William Davis Ticknor of Boston's Old Corner

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WILLIAM DAVIS TICKNOR

AND OF THE FIRM OF

TICKNOR & FIELDS

WILLIAM DAVIS TICKNOR JAMES THOMAS FIELDS

1810

August 6, Monday: William Davis Ticknor was born into a farming family just outside Lebanon, New Hampshire, a cousin of George Ticknor of Boston.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 2nd day 6 of 8 Mo// From a very dead State my mind has been aroused this evening with a very close impression of the Language “Why Stand ye all the day Idle?” Surely this is applicable to myself for I am very dull & come short every day of what is required of me. I sometimes fear that my light will grow dimer & dimer untill it finally is extinguished. Oh Lord I desire to thank thee for this little quickening & pray that thou would’st renew thy visits of love in my heart as in days that are past — HDT WHAT? INDEX

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————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

1817

December 31, Wednesday: James Thomas Fields was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

1827

William Davis Ticknor left his home on a farm just outside Lebanon, New Hampshire at the age of 17, to work in the brokerage house of his uncle Benjamin Ticknor in Boston.

Professor Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert was made a professor at the University of München. In this post, attempting to produce a religiously grounded interpretation of the cosmos, he would arouse the antagonism of Lorenz Oken.

Cornelius Conway Felton graduated from Harvard College. Horatio Wood graduated (his copious and carefully written notes on French and Spanish literature per the lectures of Professor George Ticknor, fresh from the German universities, would be preserved, and under the influence of Dr. Karl Follen, Horatio would persist in being a strenuous runner until the 7th decade of his life).

At the Divinity School, the following gentlemen commenced their studies: • Julian Abbot • Stephen Greenleaf Bulfinch (A.B. Col. [Columbia College?]) • Francis Cunningham • Joseph Hawley Dorr (A.B. Bowdoin College) • George Washington Hosmer • Josiah Moore • John Owen (A.B. Bowdoin College) • Ephraim Peabody (A.B. Brown University) • Allen Putnam • George Putnam • John Turner Sargent • David Southard • Oliver Stearns

(In these early years of the divinity school there were no formal class graduations, as students would be in the habit of remaining until they wrangled the offer of an appropriate pulpit.) NEW “HARVARD MEN”

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1830

During this year 1,700 titles were being printed in America, of which almost half were reprints of books published overseas.

1832

Houghton Mifflin had its origins on the corner of Washington and School streets in Boston, Massachusetts when John Allen and William Davis Ticknor bought the Old Corner Bookstore from “Carter & Hendee” (Richard B. Carter and Charles J. Hendee) booksellers.

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This short-lived partnership’s initial book offering –KASPAR HAUSER, a novel translated from the German– has unfortunately by now been totally forgotten.

At the laying of the cornerstone for a new Masonic Temple, the Boston Brigade Band performed a new march they termed the “Corner-Stone March.” This they would have printed as a piece of sheet music, and on the cover of the publication would appear an illustration depicting an antimasonic convention as being made up of grotesque animal figures. These ridiculous conventioneers at this cartoonish antimasonic convention are proclaiming their ideal as “no secret societies.”

December 25, Tuesday: The brig Jasper set sail out of Boston harbor, bound for Malta with four other passengers besides Waldo Emerson.

Charles Darwin spent Christmas Day at St. Martin’s Cove at Cape Receiver near Cape Horn.

Piano Concerto no.7 by John Field was performed completely for the initial time.

William Davis Ticknor got married with Emeline Staniford Holt. The couple would produce seven children, five of whom would survive until adulthood.

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1833

August: Dr. James Cowles Prichard pioneered “the term monomania, meaning madness affecting one train of thought … adopted in late times instead of melancholia.” (Herman Melville’s father-in-law, Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, would utilize this concept “monomania” in a legal opinion in 1844, and Melville would deploy it in MARDI AND A VOYAGE THITHER in 1849, and then in MOBY-DICK; OR, THE WHALE in 1851 as the defining characteristic of the psychology of the maimed Captain Ahab.) As what in this year would have been considered to be a prime instance of such monomania, in this year there appeared Lydia Maria Child’s infamous APPEAL IN FAVOR OF THAT CLASS OF AMERICANS CALLED AFRICANS.

(The author’s “madness affecting one train of thought” was immediately recognized, and in an attempt at a cure her library privileges at the Boston Athenæum were summarily revoked.) The Reverend William Ellery Channing walked down to Child’s cottage from his home on Beacon Hill, a mile and a half, to discuss the book with her for all of three hours, but not because he agreed with her — the Reverend Channing considered Child misguided and a zealot. Child later commented that she had “suffered many a shivering ague-fit in attempting to melt, or batter away the glaciers of his prejudices.” The window of

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William Davis Ticknor’s Old Corner Bookstore was smashed because this APPEAL was on display. Having

overheard his parents discussing APPEAL (and perhaps having heard of that smashed window at the Old Corner Bookstore, which had been smashed by someone leaning against or being shoved against it), the 11-year-old Edward Everett Hale considered heaving a stone at it through the shop window. This is the book that a manager of the American Bible Society refused to read for fear it would make him an abolitionist, and in fact it would be what the 22-year-old Wendell Phillips would be reading just as he was abandoning the practice of law in order to devote his life to abolitionism.

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Here is the cover of a modern edition of that offending treatise:

Outspoken in her condemnation of slavery, Mrs. Child pointed out its contradiction with Christian teachings, and described the moral and physical degradation it brought upon slaves and owners alike — not omitting to mention the issue of miscegenation, and not excepting the North from its share of responsibility for the system. “I am fully aware of the unpopularity of the task I have undertaken,” she wrote in the Introduction, “but though I expect ridicule and censure, it is not in my nature to fear them.” As a direct result of this, she would lose her editorial post with The Juvenile Miscellany (if you are so impolite and inconsiderate that you mention that we routinely molest our black servants, we certainly cannot allow you to have contact with our children).

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1837

William Davis Ticknor began to publish in Boston a national monthly magazine of engravings, known as American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, that had been in existence for several years and had previously been edited by, among others, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Elizabeth Manning Hawthorne. AMERICAN MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER 1835 SUPPLEMENT OCTOBER 1836 SUPPLEMENT

1838

James Thomas Fields was hired by the Boston bookselling firm of William D. Ticknor, which would become Ticknor, Reed & Fields in 1854 and Fields, Osgood & Company in 1868.

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September 13, Thursday: James Thomas Fields delivered an Anniversary Poem before the Mercantile Library Association of Boston (he would print this at the firm of his employer William D. Ticknor at the corner of Washington and School Streets). ANNIVERSARY POEM

Early in September, Jones Very had felt within himself the gradual coming of a new will, somewhat like his old wicked self-will but different in that “it was not a feeling of my own but a sensible will that was not my own,” a will “to do good.” There was “a consciousness which seemed to say —‘That which creates you creates also that which you see or him to whom you speak.’” By Thursday, September the 13th, Very was convinced that he had acquired an “identification with Christ.” Moved entirely by this spirit within, he began to declare to all about him at Harvard College that the coming of Christ was at hand. That evening he went to the study of the Reverend Henry Ware, Jr., who was working up his alarmed response to Waldo Emerson’s address at the Divinity School, a response directed against Emerson’s “doctrine of the Divine Impersonality,” which he was scheduled to deliver at the Divinity Hall Chapel on September 23d. Ignoring theology students who happened to be in the professor’s study, Very proceeded to parse Matthew chapter 24 to the professor and to insist that what he was offering was eternal, revealed truth. Ware could not agree with Very’s parsing of the chapter, so Very pulled out his big gun: “You are doing your own will, and not the will of your Father.”1

1842

James Thomas Fields was made a junior partner the Boston bookselling firm of William D. Ticknor, which would become Ticknor, Reed & Fields in 1854 and Fields, Osgood & Company in 1868.

1. Which although it was true enough to be painful –for in fact the Reverend Professor Henry Ware, Jr. was one of these “heroic champion of the consensual reality” types– or false enough –for in fact the Reverend Professor Ware Junior was trudging along as un-clumsily as he could in the theological footprints of his father, the Reverend Professor Ware Senior– definitely was not a helpful thing to point out. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 9 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1846

Waldo Emerson asked Henry Thoreau to add a chimney to the Emerson barn, as part of creating a schoolroom and sleeping chamber for Sophia Foord while she was tutoring the Emerson and Alcott children.

Thoreau surveyed Walden Pond, indicating Bare Peak, Wooded Peak, Sandbar, and the site of his shanty. The area of the pond is listed as 61 acres and 3 rods, its circumference as 1.7 miles, its greatest length as 175½ rods, and its greatest depth as 102 feet. The Concord Free Public Library now has three copies of this. It is the plot which he would have tipped into his bound volume of his lyceum lectures, WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS,

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between pages 285 and 287 (per the current Princeton numbering).

TIMELINE OF WALDEN

There’s an interesting little factoid about this survey being tipped into the WALDEN volume. It wasn’t all that usual, in this time period, for books to be illustrated in such a manner! Such an inclusion, in the period, amounted to “multimedia high tech”! –Take a moment and think about that!2 Most of the works published by Ticknor and Fields during the 1840s and 1850s were not illustrated in any way, but illustrations did play an important role in some. Two groups of publications from the 1850s are especially notable for their illustrations — juvenile works and literary works by the firm’s most respected authors. The more lavishly illustrated were juvenile works, which might contain as many as twelve relief wood engravings, while many literary works were regularly issued with an expensive intaglio steel-engraved frontispiece portrait. The illustrations in juveniles were usually based on the text and made the work more vivid and appealing to a young audience, whereas the portrait frontispieces in the second group served to dignify and assert the literary merit of the works they produced. Other works published by the firm during these decades were also

2. Winship, Michael. AMERICAN LITERARY PUBLISHING IN THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY: THE BUSINESS OF TICKNOR AND FIELDS. Cambridge, England; NY: Cambridge UP, 1995. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 11 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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illustrated or decorated in some way. These included textbooks: the two primary school readers by Josiah F. Bumstead each had an inserted woodcut frontispiece; and the first part of Thomas H. Palmer’s THE MORAL INSTRUCTOR had small vignettes and type ornaments printed throughout the text. Several scientific and medical works —such as Wendell Phillips’s AN ELEMENTARY TREATISE ON MINERALOGY and J. Mason Warren’s edition of Walter H. Walshe’s THE ANATOMY, PHYSIOLOGY, PATHOLOGY, AND TREATMENT OF CANCER— depended on the illustrations to transmit information. In addition, a number of the firm’s literary works, especially poetry, were pleasantly decorated with small vignettes or type ornaments. Longfellow’s THE GOLDEN LEGEND had a single small vignette of a cross, designed by Hammatt Billings, on the title page; Oliver W. Holmes’s POEMS and Richard H. Stoddard’s SONGS OF SUMMER have numerous decorative vignettes and ornamental head- or tailpieces throughout the text. The illustrations and decorations in the publications of Ticknor and Fields were reproduced by three methods. The most common used blocks produced in relief. Small vignettes and ornaments produced by this method were printed with the text, as occasionally were full-page illustrations, but more commonly relief wood engravings were printed on separate leaves and inserted during binding. The portrait frontispieces in the firm’s literary works were produced by a second method, using intaglio metal plates. Intaglio printing is done on a rolling press, separately from the text, and these frontispieces were always printed on inserted leaves. Illustrations reproduced by a third method, lithography, appeared only rarely in works published by Ticknor and Fields before 1860. In the 1840s lithography was used for the technical illustrations in a few medical and scientific works published by the firm, and in the 1850s only the engraved map in Henry D. Thoreau’s WALDEN and the illuminated paper wrapper used on some copies of William H.C. Hosmer’s THE MONTHS —a commission work— were lithographed. Again, lithographic illustrations were printed separately from the text on a special press and inserted during binding.

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That is worth repeating. In the 1850s only the engraved map in WALDEN and the illuminated paper wrapper used on some copies of one other book were lithographed! Such lithography was at that point the very high- tech cutting edge of publication technology. It was, in that period, everything that multimedia amounted to. We might miss such a fact nowadays, if it were not forcefully brought to our attention, but what a novel thing that survey map of Walden Pond tipped into the volume actually was!

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View Henry Thoreau’s personal working drafts of his surveys courtesy of AT&T and the Concord Free Public Library: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/Thoreau_Surveys.htm

(The official copy of this survey of course had become the property of the person or persons who had hired this Concord town surveyor to do their surveying work during the 19th Century. Such materials have yet to be recovered.)

View this particular personal working draft of a survey in fine detail:

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http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/137.htm

WALDEN: One afternoon I amused myself by watching a barred owl (Strix nebulosa) sitting on one of the lower dead limbs of a white- pine, close to the trunk, in broad daylight, I standing within a rod of him. He could hear me when I moved and cronched the snow with my feet, but could not plainly see me. When I made most noise he would stretch out his neck, and erect his neck feathers, and open his eyes wide; but their lids soon fell again, and he began to nod. I too felt a slumberous influence after watching him half an hour, as he sat thus with his eyes half open, like a cat, winged brother of the cat. There was only a narrow slit left between CAT their lids, by which he preserved a peninsular relation to me; thus, with half-shut eyes, looking out from the land of dreams, and endeavoring to realize me, vague object or mote that interrupted his visions. At length, on some louder noise or my nearer approach, he would grow uneasy and sluggishly turn about on his perch, as if impatient at having his dreams disturbed; and when he launched himself off and flapped through the pines, spreading his wings to unexpected breadth, I could not hear the slightest sound from them. Thus, guided amid the pine boughs rather by a delicate sense of their neighborhood than by sight, feeling his twilight way as it were with his sensitive pinions, he found a new perch, where he might in peace await the dawning of his day.

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Publication of a new collection of William Cullen Bryant’s poems, illustrated.

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(Here is an illustration of the poet, weary of trying to find another rhyme for “moon” and “June.”)

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1849

James Thomas Fields’s POEMS were published in Boston by the firm in which he was becoming a junior partner, the firm of William D. Ticknor & Co. JAMES T. FIELD’S POEMS

Ellery Channing’s THE WOODMAN, AND OTHER POEMS (Boston: James Munroe & company). THE WOODMAN, &C., &C.

