Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody Referred to a Local Person As “Our High Priest of Nature,” It Was Not Henry Thoreau to Whom She Was Referring, but Jones Very

Home , Elizabeth Peabody, George Stillman Hillard

When Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody referred to a local person as “our High Priest of Nature,” it was not Henry Thoreau to whom she was referring, but Jones Very. It is true that the term “Nature” was at that time, as it is now, associated with going on an excursion in the country (despite the fact that such an excursion was then termed a “pic nic” rather than a “picnic”), but primarily the term “Nature” was in use during this period as a trope for the investigation of theology without the opening of authoritative books. And it was Very, not Thoreau, who was the reigning local expert at this type of mystic spirituality.

When Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody at one point suggested to Margaret Fuller that she might write for the Democratic Review. Fuller responded, in a letter: “Are they good pay (for I have heard the contrary) - ? Will they pay me unasked? or torture all my lady like feelings...?”

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody HDT WHAT? INDEX

MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY

1804

May 16, Wednesday: Elizabeth Palmer Peabody was born to the dentist Nathanael Peabody and the Unitarian Elizabeth Palmer Peabody in Billerica, Massachusetts.1

She would attend the 2d (soon to be Unitarian) Church in Salem, Massachusetts.

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody 1. Elder to Mary and Sophia, the other two of “the Peabody sisters,” she would grow up to become someone the 19th Century treated with amused tolerance, in part because she was an intelligent woman, in part because she became obese: her bookstore would be at 13 West Street in Boston and she would be the publisher of the journal of the Transcendentalists, THE DIAL. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY

1807

November 16, Monday: Mary Tyler Peabody (Mann) was born to the dentist Nathanael Peabody and the Unitarian Elizabeth Palmer Peabody in Billerica, Massachusetts.

She would attend the 2d (soon to be Unitarian) Church in Salem, Massachusetts.

A British fleet arrived at the mouth of the River Tejo, Portugal.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 2nd day 16th of 11 M 1807 / This evenings Mail has confirmed the melancholy report of my dear Brother David’s decease. He departed this life the 22nd of 10th M last About 9 OClock in the evening at Savannah in Georgia after twelve days illness of a fever, the particulars of his sickness we have not yet learnt whether he was favord with his reason to the last, or reconciled to the Solemn final change, we wish very much to hear but as he was so far from us & no particular friend & acquaintance near, it is most likely we Shall not very soon if ever learn how it was with him - The circumstance of his change at so great a distance from us is a very close tryal, & since the news reached us I have had to take an home view of death. The agonies attendant at that Awful moment must be very great. Oh that when the pale messenger may assail my tabernacle, I may be in readiness to go with him — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

NO-ONE’S LIFE IS EVER NOT DRIVEN PRIMARILY BY HAPPENSTANCE

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody HDT WHAT? INDEX

MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY

1809

September 21, Thursday: In England, the Perceval ministry began as British Foreign Minister George Canning and Secretary for War Lord Castlereagh engaged in a duel on Putney Heath. Canning was upset that Castlreagh had taken troops he had intended for Portugal and used them in the Walcheren operation. Canning was struck in the thigh. Public sentiment would turn against both the duelists.

Sophia Amelia Peabody was born to the dentist Nathanael Peabody and the Unitarian Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. She would attend the 2d (soon to be Unitarian) Church in Salem, Massachusetts. She would attend a school run by her mother and by her sister Elizabeth Palmer Peabody there and upon graduation, would become a teacher in that school as well.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 21 of 9 M 1809// At meeting Our friends D Buffum & Mary Morton were very acceptably engaged in Short testimonies - In the eveng a little while at R Taylors ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody HDT WHAT? INDEX

ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY

1812

Lydia Very (1794-1867), pregnant, and Captain Jones Very of the privateer Montgomery, her first cousin, set up an “irregular household” or common-law marriage in Salem MA. Here is an account of Lydia Very of 154 Federal Street, Salem MA, which Elizabeth Palmer Peabody created during the period in which people were most concerned for the mental stability of her son Jones Very:

She was a person of great energy — was said to have more than doubts of another world and of the existence of God — having had a severe experience of life, and being at odds with the existing state of Society — a disciple of Fanny Wright....

