THE EMBATTLED FARMERS.
It was not the famous lawyers, the godly ministers, the wealthy
citizens, nor even the learned ladies of Concord, who interested Henry
Thoreau specially,--but the sturdy farmers, each on his hereditary
acres, battling with the elements and enjoying that open-air life
which to Thoreau was the only existence worth having. As his best
biographer, Ellery Channing, says: "He came to see the inside of every
farmer's house and head, his pot of beans, and mug of hard cider.
Never in too much hurry for a dish of gossip, he could sit out the
oldest frequenter of the bar-room, and was alive from top to toe with
curiosity."
Concord, in our day, and still more in Thoreau's childhood, was dotted
with frequent old farm-houses, of the ample and picturesque kind that
bespeaks antiquity and hospitality. In one such he was born, though
not one of the oldest or the best. He was present at the downfall of
several of these ancient homesteads, in whose date and in the fortunes
of their owners for successive generations, he took a deep interest;
and still more in their abandoned orchards and door-yards, where the
wild apple tree and the vivacious lilac still flourished.
To show what sort of men these Concord farmers were in the days
when their historical shot was fired, let me give some anecdotes
and particulars concerning two of the original family stocks,--the
Hosmers, who first settled in Concord in 1635, with Bulkeley and
Willard, the founders of the town; and the Barretts, whose first
ancestor, Humphrey Barrett, came over in 1639. James Hosmer, a
clothier from Hawkhurst in Kent, with his wife Ann (related to Major
Simon Willard, that stout Kentishman, Indian trader and Indian
fighter, who bought of the Squaw Sachem the township of Concord, six
miles square), two infant daughters, and two maid-servants, came
from London to Boston in the ship "Elizabeth," and the next year
built a house on Concord Street, and a mill on the town brook. From
him descended James Hosmer, who was killed at Sudbury in 1658, in
an Indian fight, Stephen, his great-grandson, a famous surveyor,
and Joseph, his great-great-grandson, one of the promoters of the
Revolution, who had a share in its first fight at Concord Bridge.
Joseph Hosmer was the son of a Concord farmer, who, in 1743, seceded
from the parish church, because Rev. Daniel Bliss, the pastor, had
said in a sermon (as his opponents averred), "that it was as great a
sin for a man to get an estate by honest labor, if he had not a single
aim at the glory of God, as to get it by gaming at cards or dice."
What this great-grandfather of Emerson did say, a century before the
Transcendental epoch, was this, as he declared: "If husbandmen plow
and sow that they may be rich, and live in the pleasures of this
world, and appear grand before men, they are as far from true religion
in their plowing, sowing, etc., as men are that game for the same
purpose." Thomas Hosmer, being a prosperous husbandman, perhaps with
a turn for display, took offense, and became a worshipper at what was
called the "Black Horse Church,"--a seceding conventicle which met at
the tavern with the sign of the Black Horse, near where the Concord
Library now stands. Joseph Hosmer, his boy, was known at the village
school as "the little black colt,"--a lad of adventurous spirit, with
dark eyes and light hair, whose mother, Prudence Hosmer, would repeat
old English poetry until all her listeners but her son were weary.
When he was thirty-nine years old, married and settled, a farmer and
cabinet-maker, there was a convention in the parish church to consider
the Boston Port Bill, the doings of General Gage in Boston, and the
advice of Samuel Adams and John Hancock to resist oppression. Daniel
Bliss, the leading lawyer and leading Tory in Concord, eldest son of
Parson Bliss, and son-in-law of Colonel Murray, of Rutland, Vt., the
chief Tory of that region, made a speech in this convention against
the patriotic party. He was a graceful and fluent speaker, a handsome
man, witty, sarcastic, and popular, but with much scorn for the
plain people. He painted in effective colors the power of the mother
country and the feebleness of the colonies; he was elegantly dressed,
friendly in his manner, but discouraging to the popular heart, and
when he sat down, a deep gloom seemed to settle on the assembly. His
brother-in-law, Parson Emerson, an ardent patriot, if present, was
silent. From a corner of the meeting-house there rose at last a man
with sparkling eyes, plainly dressed in butternut brown, who began
to speak in reply to the handsome young Tory, at first slowly and
with hesitation, but soon taking fire at his own thoughts, he spoke
fluently, in a strain of natural eloquence, which gained him the ear
and applause of the assembly. A delegate from Worcester, who sat near
Mr. Bliss, noticed that the Tory was discomposed, biting his lip,
frowning, and pounding with the heel of his silver-buckled shoe. "Who
is the speaker?" he asked of Bliss. "Hosmer, a Concord mechanic," was
the scornful reply. "Then how does he come by his English?" "Oh, he
has an old mother at home, who sits in her chimney-corner and reads
and repeats poetry all day long;" adding in a moment, "He is the most
dangerous rebel in Concord, for he has all the young men at his back,
and where he leads the way they will surely follow."