This volume would be in Henry Thoreau’s personal library. He would include a portion of “Baker Farm” and a portion of “Walden Spring” in WALDEN, and a portion of “Old Sudbury Inn” in his journal for the autumn of this year. TIMELINE OF WALDEN BAKER FARM. Thy entry is a pleasant field, Which some mossy fruit trees yield Partly to a ruddy brook, By gliding musquash undertook, And mercurial trout Darting about.

Cell of seclusion, Haunt of old time, Rid of confusion, Empty of crime, Landscape! where the richest element Is a little sunshine innocent; In thy insidious marsh,

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In thy cold opaque wood, Thy artless meadow, And forked orchard's writhing mood, Still Baker Farm! There lies in them a fourfold charm. Alien art thou to God and Devil! Man too forsakes thee, No one oms to revel On thy rail-fenced lea, Save gleaning Silence gray-headed, Who drains the frozen apple red, Thin jar of winter’s jam, Which he will with gipsy sugar cram. And here a Poet builded, In the completed years, For behold a trivial cabin That to destruction steers. Should we judge it was built? Rather by kind nature spilt To interfere with circumstance, And put a comma to the verse And west trends blue Fairhaven bay, O’er whose stained rocks the white pines sway, And south slopes Nobscot grand, And north the still Cliffs stand. Pan of unwrinkled cream, May some Poet dash thee in his churn, And with thy beauty mad, Verse thee in rhymes that burn; Thy beauty, — the beauty of Baker Farm! In the drying field, And the knotty tree, In hassock and bield, And marshes at sea! Thou art expunged from to-day, Rigid in parks of thy own, Where soberly shifts the play, And the wind sighs in monotone. Debate with no man hast thou, With questions art never perplexed, As tame at the first sight as now, In thy plain, russet gabardine dressed. I would hint at thy religion, Hadst thou any, Piny fastness of wild pigeon, Squirrel's litany,. Never thumbed a gilt Prayer Book, Here the cawing, sable rook! Art thou orphan of a deed, Title that a court can read, Or dost thou stand For the entertaining land, That no man owns, Pure grass and stones?

Idleness is in the preaching, Simpleness is all the teaching, Churches in the steepled woods, Galleries in green solitudes, Fretted never by a noise, Eloquence that each enjoys.

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Here humanity may trow, It is feasible to slough The corollary of the village, Lies, thefts, clothes, meats, and tillage! Come, ye who love, And ye who hate, Children of the Holy Dove, And Guy Faux of the State, And hang conspiracies, From the tough rafters of the trees! Still Baker Farm! So fair a lesson thou dost set, Commensurately wise, Lesson no one may forget. Consistent sanctity, Value that cannot be spent, Volume that cannot be lent, Passable to me and thee, For Heaven thou art meant!

WALDEN SPRING. Whisper ye leaves your lyrics in my ear, Carol thou glittering bird thy summer song, And flowers, and grass, and mosses on the rocks, And the lull woods, lead me in sober aisles, And may I seek this happy day the Cliffs, When fluid summer melts all ores in one, Both in the air, the water; and the ground. And so I walked beyond the last, gray house, And o’er the upland glanced, and down the mead, Then turning went into the oaken copse,— Heroic underwoods that take the air With freedom, nor respect their parent’s death. Yet a few steps, then welled a cryptic spring, Whose temperate nectar palls not on the taste, Dancing in yellow circles on the sand, And carving through the ooze a crystal bowl. Here sometime have I drank a bumper rare, Wetting parched lips, from a sleek, emerald leaf, Nursed at the fountain's breast, and neatly filled The forest-cup, filled by a woodland hand, That from familiar things draws sudden use, Strange to the civic eye, to Walden plain. And resting there after my thirst was quenched, Beneath the curtain of a civil oak, That muses near this water and the sky, I tried some names with which to grave this fount. And as I dreamed of these, I marked the roof, Then newly built above the placid spring, Resting upon some awkward masonry. In truth our village has become a butt For one of these fleet railroad shafts, and o'er Our peaceful plain, its soothing sound is — Concord, Four times and more each day a rumbling train Of painted cars rolls on the iron road, Prefigured in its advent by sharp screams That Pandemonium satisfied should hear. The steaming tug athirst, and lacking drink, The railroad eye direct with fatal stroke Smote the spring's covert, and by leaden drain Thieved its cold crystal for the engine's breast. Strange! that the playful current from the woods, Should drag the freighted train, chatting with fire, And point the tarnished rail with man and trade.

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OLD SUDBURY INN. Who set the oaks Along the road? Was it not nature's hand, Old Sudbury Inn! where I have stood And wondered at the sight, The oaks my delight? And the elms, All boldly branching to the sky, And the interminable forests, Old Sudbury Inn! that wash thee nigh On every side, With a green and rustling tide: The oaks and elms, And the surrounding woods, And Nobscot rude, Old Sudbury Inn! creature of moods, That I could find Well suited to the custom of my mind. Most homely seat! Where nature eats her frugal meals, And studies to outwit, Old Sudbury Inn! that thy inside reveals, Long mayst thou be, More than a match for her and me.

February 8, Thursday: Henry Thoreau was written to by William Davis Ticknor of William D. Ticknor & Co in Boston. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Boston Feb. 8. 1849 Henry D Thoreau Esq Concord Mass. Dear Sir, We find on looking over publishing matters that we cannot well undertake anything more at present. If however you feel inclined we will publish “Walden or Life in the Woods” on our own a/c, say One Thousand copies, allowing you 10 pr.ct. copyright on the Retail Price on all that are sold. The style of printing & binding to be like Emersons Essays. Respy Ticknor & Co.

1832-1834 Allen & Ticknor

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1834-1843 William D. Ticknor 1843-1849 William D. Ticknor & Co. 1849-1854 Ticknor, Reed & Fields 1854-1868 Ticknor and Fields 1868-1871 Fields, Osgood & Co. 1871-1878 James R. Osgood & Co.

February 16, Friday: Henry Thoreau wrote to George A. Thatcher. Concord Feb. 16th 1849 Dear George, I am going as far as Portland to lecture before their Lyceum on the 3d Wednesday in March. — By the way they pay me $25.00 — Now I am not sure but I may have leisure then to go on to Bangor and so up river. I have a great desire to go up to Chesuncook before the ice breaks up — but I should not care if I had to return down the banks and so saw the logs running; and I write now chiefly to ask how late it will probably do to go up the river — or when on the whole would be the best time for me to start? Will the 3d week in March answer? I should be very glad if you would go with me, but I hesitate to ask you now, it is so uncertain whether I go at all myself. The fact is I am once more making a bargain with the Publishers Ticknor & Co, who talk of printing a book for me, and if we come to terms I may then be confined here correcting proofs — or at most I should have but a few days to spare. If the Bangor Lyceum should want me about those times, that of course would be very convenient, and a seasonable aid to me. Shall I trouble you then to give me some of the statistics of a winter excursion to Chesuncook? Of Helen I have no better news to send. We fear that she may be very gradually failing, but it may not be so. She is not very uncomfortable and still seems to enjoy the day. I do not wish to foresee what change may take place in her condition or in my own. The rest of us are as well off as we deserve to be — Yrs truly Henry D. Thoreau

Thoreau was written to by William Davis Ticknor of Ticknor & Co in Boston: Boston Feby. 16 1849

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Henry D Thoreau Esq Dear Sir, In reply to your fav. of 10th inst. we beg to say that we will publish for your a/c — “A Week on the Concord River.”— The following general Estimate based upon a vol. 1/3 larger than Emerson’s Essays. first series (as suggested by you) we present for your consideration— Say — l000 Cops. 448 pages — like Emerson’s Essay. 1st series printed on good paper @ $4.00 pr ream will cost in sheets— $381.24. The binding in our style —fine cloth— 12cs pr Copy — or for the Edn 120.00 $501.24 In the above Estimate we have included for alterations & extractions say $15.— It may be more — or less. — This will depend on yourself. The book can be condensed & of course cost less. Our Estimate is in accordance with sample copy. As you would not, perhaps, care to bind more than 1/2 the Edn. at once, — You would need to send $450. — to print 1000 cops. & bind 1/2 of the same.— Yours Very Truly W. D. Ticknor & Co Concord .H. Mass

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1852

The Riverside Press (manufacturing division of Houghton-Mifflin) moved from Remington Street in Cambridge to the old Almshouse estate at Blackstone Street and the Charles River in Cambridgeport. It was a large employer and its establishment by Henry O. Houghton had coincided with the availability of the cheap labor of the famine Irish. In addition, Houghton visited Glasgow, London, and Paris to recruit skilled printers. Originally a Vermont farm boy, Houghton had learned the printing business at the Burlington Free Press and had attended the University of Vermont. Some of this press’s earliest publications would be The Atlantic Monthly, MERRIAM-WEBSTER’S UNABRIDGED DICTIONARY, and household editions of Charles Dickens. In the late 19th century, the Press’s great accomplishments would be the ten volumes of ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH BALLADS by Francis James Child, and Edward Fitzgerald's “translation” of THE RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM, illustrated by Elihu Vedder. One of the most well-known artists associated with the Press would be Bruce Rogers, a typographical genius who preferred to use older, less commercial methods. In a small, bare studio Rogers would work side by side with an elderly, senior pressman, Dan Sullivan, whom he found indispensable. Together Rogers and Sullivan would produce, on a handpress, the Riverside Press Editions, truly extraordinary works. When Houghton Press would buy out Ticknor and Fields, it would acquire publishing rights to works by Samuel Clemens, Stephen Crane, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Dean Howells, Sarah Orne Jewett, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Friend John Greenleaf Whittier, and, of course, Henry Thoreau:

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September: An unsigned reviewer in the Christian Examiner in effect called Nathaniel Hawthorne not a fictioner but a liar. For Hawthorne, in the preface to his THE SCARLET LETTER, had adverted that he had in his possession “historical papers which authenticate the story,” a story which involved “the gross and slanderous imputation that the colleague pastor of the First Church in Boston, who preached the Election Sermon in the year after the death of Governor Winthrop, was a mean and hypocritical adulterer,” which is an “outrageous fiction ... utterly without foundation” that could easily “deceive a reader who had no exact knowledge of our history.”

NOT A RELIABLE HISTORIAN

Meanwhile, Ticknor & Co. of Boston was publishing THE LIFE OF FRANKLIN PIERCE, a Democratic candidate campaign biography. They were actually printing more copies of Hawthorne’s tendentious campaign materials than of any book they had previously issued. Most of the copies were paperback (that is, lacking hard covers) 37 1 and were to retail at $0. /2 each.

Henry Thoreau wrote to H.G.O. Blake, enclosing draft essays on “Love” and on “Chastity & Sensuality” in response to a letter which Blake had sent to him about his trepidations on his pending marriage. These were essays he had been working on since 1846. Unfortunately, Thoreau also had evidently made the mistakes of asking advice in this regard from his married friend Emerson, and of allowing Waldo Emerson to see Blake’s letter, for we find the following caustic remark in Emerson’s journal:

H.D.T. read me a letter from Blake to himself, yesterday, by which it appears that Blake writes to ask his husband for leave to marry a wife.

Mr. Blake, Here come the sentences — which I promised y[o]u[ ]You may keep them if you will regard & use them as the disconnected fragments of what I may find to be a completer essay, on looking over my journal

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at last, and may claim again. I send you the thoughts on chastity and sensuality with diffidence and shame, not knowing how far I speak to the condition of men generally, or how far I betray my peculiar defects. Pray enlighten me on this point if you can. Henry D. Thoreau

September 10, Friday: Mrs. Sophia Peabody Hawthorne spent the day in reading the BIOGRAPHY OF GENERAL PIERCE

by her husband, James Ticknor of Ticknor, Reed, and Fields having sent a dozen copies of the book hot off his press, which she received at breakfast time.

NOT MUCH OF A HISTORIAN NOT MUCH OF A PRESIDENT

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1854

Ticknor, Reed, and Fields of Boston became Ticknor & Fields.

1832-1834 Allen & Ticknor 1834-1843 William D. Ticknor 1843-1849 William D. Ticknor & Co. 1849-1854 Ticknor, Reed & Fields 1854-1868 Ticknor and Fields 1868-1871 Fields, Osgood & Co. 1871-1878 James R. Osgood & Co. 1878-1880 Houghton, Osgood, & Co. 1880-18xx Houghton, Mifflin, & Co.

June 10, Saturday: Henry Thoreau walked to Conantum. He was being written to by William Davis Ticknor of Ticknor & Co. in Boston, to advise that Mr. James Thomas Fields would be carrying proof sheets of WALDEN; OR, LIFE 3 IN THE WOODS to England in order to secure the English copyright. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Boston June 10/54 Dear Sir Our Mr. Fields who left by the Steamer of the 7th for England took the proof sheets of Walden, — In order to secure a Copt in England the book must be published there as soon as here, and at least 12 Copies published and offered for Sale. If Mr. F. succeeds in making a sale of the Early sheets, it will doubtless be printed in London so as to cause very little delay here but if it be necessary to print and send out the Copies it will delay us 3 or 4 weeks. Probably not more than three weeks. You will probably prefer to delay the publication that you may be sure of your Cop’t in England. Truly Yours W.D. Ticknor & Co. Henry D. Thoreau Esq

3. Actually, this wouldn’t happen because Fields would be so seasick as to turn back. WALDEN would not see publication in England until 1886. 28 Copyright  Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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August 28, Monday: The Ticknor & Fields firm’s junior partner, James Thomas Fields had, more than a month prior to official publication, distributed advance copies of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, to prospective reviewers such as the Reverend John Sullivan Dwight, the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and T. Starr King. About three weeks prior to publication, Ticknor & Fields began sending advance sheets to the editors of major New-York and Boston papers. By this point the work had been praised in over 30 newspapers and magazines from Maine to Ohio. A few days prior to publication, Ticknor & Fields had placed advertisements for WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS in several Boston and New-York dailies. Under the banner headline “LIFE IN THE WOODS,” the ads had begun appearing on August 4th and had run for three, four, or even five days. A second series of ads had appeared in selected papers in late August, usually every other day for three days. Waldo Emerson was able to note that “All American kind are delighted with ‘Walden’ as far as they have dared say.” TIMELINE OF WALDEN

In the afternoon Henry Thoreau walked through Great Meadows (Gleason D8) and Bedford meadows on the south side of the Concord River to Carlisle Bridge (Gleason A9), and there crossed the river and came back on its north side, the Carlisle and Concord side, across the lots to the schoolhouse.

