FRIENDS AND COMPANIONS.
"Margaret Fuller," says William Henry Channing, "was indeed The
Friend; this was her vocation." It was no less the vocation of
Thoreau, though in a more lofty, unvarying, and serene manner.
"Literally," says the friend who best knew him, "his
views of friendship were high and noble. Those who loved
him never had the least reason to regret it. He made no
useless professions, never asked one of those questions
that destroy all relation; but he was on the spot at the
time, and had so much of human life in his keeping to the
last, that he could spare a breathing-place for a friend.
He meant friendship, and meant nothing else, and stood
by it without the slightest abatement; not veering as a
weathercock with each shift of a friend's fortune, nor like
those who bury their early friendships, in order to make
room for fresh corpses."
It is, therefore, impossible to sketch him by himself. He could have
said, with Ellery Channing,--
"O band of Friends, ye breathe within this space,
And the rough finish of a humble man
By your kind touches rises into art."
His earliest companion was his brother John, "a flowing generous
spirit," as one described him, for whom his younger brother never
ceased to grieve. Walking among the Cohasset rocks and looking at the
scores of shipwrecked men from the Irish brig St. John, in 1849, he
said, "A man can attend but one funeral in his life, can behold but
one corpse." With him it was the funeral of John Thoreau in February,
1842. They had made the voyage of the Concord and Merrimac together,
in 1839; they had walked and labored together, and invented Indian
names for one another from boyhood. John was "Sachem Hopeful of
Hopewell,"--a sunny soul, always serene and loving. When publishing
his first book, in 1849, Henry dedicated it to this brother, with the
simple verse--
"Where'er thou sail'st who sailed with me,
Though now thou climbest loftier mounts,
And fairer rivers dost ascend,
Be thou my Muse, my Brother John."
John Thoreau's death was singular and painful; his brother could not
speak of it without physical suffering, so that when he related it to
his friend Ricketson at New Bedford, he turned pale and was forced to
go to the door for air. This was the only time Mr. Ricketson ever saw
him show deep emotion. His sister Sophia once said:--
"Henry rarely spoke of dear John; it pained him too much.
He sent the following verses from Staten Island in May,
1843, the year after John's death, in a letter to Helen.
You will see that they apply to himself:"--
"Brother, where dost thou dwell?
What sun shines for thee now?
Dost thou, indeed, fare well,
As we wished here below?
"What season didst thou find?
'T was winter here.
Are not the Fates more kind
Than they appear?
"Is thy brow clear again,
As in thy youthful years?
And was that ugly pain
The summit of thy fears?
"Yet thou wast cheery still;
They could not quench thy fire;
Thou didst abide their will,
And then retire.
"Where chiefly shall I look
To feel thy presence near?
Along the neighboring brook
May I thy voice still hear?
"Dost thou still haunt the brink
Of yonder river's tide?
And may I ever think
That thou art by my side?
"What bird wilt thou employ
To bring me word of thee?
For it would give them joy,--
'T would give them liberty,
To serve their former lord
With wing and minstrelsy.
"A sadder strain mixed with their song,
They've slowlier built their nests;
Since thou art gone
Their lively labor rests.
"Where is the finch, the thrush
I used to hear?
Ah, they could well abide
The dying year.
"Now they no more return,
I hear them not;
They have remained to mourn;
Or else forgot."
Before the death of his brother, Thoreau had formed the friendship
with Ellery Channing, that was in some degree to replace the daily
intimacy he had enjoyed with John Thoreau. This man of genius, and
of the moods that sometimes make genius an unhappy boon, was a year
younger than Thoreau when he came, in 1843, to dwell in Concord with
his bride, a younger sister of Margaret Fuller. They lived first in a
cottage near Mr. Emerson's, Thoreau being at that time an inmate of
Mr. Emerson's household; afterwards, in 1843, Mr. Channing removed
to a hill-top some miles away, then to New York in 1844-45, then to
Europe for a few months, and finally to a house on the main street
of the village, opposite the last residence of the Thoreau family,
where Henry lived from 1850 till his death in 1862. In the garden
of Mr. Channing's house, which lay on the river, Thoreau kept his
boat, under a group of willows, and from that friendly harbor all his
later voyages were made. At times they talked of occupying this house
together.
"I have an old house and a garden patch," said Channing,
"you have legs and arms, and we both need each other's
companionship. These miserable cracks and crannies which
have made the wall of life look thin and fungus-like, will
be cemented by the sweet and solid mortar of friendship."