Four months later, in April, 1775, this Concord mechanic made good the
words of his Tory townsman, for it was his speech to the minute-men
which goaded them on to the fight. After forming the regiment as
adjutant, he addressed them, closing with these words: "I have often
heard it said that the British boasted they could march through our
country, laying waste every village and neighborhood, and that we
would not dare oppose them,--_and I begin to believe it is true_."
Then turning to Major Buttrick, who commanded, and looking off from
the hill-side to the village, from which a thick smoke was rising, he
cried, "Will you let them burn the town down?" whereupon the sturdy
major, who had no such intention, ordered his men to march; and when,
a few minutes later, the British fired on his column of companies,
the Acton men at the head, he sprang from the ground shouting, "Fire,
fellow-soldiers, for God's sake fire!" and discharged his own piece
at the same instant. The story has often been told, but will bear
repetition. Thoreau heard it in 1835 from the lips of Emerson, as he
pronounced the centennial discourse in honor of the town's settlement
and history; but he had read it and heard it a hundred times before,
from his earliest childhood. Mr. Emerson added, after describing the
fight:--
"These poor farmers who came up, that day, to defend their
native soil, acted from the simplest instincts; they did
not know it was a deed of fame they were doing. These men
did not babble of glory; they never dreamed their children
would contend which had done the most. They supposed they
had a right to their corn and their cattle, without paying
tribute to any but their own governors. And as they had
no fear of man, they yet did have a fear of God. Captain
Charles Miles, who was wounded in the pursuit of the enemy,
told my venerable friend (Dr. Ripley), who sits by me,
'that he went to the services of that day with the same
seriousness and acknowledgment of God, which he carried to
church.'"
Humphrey Barrett, fifth in descent from the original settler, was born
in 1752, on the farm his ancestors had owned ever since 1640, and was
no doubt in arms at Concord Fight in 1775. His biographer says:--
"Some persons slightly acquainted with him in the latter
part of his life, judged him to be unsocial, cold, and
indifferent, but those most acquainted with him knew him to
be precisely the reverse. The following acts of his life
make apparent some traits of his character. A negro, by the
name of Cæsar Robbins, had been in the habit of getting
all the wood for his family use for many years from Mr.
Barrett's wood-lot near by him; this being done with the
knowledge and with the implied if not the express consent
of the owner. Mr. Barrett usually got the wood for his own
use from another part of his farm; but on one occasion
he thought he would get it from the lot by Cæsar's. He
accordingly sent two men with two teams, with directions to
cut only hard wood. The men had been gone but a few hours
when Cæsar came to Mr. Barrett's house, his face covered
with sweat, and in great agitation, and says, 'Master
Barrett, I have come to let you know that a parcel of men
and teams have broke into our wood-lot, and are making
terrible destruction of the very best trees, and unless we
do something immediately I shall be ruined.' Mr. Barrett
had no heart to resist this appeal of Cæsar's; he told him
not to be alarmed, for he would see that he was not hurt,
and would put the matter right. He then wrote an order to
his men to cut no more wood, but to come directly home
with their teams, and sent the order by Cæsar."[3]
The biographer of Mr. Barrett, who was also his attorney and legal
adviser, goes on to say:--
"A favorite nephew who bore his name, and whose guardian he
was, died under age in 1818, leaving a large estate, and
no relatives nearer than uncle and aunt and the children
of deceased aunts. Mr. Barrett believed that the estate in
equity ought to be distributed equally between the uncle
and aunt and the children of deceased aunts by right of
representation.[4] And although advised that such was
not the law, he still insisted upon having the question
carried before the Supreme Court for decision; and when
the court decided against his opinion, he carried out his
own views of equity by distributing the portion that fell
to him according to his opinion of what the law ought to
be. After he had been fully advised that the estate would
be distributed in a manner he thought neither equitable
nor just, he applied to the writer to make out his account
as guardian; furnishing the evidence, as he believed, of
the original amount of all his receipts as such guardian.
