus, in a letter dated January 22, 1833,—

"I thank God for the testimony which you have borne to the usefulness of my writings. Such approbation from one whom I so much venerate, and who understands so well the wants and signs of the times, is very encouraging to me. If I have done anything towards manifesting Christianity in its simple majesty and mild glory I rejoice, and I am happy to have contributed anything towards the satisfaction of your last years. It would gratify many, and would do good, if, in the quiet of your advanced age, you would look back on the eventful period through which you have passed, and would leave behind you, or give now, a record of the changes you have witnessed, and especially of the progress of liberal inquiry and rational views in religion."[2]

Dr. Ripley's prayers were precise and undoubting in their appeal for present providences. He prayed for rain and against the lightning, "that it may not lick up our spirits;" he blessed the Lord for exemption from sickness and insanity,—"that we have not been tossed to and fro until the dawning of the day, that we have not been a terror to ourselves and to others." One memorable occasion, in the later years of his pastorate, when he had consented to take a young colleague, is often remembered in his parish, now fifty years after its date. The town was suffering from drought, and the farmers from Barrett's Mill, Bateman's Pond, and the Nine-Acre Corner had asked the minister to pray for rain. Mr. Goodwin (the father of Professor Goodwin, of Harvard University) had omitted to do this in his morning service, and at the noon intermission Dr. Ripley was reminded of the emergency by the afflicted farmers. He told them courteously that Mr. Goodwin's garden lay on the river, and perhaps he had not noticed how parched the uplands were; but he entered the pulpit that afternoon with an air of resolution and command. Mr. Goodwin, as usual, offered to relieve the doctor of the duty of leading in prayer, but the old shepherd, as Mr. Emerson says, "rejected his offer with some humor, and with an air that said to all the congregation, 'This is no time for you young Cambridge men; the affair, sir, is getting serious; I will pray myself.'" He did so, and with unusual fervor demanded rain for the languishing corn and the dry grass of the field. As the story goes, the afternoon opened fair and hot, but before the dwellers in Nine-Acre Corner and the North Quarter reached their homes a pouring shower rewarded the gray-haired suppliant, and reminded Concord that the righteous are not forsaken. Another of Mr. Emerson's anecdotes bears on this point:—

"One August afternoon, when I was in his hayfield, helping him, with his man, to rake up his hay, I well remember his pleading, almost reproachful looks at the sky, when the thunder-gust was coming up to spoil his hay. He raked very fast, then looked at the cloud, and said, 'We are in the Lord's hand,—mind your rake, George! we are in the Lord's hand;' and seemed to say, 'You know me; this field is mine,—Dr. Ripley's, thine own servant.'"

In his later years Dr. Ripley was much distressed by a schism in his church, which drew off to a Trinitarian congregation several of his oldest friends and parishioners. Among the younger members who thus seceded, seventy years ago, were the maiden aunts of Thoreau, Jane and Maria,—the last of whom, and the last of the name in America, has died recently, as already mentioned. Thoreau seceded later, but not to the "Orthodox" church,—as much against the wish of Dr. Ripley, however, as if he had. In later years, Thoreau's church (of the Sunday Walkers) was recognized in the village gossip; so that when I first spent Sunday in Concord, and asked my landlord what churches there were, he replied, "The Unitarian, the Orthodox, and the Walden Pond Association." To the latter he professed to belong, and said its services consisted in walking on Sunday in the Walden woods. Dr. Ripley would have viewed such rites with horror, but they have now become common. His Old Manse, which from 1842 to 1846 was occupied by Hawthorne, was for twenty years (1847-1867) the home of Mrs. Sarah Ripley, that sweet and learned lady, and has since been the dwelling-place of her children, the grandchildren of Dr. Ripley. Near by stands now the statue of the Concord Minute-Man of 1775, marking the spot to which the Middlesex farmers came

"In sloven dress and broken rank,"

and where they stood when in unconscious heroism they

"Fired the shot heard round the world,"

and drove back the invading visitor from their doorsteps and cornfields.

Dr. Ripley, however, seldom repelled a visitor or an invader, unless he came from too recent an experience in the state prison, or offered to "break out" his path on a Sunday, when he had fancied himself too much snow-bound to go forth to his pulpit. The anecdote is characteristic, if not wholly authentic. One Sunday, after a severe snow-storm, his neighbor, the great farmer on Ponkawtassett Hill, half a mile to the northward of the Old Manse, turned out his ox-teams and all his men and neighbors to break a path to the meeting-house and the tavern. Wallowing through the drifts, they had got as far as Dr. Ripley's gate, while the good parson, snugly blocked in by a drift completely filling his avenue of ash-trees, thought of nothing less than of going out to preach that day. The long team of oxen, with much shouting and stammering from the red-faced farmer, was turned out of the road and headed up the avenue, when Dr. Ripley, coming to his parsonage door, and commanding silence, began to berate Captain B. for breaking the Sabbath and the roads at one stroke,—implying, if not asserting, that he did it to save time and oxen for his Monday's work. Angered at the ingratitude of his minister, the stammering farmer turned the ten yoke of cattle round in the doctor's garden, and drove on to the village, leaving the parson to shovel himself out and get to meeting the best way he could. Meanwhile, the teamsters sat in the warm bar-room at the tavern, and cheered themselves with punch, flip, grog, and toddy, instead of going to hear Dr. Ripley hold forth; and when he had returned to his parsonage they paraded their oxen and sleds back again, past his gate, with much more shouting than at first. This led to a long quarrel between minister and parishioner, in course of which, one day, as the doctor halted his chaise in front of the farmer's house on the hill, the stammering captain came forward, a peck measure in his hand, with which he had been giving his oxen their meal, and began to renew the unutterable grievance. Waxing warm, as the doctor admonished him afresh, he smote with his wooden measure on the shafts of the chaise, until his gentle wife, rushing forth, called on the neighbors to stop the fight which she fancied was going on between the charioteer of the Lord and the foot-soldier.

Despite these outbursts, and his habitual way of looking at all things "from the parochial point of view," as Emerson said of him, he was also a courteous and liberal-minded man, as the best anecdotes of him constantly prove. He was the sovereign of his people, managing the church, the schools, the society meetings, and, for a time, the Lyceum, as he thought fit. The lecturers, as well as the young candidates for school-keeping—Theodore Parker, Edward Everett, and the rest—addressed themselves to him, and when he met Webster, then the great man of Massachusetts, it was on equal terms.

Daniel Webster was never a lyceum lecturer in Concord, and he did not often try cases there, but was sometimes consulted in causes of some pecuniary magnitude. When Humphrey Barrett died (whose management of his nephew's estate will be mentioned in the next chapter), his heir by will (a young man without property, until he should inherit the large estate bequeathed him), found it necessary to employ counsel against the heirs-at-law, who sought to break the will. His attorney went to Mr. Webster in Boston and related the facts, adding that his client could not then pay a large fee, but might, if the cause were gained, as Mr. Webster thought it would be. "You may give me one hundred dollars as a retainer," said Webster, "and tell the young man, from me, that when I win his case I shall send him a bill that will make his hair stand on end." It so happened, however, that Webster was sent to the Senate, and the case was won by his partner.

In the summer of 1843, while Thoreau was living at Staten Island, Webster visited Concord to try an important case in the county court, which then held sessions there. This was the "Wyman Trial," long famous in local traditions, Webster and Choate being both engaged in the case, and along with them Mr. Franklin Dexter and Mr. Rockwood Hoar, the latter a young lawyer, who had been practicing in the Middlesex courts for a few years, where his father, Mr. Samuel Hoar, was the leader of the bar. Judge Allen (Charles Allen of Worcester) held the court, and the eminent array of counsel just named was for the defense.