They did in fact associate more closely than if they had lived in the
same house.
At the age of thirty-seven, when contemplating a removal from the
neighborhood of his friend Thoreau, this humorous man of letters thus
described himself and his tastes to another friend:--
"I am a poet, or of a poetical temper or mood, with a very
limited income both of brains and of moneys. This world
is rather a sour world. But as I am, equally with you,
an admirer of Cowper, why should I not prove a sort of
unnecessary addition to your neighborhood possibly? I may
leave Concord, and my aim would be to get a small place,
in the vicinity of a large town, with some land, and, if
possible, near to some _one_ person with whom I might in
some measure fraternize. Come, my neighbor! thou hast now
a new occupation, the setting up of a poet and literary
man,--one who loves old books, old garrets, old wines,
old pipes, and (last not least) Cowper. We might pass the
winter in comparing _variorum_ editions of our favorite
authors, and the summer in walking and horticulture. This
is a grand scheme of life. All it requires is the house
of which I spake. I think one in middle life feels averse
to change, and especially to local change. The Lares and
Penates love to establish themselves, and desire no moving.
But the fatal hour may come, when, bidding one long, one
last adieu to those weather-beaten Penates, we sally forth
with Don Quixote, once more to strike our lances into some
new truth, or life, or man."
This hour did come, and the removal was made for a few months or
years, during which the two friends met at odd intervals, and in
queer companionship. But the "sweet and solid mortar of friendship"
was never broken, though the wall of life came to look like a ruin.
When, in Thoreau's last illness, Channing, in deep grief, said "that
a change had come over the dream of life, and that solitude began to
peer out curiously from the dells and wood-roads," Thoreau whispered,
"with his foot on the step of the other world," says Channing, "It is
better some things should end." Of their earlier friendship, and of
Channing's poetic gift, so admirable, yet so little appreciated by his
contemporaries, this mention occurs in a letter written by Thoreau in
March, 1856:--
"I was surprised to hear the other day that Channing was in
X. When he was here last (in December, I think), he said,
like himself, in answer to my inquiry where he lived, 'that
he did not know the name of the place;' so it has remained
in a degree of obscurity to me. I am rejoiced to hear that
you are getting on so bravely with him and his verses. He
and I, as you know, have been old cronies,--
"'Fed the same flock, by fountain, shade, and rill,
Together both, ere the high lawns appeared
Under the opening eyelids of the morn,
We drove afield, and both together heared,' etc.
"'But O, the heavy change,' now he is gone. The Channing
you have seen and described is the real Simon Pure. You
have seen him. Many a good ramble may you have together!
You will see in him still more of the same kind to attract
and to puzzle you. How to serve him most effectually has
long been a problem with his friends. Perhaps it is left
for you to solve it. I suspect that the most that you or
any one can do for him is to appreciate his genius,--to
buy and read, and cause others to buy and read his poems.
That is the hand which he has put forth to the world,--take
hold of that. Review them if you can,--perhaps take the
risk of publishing something more which he may write.
Your knowledge of Cowper will help you to know Channing.
He will accept sympathy and aid, but he will not bear
questioning, unless the aspects of the sky are particularly
auspicious. He will ever be 'reserved and enigmatic,' and
you must deal with him at arm's length. I have no secrets
to tell you concerning him, and do not wish to call
obvious excellences and defects by far-fetched names. Nor
need I suggest how witty and poetic he is,--and what an
inexhaustible fund of good-fellowship you will find in him."
In the record of his winter visitors at Walden, Thoreau had earlier
made mention of Channing, who then lived on Ponkawtasset Hill, two or
three miles away from the hermitage.
"He who came from farthest to my lodge," says Thoreau,
"through deepest snows and most dismal tempests, was a
poet. A farmer, a hunter, a soldier, a reporter, even
a philosopher may be daunted, but nothing can deter a
poet, for he is actuated by pure love. Who can predict
his comings and goings? His business calls him out at all
hours; even when doctors sleep. We made that small house
ring with boisterous mirth, and resound with the murmur
of much sober talk,--making amends then to Walden vale
for the long silences. At suitable intervals there were
regular salutes of laughter, which might have been referred
indifferently to the last uttered or the forthcoming jest."
In his "Week," as Thoreau floats down the Concord, past the Old Manse,
he commemorates first Hawthorne and then Channing, saying of the
latter,--
"On Ponkawtasset, since, with such delay,
Down this still stream we took our meadowy way,
A poet wise hath settled whose fine ray
Doth faintly shine on Concord's twilight day.