I made the account, charging him with interest at six per
cent. on all sums from the time of receipt till the time
of making the account. Mr. Barrett took the account for
examination, and soon returned it with directions to charge
him with compound interest, saying that he believed he had
realized as much as that. I accordingly made the account
conform to his directions. He then wished me to present
this account to the party who claimed half the estate,
and ask him to examine it with care and see if anything
was omitted. This was done, and no material omission
discovered, and no objection made. Mr. Barrett then said
that he had always kept all the property of his ward in
a drawer appropriated for the purpose; that he made the
amount of property in the drawer greater than the balance
of the account; and (handing to me the contents of the
drawer) he wished me to ascertain the precise sum to
which it amounted. I found that it exceeded the balance of
the account by $3,221.59. He then told me, in substance,
that he was quite unwilling to have so large an amount of
property go where it was in danger of being distributed
inequitably, and particularly as he was confident he had
disclosed every source from which he had realized any
property of his ward, and also the actual amount received;
_but_, as he knew not how it got into the drawer, and had
intended all the property there to go to his nephew, he
should not feel right to retain it, and therefore directed
me to add it to the amount of the estate,--which was
done."[5]
Conceive a community in which such characters were common, and imagine
whether the claim of King George and the fine gentlemen about him,
to tax the Americans without their own consent would be likely to
succeed! I find in obscure anecdotes like this sufficient evidence
that if John Hampden had emigrated to Massachusetts when he had it in
mind, he would have found men like himself tilling their own acres in
Concord. The Barretts, from their name, may have been Normans, but,
like Hampden, the Hosmers were Saxons, and held land in England before
William the Conqueror. When Major Hosmer, who was adjutant, and formed
the line of the regiment that returned the British fire at Concord
Bridge, had an estate to settle about 1785, the heir to which was
supposed to be in England, he employed an agent, who was then visiting
London, to notify the heir, and also desired him to go to the Heralds'
Office and ascertain what coat-of-arms belonged to any branch of the
Hosmer family. When the agent (who may have been Mr. Tilly Merrick, of
Concord, John Adams's attaché in Holland), returned to America, after
reporting his more important business to Major Hosmer, he added,--
"I called at the Heralds' Office in London, and the clerk
said, '_There was no coat-of-arms for you, and, if you were
an Englishman you would not want one; for_ (he said) _there
were Hosmers in Kent long before the Conquest; and at the
battle of Hastings, the men of Kent were the vanguard of
King Harold_.'"
If Major Hosmer's ancestors failed to drive back the invaders then,
their descendants made good the failure in Concord seven centuries
later.
Thoreau's favorite walk, as he tells us,--the pathway toward
Heaven,--was along the old Marlborough road, west and southwest from
Concord village, through deep woods in Concord and in Sudbury. To
reach this road he passed by the great Hosmer farm-house, built by the
old major already mentioned, in 1760 or thereabout, and concerning
which there is a pretty legend that Thoreau may have taken with him
along the Marlborough road. In 1758, young Jo. Hosmer, "the little
black colt," drove to Marlborough one autumn day with a load of
furniture he had made for Jonathan Barnes, a rich farmer, and town
clerk in thrifty Marlborough. He had received the money for his
furniture, and was standing on the doorstep, preparing to go home,
when a young girl, Lucy Barnes, the daughter of the house, ran up to
him and said, "Concord woods are dark, and a thunderstorm is coming
up; you had better stay all night." "Since you ask me, I will," was
the reply, and the visit was often repeated in the next few months.
But when he asked farmer Jonathan for his daughter, the reply was,--
"Concord plains are barren soil. Lucy had better marry her
cousin John, whose father will give him one of the best
farms in Marlborough, with a good house on it, and Lucy can
match his land acre for acre."
Joseph returned from that land of Egypt, and like a wise youth took
the hint, and built a house of his own, planting the elm trees that
now overshadow it, after a hundred and twenty years. After the due
interval he went again to Marlborough, and found Lucy Barnes in the
September sunshine, gathering St. Michael's pears in her father's
garden. Cousin John was married, by this time, to another damsel.
