Elizabeth Sherman Hoar
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PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN PEOPLE ALMOST MENTIONED IN WALDEN: ELIZABETH SHERMAN HOAR THE HOARS CONCORD’S “ROYAL FAMILY” “NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project The People of Walden HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: ELIZABETH SHERMAN HOAR PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN WALDEN: Housework was a pleasant pastime. When my floor was PEOPLE OF dirty, I rose early, and, setting all my furniture out of doors WALDEN on the grass, bed and bedstead making but one budget, dashed water on the floor, and sprinkled white sand from the pond on it, and then with a broom scrubbed it clean and white; and by the time the villagers had broken their fast the morning sun had dried my house sufficiently to allow me to move in again, and my meditations were almost uninterrupted. It was pleasant to see my whole household effects out on the grass, making a little pile like a gypsy’s pack, and my three-legged table, from which I did not remove the books and pen and ink, standing amid the pines and hickories. They seemed glad to get out themselves, and as if unwilling to be brought in. I was sometimes tempted to stretch an awning over them and take my seat there. It was worth the while to see the sun shine on these things, and hear the free wind blow on them; so much more interesting most familiar objects look out of doors than in the house. A bird sits on the next bough, life- everlasting grows under the table, and blackberry vines run round its legs; pine cones, chestnut burs, and strawberry leaves are strewn about. It looked as if this was the way these forms came to be transferred to our furniture, to tables, chairs, and bedsteads, –because they once stood in their midst. ELIZABETH SHERMAN HOAR HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: ELIZABETH SHERMAN HOAR PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN 1677 July 16, Monday (Old Style): Daniel Hoar, the race-murderer nephew of the troublesome attorney John Hoar of Concord, got married with Mary Stratton, daughter of Samuel Stratton, and they would have a son John Hoar, born on October 24, 1678 and named after its grandfather (he would become a pirate in the Persian/Arabian Gulf, and would be killed in the pirate haven of Saint Mary’s Island in 1697, thus predeceasing the grandfather after whom he had been named, who would survive until 1794), Daniel Hoar, born about 1680, Leonard Hoar, Jonathan Hoar, Joseph Hoar, Benjamin Hoar, Mary Hoar, born on March 14, 1689, Samuel Hoar, born on April 6, 1691, Isaac Hoar, born on May 15, 1695, David Hoar, born on November 14, 1698; and Elizabeth Hoar, born on February 22, 1701. He would thus become a great-grandfather of Concord’s righteous Squire Samuel Hoar and a great-great-grandfather of Edward Sherman Hoar, George Frisbie Hoar, Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, Elizabeth Sherman Hoar, etc. John Evelyn’s diary entry for this day was in part as follows: I went to Wotton to see my deare Brother. HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: ELIZABETH SHERMAN HOAR PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN 1812 Henry Pickering had asked his friend Captain Heard to bring “a Sanskrit classic” back from India. According to a letter from Waldo Emerson to Elizabeth Sherman Hoar, it appears that what the captain brought back home to Boston when he returned from Calcutta in his tall ship in this year was Charles Wilkins’s translation of THE BHAGVAT-GEETA OR DIALOGUES OF KREESHNA AND ARJOON (London: Nourse, 1785), HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: ELIZABETH SHERMAN HOAR PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN which was the first Sanskrit work to be rendered into any European language.1 In 1812, when Captain Heard was to sail for Calcutta, his friend Henry Pickering made a special request to fetch him a Sanskrit classic. Pickering is said to have received a copy of Wilkins’ translation of the BHAGVAD GITA. Again, the April issue of The Christian Register, a Boston Journal, testifies that a set of the copies of the Calcutta periodical, Hur Karu, was transported to America by a sailor. This periodical is said to have been received with great enthusiasm by those whose fascination for Indian literature was growing. ——————— Dhawan, R.K. HENRY DAVID THOREAU: A STUDY IN INDIAN INFLUENCE. New Delhi, India: Classical Publishing Company, 1985, page 11 BHAGVAT-GEETA This indeed is the translation which both Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau would access, Thoreau only after he had left the Emerson home in 1844. ... read the Bhagvat-Geeta, an episode in the Mahabharat, said to have been written by Kreeshna Dwypayen Veias, ... more than four thousand years ago, ... translated by Charles Wilkins. It deserves to be read with reverence even by Yankees, as a part of the sacred writings of a devout people; and the intelligent Hebrew will rejoice to find in it a moral grandeur and sublimity akin to those in his own Scriptures. 