Like those first stars, whose silver beams on high,
Shining more brightly as the day goes by,
Most travelers cannot at first descry,
But eyes that wont to range the evening sky."
These were true and deserved compliments, but they availed little (no
more than did the praises of Emerson in the "Dial," and of Hawthorne
in his "Mosses") to make Channing known to the general reader. Some
years after Thoreau's death, when writing to another friend, this
neglected poet said:--
"Is there no way of disabusing S. of the liking he has for
the verses I used to write? You probably know he is my only
patron, but that is no reason he should be led astray.
_There is no other test_ of the value of poetry, but its
popularity. My verses have never secured a single reader
but S. He really believes, I think, in those so-called
verses; but they are not good,--they are wholly unknown and
unread, and always will be. Mediocre poetry is worse than
nothing,--and mine is not even mediocre. I have presented
S. with the last set of those little books there is, to
have them bound, if he will. He can keep them as a literary
_curio_, and in his old age amuse himself with thinking,
'How could ever I have liked these?'"
Yet this self-disparaging poet was he who wrote,--
"If my bark sinks, 't is to another sea,"--
and who cried to his companions,--
"Ye heavy-hearted mariners
Who sail this shore,--
Ye patient, ye who labor,
Sitting at the sweeping oar,
And see afar the flashing sea-gulls play
On the free waters, and the glad bright day
Twine with his hand the spray,--
From out your dreariness,
From your heart-weariness,
I speak, for I am yours
On these gray shores."
It is he, also, who has best told, in prose and verse, what Thoreau
was in his character and his literary art. In dedicating to his
friend Henry, the poem called "Near Home," published in 1858, Channing
thus addressed him:--
"Modest and mild and kind,
Who never spurned the needing from thy door--
(Door of thy heart, which is a palace-gate);
Temperate and faithful,--in whose word the world
Might trust, sure to repay; unvexed by care,
Unawed by Fortune's nod, slave to no lord,
Nor coward to thy peers,--long shalt thou live!
Not in this feeble verse, this sleeping age,--
But in the roll of Heaven, and at the bar
Of that high court where Virtue is in place,
There thou shalt fitly rule, and read the laws
Of that supremer state,--writ Jove's behest,
And even old Saturn's chronicle;
Works ne'er Hesiod saw,--types of all things,
And portraitures of all--whose golden leaves,
Roll back the ages' doors, and summon up
Unsleeping truths, by which wheels on Heaven's prime."
In these majestic lines, suggestive of Dante, of Shakespeare, and of
Milton, yet fitting, by the force of imagination, to the simplicity
and magnanimity that Thoreau had displayed, one reads the secret of
that character which made the Concord recluse first declare to the
world the true mission of John Brown, whose friend he had been for a
few years. Of Alcott and of Hawthorne, of Margaret Fuller and Horace
Greeley, he had been longer the friend; and in the year before he
met Brown he had stood face to face with Walt Whitman in Brooklyn.
Mr. Alcott's testimony to Thoreau's worth and friendliness has been
constant.
"If I were to proffer my earnest prayer to the gods for the
greatest of all human privileges," he said one day, after
returning from an evening spent at Walden with Thoreau,
"it should be for the gift of a severely candid friend. To
most, the presence of such is painfully irksome; they are
lovers of present reputation, and not of that exaltation
of soul which friends and discourse were given to awaken
and cherish in us. Intercourse of this kind I have found
possible with my friends Emerson and Thoreau; and the
evenings passed in their society during these winter months
have realized my conception of what friendship, when great
and genuine, owes to and takes from its objects."
Not less emphatic was Thoreau's praise of Mr. Alcott, after these long
winter evenings with him in the hut:--
"One of the last of the philosophers," he writes in
"Walden,"--"Connecticut gave him to the world,--he peddled
first her wares, afterwards, as he declares, his brains.
These he peddles still, prompting God and disgracing man,
bearing for fruit his brain only, like the nut its kernel.
I think he must be the man of the most faith of any alive.
His words and attitude always suppose a better state of
things than other men are acquainted with, and he will be
the last man to be disappointed as the ages revolve. He
has no venture in the present. But though comparatively
disregarded now, laws unsuspected by most will take effect,
and masters of families and rulers will come to him for
advice. A true friend of man; almost the only friend of
human progress. He is perhaps the sanest man and has
the fewest crotchets of any I chance to know,--the same
yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow. Of yore we had sauntered
and talked, and effectually put the world behind us; for he
was pledged to no institution in it, freeborn, _ingenuus_.