Miss Lucy was bent on having her own way and her own Joseph; and so
Mr. Barnes gave his consent. They were married at Christmas, 1761;
and Lucy came home behind him on his horse, through the same Concord
woods. She afterwards told her youngest son, with some pique:--
"When my brother Jonathan was married, and went to New
Hampshire, twenty couples on horseback followed them to
Haverhill, on the Merrimac, but when your father and I were
married, we came home alone through these dark Concord
woods."[6]
The son of this lively Lucy Hosmer, Rufus Hosmer, of Stow, was a
classmate, at Cambridge, of Washington Allston, the late Chief
Justice Shaw, and Dr. Charles Lowell, father of Lowell the poet. They
graduated in 1798, and Dr. Lowell afterwards wrote:--
"I can recall with peculiar pleasure a vacation passed in
Concord in my senior year, which Loammi Baldwin, Lemuel
Shaw, Washington Allston, and myself spent with Rufus
Hosmer at his father's house. I recall the benign face
of Major Hosmer, as he stood in the door to receive us,
with his handsome daughter-in-law (the wife of Capt. Cyrus
Hosmer) on his arm. There was a charming circle of young
people then living in Concord, and we boys enjoyed this
very much; but we liked best of all to stay at home and
listen to the Major's stories. It was very pleasant to have
a rainy day come for this, and hard to tell which seemed
the happier, he or we."
Forty years afterward, in 1838, Dr. Lowell's son, James Russell
Lowell, coming under college discipline, was sent to Concord to spend
a similar summer vacation, and wrote his class poem in that town.
Major Hosmer died in 1821, at the age of eighty-five. Mr. Samuel Hoar,
long the leader of the Middlesex County bar, who knew him in his later
life, once said,--
"In two respects he excelled any one I have ever known; he
was more entirely free from prejudice, and also the best
reader of men. So clear was his mind and so strong his
reasoning power, that I would have defied the most eloquent
pleader at the bar to have puzzled him, no matter how
skillfully he concealed the weak points of the case. I can
imagine him listening quietly, and saying in his slow way,
'It's a pity so many fine words should be wasted, for, you
see, the man's on the wrong side.'"
Another old lawyer of Concord, who first saw Major Hosmer when he was
a child of ten, and the Major was sixty years old, said,--
"I then formed an opinion of him in two respects that I
never altered: First, that he had the handsomest eyes I
ever saw; second, those eyes saw the inside of my head as
clearly as they did the outside."
He was for many years sheriff of the county, and it was the habit of
the young lawyers in term-time to get round his chair and ask his
opinion about their cases. Such was his knowledge of the common law,
and so well did he know the judges and jurymen, that when he said
to Mr. Hoar, "I fear you will lose your case," that gentleman said,
"from that moment I felt it lost, for I never knew him to make a
wrong guess." He was a Federalist of the old school, and in his eyes
Alexander Hamilton was the first man in America. His son held much the
same opinion of Daniel Webster.
Near by Major Hosmer's farm-house stood the old homestead and
extensive farm buildings of the Lee family, who at the beginning of
the Revolution owned one of the two or three great farms in Concord.
This estate has been owned and sold in one parcel of about four
hundred acres ever since it was first occupied by Henry Woodhouse
about 1650. It lies between the two rivers Assabet and Musketaquid,
and includes Nahshawtuc, or Lee's Hill, on which, in early days, was
an Indian village. The Lees inherited it from the original owner,
and held it for more than one hundred years, though it narrowly
escaped confiscation in 1775, its owner being a Tory. Early in the
present century it fell, by means of a mortgage, into the hands of
"old Billy Gray" (the founder of the fortunes that for two or three
generations have been held in the Gray family of Boston), was by him
sold to Judge Fay, of Cambridge, and by him, in 1822, conveyed to his
brother-in-law, Joseph Barrett, of Concord, a distant cousin of the
Humphrey Barrett, mentioned elsewhere. Joseph Barrett had been one
of Major Hosmer's deputies, when the old yeoman was sheriff, but now
turned his attention to farming his many acres, and deserves mention
here as one of the Concord farmers of two generations after the
battle, among whom Henry Thoreau grew up. Indeed, the Lee Farm was
one of his most accustomed haunts, since the river flowed round it
for a mile or two, and its commanding hill-top gave a prospect toward
the western and northwestern mountains, Wachusett and Monadnoc chief
among the beautiful brotherhood, whom Thoreau early saluted with a
dithyrambic verse:--
"With frontier strength ye stand your ground,
With grand content ye circle round,
(Tumultuous silence for all sound),
Ye distant nursery of rills,
Monadnoc and the Peterboro hills;
* * * * *
But special I remember thee,
Wachusett, who, like me,
Standest alone without society;
Thy far blue eye
A remnant of the sky."