FANNY WRIGHT

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody HDT WHAT? INDEX

MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY

1829

January: In “Account of a Visit to an Elementary School” on pages 74-76 of the American Journal of Education, IV, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody described a typical morning at Bronson Alcott’s school.

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody HDT WHAT? INDEX

ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY

1830

Baron Joseph-Marie de Gérando’s Institutes du droit administratif français (4 volumes, Paris).

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s Englishing of Baron de Gérando’s Du perfectionnement moral, ou de l’éeducation de soi-méme (Paris, 1824) as SELF-EDUCATION; OR THE MEANS AND ART OF MORAL PROGRESS. TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH OF M. LE BARON DEGERANDO (Boston: Published anonymously, in its initial edition, by Carter and Hendee).

SELF-EDUCATION; OR ... This volume would be found in the personal library of Henry Thoreau and can now be viewed downstairs in Special Collections at the Concord Free Public Library. Accession No. 10416: Inscribed in pencil on front free endpaper and front lining leaf: “Thoreau.” Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Quarter-bound in brown cloth with printed spine label, light brown paper boards.

May 23, Sunday: Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 23rd of 5th M / Both Meetings Silent & Enoch & Lydia Absent at Cumberland. — They however were seasons of some favour for which I was thankful RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY

Abigail May (Abba Alcott) and Amos Bronson Alcott were wed in the chapel in which Abba had been baptized in her infancy, King’s Chapel in Boston,

by her brother the Unitarian minister Samuel Joseph May.

Earlier in this year Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and Bronson had met: “She may perhaps aim at being ‘original’ and fail in her attempt by becoming offensively assertive. On the whole there is, we think, too much of the man and too little of the woman in her familiarity and freedom, her affected indifference of manner. Yet, after all, she is interesting.” The Peabody sisters of Salem happened by chance to be in the vicinity and stuck around for the wedding of Abba and Bronson by request in order to swell the little group into something a bit more impressive. Everything went swimmingly and almost immediately Abba would become pregnant:

My husband, hallowed be the name, is all I expected, this is saying a good deal.

Soon the newlyweds received an anonymous bequest of $2,000.00, it is suspected from Abba’s father. THE ALCOTT FAMILY HDT WHAT? INDEX

ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY HDT WHAT? INDEX

MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY

1832

Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s KEY TO HISTORY: FIRST STEPS TO STUDY OF HISTORY. KEY TO HISTORY

Baron Joseph-Marie de Gérando’s “Cours normal des instituteurs primaires ou directions relatives a l'education physique, morale, et intellectuelle dans les ecoles primaires” and “De l’éducation des sourds- muets de naissance” (2 volumes, Paris).

In this year the Baron de Gérando became a member of the Académie des Sciences morales et politiques.

Boston’s Hilliard, Gray, Little, and Wilkins printed Baron de Gérando’s THE VISITOR OF THE POOR as translated from the French by “A Lady of Boston,” presumably Miss Peabody, with an introduction by the Reverend Joseph Tuckerman. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY

Fall: Mary Tyler Peabody and Elizabeth Peabody moved to Mrs. Rebecca Clarke’s Somerset Court boardinghouse in Boston and opened a school there. (A Dedham lawyer, Horace Mann, Sr., also moved there, after the death of his first wife.)

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody HDT WHAT? INDEX

MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY

1833

Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s key to the history of the Hebrews: KEY TO HEBREW HISTORY

Her key to the history of the Greeks: KEY TO GREEK HISTORY

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody HDT WHAT? INDEX

ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY

1834

July: Reading his musings on education and the early life of children, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody became convinced that Bronson Alcott was “like an embodiment of intellectual light,” and rounded up seven students for him to found a school upon. Since he had no qualifications either as a linguist or as a mathematician, he needed an assistant and she was it. In 1834 Elizabeth looked something like this. THE ALCOTT FAMILY HDT WHAT? INDEX

MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY

September 22, Monday: At 10AM, the School of Human Culture opened its doors for business in the Masonic Temple on Tremont Street directly across from the Tremont House and the Boston Common. The school occupied two rooms on the fourth floor, the top floor, at a rent of $300.00 per year. The furnishings, for which Bronson Alcott went further into debt, included not only a larger-than-life “bass-relievo” of Jesus Christ over a bookcase behind the schoolmaster’s enormous desk, and busts of Plato, William Shakespeare, Socrates, and Sir Walter Scott in the four corners of the classroom, but also a portrait of the Reverend William Ellery Channing (father of one of the pupils) and two geranium plants. Alcott had heard Waldo Emerson preach in 1828, and now Emerson was doing him the honor of visiting his school. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody became Bronson Alcott’s assistant at this Temple School, and began boarding with the Alcott family. There were, initially, 30 pupils.

The students used desks having individual shelves and a hinged blackboard that could swing forward or back. Evidently, this desk had been developed by Bronson’s cousin, Dr. William Andrus Alcott.

WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody HDT WHAT? INDEX

MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY

1835

June 24, Wednesday: Cesar Franck began lessons in composition with Anton Reicha in Paris.

Elizabeth Peabody Alcott, called “Lizzie” and “Betty” and “Beth,” and destined to have her middle name officially changed from “Peabody” to “Sewall,” was born to Abba Alcott. This was Abba’s third child. She was naming her infant after her friend Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody — but this was a friendship not destined to endure. A most unusual thing for those times: the father Bronson Alcott insisted on being present for the birth.

Arthur Ricketson, first son of Friend Daniel Ricketson, was born.

July: Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s diary of the School of Human Culture was published.2 BRONSON ALCOTT RECORD OF A SCHOOL

2. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. RECORD OF MR. ALCOTT’S SCHOOL, EXEMPLIFYING THE PRINCIPLES AND METHODS OF MORAL CULTURE. Boston, New-York, Philadelphia: James Munroe and Company, 1835, 208 pages (2d edition 1836, Boston, New-York: Russell, Shattuck and Company, 198 pages; 3d edition 1874, Boston: Roberts Brothers) HDT WHAT? INDEX

ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY

Fall: The School of Human Culture of Bronson Alcott and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody opened for its 2d year. There were 40 pupils. They hired a drawing teacher, Francis Graeter, who drew this picture of the school:

Harriet Martineau visited the Temple School and observed the teaching. Richard Henry Dana, Sr. offered to teach English literature to the children. Everything seemed to be going very well. The Alcotts, counting upon an anticipated income of about $1,800.00 per school year before it was hatched, moved from their boarding house into a home at 26 Front Street, south of Boston Common, agreeing to a rent of $575.00 per year. HDT WHAT? INDEX

MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY

November 28, Saturday: Robert Schumann visited Clara Wieck at the Wieck house in Leipzig before she departed on a concert tour. At the end of the evening, as she was showing him out, they kissed for the 1st time. “I thought I was on the point of fainting ... everything went black in front of my eyes; I could barely hold the lamp that was supposed to light your way, — I thought I was dreaming.”

There was a birthday party at Temple School, for the schoolmaster Bronson Alcott. The children presented him with a crown of laurel and a copy of John Milton’s PARADISE LOST. Alcott reminisced about his early years and about his struggles. The fact that their teacher was musing on his likeness to Jesus of Nazareth had not been lost upon the children, and when Alcott asked one of them

Who is the most perfect emblem of Christ?

the child responded, and was recorded as responding by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody

I think you are a little like Jesus Christ.

(Probably with the benefit of hindsight she came later to greatly regret that she had elected to make a public record of this particular childish response.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY

1836

A 2d edition of Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s diary of the School of Human Culture.3 RECORD OF A SCHOOL

Bronson Alcott’s PREFACE AND KEY TO THE EMBLEMS OF CAROVÉ’S STORY WITHOUT AN END, TRANSLATED BY SARAH AUSTIN (Boston: Joseph H. Francis, 123 pages).

