The Project Gutenberg EBook of Henry D. Thoreau, by F. B. Sanborn This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Title: Henry D. Thoreau Author: F. B. Sanborn Release Date: March 12, 2016 [EBook #51426] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HENRY D. THOREAU *** Produced by Diane Monico and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) cover American Men of Letters HENRY D. THOREAU portrait and signature of Henry D. Thoreau. Henry D. Thoreau. title page 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. [Pg v] [Pg vii] [Pg viii] 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 [Pg ix] [Pg x] [Pg xi] [Pg xii] [Pg xiii] 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. CHAPTER I. Page Birth and Family 1 CHAPTER II. Childhood and Youth 32 CHAPTER III. Concord and its Famous People 63 CHAPTER IV. The Embattled Farmers 97 CHAPTER V. The Transcendental Period 124 CHAPTER VI. Early Essays in Authorship 148 CHAPTER VII. Friends and Companions 174 CHAPTER VIII. The Walden Hermitage 201 CHAPTER IX. Horace in the Role of Mæcenas 216 CHAPTER X. In Wood and Field 242 CHAPTER XI. [Pg xiv] [Pg xv] [Pg xvii] [Pg xviii] Personal Traits and Social Life 261 CHAPTER XII. Poet, Moralist, and Philosopher 284 CHAPTER XIII. Life, Death, and Immortality 297 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." [Pg 1] [Pg 2] [Pg 3] [Pg 4] 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, [Pg 5] [Pg 6] [Pg 7] [Pg 8] [Pg 9] 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 [Pg 10] [Pg 11] [Pg 12] [Pg 13] [Pg 14] [Pg 15] 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 [Pg 16] [Pg 17] [Pg 18] [Pg 19] [Pg 20] 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 [a sort of cousin of the Thoreaus] tells how he heard Tilly Brown once asking him to show him a peculiar inside lock in wrestling. 'Now, don't hurt me,—don't throw me hard.' He struck his antagonist inside his knees with his feet, and so deprived him of his legs. Edmund Hosmer remembers his tricks in the bar-room, shuffling cards, etc.; he could do anything with cards, yet he did not gamble. He would toss up his hat, twirling it over and over, and catch it on his head invariably. He once wanted to live at Hosmer's, but the latter was afraid of him. 'Can't we study up something?' he asked. Hosmer asked him into the house, and brought out apples and cider, and uncle Charles talked. 'You!' said he, 'I burst the bully of Haverhill.' He wanted to wrestle,—would not be put off. 'Well, we won't wrestle in the house.' So they went out to the yard, and a crowd got round. 'Come, spread some straw here,' said uncle Charles,—'I don't want to hurt him.' He threw him at once. They tried again; he told them to spread more straw, and he 'burst' him. Uncle Charles used to say that he hadn't a single tooth in his head. The fact 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 [Pg 21] [Pg 22] [Pg 23] [Pg 24] [Pg 25] [Pg 26] 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:— [Pg 27] [Pg 28] [Pg 29] [Pg 30] [Pg 31] "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...