American Men of Letters
HENRY D. THOREAU
[Illustration: Henry D. Thoreau.]
American Men of Letters.
HENRY D. THOREAU.
BY
F. B. SANBORN.
_REVISED EDITION._
[Illustration]
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.
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.
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."
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
[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 _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."