April: “The Author of Record of a School” reviewed, on pages 629-648 of The Western Messenger I, a Calvinist tome entitled THE WAY FOR A CHILD TO BE SAVED. In reviewing this treatise on childhood and sin, Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody set forth at some length her own attitudes toward the nature of childhood, and her methods for leading a child toward God. She would use some of the paragraphs in the 2d edition of RECORD OF A SCHOOL, while other sections resemble the materials in Bronson Alcott’s JOURNALS.

3. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. RECORD OF MR. ALCOTT’S SCHOOL, EXEMPLIFYING THE PRINCIPLES AND METHODS OF MORAL CULTURE. Boston, New-York, Philadelphia: James Munroe and Company, 1835, 208 pages (2d edition 1836, Boston, New-York: Russell, Shattuck and Company, 198 pages; 3d edition 1874, Boston: Roberts Brothers) HDT WHAT? INDEX

MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY

September 8, Thursday: Some 1,100 to 1,300 alums attended Harvard College’s Bicentennial, and heard a professional choir offer the very original of “Fair Harvard.” Although the very oldest living alumnus, 96-year- old Judge Paine Wingate (Class of 1759, of New Hampshire) was, unfortunately, unable to be present, 86-year- old Samuel Emery (Class of 1774, of Philadelphia) was able to march in the parade. Word arrived that President Josiah Quincy, Sr. had, while researching for a “History of Harvard University” in the College Archives, located in filed-and-forgotten records of an Overseers meeting on January 6, 1644 the first rough sketch for the shield with the Latin motto “VE RI TAS” (“Verity” or “Truth”) and three open books, which was to become the College’s arms. This is how it looks today, as a refrigerator magnet:

During this Bicentennial, a white banner atop a large tent in the Yard for the 1st time publicly displayed this design, which in 1843 would become the basis of the seal officially adopted by the Harvard Corporation, and then in 1847 would be dropped in favor of another seal, and then in 1885 would be readopted. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY

Some of the alums had an interestingly historic discussion:

(following screen)

In September 1836, on the day of the second centennial anniversary of Harvard College, Mr. Emerson, George Ripley, and myself [Frederic Henry Hedge], with one other [who was this fourth person: would it have been an unnamed woman, an unnamed wife, specifically Sophia Ripley??], chanced to confer together on the state of current opinion in theology and philosophy, which we agreed in thinking was very unsatisfactory. Could anything be done in the way of protest and introduction of deeper and broader views? What we strongly felt was dissatisfaction with the reigning sensuous philosophy, dating from John Locke, on which our Christian theology was based. The writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, recently edited by Marsh [Henry Nelson Coleridge had only at this point initiated publication of THE LITERARY REMAINS OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE], and some of Thomas Carlyle’s earlier essays, especially the “Characteristics” and “SIGNS OF THE TIMES,” had created a ferment in the minds of some of the young clergy of that day. There was a promise in the air of a new era of intellectual life. We four concluded to call a few like-minded seekers together in the following week. Some dozen of us met in Boston, in the house, I believe, of Mr. Ripley. Among them I recall the name of Orestes Augustus Brownson (not yet turned Romanist), Cyrus Augustus Bartol, Theodore Parker, and Charles Stearns Wheeler and Robert Bartlett, tutors in Harvard College. There was some discussion, but no conclusion reached, on the question whether it were best to start a new journal as the organ of our views, or to work through those already existing. The next meeting, in the same month, was held by invitation of Emerson, at his house in Concord. A large number assembled; besides some of those who met at Boston, I remember Mr. Alcott, [Bronson Alcott] John Sullivan Dwight, Ephraim Peabody, Dr. Convers Francis, Mrs. Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley, Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Margaret Fuller, Caleb Stetson, James Freeman Clarke. These were the earliest of a series of meetings held from time to time, as occasion prompted, for seven or eight years. Jones Very was one of those who occasionally attended; H.D. Thoreau another. There was no club, properly speaking; no organization, no presiding officer, no vote ever taken. How the name “Transcendental,” given to these gatherings and the set of persons who took part in them, originated, I cannot say. It certainly was never assumed by the persons so called. I suppose I was the only one who had any first-hand acquaintance with German transcendental philosophy, at the start. THE DIAL was the product of the movement, and in some sort its organ.

CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE HDT WHAT? INDEX

MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY

At the wrap-up of the day, guest speaker Josiah Quincy, Jr. (Class of 1821) made a motion “that this assembly of the Alumni be adjourned to meet at this place on the 8th of September, 1936” — and the motion was unanimously adopted.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 8th of 9 M / Our meeting was small but very quietly solid — I missed father Rodman at my right hand being confined at home with a lame back — Thro’ the day my mind has been much at Providence where I have concluded to go tomorrow (if the Steam Boat get in in season) to attend the funeral of my ancient & much beloved friend Moses Brown RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY

September 19, Monday: Formation of “Hedge’s Club” centering around the visits of the Reverend Frederic Henry Hedge to Boston from Bangor, Maine.4 In September 1836, on the day of the second centennial anniversary of Harvard College, Mr. Emerson, George Ripley, and myself [Frederic Henry Hedge], with one other [who was this fourth person: would it have been an unnamed woman, an unnamed wife, specifically Sophia Ripley??], chanced to confer together on the state of current opinion in theology and philosophy, which we agreed in thinking was very unsatisfactory. Could anything be done in the way of protest and introduction of deeper and broader views? What we strongly felt was dissatisfaction with the reigning sensuous philosophy, dating from John Locke, on which our Christian theology was based. The writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, recently edited by Marsh [Henry Nelson Coleridge had only at this point initiated publication of THE LITERARY REMAINS OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE], and some of Thomas Carlyle’s earlier essays, especially the “Characteristics” and “SIGNS OF THE TIMES,” had created a ferment in the minds of some of the young clergy of that day. There was a promise in the air of a new era of intellectual life. We four concluded to call a few like-minded seekers together in the following week. Some dozen of us met in Boston, in the house, I believe, of Mr. Ripley. Among them I recall the name of Orestes Augustus Brownson (not yet turned Romanist), Cyrus Augustus Bartol, Theodore Parker, and Charles Stearns Wheeler and Robert Bartlett, tutors in Harvard College. There was some discussion, but no conclusion reached, on the question whether it were best to start a new journal as the organ of our views, or to work through those already existing. The next meeting, in the same month, was held by invitation of Emerson, at his house in Concord. A large number assembled; besides some of those who met at Boston, I remember Mr. Alcott, [Bronson Alcott] John Sullivan Dwight, Ephraim Peabody, Dr. Convers Francis, Mrs. Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley, Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Margaret Fuller, Caleb Stetson, James Freeman Clarke. These were the earliest of a series of meetings held from time to time, as occasion prompted, for seven or eight years. Jones Very was one of those who occasionally attended; H.D. Thoreau another. There was no club, properly speaking; no organization, no presiding officer, no vote ever taken. How the name “Transcendental,” given to these gatherings and the set of persons who took part in them, originated, I cannot say. It certainly was never assumed by the persons so called. I suppose I was the only one who had any first-hand acquaintance with German transcendental philosophy, at the start. THE DIAL was the product of the movement, and in some sort its organ.

CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE HDT WHAT? INDEX

MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY

December 22, Thursday: Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 22 of 12 M / This morning in straping my Razor to Shave it accidentally slipped & took off the tip of my little finger, it bleed so much & was so painful that I did not go to Meeting. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

4. This would become the Transcendental Club. It was at this first regular meeting that the Reverend Convers Francis first met Bronson Alcott. Francis would also be present for the second meeting, in Alcott’s home in Boston. As the eldest member of the Club, it would become the lot of the Reverend Francis to announce the principal topic for conversation, and to preside. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY

Bronson Alcott self-published, through James Munroe and Company of Boston, the 1st volume of CONVERSATIONS WITH CHILDREN ON THE GOSPEL (264 pages). This, and the 2nd volume (Boston MA: CONVERSATIONS, VOL. I