The occasion was a brilliant one, and made a great and lasting sensation in the village. Mr. Webster and his friends were entertained at the houses of the chief men of Concord, and the villagers crowded the court-house to hear the arguments and the colloquies between the counsel and the court. Webster was suffering from his usual summer annoyance, the "hay catarrh," or "rose cold," which he humorously described afterward in a letter to a friend in Concord:—

"You know enough of my miserable catarrh. Its history, since I left your hospitable roof, is not worth noting. There would be nothing found in it, either of the sublime or the beautiful; nothing fit for elegant description or a touch of sentiment. Not that it has not been a great thing in its way; for I think the sneezing it has occasioned has been truly transcendental. A fellow-sufferer from the same affliction, who lived in Cohasset, was asked, the other day, what in the world he took for it? His reply was that he 'took eight handkerchiefs a day.' And this, I believe, is the approved mode of treatment; though the doses here mentioned are too few for severe cases. Suffice it to say, my dear lady, that either from a change of air, or the progress of the season, or, what is more probable, from the natural progress of the disease itself, I am much better than when I left Concord, and I propose to return to Boston to-day, feeling, or hoping, that I may now be struck off the list of invalids."

Notwithstanding this affliction, Mr. Webster made himself agreeable to the ladies of Concord, old and young, and even the little girls, like Louisa Alcott, went to the courthouse to see and hear him. He was present at a large tea-party given by Mrs. R. W. Emerson in his honor, and he renewed his old acquaintance with the Dunbars and Thoreaus. Mr. Emerson, writing to Thoreau September 8, 1843, said, briefly, "You will have heard of our 'Wyman Trial,' and the stir it made in the village. But the Cliff and Walden, which know something of the railroad, knew nothing of that; not a leaf nodded; not a pebble fell;—why should I speak of it to you?" Thoreau was indeed interested in it, and in the striking personality of Webster. To his mother he wrote from Staten Island (August 29, 1843):—

"I should have liked to see Daniel Webster walking about Concord; I suppose the town shook, every step he took. But I trust there were some sturdy Concordians who were not tumbled down by the jar, but represented still the upright town. Where was George Minott? he would not have gone far to see him. Uncle Charles should have been there;—he might as well have been catching cat-naps in Concord as anywhere. And, then, what a whetter-up of his memory this event would have been! You'd have had all the classmates again in alphabetical order reversed,—'and Seth Hunt and Bob Smith—and he was a student of my father's—and where's Put now? and I wonder—you—if Henry's been to see George Jones yet? A little account with Stow—Balcolm—Bigelow—poor, miserable t-o-a-d (sound asleep). I vow—you—what noise was that? saving grace—and few there be. That's clear as preaching—Easter Brooks—morally depraved—how charming is divine philosophy—somewise and some otherwise—Heighho! (Sound asleep again.) Webster's a smart fellow—bears his age well. How old should you think he was? you—does he look as if he were two years younger than I?'"

This uncle was Charles Dunbar, of course, who was in fact two years older than Webster, and, like him, a New Hampshire man. He and his sisters—the mother and the aunt of Henry Thoreau—had known Webster in his youth, when he was a poor young lawyer in New Hampshire; and the acquaintance was kept up from time to time as the years brought them together. Whenever Webster passed a day in Concord, as he did nearly every year from 1843 to 1850, he would either call on Miss Dunbar, or she would meet him at tea in the house of Mr. Cheney, a college classmate of Mr. Emerson, whom he usually visited; and whose garden was a lovely plot, ornamented with great elm trees, on the bank of the Musketaquid. Mrs. Thoreau was often included in these friendly visits; and it was of this family, as well as of the Emersons, Hoars, and Brookses, no doubt, that Webster was thinking when he sadly wrote to Mrs. Cheney his last letter, less than a year before his death in 1852. In this note, dated at Washington, November 1, 1851, when he was Secretary of State under Fillmore, Mr. Webster said:—

"I have very much wished to see you all, and in the early part of October seriously contemplated going to Concord for a day. But I was hindered by circumstances, and partly deterred also by changes which have taken place. My valued friend, Mr. Phinney (of Lexington), is not living; and many of those whom I so highly esteemed, in your beautiful and quiet village, have become a good deal estranged, to my great grief, by abolitionism, free-soilism, transcendentalism, and other notions, which I cannot (but) regard as so many vagaries of the imagination. These former warm friends would have no pleasure, of course, in intercourse with one of old-fashioned opinions. Nevertheless, dear Mrs. Cheney, if I live to see another summer, I will make a visit to your house, and talk about former times and former things."

He never came; for in June, 1852, the Whig convention at Baltimore rejected his name as a Presidential candidate, and he went home to Marshfield to die. The tone of sadness in this note was due, in part, perhaps, to the eloquent denunciation of Webster by Mr. Emerson in a speech at Cambridge in 1851, and to the unequivocal aversion with which Webster's contemporary, the first citizen of Concord, Samuel Hoar, spoke of his 7th of March speech, and the whole policy with which Webster had identified himself in those dreary last years of his life. Mr. Hoar had been sent by his State in 1846 to protest in South Carolina against the unconstitutional imprisonment at Charleston of colored seamen from Massachusetts; and he had been driven by force from the State to which he went as an envoy. But, although Webster knew the gross indignity of the act, and introduced into his written speech in March, 1850, a denunciation of it, he did not speak this out in the Senate, nor did it appear in all the authorized editions of the speech. He could hardly expect Mr. Hoar to welcome him in Concord after he had uttered his willingness to return fugitive slaves, but forgot to claim reparation for so shameful an affront to Massachusetts as the Concord Cato had endured.

Mr. Webster was attached to Concord—as most persons are who have ever spent pleasant days there—and used to compliment his friend on his house and garden by the river side. Looking out upon his great trees from the dining-room window, he once said: "I am in the terrestrial paradise, and I will prove it to you by this. America is the finest continent on the globe, the United States the finest country in America, Massachusetts the best State in the Union, Concord the best town in Massachusetts, and my friend Cheney's field the best acre in Concord." This was an opinion so like that often expressed by Henry Thoreau, that one is struck by it. Indeed, the devotion of Thoreau to his native town was so marked as to provoke opposition. "Henry talks about Nature," said Madam Hoar (the mother of Senator Hoar, and daughter of Roger Sherman of Connecticut), "just as if she'd been born and brought up in Concord."

[CHAPTER IV.]
THE EMBATTLED FARMERS.

It was not the famous lawyers, the godly ministers, the wealthy citizens, nor even the learned ladies of Concord, who interested Henry Thoreau specially,—but the sturdy farmers, each on his hereditary acres, battling with the elements and enjoying that open-air life which to Thoreau was the only existence worth having. As his best biographer, Ellery Channing, says: "He came to see the inside of every farmer's house and head, his pot of beans, and mug of hard cider. Never in too much hurry for a dish of gossip, he could sit out the oldest frequenter of the bar-room, and was alive from top to toe with curiosity."

Concord, in our day, and still more in Thoreau's childhood, was dotted with frequent old farm-houses, of the ample and picturesque kind that bespeaks antiquity and hospitality. In one such he was born, though not one of the oldest or the best. He was present at the downfall of several of these ancient homesteads, in whose date and in the fortunes of their owners for successive generations, he took a deep interest; and still more in their abandoned orchards and door-yards, where the wild apple tree and the vivacious lilac still flourished.