Before August 29th a review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS appeared in the Philadelphia Register:

This book was written because the author had something to say. “Walden” may be pronounced a live book—a sincere, hearty production.

[Quoted from advertisement in Boston Advertiser, August 29, 2:7.]

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On this day, or one of the two following days (August 28-30), Emerson wrote George Partridge Bradford in London:

I do not know if the book has come to you yet; — but it is cheerful, sparkling, readable, with all kinds of merits, & rising sometimes to very great heights. We account Henry the undoubted King of all American lions. He is walking up & down Concord, firm-looking, but in a tremble of great expectation.

On the basis of this letter would you say that it can be established that Emerson did read WALDEN?

1855

April 30, Monday: Henry Thoreau wrote to [Ticknor & Fields?].

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Concord Ap. 30th 1855 Gentlemen, Is it not time to republish “A Week on the Concord & Merrimack Rivers”? You said you would notify me when it was; but I am afraid that it will soon be too late for this season. I have, with what were sent to you, about 250 bound, and 450 in sheets. Yrs truly Henry D. Thoreau Concord Mass.

April 30. Horse-chestnut begins to leaf, — one of them. Another, more still, cloudy, almost drizzling day, in which, is the last three, I wear a greatcoat.

P.M. — To Lee’s Cliff.

Privet begins to leaf. (Viburnum nudum and Lentago yesterday). I observed yesterday that the barn swallows confined themselves to one, place, about fifteen rods in diameter, in Willow Bay, about the sharp rock. They kept circling about and flying up the stream (the wind easterly), about six inches above the water, — it was cloudy and almost raining, — yet I could not perceive arty insects i11cre. Those myriads of little fuzzy gnats mentioned on the 21stst and 28th must afford an abundance of food to insectivorous birds. 1!hany new birds should have arrived about the 21st. There were plenty of myrtle-birds and yellow redpolls where the gnats were. The swallows were confined to this space when I passed up, and were still there when I returned, an hour and a half later. I saw them nowhere else. They uttered only a slight twitter from time to time and when they turned out for each other on meeting. Getting their meal seemed to be made a social affair. Pray, how long will they continue to circle thus without resting? The early willow by Hubbard’s Bridge has not begun to leaf. This would make it a different species from that by railroad, which has. Hear a short, rasping note, somewhat tweeter — birdlike, I think from a yellow redpoll. Yellow dorbug. I hear from far the scream of a hawk circling over the Holden woods and swamp. This accounts for those two men with guns just entering it. What a dry, shrill, angry scream! I see the bird with my glass resting upon the topmost plume of a tall white pine. Its back, reflecting the light, looks white in patches; and now it circles again. It is a red-tailed hawk. The tips of its wings are curved upward as it sails. How it scolds at the men beneath! I see its open bill. It must have a nest there. Hark! there goes a gun, and down it tumbles from a rod or two above the wood. So I thought, but was mistaken. In the meanwhile, I learn that there is a nest there, and the gunners killed one this morning, which I examined. They are now getting the young. Above it was brown, but not at all reddish-brown except about head. Above perhaps I should call it brown, and a dirty white beneath; wings above thickly barred with darker, and also wings beneath. The tail of twelve reddish feathers, once black-barred near the end. The feet pale-yellow and very stout, with strong, sharp black claws. The head and neck were remarkably stout, and the beak short and curved from the base. Powerful neck and legs. The claws pricked me as I handled it. It measured one yard and three eighths plus from tip to tip, i.e. four feet and two inches.’ Some ferruginous on the neck; ends of wings nearly black. Columbine just out; one anther sheds. Also turritis will to-morrow apparently; many probably, if they had not been eaten. Crowfoot and saxifrage are now in prime at Lee’s; they yellow and whiten the ground. I see a great many little piles of dirt made by the worms on Conantum pastures. The woodchuck has not so much what I should call a musky scent, but exactly that peculiar rank scent which I perceive in a menagerie. The musky at length becomes the regular wild-beast scent. Red-wing blackbirds [Red-winged Blackbird Agelaius phoeniceus] now fly in large flocks, covering the tops of trees — willows, maples, apples, or oaks — like a black fruit, and keep up an incessant gurgling and whistling, — all for some purpose; what is it, White pines now show the effects of last year’s drought in our yard and on the Cliffs, the needles faded and turning red to in alarming extent. I now see many Juniperus repens berries of a handsome light blue above, being still green beneath, with three hoary pouting lips. The Garfields had found a burrow of young foxes. How old? [Saw the old and tracks of young; thinks they may be one month old.] I see the black feathers of a blackbird by the Miles Swamp side, and this single bright-scarlet one shows that it belonged to a red-wing, which some hawk or quadruped devoured.

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September 29, Saturday: Henry Thoreau was sent, by Ticknor & Co. in Boston, a royalty payment for the sale of 344 copies of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS in the amount of $51.60 along with an expression of corporate condolences:

Boston, Sept. 29, 1855 H. D. Thoreau In a/c with W.D. Ticknor & Co Walden— On hand last settlement 600 Cops. Sold Since last a/c 344 remaining on hand—256 Cops Sales 344 Cops @ 15¢ is $51.60

Dear Sir, We regret, for your sake as well as ours, that a larger number of Walden has not been sold. 60 We enclose our check for Fifty One /100 Dollars for sales to date.

Ever Respy W. D. Ticknor & Co. Henry D. Thoreau Esq Concord Mass.

Men who regretted for Thoreau’s sake as well as their own that a larger number of Walden has not been sold.

On this day Thoreau was studying James Ellsworth De Kay’s MOLLUSCA OF NEW YORK. MOLLUSCA, VOLUME V

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Soon he would be reading in George Bancroft’s A HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, FROM THE DISCOVERY OF THE AMERICAN CONTINENT,

BANCROFT’S US, I BANCROFT’S US, II BANCROFT’S US, III

in Richard Hildreth’s THE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, FROM THE DISCOVERY OF THE CONTINENT TO THE ORGANIZATION OF GOVERNMENT UNDER THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION (New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 82, Cliff Street, 1848-1852), HILDRETH’S US, I HILDRETH’S US, II HILDRETH’S US, III

in the 4th volume of the Reverend Samuel Purchas’s HAKLUYTUS POSTHUMUS OR PURCHAS HIS PILGRIMES, CONTAYNING A HISTORY OF THE WORLD, IN SEA VOYAGES, & LANDE TRAVELS, BY ENGLISHMEN AND “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 33 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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OTHERS, or perhaps A RELATION OR IOURNALL OF THE BEGINNING AND PROCEEDINGS OF THE ENGLIFH PLANTATION FETTLED AT PLIMOTH, IN NEW-ENGLAND, BY CERTAINE ... (Imprinted at London for Henry Fetherstone at ye Signe of the Rose in Pauls Churchyard, 1625), or perhaps THE PRINCIPAL NAVIGATIONS, VOYAGES, TRAFFIQUES & DISCOVERIES OF THE ENGLISH NATION: MADE BY SEA OR OVERLAND TO THE REMOTE & FARTHEST DISTANT QUARTERS OF THE EARTH AT ANY TIME WITHIN THE COMPASSE OF THESE 1600 YEARS BY RICHARD HAKLUYT VOLUME FOUR (London: J.M. Dent & Co.; New York: E.P. Dutton & Co.) PURCHAS’S VOLUME IV

and in the 26th volume of Sir William Jardine’s edition THE NATURALIST’S LIBRARY, a volume on whales and other mammals that had been authored by Robert Hamilton, Esq., M.D., F.R.S.E., M.W.S., Etc.4 (Edinburgh: W.H. Lizars; London: Henry G. Bohn, 1852 [that edition being electronically unavailable, I am forced to render for you the previous edition, of 1843]).

MAMMALIA. WHALES, ETC.

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Additional cemetery land was consecrated in “Sleepy Hollow” adjoining Concord’s New Burial Ground, the Middlesex County Courthouse, the Concord Townhouse, and the grounds of the Agricultural Society.

Waldo Emerson dedicated the new garden cemetery as “the palm of Nature’s hand.” “Address at the Consecration of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery” ... They have thought that the taking possession of this field ought to be marked by a public meeting and religious rites: and they have requested me to say a few words which the serious and tender occasion inspires.... The life of a tree is a hundred and a thousand years; its decays ornamental; its repairs self-made: they grow when we sleep, they grew when we were unborn. Man is a moth among these longevities...... when these acorns, that are falling at our feet, are oaks overshadowing our children in a remote century, this mute green bank will be full of history....

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Our use will not displace the old tenants. The well-beloved birds will not sing one song less, the high-holding woodpecker, the meadow-lark, the oriole, the robin, purple finch, bluebird, thrush and red-eyed warbler, the heron, the bittern will find out the hospitality and protection from the gun of this asylum, and will seek the waters of the meadow.... We shall bring hither the body of the dead, but how shall we catch the escaped soul?

[Also (Baker, Charles, EMERSON AMONG THE ECCENTRICS, Penguin Books, New York, 1996, pp. 397-398): “I have heard that when we pronounce the name of man, we pronounce the belief in Immortality.” “The real evidence is too subtle, or is higher than we can write down in propositions… All sound minds rest on a certain preliminary conviction, namely, that if it be best that conscious personal life shall continue, it will continue; if not best, then it will not.” “In this quiet valley, as in the palm of Nature’s hand, we shall sleep well when we have finished our day.”]

Thoreau had measured for the new artificial pond in the cemetery, termed “Cat Pond.”

John Shepard Keyes had been active in the creation of this cemetery. During this summer and fall almost alone and unaided I laid out the cemetery according to Clevelands plan, so far as was feasible, and with my own hands drove the stakes for the lots and saved as many trees as possible from cutting. Made all the arrangements for dedication and had a memorable address from Emerson a poem from Sanborn, an ode by Channing all delivered on a lovely September day in the glen by the lot I afterwards selected. This was followed by a sale of lots the choice for the first bringing $50. from Wm Monroe and realizing more than I expected some fifty lots sold, and the undertaking successful Thanks to me we have a ‘Sleepy Hollow’ cemetery I am quite content to take my long sleep in— and for my only epitaph “The Founder of This Cemetery” J.S. KEYES AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Friend Daniel Ricketson had been scheduled to visit Concord again and spend time with Henry, but had canceled the visit when he learned that Ellery Channing had moved to Dorchester and would not be available in Concord. So Henry, not standing on dignity, went off to New Bedford:

Clear fine day, growing gradually cooler. Henry D. 1 Thoreau of Concord arrived about 1 /2 o’clock.

September 29: Go to Daniel Ricketson’s, New Bedford. At Natural History Library saw Dr. Cabot, who says that he has heard either the hermit, or else the olivaceous,

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thrush sing, — very like a wood thrush, but softer. Is sure that the hermit thrush sometimes breeds hereabouts. De Kay, in the New York Reports, thus describes the blackfish— [The quotation is somewhat abridged.]

“FAMILY DELPHINIDÆ. Genus Globicephalus. Lesson. The Social Whale. Globicephalus melas. Delphinus melas. Trail, Nicholson’s Journal. D. globiceps. Cuvier, Mem. Mus. Vol. 19. D. deductor. Scoresby, Arct. Regions. D. intermedius. Harlan. Phocena globiceps.Sampson, Am. Journal.”

“Length 15 to 20 feet;” “shining, bluish black above;” a narrow light-gray stripe beneath; “remarkable for its loud cries when excited.” “Black Whale-fish,” “Howling Whale,” “Social Whale,” and “Bottle-head.” Often confounded with the grampus. Not known why they are stranded. In 1822 one hundred stranded in one herd at Wellfleet. First described in a History of Greenland. In the Naturalists’ Library, Jardine, I find Globicephalus deductor or melas, “The Deductor or Ca’ing Whale.” First accurately described by Trail in 1809. Sixteen to twenty-four feet long. In 1799 two hundred ran ashore on one of the Shetland Isles. In the winter of 1809-10, one thousand one hundred and ten “approached the shore of Hvalfiord, Iceland, and were captured.” In 1812 were used as food by the poor of Bretagne. They visit the neighborhood of Nice in May and June. Got out at Tarkiln Hill or Head of the River Station, three miles this side of New Bedford. Recognized an old Dutch barn. R.’s sons, Arthur and Walton, were just returning from tautog fishing in Buzzard’s Bay, and I tasted one at supper, — singularly curved from snout to tail.5 THE SLEEPY HOLLOW CEMETERY — OLD GRAVES (Franklin Benjamin Sanborn) My arrival to reside in Concord was at the time when old customs were changing for new ones. The settlement of Waldo Emerson here in 1834, after his return from Europe, and his first acquaintance with Thomas Carlyle, had something to do with these changes, especially after his friends began to gather round him here — the Thoreaus, John and Henry, in 1836; Alcott in 1840; Hawthorne in 1842; Ellery Channing in 1843; Margaret Fuller from 1836 to 1845 (though she never resided but only visited in Concord); and the Ripley family in 1845, inheriting the Old Manse, and receiving there Mrs. Ripley’s brother, George Bradford, who had been with Hawthorne at Brook Farm, and at Plymouth with Marston Watson at his garden and nursery of “Hillside,” which Thoreau surveyed and mapped for the Watsons in 1854. Mrs. Marston Watson (Mary Russell, a sister of William and Thomas Russell, Boston lawyers) had also lived in the Emerson family before her marriage, and was “The Maiden in the East” to whom Thoreau inscribed an early poem. These friends and among the Concord residents, the Hoar, Whiting and Bartlett families, and Edmund Hosmer, a sturdy farmer, with his daughters and kindred, all made up a circle especially intimate with Emerson, Alcott and Thoreau, though by no means all agreeing with the social, religious and political reformers, to which class belonged Garrison, Phillips, Theodore Parker, the Brook