Lee's Hill (which must be distinguished from Lee's Cliff, three
miles further up the main river), was the centre of this farm, and
almost of the township itself, and Squire Barrett, while he tilled
its broad acres (or left them untilled), might be called the centre
of the farmers of his county. He was for some years president of the
Middlesex Agricultural Society (before which, in later years, Emerson,
and Thoreau, and Agassiz gave addresses), and took the prize in the
plowing-match at its October cattle-show, holding his own plow, and
driving his oxen himself. Descending from the committee-room in dress
coat and ruffled shirt, he found his plow-team waiting for him, but
his rivals in the match already turning their furrows. Laying off
his coat, and fortifying himself with a pinch of maccaboy, while, as
his teamster vowed, "that nigh-ox had his eye on the 'Squire from
the time he hove in sight, ready to start the minute he took the
plow-handles,"--then stepping to the task, six feet and one inch in
height, and in weight two hundred and fifty pounds, the 'Squire began,
and before the field was plowed he had won the premium. He was one of
the many New England yeomen we have all known, who gave the lie to the
common saying about the sturdier bulk and sinew of our beer-drinking
cousins across the water. 'Squire Barrett could lift a barrel of cider
into a cart, and once carried on his shoulders, up two flights of
stairs, a sack containing eight bushels of Indian corn, which must
have weighed more than four hundred pounds. He was a good horseman,
an accomplished dancer, and in the hayfield excelled in the graceful
sweep of his scythe and the flourish of his pitchfork.
In course of time (1840) Mr. Alcott, with his wife (a daughter of
Colonel May, of Boston), and those daughters who have since become
celebrated, came to live in the Hosmer cottage not far from 'Squire
Barrett's, and under the very eaves of Major Hosmer's farm-house, to
which in 1761 came the fair and willful Lucy Barnes. The portly and
courtly 'Squire, who knew Colonel May, came to call on his neighbors,
and had many a chat with Mrs. Alcott about her Boston kindred, the
Mays, Sewalls, Salisburys, etc. His civility was duly returned by Mrs.
Alcott, who, when 'Squire Barrett was a candidate for State Treasurer
in 1845, was able, by letters to her friends in Boston, to give him
useful support. He was chosen, and held the office till his death in
1849, when Thoreau had just withdrawn from his Walden hermitage, and
was publishing his first book, "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack."
Thoreau's special friend among the farmers was another character,
Edmund Hosmer, a scion of the same prolific Hosmer stock, who died in
1881. Edmund Hosmer, with Mr. Alcott, George Curtis and his brother
Burrill, and other friends, helped Thoreau raise the timbers of his
cabin in 1845, and was often his Sunday visitor in the hermitage. Of
him it is that mention is made in "Walden," as follows:--
"On a Sunday afternoon, if I chanced to be at home, I
heard the crunching of the snow, made by the step of a
long-headed farmer, who from far through the woods sought
my house, to have a social 'crack;' one of the few of his
vocation who are 'men on their farms;' who donned a frock
instead of a professor's gown, and is as ready to extract
the moral out of church or state as to haul a load of
manure from his barn-yard. We talked of rude and simple
times, when men sat about large fires in cold, bracing
weather, with clear heads; and when other dessert failed,
we tried our teeth on many a nut which wise squirrels have
long since abandoned,--for those which have the thickest
shells are commonly empty."
Edmund Hosmer, who was a friend of Mr. Emerson also, and of whom
George Curtis and his brother hired land which they cultivated for
a time, has been celebrated in prose and verse by other Concord
authors. I suppose it was he of whom Emerson wrote thus in his
apologue of Saadi, many years ago:--
"Said Saadi,--When I stood before
Hassan the camel-driver's door,
I scorned the fame of Timour brave,--
Timour to Hassan was a slave.
In every glance of Hassan's eye
I read rich years of victory.
And I, who cower mean and small
In the frequent interval
When wisdom not with me resides,
Worship Toil's wisdom that abides.
I shunned his eyes--the faithful man's,
I shunned the toiling Hassan's glance."