To show what sort of men these Concord farmers were in the days when their historical shot was fired, let me give some anecdotes and particulars concerning two of the original family stocks,—the Hosmers, who first settled in Concord in 1635, with Bulkeley and Willard, the founders of the town; and the Barretts, whose first ancestor, Humphrey Barrett, came over in 1639. James Hosmer, a clothier from Hawkhurst in Kent, with his wife Ann (related to Major Simon Willard, that stout Kentishman, Indian trader and Indian fighter, who bought of the Squaw Sachem the township of Concord, six miles square), two infant daughters, and two maid-servants, came from London to Boston in the ship "Elizabeth," and the next year built a house on Concord Street, and a mill on the town brook. From him descended James Hosmer, who was killed at Sudbury in 1658, in an Indian fight, Stephen, his great-grandson, a famous surveyor, and Joseph, his great-great-grandson, one of the promoters of the Revolution, who had a share in its first fight at Concord Bridge. Joseph Hosmer was the son of a Concord farmer, who, in 1743, seceded from the parish church, because Rev. Daniel Bliss, the pastor, had said in a sermon (as his opponents averred), "that it was as great a sin for a man to get an estate by honest labor, if he had not a single aim at the glory of God, as to get it by gaming at cards or dice." What this great-grandfather of Emerson did say, a century before the Transcendental epoch, was this, as he declared: "If husbandmen plow and sow that they may be rich, and live in the pleasures of this world, and appear grand before men, they are as far from true religion in their plowing, sowing, etc., as men are that game for the same purpose." Thomas Hosmer, being a prosperous husbandman, perhaps with a turn for display, took offense, and became a worshipper at what was called the "Black Horse Church,"—a seceding conventicle which met at the tavern with the sign of the Black Horse, near where the Concord Library now stands. Joseph Hosmer, his boy, was known at the village school as "the little black colt,"—a lad of adventurous spirit, with dark eyes and light hair, whose mother, Prudence Hosmer, would repeat old English poetry until all her listeners but her son were weary. When he was thirty-nine years old, married and settled, a farmer and cabinet-maker, there was a convention in the parish church to consider the Boston Port Bill, the doings of General Gage in Boston, and the advice of Samuel Adams and John Hancock to resist oppression. Daniel Bliss, the leading lawyer and leading Tory in Concord, eldest son of Parson Bliss, and son-in-law of Colonel Murray, of Rutland, Vt., the chief Tory of that region, made a speech in this convention against the patriotic party. He was a graceful and fluent speaker, a handsome man, witty, sarcastic, and popular, but with much scorn for the plain people. He painted in effective colors the power of the mother country and the feebleness of the colonies; he was elegantly dressed, friendly in his manner, but discouraging to the popular heart, and when he sat down, a deep gloom seemed to settle on the assembly. His brother-in-law, Parson Emerson, an ardent patriot, if present, was silent. From a corner of the meeting-house there rose at last a man with sparkling eyes, plainly dressed in butternut brown, who began to speak in reply to the handsome young Tory, at first slowly and with hesitation, but soon taking fire at his own thoughts, he spoke fluently, in a strain of natural eloquence, which gained him the ear and applause of the assembly. A delegate from Worcester, who sat near Mr. Bliss, noticed that the Tory was discomposed, biting his lip, frowning, and pounding with the heel of his silver-buckled shoe. "Who is the speaker?" he asked of Bliss. "Hosmer, a Concord mechanic," was the scornful reply. "Then how does he come by his English?" "Oh, he has an old mother at home, who sits in her chimney-corner and reads and repeats poetry all day long;" adding in a moment, "He is the most dangerous rebel in Concord, for he has all the young men at his back, and where he leads the way they will surely follow."

Four months later, in April, 1775, this Concord mechanic made good the words of his Tory townsman, for it was his speech to the minute-men which goaded them on to the fight. After forming the regiment as adjutant, he addressed them, closing with these words: "I have often heard it said that the British boasted they could march through our country, laying waste every village and neighborhood, and that we would not dare oppose them,—and I begin to believe it is true." Then turning to Major Buttrick, who commanded, and looking off from the hill-side to the village, from which a thick smoke was rising, he cried, "Will you let them burn the town down?" whereupon the sturdy major, who had no such intention, ordered his men to march; and when, a few minutes later, the British fired on his column of companies, the Acton men at the head, he sprang from the ground shouting, "Fire, fellow-soldiers, for God's sake fire!" and discharged his own piece at the same instant. The story has often been told, but will bear repetition. Thoreau heard it in 1835 from the lips of Emerson, as he pronounced the centennial discourse in honor of the town's settlement and history; but he had read it and heard it a hundred times before, from his earliest childhood. Mr. Emerson added, after describing the fight:—

"These poor farmers who came up, that day, to defend their native soil, acted from the simplest instincts; they did not know it was a deed of fame they were doing. These men did not babble of glory; they never dreamed their children would contend which had done the most. They supposed they had a right to their corn and their cattle, without paying tribute to any but their own governors. And as they had no fear of man, they yet did have a fear of God. Captain Charles Miles, who was wounded in the pursuit of the enemy, told my venerable friend (Dr. Ripley), who sits by me, 'that he went to the services of that day with the same seriousness and acknowledgment of God, which he carried to church.'"

Humphrey Barrett, fifth in descent from the original settler, was born in 1752, on the farm his ancestors had owned ever since 1640, and was no doubt in arms at Concord Fight in 1775. His biographer says:—

"Some persons slightly acquainted with him in the latter part of his life, judged him to be unsocial, cold, and indifferent, but those most acquainted with him knew him to be precisely the reverse. The following acts of his life make apparent some traits of his character. A negro, by the name of Cæsar Robbins, had been in the habit of getting all the wood for his family use for many years from Mr. Barrett's wood-lot near by him; this being done with the knowledge and with the implied if not the express consent of the owner. Mr. Barrett usually got the wood for his own use from another part of his farm; but on one occasion he thought he would get it from the lot by Cæsar's. He accordingly sent two men with two teams, with directions to cut only hard wood. The men had been gone but a few hours when Cæsar came to Mr. Barrett's house, his face covered with sweat, and in great agitation, and says, 'Master Barrett, I have come to let you know that a parcel of men and teams have broke into our wood-lot, and are making terrible destruction of the very best trees, and unless we do something immediately I shall be ruined.' Mr. Barrett had no heart to resist this appeal of Cæsar's; he told him not to be alarmed, for he would see that he was not hurt, and would put the matter right. He then wrote an order to his men to cut no more wood, but to come directly home with their teams, and sent the order by Cæsar."[3]

The biographer of Mr. Barrett, who was also his attorney and legal adviser, goes on to say:—