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Farm and Fruitlands residents, and many visitors from America and Europe. Among these soon appeared Henry James, Charles Newcomb, the May family, Frederick Douglass, and other fugitive slaves, whom Mrs. Brooks, the Thoreaus, and other anti-slavery households received and cherished — helping them on their way to freedom, when pursued, as they sometimes were. My school grew in numbers during its first term, and much more in its first full year, 1855-56, near the beginning of which, in September, 1855, I was called on to make my first public appearance as a citizen — not as a voter; for I still had a voting residence in New Hampshire, where my brother and I had aided in voting down the pro-slavery Democratic party, whose leader at the time was Hawthorne’s college friend, Gen. Pierce, then President of the United States. One evening, early in September, I was sitting in our Channing apartment with my sister, when Mr. Emerson called for an errand surprising to me. The Sleepy Hollow Cemetery had been purchased and was to be dedicated, and Emerson was to give the address. He was also on the Town Committee to arrange for the exercises at the grove, where the prayers, hymns and poems were read and sung; and it was in that capacity he called on me. He said, “I asked Mr. Channing for a poem on this occasion, and he has sent me a good poem, but they tell me it cannot be sung. Now will you not write for us verses that will go to some familiar tune?” He had seen some of my college verses, and others which were made to be sung, and had been sung, and he inferred from that, a capacity to do the same for Concord. I assented, and presently showed him these lines: Ode. Shine kindly forth, September sun, From heavens calm and clear, That no untimely cloud may run Before thy golden sphere, To vex our simple rites today With one prophetic tear. With steady voices let us raise The fitting psalm and prayer;— Remembered grief of other days Breathes softening in the air: Who knows not Death — who mourns no loss,— He has with us no share. To holy sorrow, solemn joy, We consecrate the place Where soon shall sleep the maid and boy, The father and his race, The mother with her tender babe, The venerable face. These waving woods, these valleys low, Between the tufted knolls, Year after year shall dearer grow To many loving souls; And flowers be sweeter here than blow Elsewhere between the poles. For deathless Love and blessed Grief Shall guard these wooded aisles, When either Autumn casts the leaf, Or blushing Summer smiles, Or Winter whitens o’er the land, Or Spring the buds uncoils. The day proved to be that prayed for; these lines were sweetly

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sung to the tune of St. Martin’s; and in the choir I recognized the voices of some of my new friends. Mr. Emerson liked them, and printed them afterward in his “Parnassus,” as he did Channing’s poem, which as poetry was much better, and which also appears in “Parnassus,” and in the XIth volume of the Centenary edition of Emerson, as here: Sleepy Hollow. (W.E. Channing) No abbeys gloom, no dark cathedral stoops, No winding torches paint the midnight air; Here the green pine delights, the aspen droops Along the modest pathways, and those fair Pale asters of the season spread their plumes Around this field, fit garden for our tombs. And thou shalt pause to hear some funeral bell Slow stealing o’er thy heart in this calm place; Not with a throb of pain, a feverish knell, But in its kind and supplicating grace It says, “Go, Pilgrim, on thy march! be more Friend to the friendless than thou wast before:” Learn from the loved one’s rest, serenity! Tomorrow that soft bell for thee shall sound, And thou repose beneath the whispering tree, One tribute more to this submissive ground:— Prison thy soul from malice, bar out pride! Nor these pale flowers, nor this still field deride. Rather to those accents of Being turn, Where a ne’er-setting sun illumes the year Eternal: and the incessant watch-fires burn Of unspent holiness and goodness clear,— Forget man’s littleness, — deserve the best,— God’s mercy in thy thought and life confest! Seldom has a finer poem been read on such an occasion. My own verses were favorably received, and the late Judge Keyes, whose daughter Annie had become one of my pupils, said that I was now a citizen of Concord, and, like some French poet whom he named, as rewarded with a grave at Pere la Chaise, ought to have a burial lot granted me wherever I chose. Long afterward I bought my present lot, in which my poet-son is buried with a slab of marble from Athens above him, inscribed with a Greek line from a Roman tomb in Boetia, of the early Christian period.

1857

February 16: Henry Thoreau was being written to by Ticknor & Fields in Boston. H. D. Thoreau Esq In a/c with Ticknor & FieldsCo. 1856 Dear Sir – By Copy’t. on 240 Walden – 36.00 " 12 Concord River 9.00 $45.00 1857 Dr. Febry 16 Cash Check $45.00

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Boston Febry 16/57 Dear Sir Enclosed we beg to hand our check for Forty Five Dollars in accordance with above statement. Please acknowledge its receipt. And oblige Your obdt servants. Ticknor & Fields Clark

He made an entry in his journal that indicates that he had been reading in Lemuel Shattuck’s 1835 A HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF CONCORD;... (Boston MA: Russell, Odiorne, and Company; Concord MA: John Stacy, 1835).

Feb. 16. 8 A.M. —To Lee house site again. It was a rough-cast house when I first saw it. The fire still glowing among the bricks in the cellar. Richard Barrett says he remembers the inscription and the date 1650, but not the rest distinctly. I find that this recess was not in the cellar, but on the west side of the parlor, which was on the same level with the upper cellar at the west end of the house. It was on the back side of a cupboard (in that parlor), which was a few inches deep at the bottom and sloped back to a foot perhaps at top, or on the brick jog three inches at bottom and five and a half at top, and had shelves. The sitting-room of late was on the same level, the west side of this chimney. The old part of the chimney, judging from the clay and the size of the brick, was seven feet wide east and west and about ten north and south. There was the back side of an old oven visible on the south side (late the front of the house) under the stairs (that had been), which had been filled up with the large bricks in clay. The chimney above and behind the oven and this recess had been filled in with great stones, many much larger than one’s head, packed in clay mixed with the coarsest meadow-hay. Sometimes there were masses of pure clay and hay a foot in diameter. There was a very great proportion of the hay, consisting of cut-grass, three-sided carex, ferns, and still stouter woody sterns, apparently a piece of corn-husk one inch wide and several long. And impressions in the clay of various plants, — grasses, ferns, etc., — exactly like those in coal in character. These are perhaps the oldest pressed plants in Concord. I have a mass eight or nine inches in diameter which is apparently one third vegetable. About these stones there is generally only the width (four and one quarter inches) of one brick, so that the chimney was a mere shell. Though the inscription was in a coarse mortar mixed with straw, the sooty bricks over which it was spread were laid in a better mortar, without straw, and yet the mass of the bricks directly above this recess, in the chimney, were all laid in *clay*. Perhaps they had used plastering *there* instead of clay because it was a fireplace. A thin coating of whiter and finer mortar or plastering without straw had been spread over the sloping and rounded chimney above the recess and on each side and below it, and this covered many small bricks mingled with the large ones, and though this looked more modern, the straw-mixed mortar of the inscription overlapped at the top about a foot, proving the coarser mortar the more recent. The inscription, then, was made after the chimney was built, when some alteration was made, and a small brick had come to be used. Yet so long ago that straw was mixed with the mortar. If that recess was an old fireplace, then, apparently, the first house fronted east, for the oven was on the south side. A boy who was at the fire said to me, “This was the chimney in which the cat was burned up; she ran into a stove, and we heard her cries in the midst of the fire.” Parker says there was no cat; she was drowned. According CAT to Shattuck, Johnson, having the period 1615 to 1650 in view, says of Concord that it *had* been more populous. “The number of families at present are about 50. Their buildings are conveniently placed, chiefly in one straite street under a sunny banke in a low level,” etc. (History, page 18.) According to Shattuck (page 14), Governor Winthrop “selected (judiciously, I think) a lot in Concord [apparently in 1638], which ‘he intended to build upon,’ near where Captain Humphrey Hunt now lives.” I was contending some time ago that our meadows must have been wetter once than they now are, else the trees would have got up there more. I see that Shattuck says under 1654 (page 33), “The meadows were somewhat: drier, and ceased to be a subject of frequent complaint.” According to Wood’s “New England’s Prospect,” the first settlers of Concord for meat bought “venison or rockoons” of the Indians. The latter must have been common then. The wolves robbed them of their swine. A wonderfully warm day (the third one); about 2 P.M., thermometer in shade 58. I perceive that some, commonly talented, persons are enveloped and confined by a certain crust of manners, which, though it may sometimes be a fair and transparent enamel, yet only repels and saddens the beholder,

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since by its rigidity it seems to repress all further expansion. They are viewed as at a distance, or like an insect under a tumbler. They have, as it were, prematurely hardened both seed and shell, and this has severely taxed, if not put a period to, the life of the plant. This is to stand upon your dignity. Genius has evanescent boundaries, like an altar from which incense rises. The former are, after all, but hardened sinners in a mild sense. The pearl is a hardened sinner. Manners get to be human parchment, in which sensible books are often bound and honorable titles engrossed, though they may be very stiff and dry.

February 27: Jacob Whitman Bailey died at the age of 46. The diatom Stauronema Bayleyi either had been or would be provided with that name in his honor.

Henry Thoreau was being written to by Ticknor & Fields in Boston. Boston. 27 Feb 1857 H. Thoreau Esq Concord Mass Dear Sir Please send us as soon as convenient twelve copies of the “Week &c” on Sale and oblige Truly Yours Ticknor & Co per J.R. Osgood

Harper’s Illustrated Weekly overindulged somewhat in microeconomic versus macroeconomic rhyme versus rhythm: For fate is fickle, and Fortune fails, And life is a game of heads and tails, And mixed-up losers and winners, And the same retributions now and then Happen to fall on nations of men As on individual sinners.

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1858

December 7, Tuesday: Henry Thoreau checked out, from Harvard Library, Enrico “Iron Hand” de Tonti’s RELATION 6 DE LA LOUISIANA OU MISSISSIPPI PAR LE CHEVALIER DE TONTI (1734).

6. Henry, Chevalier de Tonti was born in Gaeta, Italy in about 1650, a son of Lorenzo Tonti. He entered the French army as a cadet and served in addition in the French navy. In 1678 he accompanied René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle (1643-1687) to Canada. In 1680, during an exploration of the Mississippi he was left in command of Fort Crevecoeur on the Illinois River near Peoria, Illinois. After making an unsuccessful attempt to found a settlement in Arkansas, in 1685 he took part in an expedition of the Western Indians against the Senecas. He twice went down the Mississippi to its mouth while in search of La Salle, and then needed to go down the river a third time to meet M. D’Iberville. During September 1704 he died at Fort Saint Loûis (now Mobile, Alabama). There is a report by him in Margry’s RELATIONS ET MEMOIRES, and an English translation of this report, “An Account of Monsieur de la Salle’s Last Discoveries in North America. Presented to the French King, and Published by the Chevalier Tonti, Governour of Fort St. Louis, in the Province of the Illinois ...,” would be printed in London by J. Tonson, S. Buckley, and R. Knaplock in 1698 and reprinted in New-York in 1814. Refer to Benjamin Franklin French’s HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS OF LOUISIANA AND FLORIDA (Volume I, 1846). 42 Copyright  Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Thoreau also checked out Volume IV of the five volumes of Benjamin Franklin French’s HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS OF LOUISIANA, EMBRACING MANY RARE AND VALUABLE DOCUMENTS RELATING TO THE NATURAL, CIVIL AND POLITICAL HISTORY OF THAT STATE. COMPILED WITH HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES, AND AN INTRODUCTION... (New York: Wiley & Putnam). Part I of this, Historical Documents from 1678-1691, contains La Salle’s memoir of the discovery of the Mississippi, Joutel’s journal, and Hennepin’s account of the Mississippi. Part II contains Marquette and Joliet’s voyage to discover the Mississippi, De Soto’s expedition, and Coxe’s “Carolana.” Part III contains La Harpe’s journal of the establishment of the French in Louisiana, Charlevoix’s journal, etc. Part IV, the volume from which Thoreau was extracting into his Indian Notebook #11, printed in 1852, contains narratives of the voyages, missions, and travels among the Indians, by Marquette, Joliet, Dablon, Allouez, Le Clercq, La Salle, Hennepin, Membre, and Douay, with biographical and bibliographical notices of these missionaries and their works, by John Gilmary Shea, and contains the 1673 Thevenot chart of the “R. Mitchisipi ou grand Riviere” indicating the native tribes along its tributaries, “Carte de la decouverte faite l’an 1673. dans l’Amerique Septentrionale.” THE MITCHISIPI RIVER

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Part V contains Dumont’s memoir of transactions with the Indians of Louisiana, from 1712 to 1740, and Champégny’s memoirs.

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Thoreau also checked out Jean-Frédéric Bernard’s RECUEIL DE VOYAGES AU NORD, CONTENANT DIVERS MÉMOIRES TRÈS UTILES AU COMMERCE & À LA NAVIGATION, 1715-1738 (A Amsterdam, Chez J.F. Bernard), and would make extracts in his Indian Notebook #11. According to the edition statement contained in the 4th volume, this is the 4th edition of the work and Volume 2 had been printed in 1715, Volumes 1 and 3 in 1716, Volume 6 in 1723, Volume 5 in 1724, Volume 7 in 1725, and Volume 8 in 1727 (of the final two of the 10 volumes, Volumes 9 and 10, this 1732 printing says nothing, of course because they had not yet been put through the press).

Unfortunately, Google Books has scanned so far of these ten volumes only Volume 4 — so that is all I am able to provide for you here: JEAN-FRÉDÉRIC BERNARD

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Thoreau also checked out Father Louis Hennepin’s VOYAGES | CURIEUX ET NOUVEAUX | DE MESSIEURS | HENNEPIN & DE LA BORDE, | OU L’ON VOIT UNE DESCRIPTION TRÈS PARTICULIERE, D’UN GRAND PAYS DANS L’AMERIQUE, ENTRE LE | NOUVEAU MEXIQUE, & LA MER GLACIALE, AVEC UNE RELATION CURIEUSE DES | CARAIBES SAUVAGES DES ISLES ANTILLES DE L’AMERIQUE, | LEURS MŒURS, COÛTUMES, RELIGION &C. | LE TOUTE ACCOMPAGNÉ DES CARTES & FIGURES NECESSAIRES. | [Emblem.] | AAMSTERDAM, AUX DEPENS DE LA COMPAGNIE. MDCXI (this was an exact reprint of the edition of 1704, with merely a slight change to the title page).

Sieur de la Borde is a mysterious figure, for all we know for sure is that he worked, perhaps as a lay brother, for a short period with Jesuit missionaries, especially with Father Simon at the mission on St. Vincent Island in the Antilles.