1. The BHAGAVAD-GITA or “The Song of the Adorable Possessed of all Excellences” forms part of Book VI of the MAHABHARATA or “Great Epic of the Bharata Dynasty” and consists largely of a dialog between the prince Arjuna and his friendly chariot-driver Krishna who happens also to be an incarnation of the deity Vishnu, on the field of battle. The 700 stanzas of this poem date to the 1st or 2nd centuries of our common era. It is said to have been written by someone named Vyasa, but there is no information as to who this Vyasa was or when he lived. HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: ELIZABETH SHERMAN HOAR PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN A WEEK: The New Testament is remarkable for its pure morality; the best of the Hindo Scripture, for its pure intellectuality. The reader is nowhere raised into and sustained in a higher, purer, or rarer region of thought than in the Bhagvat-Geeta. Warren Hastings, in his sensible letter recommending the translation of this book to the Chairman of the East India Company, declares the original to be “of a sublimity of conception, reasoning, and diction almost unequalled,” and that the writings of the Indian philosophers “will survive when the British dominion in India shall have long ceased to exist, and when the sources which it once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance.” It is unquestionably one of the noblest and most sacred scriptures which have come down to us. Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics, even more than by the manner in which they are treated. The Oriental philosophy approaches, easily, loftier themes than the modern aspires to; and no wonder if it sometimes prattle about them. It only assigns their due rank respectively to Action and Contemplation, or rather does full justice to the latter. Western philosophers have not conceived of the significance of Contemplation in their sense. Speaking of the spiritual discipline to which the Brahmans subjected themselves, and the wonderful power of abstraction to which they attained, instances of which had come under his notice, Hastings says: — “To those who have never been accustomed to the separation of the mind from the notices of the senses, it may not be easy to conceive by what means such a power is to be attained; since even the most studious men of our hemisphere will find it difficult so to restrain their attention, but that it will wander to some object of present sense or recollection; and even the buzzing of a fly will sometimes have the power to disturb it. But if we are told that there have been men who were successively, for ages past, in the daily habit of abstracted contemplation, begun in the earliest period of youth, and continued in many to the maturity of age, each adding some portion of knowledge to the store accumulated by his predecessors; it is not assuming too much to conclude, that as the mind ever gathers strength, like the body, by exercise, so in such an exercise it may in each have acquired the faculty to which they aspired, and [page 112] that their collective studies may have led them to the discovery of new tracks and combinations of sentiment, totally different from the doctrines with which the learned of other nations are acquainted; doctrines which, however speculative and subtle, still as they possess the advantage of being derived from a source so free from every adventitious mixture, may be equally founded in truth with the most simple of our own.” HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: ELIZABETH SHERMAN HOAR PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN WARREN HASTINGS A WEEK: Scholars are wont to sell their birthright for a mess of learning. But is it necessary to know what the speculator prints, or the thoughtless study, or the idle read, the literature of the Russians and the Chinese, or even French philosophy and much of German criticism. Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all. “There are the worshippers with offerings, and the worshippers with mortifications; and again the worshippers with enthusiastic devotion; so there are those the wisdom of whose reading is their worship, men of subdued passions and severe manners; — This world is not for him who doth not worship; and where, O Arjoon, is there another?” Certainly, we do not need to be soothed and entertained always like children. He who resorts to the easy novel, because he is languid, does no better than if he took a nap.