"A favorite nephew who bore his name, and whose guardian he was, died under age in 1818, leaving a large estate, and no relatives nearer than uncle and aunt and the children of deceased aunts. Mr. Barrett believed that the estate in equity ought to be distributed equally between the uncle and aunt and the children of deceased aunts by right of representation.[4] And although advised that such was not the law, he still insisted upon having the question carried before the Supreme Court for decision; and when the court decided against his opinion, he carried out his own views of equity by distributing the portion that fell to him according to his opinion of what the law ought to be. After he had been fully advised that the estate would be distributed in a manner he thought neither equitable nor just, he applied to the writer to make out his account as guardian; furnishing the evidence, as he believed, of the original amount of all his receipts as such guardian. I made the account, charging him with interest at six per cent. on all sums from the time of receipt till the time of making the account. Mr. Barrett took the account for examination, and soon returned it with directions to charge him with compound interest, saying that he believed he had realized as much as that. I accordingly made the account conform to his directions. He then wished me to present this account to the party who claimed half the estate, and ask him to examine it with care and see if anything was omitted. This was done, and no material omission discovered, and no objection made. Mr. Barrett then said that he had always kept all the property of his ward in a drawer appropriated for the purpose; that he made the amount of property in the drawer greater than the balance of the account; and (handing to me the contents of the drawer) he wished me to ascertain the precise sum to which it amounted. I found that it exceeded the balance of the account by $3,221.59. He then told me, in substance, that he was quite unwilling to have so large an amount of property go where it was in danger of being distributed inequitably, and particularly as he was confident he had disclosed every source from which he had realized any property of his ward, and also the actual amount received; but, as he knew not how it got into the drawer, and had intended all the property there to go to his nephew, he should not feel right to retain it, and therefore directed me to add it to the amount of the estate,—which was done."[5]

Conceive a community in which such characters were common, and imagine whether the claim of King George and the fine gentlemen about him, to tax the Americans without their own consent would be likely to succeed! I find in obscure anecdotes like this sufficient evidence that if John Hampden had emigrated to Massachusetts when he had it in mind, he would have found men like himself tilling their own acres in Concord. The Barretts, from their name, may have been Normans, but, like Hampden, the Hosmers were Saxons, and held land in England before William the Conqueror. When Major Hosmer, who was adjutant, and formed the line of the regiment that returned the British fire at Concord Bridge, had an estate to settle about 1785, the heir to which was supposed to be in England, he employed an agent, who was then visiting London, to notify the heir, and also desired him to go to the Heralds' Office and ascertain what coat-of-arms belonged to any branch of the Hosmer family. When the agent (who may have been Mr. Tilly Merrick, of Concord, John Adams's attaché in Holland), returned to America, after reporting his more important business to Major Hosmer, he added,—

"I called at the Heralds' Office in London, and the clerk said, 'There was no coat-of-arms for you, and, if you were an Englishman you would not want one; for (he said) there were Hosmers in Kent long before the Conquest; and at the battle of Hastings, the men of Kent were the vanguard of King Harold.'"

If Major Hosmer's ancestors failed to drive back the invaders then, their descendants made good the failure in Concord seven centuries later.

Thoreau's favorite walk, as he tells us,—the pathway toward Heaven,—was along the old Marlborough road, west and southwest from Concord village, through deep woods in Concord and in Sudbury. To reach this road he passed by the great Hosmer farm-house, built by the old major already mentioned, in 1760 or thereabout, and concerning which there is a pretty legend that Thoreau may have taken with him along the Marlborough road. In 1758, young Jo. Hosmer, "the little black colt," drove to Marlborough one autumn day with a load of furniture he had made for Jonathan Barnes, a rich farmer, and town clerk in thrifty Marlborough. He had received the money for his furniture, and was standing on the doorstep, preparing to go home, when a young girl, Lucy Barnes, the daughter of the house, ran up to him and said, "Concord woods are dark, and a thunderstorm is coming up; you had better stay all night." "Since you ask me, I will," was the reply, and the visit was often repeated in the next few months. But when he asked farmer Jonathan for his daughter, the reply was,—

"Concord plains are barren soil. Lucy had better marry her cousin John, whose father will give him one of the best farms in Marlborough, with a good house on it, and Lucy can match his land acre for acre."

Joseph returned from that land of Egypt, and like a wise youth took the hint, and built a house of his own, planting the elm trees that now overshadow it, after a hundred and twenty years. After the due interval he went again to Marlborough, and found Lucy Barnes in the September sunshine, gathering St. Michael's pears in her father's garden. Cousin John was married, by this time, to another damsel. Miss Lucy was bent on having her own way and her own Joseph; and so Mr. Barnes gave his consent. They were married at Christmas, 1761; and Lucy came home behind him on his horse, through the same Concord woods. She afterwards told her youngest son, with some pique:—

"When my brother Jonathan was married, and went to New Hampshire, twenty couples on horseback followed them to Haverhill, on the Merrimac, but when your father and I were married, we came home alone through these dark Concord woods."[6]

The son of this lively Lucy Hosmer, Rufus Hosmer, of Stow, was a classmate, at Cambridge, of Washington Allston, the late Chief Justice Shaw, and Dr. Charles Lowell, father of Lowell the poet. They graduated in 1798, and Dr. Lowell afterwards wrote:—

"I can recall with peculiar pleasure a vacation passed in Concord in my senior year, which Loammi Baldwin, Lemuel Shaw, Washington Allston, and myself spent with Rufus Hosmer at his father's house. I recall the benign face of Major Hosmer, as he stood in the door to receive us, with his handsome daughter-in-law (the wife of Capt. Cyrus Hosmer) on his arm. There was a charming circle of young people then living in Concord, and we boys enjoyed this very much; but we liked best of all to stay at home and listen to the Major's stories. It was very pleasant to have a rainy day come for this, and hard to tell which seemed the happier, he or we."

Forty years afterward, in 1838, Dr. Lowell's son, James Russell Lowell, coming under college discipline, was sent to Concord to spend a similar summer vacation, and wrote his class poem in that town.

Major Hosmer died in 1821, at the age of eighty-five. Mr. Samuel Hoar, long the leader of the Middlesex County bar, who knew him in his later life, once said,—

"In two respects he excelled any one I have ever known; he was more entirely free from prejudice, and also the best reader of men. So clear was his mind and so strong his reasoning power, that I would have defied the most eloquent pleader at the bar to have puzzled him, no matter how skillfully he concealed the weak points of the case. I can imagine him listening quietly, and saying in his slow way, 'It's a pity so many fine words should be wasted, for, you see, the man's on the wrong side.'"

Another old lawyer of Concord, who first saw Major Hosmer when he was a child of ten, and the Major was sixty years old, said,—

"I then formed an opinion of him in two respects that I never altered: First, that he had the handsomest eyes I ever saw; second, those eyes saw the inside of my head as clearly as they did the outside."

He was for many years sheriff of the county, and it was the habit of the young lawyers in term-time to get round his chair and ask his opinion about their cases. Such was his knowledge of the common law, and so well did he know the judges and jurymen, that when he said to Mr. Hoar, "I fear you will lose your case," that gentleman said, "from that moment I felt it lost, for I never knew him to make a wrong guess." He was a Federalist of the old school, and in his eyes Alexander Hamilton was the first man in America. His son held much the same opinion of Daniel Webster.

Near by Major Hosmer's farm-house stood the old homestead and extensive farm buildings of the Lee family, who at the beginning of the Revolution owned one of the two or three great farms in Concord. This estate has been owned and sold in one parcel of about four hundred acres ever since it was first occupied by Henry Woodhouse about 1650. It lies between the two rivers Assabet and Musketaquid, and includes Nahshawtuc, or Lee's Hill, on which, in early days, was an Indian village. The Lees inherited it from the original owner, and held it for more than one hundred years, though it narrowly escaped confiscation in 1775, its owner being a Tory. Early in the present century it fell, by means of a mortgage, into the hands of "old Billy Gray" (the founder of the fortunes that for two or three generations have been held in the Gray family of Boston), was by him sold to Judge Fay, of Cambridge, and by him, in 1822, conveyed to his brother-in-law, Joseph Barrett, of Concord, a distant cousin of the Humphrey Barrett, mentioned elsewhere. Joseph Barrett had been one of Major Hosmer's deputies, when the old yeoman was sheriff, but now turned his attention to farming his many acres, and deserves mention here as one of the Concord farmers of two generations after the battle, among whom Henry Thoreau grew up. Indeed, the Lee Farm was one of his most accustomed haunts, since the river flowed round it for a mile or two, and its commanding hill-top gave a prospect toward the western and northwestern mountains, Wachusett and Monadnoc chief among the beautiful brotherhood, whom Thoreau early saluted with a dithyrambic verse:—

"With frontier strength ye stand your ground,
With grand content ye circle round,
(Tumultuous silence for all sound),
Ye distant nursery of rills,
Monadnoc and the Peterboro hills;
. . . .
But special I remember thee,
Wachusett, who, like me,
Standest alone without society;
Thy far blue eye
A remnant of the sky."