Great Looker! great Expecter! to converse with whom was a
New England Night's Entertainment. Ah! such discourse we
had, hermit and philosopher, and the old settler I have
spoken of,--we three,--it expanded and racked my little
house."
Nor did Thoreau participate in such discourse at Walden alone, but
frequented Mr. Alcott's conversations at Mr. Emerson's house in
Concord, at Hawthorne's in Salem, at Marston Watson's in Plymouth, at
Daniel Ricketson's in New Bedford, and once or twice in Boston and New
York. With Mr. Alcott and Alice Carey, Thoreau visited Horace Greeley
at Chappaqua, in 1856, and with Mr. Alcott alone he called on Walt
Whitman in Brooklyn the same year.
Between Hawthorne and Thoreau, Ellery Channing was perhaps the
interpreter, for they had not very much in common, though friendly
and mutually respectful. The boat in which Thoreau made his voyage of
1839, on the Concord and Merrimac, came afterwards into Hawthorne's
possession, and was the frequent vehicle for Channing and Hawthorne as
they made those excursions which Hawthorne has commemorated. Channing
also has commemorated those years when Hawthorne spent the happiest
hours of his life in the Old Manse, to which he had removed soon after
his marriage in 1842:--
"There in the old gray house, whose end we see
Half peeping through the golden willow's veil,
Whose graceful twigs make foliage through the year,
My Hawthorne dwelt, a scholar of rare worth,
The gentlest man that kindly nature drew;
New England's Chaucer, Hawthorne fitly lives.
His tall, compacted figure, ably strung
To urge the Indian chase or guide the way,
Softly reclining 'neath the aged elm,
Like some still rock looked out upon the scene,
As much a part of nature as itself."
In July, 1860, writing to his sister Sophia, among the New Hampshire
mountains, Thoreau said:--
"Mr. Hawthorne has come home. I went to meet him the other
evening (at Mr. Emerson's), and found that he had not
altered, except that he was looking pretty brown after his
voyage. He is as simple and childlike as ever."
This was upon the return of Hawthorne from his long residence abroad,
in England, Portugal, and Italy. Thoreau died two years before
Hawthorne, and they are buried within a few feet of each other in the
Concord cemetery, their funerals having proceeded from the same parish
church near by.
Of Thoreau's relations with Emerson, this is not the place to speak in
full; it was, however, the most important, if not the most intimate,
of all his friendships, and that out of which the others mainly
grew. Their close acquaintance began in 1837. In the latter part of
April, 1841, Thoreau became an inmate of Mr. Emerson's house, and
remained there till, in the spring of 1843, he went for a few months
to be the tutor of Mr. William Emerson's sons at Staten Island.
In 1840, while teaching school in Concord, Thoreau seems to have
been fully admitted into that circle of which Emerson, Alcott, and
Margaret Fuller were the leaders. In May, 1840, this circle met, as
it then did frequently, at the house of Mr. Emerson, to converse on
"the inspiration of the Prophet and Bard, the nature of Poetry, and
the causes of the sterility of Poetic Inspiration in our age and
country." Mr. Alcott, in his diary, has preserved a record of this
meeting, and some others of the same kind. It seems that on this
occasion--Thoreau being not quite twenty-three years old, Mr. Alcott
forty-one, Mr. Emerson thirty-seven, and Miss Fuller thirty--all
these were present, and also Jones Very, the Salem poet, Dr. F. H.
Hedge, Dr. C. A. Bartol, Dr. Caleb Stetson, and Robert Bartlett of
Plymouth. Bartlett and Very were graduates of Harvard a year before
Thoreau, and afterwards tutors there; indeed, all the company except
Alcott were Cambridge scholars,--for Margaret Fuller, without entering
college, had breathed in the learned air of Cambridge, and gone beyond
the students who were her companions. I find no earlier record of
Thoreau's participation in these meetings; but afterward he was often
present. In May, 1839, Mr. Alcott had held one of his conversations
at the house of Thoreau's mother, but no mention is made of Henry
taking part in it. At a conversation in Concord in 1846, one April
evening, Thoreau came in from his Walden hermitage, and protested with
some vehemence against Mr. Alcott's declaration that Jesus "stood in
a more tender and intimate nearness to the heart of mankind than any
character in life or literature." Thoreau thought he "asserted this
claim for the fair Hebrew in exaggeration"; yet he could say in the
"Week," "It is necessary not to be Christian to appreciate the beauty
and significance of the life of Christ."