Edmund Hosmer was also, in George Curtis's description of a
conversation at Mr. Emerson's house in 1845, "the sturdy farmer
neighbor, who had bravely fought his way through inherited
embarrassments to the small success of a New England husbandman, and
whose faithful wife had seven times merited well of her country." And
it may be that he was Ellery Channing's
"Spicy farming sage,
Twisted with heat and cold and cramped with age,
Who grunts at all the sunlight through the year,
And springs from bed each morning with a cheer.
Of all his neighbors he can something tell,
'Tis bad, whate'er, we know, and like it well!
The bluebird's song he hears the first in spring,--
Shoots the last goose bound south on freezing wing."
Hosmer might have sat, also, for the more idyllic picture of the
Concord farmer, which Channing has drawn in his "New England":--
"This man takes pleasure o'er the crackling fire,
His glittering axe subdued the monarch oak;
He earned the cheerful blaze by something higher
Than pensioned blows.--he owned the tree he stroke,
And knows the value of the distant smoke,
When he returns at night, his labor done,
Matched in his action with the long day's sun."
Near the small farm of Edmund Hosmer, when Mr. Curtis lived with him
and sometimes worked on his well-tilled acres, lay a larger farm,
which, about the beginning of Thoreau's active life, was brought from
neglect and barrenness into high cultivation by Captain Abel Moore,
another Concord farmer, and one of the first, in this part of the
country, to appreciate the value of our bog-meadows for cultivation
by ditching and top-dressing with the sand which Nature had so
thoughtfully ridged up in hills close by. Under the name of "Captain
Hardy," Emerson celebrated this achievement of his townsman, upon
which the hundreds who in summer strolled to the School of Philosophy
in Mr. Alcott's orchard, gazed with admiration,--bettered as it had
been by the thirty years' toil and skill bestowed upon it since by
Captain Moore's son and grandson. Emerson said:--
"Look across the fence into Captain Hardy's land. There's a
musician for you who knows how to make men dance for him in
all weathers,--all sorts of men,--Paddies, felons, farmers,
carpenters, painters,--yes, and trees, and grapes, and ice,
and stone,--hot days, cold days. Beat that true Orpheus
lyre if you can. He knows how to make men sow, dig, mow,
and lay stone-wall; to make trees bear fruit God never gave
them, and foreign grapes yield the juices of France and
Spain, on his south side. He saves every drop of sap, as
if it were his blood. See his cows, his horses, his swine!
And he, the piper that plays the jig they all must dance,
biped and quadruped, is the plainest, stupidest harlequin,
in a coat of no colors. His are the woods, the waters,
hills, and meadows. With one blast of his pipe he danced a
thousand tons of gravel from yonder blowing sand-heap to
the bog-meadow, where the English grass is waving over
thirty acres; with another, he winded away sixty head of
cattle in the spring, to the pastures of Peterboro' on the
hills."
Such were and are the yeomen of Concord, among whom Thoreau spent
his days, a friend to them and they to him, though each sometimes
spoke churlishly of the other. He surveyed their wood-lots, laid
out their roads, measured their fields and pastures for division
among the heirs when a husbandman died, inspected their rivers and
ponds, and exchanged information with them concerning the birds, the
beasts, insects, flowers, crops, and trees. Their yearly Cattle Show
in October was his chief festival,--one of the things he regretted,
when living on the edge of New York Bay, and sighing for Fairhaven
and White Pond. Without them the landscape of his native valley would
not have been so dear to his eyes, and to their humble and perennial
virtues he owed more inspiration than he would always confess.
He read in the crabbed Latin of those old Roman farmers, Cato, Varro,
and musically-named Columella, and fancied the farmers of Concord were
daily obeying Cato's directions, who in turn was but repeating the
maxims of a more remote antiquity.
"I see the old, pale-faced farmer walking beside his team,
with contented thoughts," he says, "for the five thousandth
time. This drama every day in the streets; this is the
theatre I go to.... Human life may be transitory and full
of trouble, but the perennial mind, whose survey extends
from that spring to this, from Columella to Hosmer, is
superior to change. I will identify myself with that which
did not die with Columella, and will not die with Hosmer."
* * * * *
_Note._--The account of "Captain Hardy" was copied by
Channing from Emerson's Journal into the first biography
of Thoreau, without the name of the author; and so was
credited by me to Thoreau in a former edition of this book.