Say to Mrs. Emerson that I am glad to remember how she too dwells
there in Concord, and shall send her anon some of the thoughts that
belong to her. As for Edith, I seem to see a star in the east over
where the young child is. Remember me to Mrs. Brown.
* * * * *
These letters for the most part explain themselves, with the aid of
several to Thoreau's family, which the purpose of Emerson, in 1865, to
present his friend in a stoical character, had excluded from the
collection then printed. Mention of C. S. Wheeler and his sad death in
Germany had come to him from Emerson, as well as from his own family
at Concord,--of whose occupations Thoreau gives so genial a picture in
the letter of August 6 to his mother. Emerson wrote: "You will have
read and heard the sad news to the little village of Lincoln, of
Stearns Wheeler's death. Such an overthrow to the hopes of his parents
made me think more of them than of the loss the community will suffer
in his kindness, diligence, and ingenuous mind." He died at Leipsic,
in the midst of Greek studies which have since been taken up and
carried farther by a child of Concord, Professor Goodwin of the same
university. Henry James, several times mentioned in the
correspondence, was the moral and theological essayist (father of the
novelist Henry James, and the distinguished Professor James of
Harvard), who was so striking a personality in Concord and Cambridge
circles for many years. W. H. Channing was a Christian Socialist fifty
years ago,--cousin of Ellery Channing, and nephew and biographer of
Dr. Channing. Both he and Horace Greeley were then deeply interested
in the Fourierist scheme of association, one development of which was
going on at Brook Farm, under direction of George Ripley, and another,
differing in design, at Fruitlands, under Bronson Alcott and Charles
Lane. The jocose allusions of Thoreau to his Jones ancestors (the
descendants of the Tory Colonel Jones of Weston) had this foundation
in fact,--that his uncle, Charles Dunbar, soon to be named in
connection with Daniel Webster, suffered from a sort of lethargy,
which would put him to sleep in the midst of conversation. Webster had
been retained in the once famous "Wyman case," of a bank officer
charged with fraud, and had exerted his great forensic talent for a
few days in the Concord court-house. Emerson wrote Thoreau: "You will
have heard of the Wyman trial, and the stir it made in the village.
But the Cliff and Walden knew nothing of that."