I am guessing that he was part of the Langlade family that had come over from Castle Sarrasin in Bassee, Guyenne, France (at first known as the family Mouet de Moras) that had settled at Trois-Rivières, Québec in

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1668, and I am guessing that his full name was Louis Mouet De Moras, Sieur de la Borde and that he was the 4th of the sons of Pierre Mouet, Landlord of Moras, who was an ensign in the Carignan-Salières regiment, with Marie Toupin, Madame de Moras (born on August 19, 1651 at Québec, died on March 13, 1722/1723 at Trois- Rivières),

that he had been baptized on October 9, 1676 and would die on March 27, 1699 (but this is guesswork based on family genealogies, and does not at all jibe with an original date of his publication of 1674 at Paris; none of this makes sense if his book was published before he was born, and everything of this makes somewhat more sense if his book actually was published in 1694, when he was perhaps 18 years of age and had perhaps already in his teens as a lay brother assisted Father Simon at his mission in St. Vincent Island, and simply went through the press with a numerical typo on its title page).

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Thoreau would extract something about heavy surf from this source, for use in Chapter 8 “The Highland Light” of CAPE COD.]

CURIEUX ET NOUVEAU

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CAPE COD: Our host said that you would be surprised if you were on the beach when the wind blew a hurricane directly on to it, to see that none of the drift-wood came ashore, but all was carried directly northward and parallel with the shore as fast as a man can walk, by the inshore current, which sets strongly in that direction at flood tide. The strongest swimmers also are carried along with it, and never gain an inch toward the beach. Even a large rock has been moved half a mile northward along the beach. He assured us that the sea was never still on the back side of the Cape, but ran commonly as high as your head, so that a great part of the time you could not launch a boat there, and even in the calmest weather the waves run six or eight feet up the beach, though then you could get off on a plank. Champlain and Poitrincourt could not land here in 1606, on account of the swell (la houlle), yet the savages came off to them in a canoe. In the Sieur de la Borde’s “Relation des Caraibes,” my edition of which DE LA BORDE was published at Amsterdam in 1711, at page 530 he says:–

“Couroumon a Caraibe, also a star [i.e. a god], makes the great lames à la mer, and overturns canoes. Lames à la mer are the long vagues which are not broken (entrecoupees), and such as one sees come to land all in one piece, from one end of a beach to another, so that, however little wind there may be, a shallop or a canoe could hardly land (aborder terre) without turning over, or being filled with water.” But on the Bay side the water even at its edge is often as smooth and still as in a pond. Commonly there are no boats used along this beach. There was a boat belonging to the Highland Light which the next keeper after he had been there a year had not launched, though he said that there was good fishing just off the shore. Generally the Life Boats cannot be used when needed. When the waves run very high it is impossible to get a boat off, however skilfully you steer it, for it will often be completely covered by the curving edge of the approaching breaker as by an arch, and so filled with water, or it will be lifted up by its bows, turned directly over backwards and all the contents spilled out. A spar thirty feet long is served in the same way. I heard of a party who went off fishing back of Wellfleet some years ago, in two boats, in calm weather, who, when they had laden their boats with fish, and approached the land again, found such a swell breaking on it, though there was no wind, that they were afraid to enter it. At first they thought to pull for Provincetown, but night was coming on, and that was many miles distant. Their case seemed a desperate one. As often as they approached the shore and saw the terrible breakers that intervened, they were deterred. In short, they were thoroughly frightened. Finally, having thrown their fish overboard, those in one boat chose a favorable opportunity, and succeeded, by skill and good luck, in reaching the land, but they were unwilling to take the responsibility of telling the others when to come in, and as the other helmsman was inexperienced, their boat was swamped at once, yet all managed to save themselves.

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The full title of the book to which Thoreau refers in CAPE COD, “the Sieur de la Borde’s ‘Relation des Caraibes,’ my edition of which was published at Amsterdam in 1711,” is VOYAGES | CURIEUX ET NOUVEAUX | DE MESSIEURS | HENNEPIN & DE LA BORDE, | OU L’ON VOIT UNE DESCRIPTION TRÈS PARTICULIERE, D’UN GRAND PAYS DANS L’AMERIQUE, ENTRE LE | NOUVEAU MEXIQUE, & LA MER GLACIALE, AVEC UNE RELATION CURIEUSE DES | CARAIBES SAUVAGES DES ISLES ANTILLES DE L’AMERIQUE, | LEURS MŒURS, COÛTUMES, RELIGION &C. | LE TOUTE ACCOMPAGNÉ DES CARTES & FIGURES NECESSAIRES. | [Emblem.] | A AMSTERDAM, AUX DEPENS DE LA COMPAGNIE. MDCXI (this is an exceedingly rare volume, but was a mere reprint of the more available edition of 1704, with slight change in the title page). The original date of his publication RELATION CURIEUSE DES CARAIBES SAUVAGES DES ISLES ANTILLES DE L’AMERIQUE had been 1674, when it had appeared at Paris under the title RELATION DE L’ORIGINE, MOEURS, COÛTUMES, RELIGION, GUERRES & VOYAGES DES CARAIBES, SAUVAGES DES ISLES ANTILLES DE L’AMERIQUE. FAITE PAR LE SIEUR DE LA BORDE EMPLOYE A LA CONVERSION DES CARAIBES, ESTANT AVEC LE R.P. SIMON JESUITE; ET TIREE DU CABINET DE MONSIEUR BLOUDEL ... DIVIDED INTO 12 COMPARTMENTS, EXHIBITING THE UTENSILS, DWELLINGS, AND MANUFACTURES OF THE CARIBS.

While he was in Cambridge, Thoreau also checked out Père Claude Dablon’s RELATION OF THE VOYAGES OF FATHER JAMES MARQUETTE, 1673-75 (1677).

“There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away” — Emily Dickinson

After leaving the Harvard Library with his load of books of the history of French Catholic7 exploration to study, such as JESUIT RELATIONS for 1670-1672, from which he would copy into his Indian Notebook #11, Thoreau visited the Boston Society of Natural History to do some ornithology.

December 7. To Boston.

7. It never ceases to amaze me how Thoreau, with his Huguenot family history of persecution by French Catholics, and despite the rampant anti-Catholicism that marred the USer attitudes of those times, was able so benignly to consider the positive accomplishments of French Catholics! Clearly he carried with him no grudge at all in regard to what had been in its day the largest mass religious expulsion and genocide (prior, of course, to the Holocaust). 52 Copyright  Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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At Natural History Rooms. The egg of Turdus solitarius is light-bluish with pale-brown spots. This is apparently mine which I call hermit thrush, though mine is [sic] redder and distincter brown spots. The egg of Turdus brunneus (called hermit thrush) is a clear blue. The rail’s egg (of Concord, which I have seen) is not the Virginia rail’s, which is smaller and nearly pure white, nor the clapper rail’s, which is larger. Is it the sora rail’s (of which there is no egg in this collection)? My egg found in R.W.E.’s garden is not the white-throated sparrow’s egg. Dr. Bryant calls my seringo (i.e. the faint-noted bird) Savannah sparrow. He says Cooper’s hawk is just like the sharp-shinned, only a little larger commonly. He could not tell them apart. Neither he nor Brewer8 can identify eggs always. Could match some gulls’ eggs out of another basket full of a different species as well as out of the same basket.

On this day his letter arrived in New Bedford, so in the evening Friend Daniel Ricketson was waiting for the train from Boston at the Tarkiln Hill depot at the head of the river, and picked up Thoreau with his load of books, and Thomas Cholmondeley, and took them to his Shanty — where they talked of the English poets Thomas Gray, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, William Wordsworth, etc. until they retired at 10 PM.

On this day Thoreau was being written to by Ticknor & Fields in Boston. Boston Decr 7/58 Henry D. Thoreau Esq Concord Mass. Dear Sir Referring to our file of letters for 1857 we find a note from you of which the enclosed is a copy. As our letter –to which it is a reply– was missent, we doubt not but our answer to yours of a few months since has been subjected to the same, or a similar irregularity. Respectfully Yours &c. Ticknor & Fields pr Clark

8. Thomas Mayo Brewer had written in the Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History for the years 1851-1854, on page 324 of volume 4, that Thoreau copied into his Commonplace Book #2. Spencer Fullerton Baird, Thomas Mayo Brewer, and Robert Ridgway would create the 3-volume A HISTORY OF NORTH AMERICAN BIRDS. LAND BIRDS (Boston: Little, Brown, 1874-1884). Brewer’s specialty in bird study was nesting and eggs. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 53 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1860

January 17, Tuesday: Anton Chekhov was born (January 29th, New Style).

Henry Thoreau was being written to by Samuel Ripley Bartlett, son of the Concord physician residing in Boston, who was requesting a letter of introduction to Ticknor & Fields so that he could submit his poem “The Concord Fight” for publication.

Here still in Concord sleeps the ancient force; Here rebels wild, fanatics fierce, we find, Who war against a tyranny more dread Than that of old, the thraldom of the mind. What the old spirit dead? No, No! — it lives.

BARTLETT’S CONCORD FIGHT

Boston Jan 17th 59 H. D. Thoreau. Dear Sir, Will you be so very kind as to send me a letter of introduction to Mess Ticknor & Fields. I want to get them to publish Concord Fight, the poem I read at Con- cord, & yr introduction would be of great use to me S Ripley Bartlett

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Care John C. Morse 99 Devonshire St

Carl Schurz wrote from New-York to Charles Wesley Slack, to make arrangements for a lecture tour.9

Jan. 17. Another mild day.

P.M.—To Goose Pond and Walden. Sky overcast, but a crescent of clearer in the northwest. I see on the snow in Hubbard’s Close one of those rather large flattish black bugs some five-eighths of an inch long, with feelers and a sort of shield at the forward part with an orange mark on each side of it.

In the spring-hole ditches of the Close I see many little water-bugs (Gyrinus) gyrating, and some under water. It must be a common phenomenon there in mild weather in the winter. I look again at that place of squirrels (of the 13th). As I approach, I have a glimpse of one or two red squirrels gliding off silently along the branches of the pines, etc. They are gone so quickly and noiselessly, perhaps

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keeping the trunk of the tree between you and them, that [YOU] would not commonly suspect their presence if you were not looking for them. But one that was on the snow ascended a pine and sat on a bough with its back to the trunk as if there was nothing to pay. Yet when I moved again he scud up the tree, and glided across on some very slender twigs into a neighboring tree, and so I lost him. Here is, apparently, a settlement of these red squirrels. There are many holes through the snow into the ground, and many more w here they have probed and dug up a white pine cone, now pretty black and, for aught I can see, with abortive or empty seeds; yet they patiently strip them on the spot, or at the base of the trees, or at the entrance of their holes, and evidently find some good seed. The snow, however, is strewn with the empty and rejected seeds. They seem to select for their own abode a hillside where there are half a dozen rather large and thick white pines near enough together for their aerial travelling, and then they burrow numerous holes and depend on finding (apparently) the pine cones which they cast down in the summer, before they have opened. In the fall they construct a nest of grass and bark- fibres, moss, etc., in one of the trees for winter use, and so apparently have two resources. I walk about Ripple Lake and Goose Pond. I see the old tracks of some foxes and rabbits about the edge of these ponds (over the ice) within a few feet of the shore. I think that I have noticed that animals thus commonly go round by the shore of a pond, whether for fear of the ice, or for the shelter of the shore, i. e. not to be seen, or DOG because their food and game is found there. But a dog will oftener bolt straight across. When I reached the open railroad causeway returning, there was a splendid sunset. The northwest sky at first was what you may call a lattice sky, the fair weather establishing itself first on that side in the form of a long and narrow crescent, in which the clouds, which were uninterrupted overhead, were broken into long bars parallel to the horizon, thus:—

Alcott said well the other day that this was his definition of heaven, “A place where you can have a little conversation.”

January 19, Thursday: Henry Thoreau provided to Samuel Ripley Bartlett the letter of introduction to Ticknor & Fields which had been requested (the only text for this letter of introduction which I have been able so far to locate is a text which appears to now be considerably mangled), but suggested nevertheless that the author not offer the poem “The Concord Fight” for publication.

Concord Jan 19th 1860 Mr S. Ripley Bartlett, Dear Sir, I send you with this a letter of introduction to Ticknor & Fields, as you request; though I am rather remote from them. I think that your poem was well calculated for our lyceum, and the neighboring towns, but I would advise you, if it is not impertinent, not to have it printed, as you propose. You might keep it by you, read it as you have done, as you may have opportunity, and see how it wears with yourself. It may be in your own way if printed. The public are very cold and indifferent to such things, and the publishers still more so. I have found that the precept “Write with fury, and correct with flegm” required me to print only the hundredth part of what I had written. If you print at first in newspapers and magazines, you can afterward collect survives — what your readers demand. That, I should say, is the sim- plest and safest, as it is the commonest, way. You so get the criticism of the public, & if you fail, no harm is done. You may think this harsh advice, but, believe me, it is sincere. Yrs truly

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Henry D. Thoreau

Concord [Jn] 19th 60 [Mesr] Ticknor & [Fields] The bearer of this [ ] Ripley Bartlett is a young of mine who wishes who you of & very He is the son of Dr [Jonah] Bartlett Josiah of & the nephew of Ripley yrs H D Thoreau

BARTLETT’S CONCORD FIGHT

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Jan. 19. P.M. — Down river.

2 P.M. — Thermometer 38. Somewhat cloudy at first. The open water at Barrett’s Bar is very small compared with that at Hubbard’s Bath yesterday, and I think it could not have frozen much last night. It is evident mere shallowness is not enough to prevent freezing, for that shallowest space of all, in middle of river at Barrett’s Bar, has been frozen ever since the winter began. It is the swifter though deeper, but not deep, channels on each side that remain open. When I reached the lowest part of the Great Meadows, the neck of the Holt, I saw that the ice, thickly covered with snow, before me was of two shades, white and darker, as far as I could see in parallel sections. This was owing to fine snow blown low over the first –hence white– portion. I noticed it when I was returning toward the sun. This snow looks just like vapor curling along over the surface,— long waving lines producing the effect of a watered surface, very interesting to look at, when you face the sun, waving or curving about swellings in the ice like the grain of wood, the whole surface in motion, like a low, thin, but infinitely broad stream made up of a myriad meandering rills of vapor flowing over the surface. It seemed to rise a foot or two, yet when I laid my finger on the snow I did not perceive that any of the drifting snow rose above it or passed over it; it rather turned and went round it. It was the snow, probably the last light snow of the morning (when half an inch fell), blown by the strong northwest wind just risen, and apparently blown only where the surface beneath was smooth enough to let it slide. On such a surface it would evidently be blown a mile very quickly. Here the distance over which it was moving may have been half a mile. As you look down on it around you, you only see it moving straight forward in a thin sheet; but when you look at it several rods off in the sun, it has that waving or devious motion like vapor and flames, very agreeable and surprising.