This earliest of his volumes, like most of his writings, is a record
of his friendships, and in it we find that high-toned, paradoxical
essay on Love and Friendship, which has already been quoted. To
read this literally, as Channing says, "would be to accuse him of
stupidity; he gossips there of a high, imaginary world." But its tone
is no higher than was the habitual feeling of Thoreau towards his
friends, or that sentiment which he inspired in them. In Mr. Alcott's
diary for March 16, 1847, he writes, two years before the "Week" was
made public:--
"This evening I pass with Thoreau at his hermitage on
Walden, and he reads me some passages from his manuscript
volume, entitled 'A Week on the Concord and Merrimac
Rivers.' The book is purely American, fragrant with the
life of New England woods and streams, and could have
been written nowhere else. Especially am I touched by his
sufficiency and soundness, his aboriginal vigor,--as if a
man had once more come into Nature who knew what Nature
meant him to do with her,--Virgil, and White of Selborne,
and Izaak Walton, and Yankee settler all in one. I came
home at midnight, through the woody snow-paths, and slept
with the pleasing dream that presently the press would
give me two books to be proud of--Emerson's 'Poems,' and
Thoreau's 'Week.'"
This high anticipation of the young author's career was fully shared
by Emerson himself, who everywhere praised the genius of Thoreau; and
when in England in 1848, listened readily to a proposition from Dr.
Chapman the publisher, for a new magazine to be called "The Atlantic,"
and printed at the same time in London and in Boston, whose chief
contributors in England should be Froude, Garth Wilkinson, Arthur Hugh
Clough, and perhaps Carlyle; and in New England, Emerson, Thoreau,
Alcott, the Channings, Theodore Parker, and Elliott Cabot. The plan
came to nothing, but it may have been some reminiscence of it which,
nine years afterward, gave its name to that Boston magazine, the
"Atlantic Monthly." Mr. Emerson's letter was dated in London, April
20, 1848, and said:--
"I find Chapman very anxious to publish a journal common
to Old and New England, as was long ago proposed. Froude
and Clough and other Oxonians would gladly conspire. Let
the 'Massachusetts Quarterly' give place to this, and we
should have two legs, and bestride the sea. Here I know so
many good-minded people that I am sure will gladly combine.
But what do I, or does any friend of mine in America care
for a journal? Not enough, I fear, to secure an energetic
work on that side. I have a letter from Cabot lately and do
write him to-day. 'Tis certain the Massachusetts 'Quarterly
Review' will fail, unless Henry Thoreau, and Alcott, and
Channing and Newcome, the fourfold visages, fly to the
rescue. I am sorry that Alcott's editor, the Dumont of our
Bentham, the Baruch of our Jeremiah, is so slow to be born."
In 1846, before Mr. Emerson went abroad, we find Thoreau (whose own
hut beside Walden had been built and inhabited for a year) sketching
a design for a lodge which Mr. Emerson then proposed to build on
the opposite shore. It was to be a retreat for study and writing,
at the summit of a ledge, with a commanding prospect over the level
country, towards Monadnoc and Wachusett in the west and northwest. For
this lookout Mr. Alcott added a story to Thoreau's sketch; but the
hermitage was never built, and the plan finally resulted in a rustic
summer-house, erected by Alcott with some aid from Thoreau, in Mr.
Emerson's garden, in 1847-48.[9]
Humbler friends than poets and philosophers sometimes shared the
companionship of these brethren in Concord. In February, 1847, Mr.
Alcott, who was then a woodman, laboring on his hillside with his own
axe, where afterwards Hawthorne wandered and mused, thus notes in his
diary an incident not unusual in the town:--
"Our friend the fugitive, who has shared now a week's
hospitalities with us (sawing and piling my wood), feels
this new trust of Freedom yet unsafe here in New England,
and so has left us this morning for Canada. We supplied him
with the means of journeying, and bade him Godspeed to a
freer land. His stay with us has given image and a name to
the dire entity of slavery."
It was this slave, no doubt, who had lodged for a while in Thoreau's
Walden hut.