Lee's Hill (which must be distinguished from Lee's Cliff, three miles further up the main river), was the centre of this farm, and almost of the township itself, and Squire Barrett, while he tilled its broad acres (or left them untilled), might be called the centre of the farmers of his county. He was for some years president of the Middlesex Agricultural Society (before which, in later years, Emerson, and Thoreau, and Agassiz gave addresses), and took the prize in the plowing-match at its October cattle-show, holding his own plow, and driving his oxen himself. Descending from the committee-room in dress coat and ruffled shirt, he found his plow-team waiting for him, but his rivals in the match already turning their furrows. Laying off his coat, and fortifying himself with a pinch of maccaboy, while, as his teamster vowed, "that nigh-ox had his eye on the 'Squire from the time he hove in sight, ready to start the minute he took the plow-handles,"—then stepping to the task, six feet and one inch in height, and in weight two hundred and fifty pounds, the 'Squire began, and before the field was plowed he had won the premium. He was one of the many New England yeomen we have all known, who gave the lie to the common saying about the sturdier bulk and sinew of our beer-drinking cousins across the water. 'Squire Barrett could lift a barrel of cider into a cart, and once carried on his shoulders, up two flights of stairs, a sack containing eight bushels of Indian corn, which must have weighed more than four hundred pounds. He was a good horseman, an accomplished dancer, and in the hayfield excelled in the graceful sweep of his scythe and the flourish of his pitchfork.

In course of time (1840) Mr. Alcott, with his wife (a daughter of Colonel May, of Boston), and those daughters who have since become celebrated, came to live in the Hosmer cottage not far from 'Squire Barrett's, and under the very eaves of Major Hosmer's farm-house, to which in 1761 came the fair and willful Lucy Barnes. The portly and courtly 'Squire, who knew Colonel May, came to call on his neighbors, and had many a chat with Mrs. Alcott about her Boston kindred, the Mays, Sewalls, Salisburys, etc. His civility was duly returned by Mrs. Alcott, who, when 'Squire Barrett was a candidate for State Treasurer in 1845, was able, by letters to her friends in Boston, to give him useful support. He was chosen, and held the office till his death in 1849, when Thoreau had just withdrawn from his Walden hermitage, and was publishing his first book, "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack."

Thoreau's special friend among the farmers was another character, Edmund Hosmer, a scion of the same prolific Hosmer stock, who died in 1881. Edmund Hosmer, with Mr. Alcott, George Curtis and his brother Burrill, and other friends, helped Thoreau raise the timbers of his cabin in 1845, and was often his Sunday visitor in the hermitage. Of him it is that mention is made in "Walden," as follows:—

"On a Sunday afternoon, if I chanced to be at home, I heard the crunching of the snow, made by the step of a long-headed farmer, who from far through the woods sought my house, to have a social 'crack;' one of the few of his vocation who are 'men on their farms;' who donned a frock instead of a professor's gown, and is as ready to extract the moral out of church or state as to haul a load of manure from his barn-yard. We talked of rude and simple times, when men sat about large fires in cold, bracing weather, with clear heads; and when other dessert failed, we tried our teeth on many a nut which wise squirrels have long since abandoned,—for those which have the thickest shells are commonly empty."

Edmund Hosmer, who was a friend of Mr. Emerson also, and of whom George Curtis and his brother hired land which they cultivated for a time, has been celebrated in prose and verse by other Concord authors. I suppose it was he of whom Emerson wrote thus in his apologue of Saadi, many years ago:—

"Said Saadi,—When I stood before
Hassan the camel-driver's door,
I scorned the fame of Timour brave,—
Timour to Hassan was a slave.
In every glance of Hassan's eye
I read rich years of victory.
And I, who cower mean and small
In the frequent interval
When wisdom not with me resides,
Worship Toil's wisdom that abides.
I shunned his eyes—the faithful man's,
I shunned the toiling Hassan's glance."

Edmund Hosmer was also, in George Curtis's description of a conversation at Mr. Emerson's house in 1845, "the sturdy farmer neighbor, who had bravely fought his way through inherited embarrassments to the small success of a New England husbandman, and whose faithful wife had seven times merited well of her country." And it may be that he was Ellery Channing's

"Spicy farming sage,
Twisted with heat and cold and cramped with age,
Who grunts at all the sunlight through the year,
And springs from bed each morning with a cheer.
Of all his neighbors he can something tell,
'Tis bad, whate'er, we know, and like it well!
The bluebird's song he hears the first in spring,—
Shoots the last goose bound south on freezing wing."

Hosmer might have sat, also, for the more idyllic picture of the Concord farmer, which Channing has drawn in his "New England":—

"This man takes pleasure o'er the crackling fire,
His glittering axe subdued the monarch oak;
He earned the cheerful blaze by something higher
Than pensioned blows.—he owned the tree he stroke,
And knows the value of the distant smoke,
When he returns at night, his labor done,
Matched in his action with the long day's sun."

Near the small farm of Edmund Hosmer, when Mr. Curtis lived with him and sometimes worked on his well-tilled acres, lay a larger farm, which, about the beginning of Thoreau's active life, was brought from neglect and barrenness into high cultivation by Captain Abel Moore, another Concord farmer, and one of the first, in this part of the country, to appreciate the value of our bog-meadows for cultivation by ditching and top-dressing with the sand which Nature had so thoughtfully ridged up in hills close by. Under the name of "Captain Hardy," Emerson celebrated this achievement of his townsman, upon which the hundreds who in summer strolled to the School of Philosophy in Mr. Alcott's orchard, gazed with admiration,—bettered as it had been by the thirty years' toil and skill bestowed upon it since by Captain Moore's son and grandson. Emerson said:—

"Look across the fence into Captain Hardy's land. There's a musician for you who knows how to make men dance for him in all weathers,—all sorts of men,—Paddies, felons, farmers, carpenters, painters,—yes, and trees, and grapes, and ice, and stone,—hot days, cold days. Beat that true Orpheus lyre if you can. He knows how to make men sow, dig, mow, and lay stone-wall; to make trees bear fruit God never gave them, and foreign grapes yield the juices of France and Spain, on his south side. He saves every drop of sap, as if it were his blood. See his cows, his horses, his swine! And he, the piper that plays the jig they all must dance, biped and quadruped, is the plainest, stupidest harlequin, in a coat of no colors. His are the woods, the waters, hills, and meadows. With one blast of his pipe he danced a thousand tons of gravel from yonder blowing sand-heap to the bog-meadow, where the English grass is waving over thirty acres; with another, he winded away sixty head of cattle in the spring, to the pastures of Peterboro' on the hills."