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1861

April 10, Wednesday: Henry Thoreau wrote to Parker Pillsbury, sending along a copy of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS per their request but indicating that for WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS the Anti- Slavery Office will need to go to Ticknor & Fields.

A macarism from this letter: “[Ignoring evil, in general, and, specifically, ignoring the fighting that was going on at Fort Sumter, and ignoring the attitudes of President Abraham Lincoln about this fighting] is just the most fatal and indeed the only fatal, weapon you can direct against evil, ever…. I do not so much regret the present condition of things in this country (provided I regret it at all) as I do that I ever heard of it…. Blessed were the days before you read a president’s message. Blessed are they who never read a newspaper, for they shall see Nature, and through her, God.”

ROSS/ADAMS COMMENTARY US CIVIL WAR

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Concord Ap. 10th 1861 Friend Pillsbury, I am sorry to say that I have not a copy of “Walden” which I can spare, and know of none, unless, possibly, Ticknor & Fields have one. I send, nevertheless, a copy of the “Week”, the price of which is $1.25 which you can pay at your convenience. As for my prospective reader, I hope that he ignores Fort Sumpter, & Old Abe, & all that, for that is just the most fatal, and indeed the only fatal, weapon you can direct against evil ever; for as long as you know of it, you are particeps criminis. What business have you, if you are “an angel of light,” to be pondering over the deeds of darkness, — reading the New York Herald, & the like? I do not so much regret the present condition of things in this country, (provided I regret it at all) as I do that I ever heard of it. I know one or 2 who have this year, for the first time, read a president’s message; but they do not see that this implies a fall in themselves, rather than a rise in the president. Blessed were the days before you read a president’s message. Blessed are the young for they do not read the president’s message. Blessed are they who never read a newspaper, for they shall see Na- ture, and through her, God. But alas I have heard of Sumpter, & Pickens, & even of Buchanan, (though I did not read his message). I also read the New York Tribune, but then I am reading Herodotus & Strabo, & Blodget’s Climatology, and Six Years in the Deserts of STRABO North America, as hard as I can, to counterbalance it. BLODGET By the way, Alcott is at present our most popular & successful man, and has just published a volume in size, in the shape of the annual school report, which, I presume, he has sent to you. Yrs, for remembering all good things, Henry D. Thoreau

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SEVEN YEARS RESIDENCE, I SEVEN YEARS RESIDENCE, II

April 10. Purple finch.

1862

February 11, day: Fighting began at Fort Donelson in Tennessee.

William Brooks wrote from Washington DC to Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, sending along some petitions relative to emancipation that had been submitted to the US Senate.

Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau wrote for Henry Thoreau to W.D. Ticknor and James T. Fields, currently the editors of The Atlantic Monthly, who were interested in publishing more easy-reading crowd-pleasing nature-related stuff:

I have no objection to having the papers you refer to printed in your monthly—if my feeble health will permit me to prepare them for the printer.

Bradley P. Dean has commented that since Thoreau knew his condition, “he was probably more interested in moving some of his lectures into print than his rather nonchalant reply to Ticknor & Fields seems to indicate.”

Concord Feb. 11.th ’62

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Messrs, Editors Only extreme illness has prevented my answering your note earlier. I have no objection to having the papers you refer to printed in your monthly—if my feeble health will permit me to prepare them for the printer— What will you give me for them? They are, or have been used as, lectures of the usual length, taking about an hour to read & I dont see how they can be divided without injury— How many pages can you print at once?— Of course, I should expect that no sentiment or sentence be altered or omitted without my consent, & to retain the copyright of the paper after you had used it in your monthly.— Is your monthly copyrighted? Yours respectfully, S.E. Thoreau for H.D. Thoreau

February 18, Tuesday: Brooks Williams wrote from Washington DC to Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, offering further information about the petitions on emancipation that had been submitted to the House of Representatives.

Henry Thoreau wrote to Ticknor & Fields, promising to forward “AUTUMNAL TINTS” to them in a day or two, in the original “culled out of a very large imperfect essay, whose integrity I wish to restore,” which they would need to return to him since he had no duplicate.

Concord Feb. 18th 1862. Messrs Ticknor & Fields, I will accept the offer contained in your last, & will forward to you a paper called “Autumnal Tints” in a day or two. I must ask two favors. First, that I may see the proofs, chiefly that I may look after my peculiarities, for I may not be well enough thoroughly to revise them, and therefore trust that you have a sharp-eyed reader, who will save me that labor. Secondly, I wish to have the MSS. of this article preserved, since I have no duplicate, & what I send will be culled out from a very large imperfect essay, whose integrity I wish to restore.

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Yrs respectfully Henry D. Thoreau

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February 20, Thursday: President Abraham Lincoln’s son Willie died at age 12. The president’s wife was emotionally devastated and would not fully recover.

Cover letter to Ticknor & Fields from Henry Thoreau by S.E. Thoreau, over “AUTUMNAL TINTS”, mentioning leaf still to be sent:

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Concord Feb 20.th 1862 Messrs Ticknor & Fields, I send you herewith, the paper called Autumnal Tints. I see that it will have to be divided, & I would prefer that the first portion terminate with page 42, in order that it may make the more impression. The rest I think will take care of itself. I may as well say now that on pages 55-6-7-8 I have described the Scarlet Oak leaf very minutely. In my lecturing I have always carried a very large & handsome one displayed on a white ground, which did me great service with the audience. Now if you will read those pages, I think that you will see the advantage of having a simple outline engraving of this leaf & also of the White Oak leaf on the opposite page, that the readers may the better appreciate my words— I will supply the leaves to be copied when the time comes. When you answer the questions in my last note, please let me know about how soon this article will be published. Yours respectfully, Henry D. Thoreau. by S.E. Thoreau.

February 24, Monday: Letter to Ticknor & Fields from H.D. Thoreau by the hand of his sister Sophia, about a new

edition of WALDEN. Knowing full well that it was not what they had in mind, Henry also wrote in regard to the publication of his most often-delivered lecture, the didactic piece of moral instruction that would become his essay “LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE”:

I will send you an article as soon as I can prepare it, which has no relation to the seasons of the year.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN

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Concord Feb 24.th 1862 Messrs Ticknor & Fields Oct. 25th 1853 I received from Munroe & Co. the following note; “We send by ex- press this day a box & bundle containing 250 copies of Concord River, & also 450. in sheets. All of which we trust you will find correct.” I found by count the number of bound volumes to be correct. The sheets have lain untouched just as received, in stout papter wrappers ever since. I find that I now have 146 bound copies. Therefore the whole number in my possession is, Bound copies 146 In sheets 450 596 You spoke when here, of printing a new edition of the Walden. If you incline to do so, I shall be happy to make an arrangement with you to that effect. Yours respectfully H.D. Thoreau by S.E. Thoreau PS. I will send you an article as soon as I can prepare it, which has no relation to the seasons of the year.

February 28, day: A struggle began at New Madrid, that would be continuing unabated until April 8th.

This is the date on a cover letter to Ticknor & Fields from H.D. Thoreau by the hand of his sister Sophia, over “a paper called The Higher Law, it being much shorter & easier to prepare than that on Walking” which Thoreau had prepared by making a few changes in his reading draft of “LIFE MISSPENT”. He omitted paragraphs 31-32, 34-39, 47, and 57-61; combined paragraphs 19 and 56; moved the leaves containing the material in paragraphs 25-30, 33, and 40-41 to the end of the text; placed paragraph 55 after paragraph 5l; placed the paragraph resulting from the combination of 19 and 56 after paragraph 24; and added two newly 10 written transitional paragraphs “LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE” 2 and 46) to his text. By this procedure Thoreau transformed “Life Misspent” in four days into “The Higher Law.”

Concord Feb 28.th 1862. Messrs Ticknor & Fields, I send you with this a paper called The Higher Law, it being much shorter & easier to prepare than that on Walking. It will not need to be divided on account of its length, as indeed the subject does not permit it. I should like to know that you receive it & also about what time it will be published. Yours truly HD. Thoreau by S.E. Thoreau.

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March 1, Saturday: Emily Dickinson’s “The Sleeping” appeared in the Springfield MA Republican.

Letter to Ticknor & Fields from Henry Thoreau, conveying one scarlet oak Quercus coccinea leaf to use for the basis of an illustration in their printing of “AUTUMNAL TINTS”:

Concord March 1st 1862.

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Messrs Ticknor & Fields, This Scarlet Oak leaf is the smallest one in my collection, yet it must lose a bristle or two to gain admittance to your page. I wish simply for a faithful outline engraving of the leaf bristles & all. In the middle of page 57 or of a neighboring page, is a note in pencil— The leaf should be opposite to this page & this note be altered into a note for the bottom of the page like this — viz “The original of the leaf on the opposite page was picked from such a pile” Yours truly Henry D Thoreau, by S.E. Thoreau.

March 4, Tuesday: Letter to Ticknor & Fields from H.D. Thoreau by the hand of his sister Sophia, changing the title of “The Higher Law” to “Life without Principle,” and changing the title of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS: “I wish to make one alteration in the new edition viz, to leave out from the title the words ‘Or Life in the Woods’.” TIMELINE OF WALDEN Concord March 4th ’62 Messrs Ticknor & Fields, I hereby acknowledge the receipt of your check for one hundred dollars on account of manuscript sent to you— As for another title for the Heigher Law article, I can think of nothing better than, Life without Principle. The paper on Walking will be ready ere long. I shall be happy to have you print 250. copies of Walden on the terms mentioned & will consider this answer as settling the business. I wish to make one alteration in the new edition viz, to leave out from the title the words “or Life in the Woods.” Yours truly H.D. Thoreau by S.E. Thoreau

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Thoreau acknowledged receipt from Ticknor & Fields of a draft, for $100.00, which may well have been their payment for “AUTUMNAL TINTS”.

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(Thoreau’s book had been primarily the publication of a collection of lyceum lectures he had offered, made up of one lyceum lecture per chapter. One of his earliest of these lyceum lectures had been titled “Life in the Woods,” and the “hook” that had rounded up an audience for this particular lecture had been that he was going to explain to his fellow townspeople, why as a younger man he had made the strange experiment of going off and living by himself outside of town. In the year in which he had first published this collection of his lyceum lectures, the names “Walden Pond” and “Walden Woods” were quite unknown outside of the immediate environs of Concord, Massachusetts and therefore a book title such as simply WALDEN wouldn’t have meant much to anybody, any more than if he had titled it IPSUM, or PERMOS, or LADDET. The situation was very different, however, at this 2d publication. By the year of republication, this word “Walden” had come to be a word known to everyone and everyone’s aunt Matilda. The word stood for one thing and one thing only — that famous book, a book that everybody had come to know about even if they hadn’t themselves bothered to peruse it. –Meanwhile, however, the fact that Thoreau had once offered a lyceum lecture that he had titled “Life in the Woods” had been quite forgotten. The title needed to be simplified because simple titles are better titles, and because the “Life in the Woods” part of the title had turned out to be ill-advised — there had turned out to be a certain sort of reader who would presume, on the basis of this title, that what Thoreau was doing was sponsoring an agenda, that folks ought to go off and live in the woods the way he had gone off and lived in the woods. That was an unfortunate interpretation and one that was getting in the way of his communicating his message. He hadn’t ever been proposing that anyone ought to go live on the shore of Walden Pond, or that anyone ought to go out and live in the piney Walden Woods, that had been no part of his agenda. So it was better to be rid of this part of the title.)

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Thoreau acknowledged receipt from Ticknor & Fields of a draft, for $100.00, which may well have been their payment for “AUTUMNAL TINTS”.

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March 11, Tuesday: The USS Constellation left Portsmouth, New Hampshire under the command of Commodore Henry K. Thatcher, heading for the Mediterranean.

The Governor of Massachusetts, John Albion Andrew, proclaimed “Thursday, the third day of April next, to be observed throughout this Commonwealth, as a day of public HUMILIATION, FASTING, AND PRAYER.”

“Henry D. Thoreau by S.E. Thoreau” sent in to Ticknor & Fields in Boston both “WALKING”

“WALKING”: Where on the Globe can there be found an area of equal extent with that occupied by the bulk of our states, so fertile and so rich and varied in its productions, and at the same time so habitable by the European, as this is? Michaux who knew but part of them, says that “the species of large trees are much more numerous in North America than in Europe: in the United States there are more than 140 species that exceed thirty feet in height; in France there are but thirty that attain this size.” Later botanists more than confirm his observations. Humboldt came to America to realize his youthful dreams of a tropical vegetation, and he beheld it in its greatest perfection in the primitive forests of the Amazon, the most gigantic wilderness on the earth, which he has so eloquently described. The geographer Guyot, himself a European, goes farther — farther than I am ready to follow him, yet not when he says, “As the plant is made for the animal, as the vegetable world is made for the animal world, America is made for the man of the Old World.” “The man of the Old World sets out upon his way. Leaving the highlands of Asia, he descends from station to station, towards Europe. Each of his steps is marked by a new civilization superior to the preceding, by a greater power of development. Arrived at the Atlantic, he pauses on the shore of this unknown Ocean, the bounds of which he knows not, and turns upon his foot prints for an instant.” When he has exhausted the rich soil of Europe and reinvigorated himself — “Then recommences his adventurous career westward as in the earliest ages.” — So far Guyot.

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT ARNOLD HENRI GUYOT

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and the corrected proofs for “AUTUMNAL TINTS,” under a cover note in Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau’s handwriting.