My own acquaintance with Thoreau did not begin with our common
hostility to slavery, which afterwards brought us most closely
together, but sprang from the accident of my editing for a few weeks
the "Harvard Magazine," a college monthly, in 1854-55, in which
appeared a long review of "Walden" and the "Week." In acknowledgment
of this review, which was laudatory and made many quotations from
his two volumes, Thoreau, whom I had never seen, called at my room
in Holworthy Hall, Cambridge, in January, 1855, and left there in
my absence, a copy of the "Week" with a message implying it was for
the writer of the magazine article. It so happened that I was in the
College Library when Thoreau was calling on me, and when he came,
directly after, to the Library, some one present pointed him out to me
as the author of "Walden." I was then a senior in college, and soon to
go on my winter vacation; in course of which I wrote to Thoreau from
my native town, as follows:--
"HAMPTON FALLS, N. H., _Jan'y_ 30th, '55.
"MY DEAR SIR,--I have had it in mind to write you a letter
ever since the day when you visited me, without my knowing
it, at Cambridge. I saw you afterward at the Library, but
refrained from introducing myself to you, in the hope that
I should see you later in the day. But as I did not, will
you allow me to seek you out, when next I come to Concord?
"The author of the criticism in the 'Harvard Magazine' is
Mr. Morton of Plymouth, a friend and pupil of your friend,
Marston Watson, of that old town. Accordingly I gave him
the book which you left with me, judging that it belonged
to him. He received it with delight, as a gift of value in
itself, and the more valuable for the sake of the giver.
"We who at Cambridge look toward Concord as a sort of Mecca
for our pilgrimages, are glad to see that your last book
finds such favor with the public. It has made its way where
your name has rarely been heard before, and the inquiry,
'Who is Mr. Thoreau?' proves that the book has in part done
its work. For my own part, I thank you for the new light it
shows me the aspects of Nature in, and for the marvelous
beauty of your descriptions. At the same time, if any one
should ask me what I think of your philosophy, I should be
apt to answer that it is not worth a straw. Whenever again
you visit Cambridge, be assured, sir, that it would give me
much pleasure to see you at my room. There, or in Concord,
I hope soon to see you; if I may intrude so much on your
time.
"Believe me always, yours very truly,
"F. B. SANBORN."
This note, which I had entirely forgotten, and of which I trust my
friend soon forgave the pertness, came to me recently among his
papers; with one exception, it is the only letter that passed between
us, I think, in an acquaintance of more than seven years. Some six
weeks after its date, I went to live in Concord, and happened to take
rooms in Mr. Channing's house, just across the way from Thoreau's.
I met him more than once in March, 1855, but he did not call on my
sister and me until the 11th of April, when I made the following brief
note of his appearance:--
"To-night we had a call from Mr. Thoreau, who came at eight
and stayed till ten. He talked about Latin and Greek--which
he thought ought to be studied--and about other things. In
his tones and gestures he seemed to me to imitate Emerson,
so that it was annoying to listen to him, though he said
many good things. He looks like Emerson, too,--coarser,
but with something of that serenity and sagacity which E.
has. Thoreau looks eminently _sagacious_--like a sort of
wise, wild beast. He dresses plainly, wears a beard in his
throat, and has a brown complexion."
A month or two later my diary expanded this sketch a little, with
other particulars:--
"He is a little under size, with a huge Emersonian nose,
bluish gray eyes, brown hair, and a ruddy weather-beaten
face, which reminds me of some shrewd and honest
animal's--some retired philosophical woodchuck or
magnanimous fox. He dresses very plainly, wears his collar
turned over like Mr. Emerson" [we young collegians then
wearing ours upright], "and often an old dress-coat, broad
in the skirts, and by no means a fit. He walks about with a
brisk, rustic air, and never seems tired."
Notwithstanding the slow admiration that these trivial comments
indicated, our friendship grew apace, and for two years or more I
dined with him almost daily, and often joined in his walks and river
voyages, or swam with him in some of our numerous Concord waters. In
1857 I introduced John Brown to him, then a guest at my house; and in
1859, the evening before Brown's last birthday, we listened together
to the old captain's last speech in the Concord Town Hall. The events
of that year and the next brought us closely together, and I found him
the stanchest of friends.
This chapter might easily be extended into a volume, so long was the
list of his companions, and so intimate and perfect his relation with
them, at least on his own side.
"A truth-speaker he," said Emerson at his funeral, "capable
of the most deep and strict conversation; a physician to
the wounds of any soul; a friend, knowing not only the
secret of friendship, but almost worshipped by those few
persons who resorted to him as their confessor and prophet,
and knew the deep value of his mind and great heart. His
soul was made for the noblest society; he had in a short
life exhausted the capabilities of this world; wherever
there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever
there is beauty, he will find a home."