Russell, Shattuck and Company, February 1837, 198 pages), would cost the author $741.00 he did not have, CONVERSATIONS, VOL. II

and buy him an incredible amount of trouble. These conversations had been transcribed by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. However, the original title page, which in accordance with the convention of the time did not list the name of the author, was preceded by a page that read

CONVERSATIONS WITH CHILDREN ON THE GOSPELS CONDUCTED AND EDITED BY A. BRONSON ALCOTT

rather than “transcribed by Elizabeth Peabody,” and evidently resulted from the desire of others who had been involved in the generation of this material that they not be implicated in the folly of its dissemination. Elizabeth Peabody and the new teacher at the school, Margaret Fuller, could see what was coming — the self-convicted supersalesman and self-convinced enthusiast could not. Abba Alcott the faithful wife could not help but sympathize with her husband rather than with the helper who wanted no share of the repercussions: in the family record, she altered the name of her third child from Elizabeth Peabody Alcott to Elizabeth Sewall Alcott.

MR. ALCOTT. Do you think these conversations are of any use to you? CHARLES. Yes; they teach us a great deal. MR. ALCOTT. What do they teach you? GEORGE K. To know ourselves. ... HDT WHAT? INDEX

MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY HDT WHAT? INDEX

ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY

MR. ALCOTT. Now, does your spirit differ in any sense from God’s spirit? Each may answer. CHARLES. (10-12 years old). God made our spirits. MR. ALCOTT. They differ from His then in being derived? GEORGE K. (7-10). They are not so good. WILLIAM B. (10-12). They have not so much power. AUGUSTINE (7-10). 1 don’t think our spirit does differ much. CHARLES. God is spirit, we are spirit and body. JOSIAH (5 years old). He differs from us, as a king’s body differs from ours. A king’s body is arrayed with more goodness than ours. EDWARD B. (10-12) God’s spirit is a million times larger than ours, and comes out of him as the drops of the ocean. MR. ALCOTT. Jesus said he was the son - the child of God. Are we also God’s sons? WILLIAM B. Oh! before I was born - I think I was a part of God himself. MANY OTHERS. So do l. MR. ALCOTT Who thinks his own spirit is the child of God? (All held up hands). Now, is God your Father in the same sense that he is the Father of Jesus? (Most held up hands). MR. ALCOTT. Does Father and Son mean God and Jesus? CHARLES. No; it means God and any man. MR. ALCOTT. Do you think that were you to use all that is in your spirit, you might also be prophets? SEVERAL. If we had faith enough. WILLIAM B. If we had love enough. CHARLES. A prophet first has a little love, and that gives the impulse to more, and so on, until he becomes so full of love, he knows everything. MR. ALCOTT. Why did the angel say to Mary, “The Lord is with thee”? GEORGE K. I don’t know. The Lord is always with us. ARNOLD (?). The Lord is with us when we are good. AUGUSTINE. The Lord is with us when we are bad, or we could not live. ELLEN (10-12). [mentions Judgment Day] MR. ALCOTT. What do you mean by Judgment Day? ELLEN. The last day, the day when the world is to be destroyed. CHARLES. The day of Judgment is not any more at the end of the world than now. It is the Judgment of conscience at every moment. MR. ALCOTT Where did Jesus get his knowledge? MARTHA (7-10) He went into his own soul. AUGUSTINE. Heaven is in our spirits - in God. It is in no particular place. It is not material. It is wherever people are good. CHARLES. Heaven is everywhere - Eternity. It stops where there is anything bad. It means peace and love. High and white are emblems of it. ANDREW (7-10). Heaven is like a cloud, and God and Jesus and the HDT WHAT? INDEX

MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY

angels sit on it. MR. ALCOTT Where is it? ANDREW Everywhere. Every person that is good, God looks at and takes care of. FREDERIC (10-12). Wherever there is good. SAMUEL R. (10-12) But in no place. FRANKLIN (10-12). Heaven is the spirit’s truth and goodness. It is in everybody; but mostly in the good. MR. ALCOTT. Can you say to yourself, I can remove this mountain? [Now comes an astonishing rhapsody by the five-year-old Josiah Quincy.] JOSIAH (bursts out). Yes, Mr. Alcott! I do not mean that with my body can lift up a mountain - with my hand; but I can feel; and I know that my conscience is greater than the mountain, for it can feel and do; and the mountain cannot. There is the mountain, there! It was made, and that is all. But my conscience can grow. It is the same kind of spirit as made the mountain be, in the first place. I do not know what it may be and do. The body is a mountain, and the spirit says, be moved, it is moved into another place. Mr. Alcott, we think too much about clay. We should think of spirit. I think we should love spirit, not clay. I should think a mother now would love her baby’s spirit; and suppose it should die, that is only the spirit bursting away out of the body. It is alive; it is perfectly happy; I really do not know why people mourn when their friends die. I should think it would be a matter of rejoicing. For instance, now, if we should go into the street and find a box, an old dusty box, and should put into it some very fine pearls, and bye and bye the box should grow old and break, why, we should not even think about the box; but if the pearls were safe, we should think of them and nothing else. So it is with the soul and body. I cannot see why people mourn for bodies. MR. ALCOTT. Yes, Josiah; that is all true, and we are glad to hear it. Shall someone else now speak beside you? [But Josiah’s eloquence is like a mighty river; its momentum is such that he can barely restrain himself, and he is quiet only on condition.] JOSIAH. Oh, Mr. Alcott! then I will stay in at recess and talk. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY

Bronson Alcott. CONVERSATIONS WITH CHILDREN ON THE GOSPELS CONDUCTED AND EDITED BY A. BRONSON ALCOTT, Volume I, as transcribed by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. Boston: James Munroe and Company, 1836. The Introduction to this volume consisted of the 27-page pamphlet which had previously this year been published in Boston, THE DOCTRINE AND DISCIPLINE OF HUMAN CULTURE. [Refer to the Arno Press, New York reprint edition, two volumes in one, 1972, or to the Lindisfarne Press edition of 1991 titled HOW LIKE AN ANGEL CAME I DOWN] HDT WHAT? INDEX

MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY

1837

Visiting the Peabody sisters Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Mary Tyler Peabody (Mann), and Sophia Amelia Peabody (Hawthorne) in Salem in this year, Nathaniel Hawthorne met his future wife. The sisters began their efforts to champion his reputation and assist his fortunes. Sophia was during this period achieving a reputation as a copyist of artworks and Nathaniel would engage her to illustrate the 1839 book edition of his THE GENTLE BOY. He would wind up dedicating this book to her. SOPHIA PEABODY HAWTHORNE

March 6, Monday: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s TWICE-TOLD TALES (1st Series), a collection of eighteen of his stories that had previously appeared in periodicals, publication of which had been underwritten without his knowledge by his friend Horatio Bridge,5 received a laudatory review by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the North American Review. The tradition that William Goffe headed the citizens of Hadley, Massachusetts in repelling an attack by Native Americans was used by Hawthorne in “The Gray Champion.”

REGICIDE Publication of “The Man of Adamant.”

Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, friend of Waldo Emerson and, later, publisher of The Dial, visited Nathaniel Hawthorne’s sister — whom she initially supposed to have been the one who had written TWICE-TOLD TALES.

00 5. Horatio Bridge had guaranteed to Hawthorne’s publisher the $250. this publisher needed to ensure TWICE-TOLD TALES against publishing loss. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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November: A review of CONVERSATIONS WITH CHILDREN ON THE GOSPELS appeared in The Christian Examiner, 3d Series, V, on pages 252-261. The review was generally favorable, citing the possibilities inherent in this new method and pointing to snippets where important topics had been well expressed. The reviewer mentioned, however, that the conversations sometimes rambled and were inconsequential, even descending to the absurd. SOPHIA PEABODY HAWTHORNE BRONSON ALCOTT CONVERSATIONS, VOL. II EXAMINER’S REVIEW HDT WHAT? INDEX

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November 11, Saturday: Henry Thoreau indicated a familiarity with the contents of at least pages 2-3 and 6- 9 of Lemuel Shattuck’s A HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF CONCORD;..., which had appeared in October 1835.