Such were and are the yeomen of Concord, among whom Thoreau spent his days, a friend to them and they to him, though each sometimes spoke churlishly of the other. He surveyed their wood-lots, laid out their roads, measured their fields and pastures for division among the heirs when a husbandman died, inspected their rivers and ponds, and exchanged information with them concerning the birds, the beasts, insects, flowers, crops, and trees. Their yearly Cattle Show in October was his chief festival,—one of the things he regretted, when living on the edge of New York Bay, and sighing for Fairhaven and White Pond. Without them the landscape of his native valley would not have been so dear to his eyes, and to their humble and perennial virtues he owed more inspiration than he would always confess.

He read in the crabbed Latin of those old Roman farmers, Cato, Varro, and musically-named Columella, and fancied the farmers of Concord were daily obeying Cato's directions, who in turn was but repeating the maxims of a more remote antiquity.

"I see the old, pale-faced farmer walking beside his team, with contented thoughts," he says, "for the five thousandth time. This drama every day in the streets; this is the theatre I go to.... Human life may be transitory and full of trouble, but the perennial mind, whose survey extends from that spring to this, from Columella to Hosmer, is superior to change. I will identify myself with that which did not die with Columella, and will not die with Hosmer."

Note.—The account of "Captain Hardy" was copied by Channing from Emerson's Journal into the first biography of Thoreau, without the name of the author; and so was credited by me to Thoreau in a former edition of this book.

[CHAPTER V.]
THE TRANSCENDENTAL PERIOD.

Although Henry Thoreau would have been, in any place or time of the world's drama, a personage of note, it has already been observed, in regard to his career and his unique literary gift, that they were affected, and in some sort fashioned by the influences of the very time and place in which he found himself at the opening of life. It was the sunrise of New England Transcendentalism in which he first looked upon the spiritual world; when Carlyle in England, Alcott, Emerson, and Margaret Fuller in Massachusetts, were preparing their contemporaries in America for that modern Renaissance which has been so fruitful, for the last forty years, in high thought, vital religion, pure literature, and great deeds. And the place of his birth and breeding, the home of his affections, as it was the Troy, the Jerusalem, and the Rome of his imagination, was determined by Providence to be that very centre and shrine of Transcendentalism, the little village of Concord, which would have been saved from oblivion by his books, had it no other title to remembrance. Let it be my next effort, then, to give some hint—not a brief chronicle—of that extraordinary age, not yet ended (often as they tell us of its death and epitaph), now known to all men as the Transcendental Period. We must wait for after-times to fix its limits and determine its dawn and setting; but of its apparent beginning and course, one cycle coincided quite closely with the life of Thoreau. He was born in July, 1817, when Emerson was entering college at Cambridge, and Carlyle was wrestling "with doubt, fear, unbelief, mockery, and scoffing, in agony of spirit," at Edinburgh. He died in May, 1862, when the distinctly spiritual and literary era of Transcendentalism had closed, its years of preparation were over, and it had entered upon the conflict of political regeneration, for which Thoreau was constantly sounding the trumpet. In these forty-five years,—a longer period than the age of Pericles, or of the Medici, or of Queen Elizabeth,—New England Transcendentalism rose, climbed, and culminated, leaving results that, for our America, must be compared with those famous eras of civilization. Those ages, in fact, were well-nigh lost upon us, until Channing, Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and their fellowship, brought us into communication with the Greek, the Italian, and the noble Elizabethan revivals of genius and art. We had been living under the Puritan reaction, modified and politically fashioned by the more humane philosophy of the eighteenth century, while the freedom-breathing, but half-barbarizing influences of pioneer life in a new continent, had also turned aside the full force of English and Scotch Calvinism.

It is common to trace the so-called Transcendentalism of New England to Carlyle and Coleridge and Wordsworth in the mother-country, and to Goethe, Richter, and Kant in Germany; and there is a certain outward affiliation of this sort, which cannot be denied. But that which in our spiritual soil gave root to the foreign seeds thus wafted hitherward, was a certain inward tendency of high Calvinism and its counterpart, Quakerism, always welling forth in the American colonies. Now it inspired Cotton, Wheelwright, Sir Harry Vane, and Mistress Anne Hutchinson, in Massachusetts; now William Penn and his quaint brotherhood on the Delaware; now Jonathan Edwards and Sarah Pierpont, in Connecticut; and, again, John Woolman, the wandering Friend of God and man, in New Jersey, Nicholas Gilman, the convert of Whitefield, in New Hampshire, and Samuel Hopkins, the preacher of disinterested benevolence, in Rhode Island, held forth this noble doctrine of the Inner Light. It is a gospel peculiarly attractive to poets, so that even the loose-girt Davenant, who would fain think himself the left-hand son of Shakespeare, told gossiping old Aubrey that he believed the world, after a while, would settle into one religion, "an ingenious Quakerism,"—that is, a faith in divine communication that would yet leave some scope for men of wit like himself. How truly these American Calvinists and Quakers prefigured the mystical part of Concord philosophy, may be seen by a few of their sayings.

Jonathan Edwards, in 1723, when he was twenty years old, and the fair saint of his adoration was fifteen, thus wrote in his diary what he had seen and heard of Sarah Pierpont:—

"There is a young lady in New Haven who is beloved of that Great Being who made and rules the world; and there are certain seasons in which this Great Being, in some way or other invisible, comes to her and fills her mind with exceeding sweet delight, and she hardly cares for anything except to meditate on Him. Therefore, if you present all the world before her, with the richest of its treasures, she disregards it, and cares not for it, and is unmindful of any pain or affliction. She has a strange sweetness in her mind, and a singular purity in her affections; is most just and conscientious in all her conduct; and you could not persuade her to do anything wrong or sinful, if you would give her all the world, lest she should offend this Great Being. She will sometimes go about from place to place singing sweetly, and seems to be always full of joy and pleasure, and no one knows for what. She loves to be alone walking in the fields and groves, and seems to have some one invisible always conversing with her."

Nicholas Gilman, the parish minister of little Durham, in New Hampshire,—being under concern of mind for his friend Whitefield, and the great man of New England, at that time, Sir William Pepperell, just setting forth for the capture of Louisburg—wrote to them in March, 1745,—to Sir William thus:—

"Do you indeed love the Lord? do you make the Lord your Guide and Counselor in ye affair? If you have a Soul, great as that Hero David of old, you will ask of the Lord, and not go till he bid you: David would not. If you are sincerely desirous to know and do your duty in that and every other respect, and seek of God in Faith, you shall know that, and everything else needful, one thing after another, as fast as you are prepared for it. But God will, doubtless, humble such as leave him out of their Schemes, as though his Providence was not at all concerned in the matter—whereas his Blessing is all in all."

To Whitefield, Gilman wrote in the same vein, on the same day:—

"Are you sufficiently sure that his call is from above, that he was moved by the Holy Ghost to this Expedition? Would it be no advantage to his Estate to win the place? May he not have a prospect of doubling his Wealth and Honours, if crowned with Success? What Demonstration has he given of being so entirely devoted to the Lord? He has a vast many Talents,—is it an easy thing for so Wise a man to become a Fool for Christ? so great a man to become a Little Child? so rich a man to crowd in at the Strait Gate of Conversion, and make so little noise?... If you see good to encourage the Expedition, be fully satisfy'd the project was formed in Heaven. Was the Lord first consulted in the affair? Did they wait for his Counsell?"