Sophia Thoreau Concord Mar. 11th 1862 Messrs Ticknor & Fields, I send with this the paper on Walking & also the proofs of Autumnal Tints. The former paper will bear dividing into two portions very well, the natural joint being, I think at the end of page 44. At any rate the two parcels being separately tied up, will indicate it— I do not quite like to have the Autumnal Tints described as in two parts, for it appears as if the author had made a permanent distinction between them; Would it not be better to say at the end of the first portion “To be continued in the next number”? As for the leaf, I had not thought how it should be engraved, but left it to you. Your note suggests that perhaps it is to be done at my expense. What is the custom? and what would be the cost of a steel engraving? I think that an ordinary wood engraving would be much better than nothing. Yours truly Henry D. Thoreau by S.E. Thoreau.

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General McClellan was relieved of command.

A later letter from Theophilus Brown to Friend Daniel Ricketson, on January 19, 1868, described a conversation of this period: H.G.O. Blake had asked Henry how the future seemed, and

“Just as uninteresting as ever, was his characteristic answer.... He said it was just as good to be sick as to be well, — just as good to have a poor time as a good time.”

Also, sometime during this period, occurred the conversation in which Henry was asked a question about the next world, and replied “One world at a time.” Thoreau’s nonchalant response has reminded me of a play by Paul Claudel, Tidings Brought to Mary, in which the question of paying attention to another world besides this one is dismissed with the remark “There are two, but I say there is only one and that is enough.”11

March 21, Friday: Ticknor & Fields issued a 2nd edition of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, at Henry Thoreau’s request deleting from the title page ‘Or Life in the Woods’.” TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Thoreau wrote with Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau’s help to Myron B. Benton.

{No MS — printed copy LVP, 1865} Concord, 21 March 1862 Dear Sir,— I thank you for your very kind letter, which, ever since I received it, I have intended to answer before I died, however briefly. I am encouraged to know, that, so far as you are concerned, I have not written my books in vain. I was particularly gratified, some years ago, when one of my friends and neighbors said, “I wish you would write another book,—write it for me.” He is actually more familiar with what I have written than I am myself. The verses you refer to in Conway’s “Dial,” were written by F.B. Sanborn of this town. I never wrote for that journal. I am pleased when you say that in “The Week” you like especially “those little snatches of poetry interspersed through the book,” for these, I suppose, are the least attractive to most readers. I have not been engaged in any particular work on Botany, or the like, though, if I were to live, I should have much to report on Natural History generally. You ask particularly after my health. I suppose that I have not many months to live; but, of course, I know nothing about it. I may add that I am enjoying existence as much as ever, and regret nothing. Yours truly, Henry D. Thoreau, by S.E. Thoreau.

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March 24, Monday: At the head of the thumbnail file of the life of the Reverend Samuel Joseph May and his contacts with people who were in contact with Henry Thoreau, there stands the following inscription: In the index to Raymond Borst’s THE THOREAU LOG: A DOCUMENTARY LIFE OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU 1817- 1862, there is one and only one reference to a person bearing the surname “May.” That reference is to page 604, on which, under the date March 24, 1862, “Abigail Alcott writes to her brother, Samuel May,” about the weak condition of “Our poor Thoreau.” So who was this brother Samuel May and what had been his contact with Thoreau? This file provides a bit more detail.

Here is the post from Abba Alcott to her minister brother as reprised by Borst: Our poor Thoreau is most gone– Elizabeth Hoar is arranging his papers– Miss Thoreau copying for him — he is too weak to do any of the mechanical part himself. Mr Ticknor has been up to buy the right of all his works– He means to get up a uniform edition– Mr Alcott has written a beautiful sketch of Thoreau which is to appear in the April number of the “Atlantic” preparatory to this works– Mr Fields thought it a good introduction– He is very calm, but earnest about every thing as if his moments were numbered– Mr Alcott carries him sweet apples and now and then a Bottle of Cider which seems to please him.

ELIZABETH SHERMAN HOAR WILLIAM DAVIS TICKNOR BRONSON ALCOTT SOPHIA E. THOREAU Sheriff Sam Staples visited the Thoreaus and the next day recounted the substance of his visit to Waldo Emerson:

Samuel Staples yesterday had been to see Henry Thoreau. Never spent an hour with more satisfaction. Never saw a man dying with so much pleasure & peace. Thinks that very few men in Concord know Mr Thoreau; finds him serene & happy. Henry praised to me lately the manners of an old, established, calm, well-behaved river, as perfectly distinguished from those of a new river. A new river is a torrent; an old one slow & steadily supplied. What happens in any part of the old river relates to what befalls in every other part of it. ’Tis full of compensations, resources, & reserved funds.

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This happens to be the first recognition among Emerson’s journal jottings that Thoreau had been for some time in an irreversible and inevitable process of wasting away and dying. The situation had become so much more than obvious as to be no longer avoidable. [At some point during his terminal illness (I'll insert this here) Thoreau heard an organ grinder on the street, “loosening the vary paving stones and tearing the routine of life to rags and tatters,” and insisted “Give him some money. Give him some money.” This was reminiscent of what he wrote in his Journal for August 8, 1851: “The really inspiring melodies are cheap & universal –& are as audible to the poor man's son as to the rich mans. Listening to the harmonies of the universe is not allied to dissipation.… All Vienna cannot serve me more than the Italian boy who seeks my door with his organ.”]

At some point that Spring: At some point during this spring, shortly before his death, Henry Thoreau gave to Edmund Hosmer his personal copy of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS, pointing out the lock of John’s hair pasted into the front and the poem that accompanied it, and said:

You know how a pregnant woman has to eat for two. I have felt that I needed to live for John.

According to Raymond R. Borst, this happened on May 5th: “At Thoreau’s request, his friend Edmund Hosmer spends the night with him” and “In appreciation for this kindness, Thoreau asks his sister to give Hosmer his memorial copy of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS with a lock of his brother John’s hair taped in it.” Borst’s reference is to the Concord Saunterer, 11, Number 4 for Winter 1976, page 16.

Thoreau was then in the process of revising A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS for Ticknor & Fields to reissue it.

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At some point, also, Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau presented Henry with a handwritten list of people to whom, she suggested, he might want to leave some special gift. Her list included in no particular sequence Bronson Alcott, H.G.O. Blake, Theophilus Brown, Ellery Channing, Aunt Louisa Dunbar, Edith Emerson, Edward Waldo Emerson, Edmund Hosmer, Judge Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, Elizabeth Sherman Hoar, Horace Mann, Jr., Friend Daniel Ricketson, Mrs. Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, the Concord Town Library, and the Boston Society of Natural History. Thoreau worked at this list, jotting down alongside the names various small gifts (such as his two-volume edition of Froissart’s CHRONICLES for Ellery), FROISART’S CHRONICLES, I FROISART’S CHRONICLES, II

until he got down to the entry for Ellen Emerson. Evidently at this point he was unable to proceed, for the bequest to her (of his volume on the mineralogy of Maine and Massachusetts, evidently because it was by her uncle Charles T. Jackson), and all the remainder, are not in his handwriting but instead in Sophia’s.

April: Nathaniel Hawthorne and William Davis Ticknor traveled by train via New-York and Philadelphia to Washington DC and there met with General George B. McClellan, Horatio Bridge, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, and President Abraham Lincoln (Hawthorne would describe this trip in an anonymous, expurgated essay published by Ticknor & Fields opposing the Civil War “by a Peaceable Man,” entitled “Chiefly about War Matters”).

Abolitionist lecturers had begun to dominate the annual lecture course of the Smithsonian Institution sponsored by the Washington Lecture Association, which was the leading lectern in Washington DC, since December 1861, paving the way for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia and pushing the US President toward issuance of an Emancipation Proclamation. The lectures offered by Horace Greeley, Wendell Phillips, the Reverend George Barrell Cheever (1807-1890), and other abolitionists from this point offer a case study of radical antislavery Christian political activity and its clash with American science. The lectures had aroused among these establishment scientists great fears of mob violence and had roiled their Institution in popular disputes. Joseph Henry, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, believing that black people could live with white people only in a state of servitude, at this point closed the course by forbidding further lectures on partisan topics. In the following seasons he would invite only such safe scientific lecturers as Arnold Henri Guyot.

April 2: Henry Thoreau was being written to by Benjamin Marston Watson in Plymouth.

Cover letter to Ticknor & Fields from “Henry D. Thoreau” by “S.E. Thoreau,” in regard to enclosed manuscript “Wild Apples” (culled from WILD FRUITS) for The Atlantic Monthly, reminding them that they had as yet made no offer for A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS: Concord Apr. 2nd ’62 Messrs Ticknor & Fields, I send you herewith the paper on Wild Apples. You have made me no offer for The “Week.” Do not suppose that I rate it too high, I shall be glad to dispose of it; & it will be an advantage to advertize it with Walden. Yours truly, Henry D. Thoreau

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by S.E. Thoreau. TIMELINE OF A WEEK TIMELINE OF ESSAYS

“Wild Apples”: There is, first of all, the Wood-Apple (Malus sylvatica); the Blue-Jay Apple; the Apple which grows in Dells in the Woods, (sylvestrivallis), also in Hollows in Pastures (campestrivallis); the Apple that grows in an old Cellar-Hole (Malus cellaris); the Meadow-Apple; the Partridge-Apple; the Truant’s Apple, (Cessatoris), which no boy will ever go by without knocking off some, however late it may be; the Saunterer’s Apple, — you must lose yourself before you can find the way to that; the Beauty of the Air (Decus Aëris); December-Eating; the Frozen- Thawed, (gelato-soluta), good only in that state; the Concord Apple, possibly the same with the Musketaquidensis; the Assabet Apple; the Brindled Apple; Wine of New England; the Chickaree Apple; the Green Apple (Malus viridis); — this has many synonyms; in an imperfect state, it is the Choleramorbifera aut dysenterifera, puerulis dilectissima; — the Apple which Atalanta stopped to pick up; the Hedge-Apple (Malus Sepium); the Slug- Apple (limacea); the Railroad-Apple, which perhaps came from a core thrown out of the cars; the Apple whose Fruit we tasted in our Youth; our Particular Apple, not to be found in any catalogue, — Pedestrium Solatium; also the Apple where hangs the Forgotten Scythe; Iduna’s Apples, and the Apples which Loki found in the Wood; and a great many more I have on my list, too numerous to mention, — all of them good. As Bodaeus exclaims, referring to the cultivated kinds, and adapting Virgil to his case, so I, adapting Bodaeus, — “Not if I had a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths, An iron voice, could I describe all the forms And reckon up all the names of these wild apples.”

April 6, Sunday: Henry Thoreau was being written to by Ticknor & Fields in Boston. Boston April 6, 1862 HD Thoreau Esq Dear Sir. Your paper on Wild Apples is reced. In a few days we will send proof of the article on “Walking”. Touching the “Week on [MS torn] we find by yours of [Portion of page missing] those already in cloth if we found them rusty. Since the volume was published prices have changed materially and discounts to Book- sellers have largely increased. We now make 1/3 & 40% to the Trade as a matter of course. What with bad [MS torn]nts we could not [Portion of page missing] our check for the amount.

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Yours Very truly Ticknor & Fields

Thoreau was being written to by Friend Daniel Ricketson at his “shanty” on his “Brooklawn” estate in New Bedford. The Shanty, April 6th 1862. My dear Philomath! Another Sunday has come ’round, and as usual I am to be found in the Shanty, where I should also be glad to have you bodily present. We have had a little interruption to our fine weather during the past week, in the shape of a hail storm, yesterday p. m. and evening, but it is clear again to-day, though cooler. I have to Kronikle the arrival of the White-bellied swallow and the commencement of the frog choir, which saluted my ear for the first time on the eveg. of the 3rd Inst. The fields & the are becoming a little greener long, trailing, ^ moss is alreading waving along the sides of the rivulets. I have n’t walked much however, as I have been busy about farm work,

Page 2 the months of April, and May, being my busiest time, but as my real business is with Nature, I do not let any of these “side issues” lead me astray. How serenely, and grandly amid this din of arms Nature preserves her integrity, nothing moved; with the return of Spring come the birds, & the flowers, the swollen streams go dancing on, and all the laws of the great solar system are perfectly preserved. How wise, how great, must be the Creator & Mover of it all! But to descend to the affairs of mortals, which particularly concern us at this time, I do not think that the people of the North appear to be awakened, or enlightened rather, as to their duty in this great struggle. I fear that there is a great deal of treachery which time will alone discover & remove, for the Right must eventually prevail Can we expect when we consult the page

Page 3 of history that, this revolution will be more speedily terminated than others of a like nature? The Civil War of England lasted I think some ten years, and the American Revolution some 7 or 8 years besides the years of anticedent agitation. We have no Cromwell, unless Wendell Phillips shall by & by prove one — but at present he rather represents Hampden, whose mournful end was perhaps a better one than to be killed by a rotten egg mob. The voice of “Hogopolis,*” if such grunts can be thus dignified, must prove a lasting disgrace. The Government party, if we have a Govt, seem to continue with a saintly perseverance, their faith in Gen McClellan. How much longer this state of delay will continue to be borne it is difficult to foresee, but I trust the force of circumstances (sub deo) we’ll soon require a move

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for the cause of liberty. I read but little of the newspaper reports of the War rather preferring to be governed by the general character- istics of the case,

*the mob portion of Cincinnati

Page 4 as they involuntarily affect my mind. 4 p.m. Since writing the fore- going, somewhat more than an hour ago, I have taken a stroll with my son Walton & our dog, through the woods & fields west of our house, where you & I have walked several times -- the afternoon is sunny and of mild temperature, but the wind from N. W. rather cool, rendering overcoat agreeable. Our principal object was to look at lichens to & mosses, which W. is paying some attention. ^ We started up a woodcock, at the south edge of the woods, & a large number of robins in a field adjoining, also pigeon-woodpeck- ers, & heard the warble of blue birds. I remain with faith in the sustaining forces of Nature, and Nature’s God, Yours truly, & affectionately, Daniel Ricketson. Henry D. Thoreau, Concord, Mass.

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May 9, Friday: In preparing the body, they had placed a wreath of the local Andromeda on its rib cage.

