[42] It will readily be seen that this letter relates to the shipwreck
on Fire Island, near New York, in which Margaret Fuller, Countess
Ossoli, with her husband and child, was lost. A letter with no date of
the year, but probably written February 15, 1840, from Emerson to
Thoreau, represents them both as taking much trouble about a house in
Concord for Mrs. Fuller, the mother of Margaret, who had just sold her
Groton house, and wished to live with her daughter near Emerson.
[43] Rev. A. B. Fuller, then of Manchester, N. H., afterward of
Boston; a brother of Margaret, who died a chaplain in the Civil War.
[44] The name of a political party, afterwards called "Republicans."
[45] Baron Trenck, the famous prisoner.
[46] The _Week_.
[47] Of _Putnam's Magazine_.
[48] A town near Boston.
[49] A Massachusetts town, the birthplace of Whittier.
[50] An American seaman, wrecked on the coast of Arabia,--once a
popular book.
[51] "The world is too much with us."--_Wordsworth._
[52] A lady who made such a night voyage with Thoreau, years before,
says: "How wise he was to ask the elderly lady with a younger one for
a row on the Concord River one moonlit night! The river that night was
as deep as the heavens above; serene stars shone from its depths, as
far off as the stars above. Deep answered unto deep in our souls, as
the boat glided swiftly along, past low-lying fields, under
overhanging trees. A neighbor's cow waded into the cool water,--she
became at once a Behemoth, a river-horse, hippopotamus, or river-god.
A dog barked,--he was Diana's hound, he waked Endymion. Suddenly we
were landed on a little isle; our boatman, our boat glided far off in
the flood. We were left alone, in the power of the river-god; like two
white birds we stood on this bit of ground, the river flowing about
us; only the eternal powers of nature around us. Time for a prayer,
perchance,--and back came the boat and oarsman; we were ferried to our
homes,--no question asked or answered. We had drank of the cup of the
night,--had left the silence and the stars."
[53] See Memoir of Bronson Alcott, pp. 485-494. The remark of Emerson
quoted on p. 486, that Cholmondeley was "the son of a Shropshire
squire," was not strictly correct, his father being a Cheshire
clergyman of a younger branch of the ancient race of Cholmondeley. But
he was the _grandson_ of a Shropshire squire (owner of land), for his
mother was daughter and sister of such gentlemen, and it was her
brother Richard who presented Reginald Heber and Charles Cholmondeley
to the living of Hodnet, near Market Drayton.
[54] Mr. Ricketson's immediate reply was received by Thoreau before he
wrote to Blake on the 22d. He set out from Concord for Cambridge on
Christmas Day, and reached Brooklawn, the country-house of his friend,
towards evening of that short day, on foot, with his umbrella and
traveling-bag, and he made so striking a figure in the eyes of
Ricketson that he sketched it roughly in his shanty-book. His children
have engraved it in their pleasing volume _Daniel Ricketson and his
Friends_, from the pages of which several of these letters are taken.
It is by no means a bad likeness of the plain and upright Thoreau.
[55] Hyannis was once a port for the sailing of the steamers to
Nantucket, where probably Thoreau was to land on his return. He had
visited the Cape before, but never Nantucket. Thomas Cholmondeley went
home with the distinct purpose of going to the Crimean war, and did
so. The subject of the New Bedford lecture was "Getting a Living."
Channing, his wife and children having left him, was living by himself
in his house opposite to Thoreau. Late in 1855 he rejoined Mrs.
Channing, in a household near Dorchester, and became one of the
editors of the New Bedford _Mercury_, residing in that city in
1856-57, after the death of Mrs. Channing.
[56] Quitman, aided perhaps by Laurence Oliphant, was aiming to
capture Cuba with "filibusters" (flibustiers).
[57] Then President of the United States, whose life Hawthorne had
written in 1852.
[58] I had been visiting Emerson occasionally for a year or two, and
knew Alcott well at this time; was also intimate with Cholmondeley in
the autumn of 1854, but had never seen Thoreau, a fact which shows how
recluse were then his habits. The letter below, and the long one
describing his trip to Minnesota, were the only ones I received from
him in a friendship of seven years. See Sanborn's _Thoreau_, pp.
195-200. Edwin Morton was my classmate. See pp. 286, 353, 440.
[59] The book was _Ultima Thule_, describing New Zealand.
[60] This was Edmund Hosmer, a Concord farmer, before mentioned as a
friend of Emerson, who was fond of quoting his sagacious and often
cynical remarks. He had entertained George Curtis and the Alcotts at
his farm on the "Turnpike," southeast of Emerson's; but now was living
on a part of the old manor of Governor Winthrop, which soon passed to
the ownership of the Hunts; and this house which Mr. Ricketson
proposed to lease was the "old Hunt farmhouse,"--in truth built for
the Winthrops two centuries before. It was soon after torn down.
[61] Sons of Mr. Ricketson; the second, a sculptor, modeled the
medallion head of Thoreau reproduced in photogravure for the
frontispiece of this volume.
[62] Mr. Channing had gone, October, 1855, to live in New Bedford, and
help edit the _Mercury_ there.
[63] The centre of Concord village, where the post-office and shops
are,--so called from an old mill-dam where now is a street.
[64] The aunt of R. W. Emerson, then eighty-one years old, an admirer
of Thoreau, as her notes to him show. For an account of her see
Emerson's _Lectures and Biographical Sketches_, Centenary Ed., pp.
397-433; Riverside Ed., pp. 371-404.
[65] The books on India, Egypt, etc., sent by Cholmondeley. See p.
271. They were divided between the Concord Public Library and the
libraries of Alcott, Blake, Emerson, Sanborn, etc.
[66] Mr. Channing became a frequent visitor at Brooklawn in the years
of his residence at New Bedford, 1856-58. See p. 274.
[67] These books were ordered by Cholmondeley in London, and sent to
Boston just as he was starting for the Crimean War, in October, 1855,
calling them "a nest of Indian books." They included Mill's _History
of British India_, several translations of the sacred books of India,
and one of them in Sanscrit; the works of Bunsen, so far as then
published, and other valuable books. In the note accompanying this
gift, Cholmondeley said, "I think I never found so much kindness in
all my travels as in your country of New England." In return, Thoreau
sent his English friend, in 1857, his own _Week_, Emerson's Poems,
Walt Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_, and F. L. Olmsted's book on the
Southern States (then preparing for the secession which they attempted
four years later). This was perhaps the first copy of Whitman seen in
England, and when Cholmondeley began to read it to his stepfather,
Rev. Z. Macaulay, at Hodnet, that clergyman declared he would not hear
it, and threatened to throw it in the fire. On reading the _Week_ (he
had received _Walden_ from Thoreau when first in America),
Cholmondeley wrote me, "Would you tell dear Thoreau that the lines I
admire so much in his _Week_ begin thus:--
'Low-anchored cloud,
Newfoundland air,' etc.