John Woolman, the New Jersey Quaker (born in 1720, died in 1772), said,—

"There is a principle which is pure, placed in the human mind, which, in different places and ages hath had different names; it is, however, pure, and proceeds from God. It is deep and inward, confined to no forms of religion, nor excluded from any, when the heart stands in perfect sincerity. In whomsoever this takes root and grows, they become brethren. That state in which every motion from the selfish spirit yieldeth to pure love, I may acknowledge with gratitude to the Father of Mercies, is often opened before me as a pearl to seek after."[7]

That even the pious egotism and the laughable vagaries of Transcendentalism had their prototype in the private meditations of the New England Calvinists, is well known to such as have studied old diaries of the Massachusetts ministers. Thus, a minister of Malden (a successor of the awful Michael Wigglesworth, whose alleged poem, "The Day of Doom," as Cotton Mather thought, might perhaps "find our children till the Day itself arrives"), in his diary for 1735, thus enters his trying experiences with a "one-horse Shay," whose short life may claim comparison with that of the hundred-year master-piece of Dr. Holmes's deacon:—

"January 31. Bought a shay for £27 10s. The Lord grant it may be a comfort and blessing to my family.

"March, 1735. Had a safe and comfortable journey to York.

"April 24. Shay overturned, with my wife and I in it, yet neither of us much hurt. Blessed be our gracious Preserver! Part of the shay, as it lay upon one side, went over my wife, and yet she was scarcely anything hurt. How wonderful the preservation!

"May 5. Went to the Beach with three of the children. The Beast being frighted, when we were all out of the shay, overturned and broke it. I desire (I hope I desire it) that the Lord would teach me suitably to repent this Providence, to make suitable remarks on it, and to be suitably affected with it. Have I done well to get me a shay? Have I not been proud or too fond of this convenience? Do I exercise the faith in the divine care and protection which I ought to do? Should I not be more in my study, and less fond of diversion? Do I not withhold more than is meet from pious and charitable uses?

"May 15. Shay brought home; mending cost 30 shillings. Favored in this beyond expectation.

"May 16. My wife and I rode to Rumney Marsh. The Beast frighted several times."

At last this divine comedy ends with the pathetic conclusive line,—

"June 4. Disposed of my shay to the Rev. Mr. White."

I will not pause to dwell on the laughable episodes and queer characteristic features of the Transcendental Period, though such it had in abundance. They often served to correct the soberer absurdity with which our whole country was slipping unconsciously down the easy incline of national ruin and dishonor,—from which only a bloody civil war could at last save us. Thoreau saw this clearly, and his political utterances, paradoxical as they seemed in the two decades from 1840 to 1860, now read like the words of a prophet. But there are some points in the American Renaissance which may here be touched on, so much light do they throw on the times. It was a period of strange faiths and singular apocalypses—that of Charles Fourier being one. In February, 1843, Mr. Emerson, writing to Henry Thoreau from New York, where he was then lecturing, said:—

"Mr. Brisbane has just given me a faithful hour and a half of what he calls his principles, and he shames truer men by his fidelity and zeal; and already begins to hear the reverberations of his single voice from most of the States of the Union. He thinks himself sure of W. H. Channing here, as a good Fourierist. I laugh incredulous whilst he recites (for it seems always as if he was repeating paragraphs out of his master's book) descriptions of the self-augmenting potency of the solar system, which is destined to contain one hundred and thirty-two bodies, I believe,—and his urgent inculcation of our stellar duties. But it has its kernel of sound truth, and its insanity is so wide of the New York insanities that it is virtue and honor."

This was written a few months before Thoreau himself went to New York, and it was while there that he received from his friends in Concord and in Harvard, the wondrous account of Mr. Alcott's Paradise Regained at Fruitlands; where in due time Thoreau made his visit and inspected that Garden of Eden on the Coldspring Brook.

If Mr. Brisbane had his "stellar duties" and inculcated them in others, the Brook Farmers of 1842-43 had their planetary mission also; namely, to cultivate the face of the planet they inhabited, and to do it with their own hands, as Adam and Noah did. Of the Brook Farm enterprise much has been written, and much more will be; but concerning the more individual dream of Thoreau's friends at "Fruitlands," less is known; and I may quote a few pages concerning it from Thoreau's correspondence. While Thoreau was at Staten Island in 1843, Mr. Emerson wrote to him often, giving the news of Concord as a Transcendental capital. In May of that year we have this intelligence:—

"Ellery Channing is well settled in his house, and works very steadily thus far, and our intercourse is very agreeable to me. Young Ball (B. W.) has been to see me, and is a prodigious reader and a youth of great promise,—born, too, in the good town. Mr. Hawthorne is well, and Mr. Alcott and Mr. Lane are revolving a purchase in Harvard of ninety acres."

This was "Fruitlands," described in the "Dial" for 1843, and which Charles Lane himself describes in a letter soon to be cited. In June, 1843, Mr. Emerson again sends tidings from Concord, where the Fitchburg railroad was then building:—

"The town is full of Irish, and the woods of engineers, with theodolite and red flag, singing out their feet and inches to each other from station to station. Near Mr. Alcott's (the Hosmer cottage) the road is already begun. From Mr. A. and Mr. Lane at Harvard we have yet heard nothing. They went away in good spirits, having sent 'Wood Abram' and Larned, and William Lane before them with horse and plow, a few days in advance, to begin the spring work. Mr. Lane paid me a long visit, in which he was more than I had ever known him gentle and open; and it was impossible not to sympathize with and honor projects that so often seem without feet or hands. They have near a hundred acres of land which they do not want, and no house, which they want first of all. But they account this an advantage, as it gives them the occasion they so much desire,—of building after their own idea. In the event of their attracting to their company a carpenter or two, which is not impossible, it would be a great pleasure to see their building,—which could hardly fail to be new and beautiful. They have fifteen acres of woodland, with good timber."

Then, passing in a moment from "Fruitlands" to Concord woods, Thoreau's friend writes:—

"Ellery Channing is excellent company, and we walk in all directions. He remembers you with great faith and hope, thinks you ought not to see Concord again these ten years; that you ought to grind up fifty Concords in your mill; and much other opinion and counsel he holds in store on this topic. Hawthorne walked with me yesterday afternoon, and not until after our return did I read his 'Celestial Railroad,' which has a serene strength we cannot afford not to praise, in this low life. I have letters from Miss Fuller at Niagara. She found it sadly cold and rainy at the Falls."

Not so with Mr. Alcott and Mr. Lane in the first flush of their hopes at Fruitlands. On the 9th of June,—the date of the letter just quoted being June 7,—Mr. Lane writes to Thoreau:—

"Dear Friend,—The receipt of two acceptable numbers of the 'Pathfinder' reminds me that I am not altogether forgotten by one who, if not in the busy world, is at least much nearer to it externally than I am. Busy indeed we all are, since our removal here; but so recluse is our position, that with the world at large we have scarcely any connection. You may possibly have heard that, after all our efforts during the spring had failed to place us in connection with the earth, and Mr. Alcott's journey to Oriskany and Vermont had turned out a blank,—one afternoon in the latter part of May, Providence sent to us the legal owner of a slice of the planet in this township (Harvard), with whom we have been enabled to conclude for the concession of his rights. It is very remotely placed, nearly three miles beyond the village, without a road, surrounded by a beautiful green landscape of fields and woods, with the distance filled up by some of the loftiest mountains in the State. The views are, indeed, most poetic and inspiring. You have no doubt seen the neighborhood; but from these very fields, where you may at once be at home and out, there is enough to love and revel in for sympathetic souls like yours. On the estate are about fourteen acres of wood, part of it extremely pleasant as a retreat, a very sylvan realization, which only wants a Thoreau's mind to elevate it to classic beauty.