They had missed a fine opportunity: they should also have placed in the body’s hand that sprig of wild American crab-apple Malus angustifolia, that our guy had just traveled so far to recover. Against the better judgment of surviving members of the family, Waldo Emerson had insisted that the 3PM funeral service be staged at the 1st Parish Church of Concord from which Henry David Thoreau had resigned. (The Unitarians got him at last.) H.G.O. Blake and Theophilus Brown came from Worcester. The Unitarian reverend who had been the 1st person to plunk down one dollar and purchase a copy of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 83 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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THE WOODS, the Reverend William Rounseville Alger, came out to Concord from Boston specifically to attend (this reverend would demean him as “constantly feeling himself, reflecting himself, fondling himself, reverberating himself, exalting himself, incapable of escaping or forgetting himself”). Nathaniel Hawthorne attended. The Emersons had invited James T. and Annie Fields to their home for dinner. At the funeral, at which the Reverend Grindall Reynolds officiated, Waldo, being the sort of person who can find a way to turn a profit even in the death of a friend, used the opportunity to deliver himself of a judgmental lecture singularly unsuitable as a remembrance upon such an occasion, and, on the church steps after the funeral, he cut a deal with his publisher guest James Thomas Fields for its distribution by Ticknor & Fields as “Thoreau.” Ross/Adams commentary

Emerson’s charge of Stoicism

What Emerson should have said:

Son of John Thoreau and Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau. He helped us to gain our independence, instructed us in economy, and drew down lightning from the clouds.

Bronson Alcott, more appropriately, read a few passages from A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS, one of America’s first treatises on comparative religion: “Does not that which is within make that which is without also? May we not see God?”

A WEEK: We need pray for no higher heaven than the pure senses can furnish, a purely sensuous life. Our present senses are but the rudiments of what they are destined to become. We are comparatively deaf and dumb and blind, and without smell or taste or feeling. Every generation makes the discovery, that its divine vigor has been dissipated, and each sense and faculty misapplied and debauched. The ears were made, not for such trivial uses as men are wont to suppose, but to hear celestial sounds. The eyes were not made for such grovelling uses as they are now put to and worn out by, but to behold beauty now invisible. May we not see God? Are we to be put off and amused in this life, as it were with a mere allegory? Is not Nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol merely? When the common man looks into the sky, which he has not so much profaned, he thinks it less gross than the earth, and with reverence speaks of “the Heavens,” but the seer will in the same sense speak of “the Earths,” and his Father who is in them. “Did not he that made that which is within, make that which is without also?” What is it, then, to educate but to develop these divine germs called the senses? for individuals and states to deal magnanimously with the rising generation, leading it not into temptation, — not teach the eye to squint, nor attune the ear to profanity. But where is the instructed teacher? Where are the normal schools?

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The funeral bell tolled his 44 years and the coffin was lowered into a hole in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.12

Here is how Professor Scott A. Sandage, in BORN LOSERS: A HISTORY OF FAILURE IN AMERICA, would

12. Not in the current family plot on Authors Ridge, as in the photo, nor with the current stone. The original stone was red and bore his name and his date of death. When the body was later moved to Authors Ridge, the stone was put with many another stone to be recycled, and used to cover over one or another drainage gutter in the cemetery. It is probably still there somewhere alongside one of the cemetery paths, with its inscription facing downward: “HENRY / MAY 6, 1862.” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 85 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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describe the scene of this day: The American Dream died young and was laid to rest on a splendid afternoon in May 1862, when blooming apple trees heralded the arrival of spring. At three o’clock, a bell tolled forty-four times, once for each year of a life cut short. Dismissed from school, three hundred children marched to the funeral under the bright sun. Those with luck and pluck would grow up to transform American capitalism during the Gilded Age. But on this day the scent in the air was not wealth, but wildflowers. Violets dotted the grass outside the First Parish Church. The casket in the vestibule bore a wreath of andromeda and a blanket of flowers that perfumed the sanctuary with the sweetness of spring. Townsfolk and visiting notables crowded in to hear the eulogist admit what many had thought all along: the dearly departed had wasted his gifts. Neither a deadbeat nor a drunkard, he was the worst kind of failure: a dreamer. “He seemed born for greatness ... and I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition,” the speaker grieved. Rather than an engineer or a great general, “he was the captain of a huckleberry-party.” When not picking berries, the deceased had tried his hand at a variety of occupations: teacher, surveyor, pencilmaker, housepainter, mason, farmer, gardener, and writer. Some who congregated that day in Concord, Massachusetts thought it tactless to say such things of Henry Thoreau at his own funeral, however true Mr. Emerson’s sermon about his dear friend was: Henry’s quirky ambitions hardly amounted to a hill of beans. Perhaps no one present fully understood what Ralph Waldo Emerson was saying about ambition, least of all the children fidgeting and daydreaming in the pews. Someday they would rise and fall in the world the sermon presaged, where berry picking was a higher crime than bankruptcy. If a man could fail simply by not succeeding or not striving, then ambition was not an opportunity but an obligation. Following the casket to the grave, stooping here and there to collect petals that wafted from it, the children buried more than the odd little man they had seen in the woods or on the street. Part of the American Dream of success went asunder: the part that gave them any choice in the matter. We live daily with Emerson’s disappointment in Thoreau. The promise of America is that nobody is a born loser, but who has never wondered, “Am I wasting my life?” We imagine escaping the mad scramble, yet kick ourselves for lacking drive. Low ambition offends Americans even more than low achievement. How we play the game is the important thing, or so we say. Win or lose, Thoreau taunts us from the dog-eared pages and dogwooded shores of WALDEN: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” We sprint as much to outrun failure as to catch success. Failure conjures such vivid pictures of lost souls that it is hard to imagine a time, before the Civil War, when the word commonly meant “breaking in business” — going broke. How did it become a name for a deficient self, an identity in the red? Why do we manage identity the way we run a business — by investment, risk, profit, and loss? Why do we calculate failure in lost dreams as much as in lost dollars?

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In the summation paragraphs to a general derogation of the author and all his works in 1866 (considering Henry, for example, to have led a life that consisted primarily of “fondling himself”), the Reverend William Rounseville Alger would describe this day’s procession, bells, funeral, and interment: While we walked in procession up to the church, though the bell tolled the forty-four years he had numbered, we could not deem that he was dead whose ideas and sentiments were so vivid in our souls. As the fading image of pathetic clay lay before us, strewn with wild flowers and forest sprigs, thoughts of its former occupant seemed blent with all the local landscapes. We still recall with emotion the tributary words so fitly spoken by friendly and illustrious lips. The hands of friends reverently lowered the body of the lonely poet into the bosom of the earth, on the pleasant hillside of his native village, whose prospects will long wait to unfurl themselves to another observer so competent to discriminate their features and so attuned to their moods. And now that it is too late for any further boon amidst his darling haunts below, There will yet his mother yield A pillow in her greenest field, Nor the June flowers scorn to cover The clay of their departed lover.

Shortly after Henry David Thoreau had been buried, the Emerson family would feel that an adventure in California would assist their son in the slow recovery of his health, and Edward Waldo Emerson would set off on the overland route.

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June 29: There was fighting at Savage’s Station. Waldo Emerson repeated his funeral oration on Henry David Thoreau for the benefit of the Reverend Theodore Parker’s “Fraternity” in Boston.

After Thoreau’s death, Louisa May Alcott wrote a poem “Thoreau’s Flute” for The Atlantic Monthly. According to Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson she wrote the poem while she was nursing in the military hospital in Washington DC where she had received the news of Henry Thoreau’s death:

We sighing said, “Our Pan is dead— His pipe hangs mute beside the river, Around it friendly moonbeams quiver, But music’s airy voice is fled. Spring comes to us in guise forlorn, The blue-bird chants a requiem, The willow-blossom waits for him, The genius of the wood is gone” Then from the flute, untouched by hands, There came a low, harmonious breath: For such as he there is no death. His life the eternal life commands. Above men’s aims his nature rose. The wisdom of a just content Make one small spot a continent, And turned to poetry life’s prose Haunting the hills, the stream, the wild, Swallow and aster, lake and pine To him seemed human or divine, Fit mates for this large-hearted child. Such homage nature ne’er forgets; And yearly on the coverlid ’Neath which her darling lieth hid Will write his name in violets. To him no vain regrets belong Whose soul, that finer instrument, Gave to the world no poor lament, But wood-notes ever sweet and strong. Oh lonely friend, He still will be A potent presence, though unseen, Steadfast, sagacious and serene. Seek not for him: he is with Thee.

At that time the magazine was withholding the names of contributors, and Louisa was informed by her father Bronson Alcott that one day while he was visiting Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the poet had picked up the The Atlantic Monthly and had read aloud a few lines from her poem, and had asked her father whether he had read “Emerson’s fine poem on Thoreau’s Flute?” THE ALCOTT FAMILY

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In “Chiefly about War Matters,” edited and expurgated by Ticknor & Fields, Nathaniel Hawthorne revealed that he had been utterly at odds with Emerson’s and Thoreau’s attitude toward John Brown while Brown was awaiting execution in 1859.

I shall not pretend to be an admirer of old John Brown, any farther than sympathy with Whittier’s excellent ballad about him may go; nor did I expect ever to shrink so unutterably from any apophthegm of a sage, whose happy lips have uttered a hundred gold sentences, as from that saying (perhaps falsely attributed to so honored a source), that the death of this blood-stained HANGING fanatic has “made the Gallows as venerable as the Cross!” Nobody was ever more justly hanged.

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Plan of Fort Ridgely as it was in 1862 during the race war

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July: The short Scots sergeant and second tenor, Sgt. John Brown, the real subject of the song “John Brown’s Body,” was drowned while attempting to ford the Rappahannock River with his unit of the 2d Battalion of Boston Light Infantry, Massachusetts Volunteer Militia.

Nathaniel Hawthorne placed an essay on the civil war, “Chiefly about War Matters,” in The Atlantic Monthly. Some remarks he thought to make were censored by James Thomas Fields of Ticknor & Fields, the publisher of the magazine, with Hawthorne’s prior consent, as just too outrageous to publish during a war situation. Fields evidently had, however, no objection to Hawthorne’s revealing how utterly he had been at odds with Emerson’s and Thoreau’s attitude toward John Brown while his execution had been pending in late 1859.

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER

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In the course of this article Hawthorne alleged something we have no reason whatever to believe to be true, and indeed, something we have no reason to believe was ever suggested by any evidence, to wit, that after bringing over the white people, the Mayflower had been used as a black slaver, a negrero.

Hawthorne, whose politics had always been anti-negro and pro-slavery, was evidently the sort of guy who made up this sort of stuff up as he went along. At this critical juncture in the Civil War –the North toying with the idea of re-defining the war into a noble purpose in order to get it won– he was deliberately stirring the waters to make them muddier.

There is an historical circumstance, known to few, that connects the children of the Puritans with these Africans of Virginia in a very singular way. They are our brethren, as being lineal descendants from the Mayflower, the fated womb of which, in her first voyage, sent forth a brood of Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock, and, in a subsequent one, spawned slaves upon the Southern soil, — a monstrous birth, but with which we have an instinctive sense of kindred, and so are stirred by an irresistible impulse to attempt their rescue, even at the cost of blood and ruin. The character of our sacred ship, I fear, may suffer a little by this revelation; but we must let her white progeny offset her dark one, — and two such portents never sprang from an identical source before.

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1864

April 10, Sunday: William Davis Ticknor had had a cold or something when he and Nathaniel Hawthorne had left Boston, and Hawthorne had written home that his friend had eaten some bad oysters. By the time the travelers had arrived at New-York, Ticknor had contracted pneumonia. After they had reached Philadelphia his condition had worsened to the point at which a physician had been consulted. On this morning he died in Philadelphia at the age of 53.

There was fighting at Mansfield / Sabine Cross-Roads / Pleasant Grove.

1865

Mosleh Od-Din Sa’di’s THE GULISTAN, OR ROSE-GARDEN, BY MUSLE-HUDDEEN SHEIKH SAADI, OF SHIRAZ was published by Boston’s firm of Ticknor & Fields, in an English translation by Francis Gladwin, with an essay on Saadi’s life and genius by James Ross, and a preface by Waldo Emerson.

WALDEN: I read in the Gulistan, or Flower Garden, of Sheik Sadi PEOPLE OF of Shiraz, that “They asked a wise man, saying; Of the many WALDEN celebrated trees which the Most High God has created lofty and umbrageous, they call none azad, or free, excepting the cypress, which bears no fruit; what mystery is there in this? He replied; Each has its appropriate produce, and appointed season, during the continuance of which it is fresh and blooming, and during their absence dry and withered; to neither of which states is the cypress exposed, being always flourishing; and of this nature are the azads, or religious independents. –Fix not thy heart on that which is transitory; for the Dijlah, or Tigris, will continue to flow through Bagdad after the race of caliphs is extinct: if thy hand has plenty, be liberal as the date tree; but if it affords nothing to give away, be an azad, or free man, like the cypress.”

CYPRESS ANDROMEDA MOSLEH OD-DIN SA’DI

SA’DI IN ENGLISH PROSE

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1867

The Riverside Press, manufacturing arm of Houghton Mifflin, had built a four-story brick factory, purchased ten additional presses, and was employing 150 men and 150 women in the technological process of the manufacture of an endless stream of books.

HISTORY OF THE PRESS

“Among all the manufactures which –for the mental and mechanical skill required in their prosecution, the remarkable steps by which they have attained their present rank, and the influence which they exert on society generally– claim our attention and admiration, none perhaps is more striking than the manufacture of a book.” — George Dodd’s DAYS AT THE FACTORIES

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1868

The evolutionary development of Houghton Mifflin continued in Boston as the Ticknor publishing firm completed its transition into the Fields firm.

1885

The new J.R. Osgood and Co. was taken over by Benjamin Holt Ticknor and renamed Ticknor and Co.

1889

Ticknor and Co. became part of Houghton, Mifflin, & Co.

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1908

Houghton, Mifflin, & Co. was renamed Houghton Mifflin Company (in order to preserve an impression of continuity, this business entity would sometimes make use of the honored imprint “Ticknor and Fields”).

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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2013. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: April 22, 2013

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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, upon someone’s request we have pulled it out of the hat of a pirate that has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (depicted above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of data modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture. This is data mining. To respond to such a request for information, we merely push a button.

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Commonly, the first output of the program has obvious deficiencies and so we need to go back into the data modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and do a recompile of the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process which you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place your requests with . Arrgh.