"I have some imagination that you are not so happy and so well housed in your present position as you would be here amongst us; although at present there is much hard manual labor,—so much that, as you perceive, my usual handwriting is very greatly suspended. We have only two associates in addition to our own families; our house accommodations are poor and scanty; but the greatest want is of good female aid. Far too much labor devolves on Mrs. Alcott. If you should light on any such assistance, it would be charitable to give it a direction this way. We may, perhaps, be rather particular about the quality; but the conditions will pretty well determine the acceptability of the parties without a direct adjudication on our part. For though to me our mode of life is luxurious in the highest degree, yet generally it seems to be thought that the setting aside of all impure diet, dirty habits, idle thoughts, and selfish feelings, is a course of self-denial, scarcely to be encountered or even thought of in such an alluring world as this in which we dwell.

"Besides the busy occupations of each succeeding day, we form, in this ample theatre of hope, many forthcoming scenes. The nearer little copse is designed as the site of the cottages. Fountains can be made to descend from their granite sources on the hill-slope to every apartment if required. Gardens are to displace the warm grazing glades on the south, and numerous human beings, instead of cattle, shall here enjoy existence. The farther wood offers to the naturalist and the poet an exhaustless haunt; and a short cleaning of the brook would connect our boat with the Nashua. Such are the designs which Mr. Alcott and I have just sketched, as, resting from planting, we walked round this reserve.

"In your intercourse with the dwellers in the great city, have you alighted on Mr. Edward Palmer, who studies with Dr. Beach, the Herbalist? He will, I think, from his previous nature-love, and his affirmations to Mr. Alcott, be animated on learning of this actual wooing and winning of Nature's regards. We should be most happy to see him with us. Having become so far actual, from the real, we might fairly enter into the typical, if he could help us in any way to types of the true metal. We have not passed away from home, to see or hear of the world's doings, but the report has reached us of Mr. W. H. Channing's fellowship with the Phalansterians, and of his eloquent speeches in their behalf. Their progress will be much aided by his accession. To both these worthy men be pleased to suggest our humanest sentiments. While they stand amongst men, it is well to find them acting out the truest possible at the moment.

"Just before we heard of this place, Mr. Alcott had projected a settlement at the Cliffs on the Concord River, cutting down wood and building a cottage; but so many more facilities were presented here that we quitted the old classic town for one which is to be not less renowned. As far as I could judge, our absence promised little pleasure to our old Concord friends; but at signs of progress I presume they rejoiced with, dear friend,

"Yours faithfully,

"Charles Lane."

Another Palmer than the Edward here mentioned became an inmate of "Fruitlands," and, in course of time its owner; the abandoned paradise, which was held by Mr. Lane and Mr. Alcott for less than a year, is now the property of his son. Mr. Lane, after a time, returned to England and died there; Mr. Alcott to Concord, where, in 1845, he aided Thoreau in building his hut by Walden. Mr. Channing (the nephew and biographer of Dr. Channing) continued his connection with the "Phalansterians" in New Jersey until 1849 or later, for in that year Fredrika Bremer found him dwelling and preaching among them, at the "North American Phalanstery," to which he had been invited from his Unitarian parish in Cincinnati, about the time that Brook Farm was made a community, and before Mr. Alcott's dream had taken earthly shape at "Fruitlands." The account given by Miss Bremer of the terms upon which Mr. Channing was thus invited to New Jersey, show what was the spirit of Transcendentalism then, on its social side. They said to him,—

"Come to us,—be our friend and spiritual shepherd, but in perfect freedom. Follow your own inspiration,—preach, talk to us, how and when it appears best to you. We undertake to provide for your pecuniary wants; live free from anxiety, how, and where you will; but teach us how we should live and work; our homes and our hearts are open to you."

It was upon such terms as this, honorable alike to those who gave and those who received, that much of the intellectual and spiritual work of the Transcendental revival was done. There was another and an unsocial side to the movement also, which Mr. Emerson early described in these words, that apply to Thoreau and to Alcott at one period:—

"It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that many intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a solitary and critical way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation. They hold themselves aloof; they feel the disproportion between themselves and the work offered them, and they prefer to ramble in the country and perish of ennui, to the degradation of such charities and such ambitions as the city can propose to them. They are striking work and crying out for somewhat worthy to do. They are lonely; the spirit of their writing and conversation is lonely; they repel influences; they shun general society; they incline to shut themselves in their chamber in the house; to live in the country rather than in the town; and to find their tasks and amusements in solitude. They are not good citizens, not good members of society; unwillingly they bear their part of the public and private burdens; they do not willingly share in the public charities, in the public religious rites, in the enterprise of education, of missions, foreign or domestic, in the abolition of the slave trade, or in the temperance society. They do not even like to vote. The philanthropists inquire whether Transcendentalism does not mean sloth; they had as lief hear that their friend is dead, as that he is a Transcendentalist; for then is he paralyzed, and can do nothing for humanity."

It was this phase of Transcendentalism that gave most anxiety to Thoreau's good old pastor, Dr. Ripley, who early foresaw what immediate fruit might be expected from this fair tree of mysticism,—this "burning bush" which had started up, all at once, in the very garden of his parsonage. I know few epistles more pathetic in their humility and concern for the future, than one which Dr. Ripley addressed to Dr. Channing in February, 1839, after hearing and meditating on the utterances of Alcott, Emerson, Thoreau, George Ripley, and the other "apostles of the newness," who disturbed with their oracles the quiet air of his parish. He wrote:—

"Denied, as I am, the privilege of going from home, of visiting and conversing with enlightened friends, and of reading even; broken down with the infirmities of age, and subject to fits that deprive me of reason and the use of my limbs, I feel it a duty to be patient and submissive to the will of God, who is too wise to err, and too good to injure. Some reason is left,—my mental powers, though weak, are yet awake, and I long to be doing something for good. The contrast between paper and ink is so strong, that I can write better than do anything else. In this way I take the liberty to express to you a few thoughts, which you will receive as well-meant and sincere....

"We may certainly assume that whatever is unreasonable, self-contradictory, and destitute of common sense, is erroneous. Should we not be likely to find the truth, in all moral subjects, were we to make more use of plain reason and common sense? I know that our modern speculators, Transcendentalists, or, as they prefer to be called, Realists, presume to follow Reason in her purest dictates, her sublime and unfrequented regions. They presume, by her power, not only to discover what is truth, but to judge of revealed truth. But is not their whole process marred by leaving out common sense, by which mankind are generally governed? That superiority which places a man above the power of doing good to his fellow-men seems to me not very desirable. I honor most the man who transcends others in capacity and disposition to do good, and whose daily practice corresponds with his profession. Here I speak of professed Christians. I would not treat with disrespect and severe censure men who advance sentiments which I may neither approve nor understand, provided their authors be men of learning, piety, and holy lives. The speculations and novel opinions of such men rarely prove injurious. Nevertheless, I would that their mental endowments might find a better method of doing good,—a more simple and intelligible manner of informing and reforming their fellow-men....

"The hope of the gospel is my hope, my consolation, support and rejoicing. Such is my state of health that death is constantly before me; no minute would it be unexpected. I am waiting in faith and hope, but humble and penitent for my imperfections and faults. The prayer of the publican, 'God be merciful to me a sinner!' is never forgotten. I have hoped to see and converse with you, but now despair. If you shall think I use too much freedom with you, charge it to the respect and esteem which are cherished for your character by your affectionate friend and brother,