At some point between this day and the 14th, Henry wrote his older brother John Thoreau, Jr., who was teaching in Taunton.

Brother, it is many suns that I have not seen the print of thy moccasins by our council fire, the Great Spirit has blown more leaves from the trees and many clouds from the land of snows have visited our lodge — the earth has become hard like a frozen buffalo skin, so that the trampling of many herds is like the Great Spirit’s thunder — the grass on the great fields is like the old man of eight [sic?] winters — and the small song-sparrow prepares for his flight to the land whence summer comes.

In Salem, the Hawthornes paid a visit to the Peabody sisters. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY SOPHIA AMELIA PEABODY MARY TYLER PEABODY

Thomas Green Fessenden died in Boston.

Mormon missionaries had been sent from America to England and had begun preaching the apocalyptic end of the world as we know it, in Preston in Lancashire. This day saw the carpenter Miles Romney and his wife Elizabeth Gaskell Romney, previously adherents of the Church of England, being baptized there in the Ribble River (in 1841 this Romney family would emigrate to Nauvoo, Illinois and Miles would become an architect for a Mormon Church in Utah; Miles Park Romney, one of their sons, would when US anti-polygamy laws began to be seriously enforced flee from Utah to Mexico in 1885 with his 4 wives and 30 children). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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December 27, Wednesday: Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody heard Jones Very speak at the Salem Lyceum, on the epic poetry of the antique Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton — and on the epic poetry of one who was almost their contemporary, Coleridge. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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At the end, she invited him to come home with her and her father. Shortly after Very had left their home that night, she took up her pen and wrote to Waldo Emerson, saying that he should send for Very “at once” to make his acquaintance and to hear him lecture.

Henry Thoreau wrote in his journal in such manner as to indicate that Emerson was sharing with him a book of self-congratulatory racist “herstory” that he had recently checked out from the library of the Athenaeum, Sharon Turner’s HISTORY OF THE ANGLO-SAXONS: TIMELINE OF A WEEK REVOLUTIONS

Dec. 27. Revolutions are never sudden. Not one man, nor many men, in a few years or generations, suffice to regulate events and dispose mankind for the revolutionary movement. The hero is but the crowning stone of the pyramid, — the keystone of the arch. Who was Romulus or Remus, Hengist or Horsa, that we should attribute to them Rome or England? They are famous or infamous because the progress of events has chosen to make them its stepping-stones. But we would know where the avalanche commenced, or the hollow in the rock whence springs the Amazon. The most important is apt to be some silent and unobtrusive fact in history. In 449 three Saxon cyules arrived on the British coast, — “Three scipen gode comen mid than flode, three hundred enihten.”6 The pirate of the British coast was no more the founder of a state than the scourge of

6. Cf. the essay “Reform and the Reformers”: “In the year 449 three Saxon cyules arrived on the British coast. ‘Three scipen gode comen mid than flode.’” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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the German shore. HEROES The real heroes of minstrelsy have been ideal, even when the names of actual heroes have been perpetuated. The real Arthur, who “not only excelled the experienced past, but also the possible future,” of whom it was affirmed for many centuries that he was not dead, but “had withdrawn from the world into some magical region; from which at a future crisis he was to reappear, and lead the Cymri in triumph through the island,” whose character and actions were the theme of the bards of Bretagne and the foundation of their interminable romances, was only an ideal impersonation. Men claim for the ideal an actual existence also, but do not often expand the actual into the ideal. “If you do not believe me, go into Bretagne, and mention in the streets or villages, that Arthur is really dead like other men; you will not escape with impunity; you will be either hooted with the curses of your hearers, or stoned to death.” HOMESICKNESS The most remarkable instance of homesickness is that of the colony of Franks transplanted by the Romans from the German Ocean to the Euxine, who at length resolving to a man to abandon the country, seized the vessels which carried them out, and reached at last their native shores, after innumerable difficulties and dangers upon the Mediterranean and Atlantic. THE INTERESTING FACTS IN HISTORY How cheering is it, after toiling through the darker pages of history, — the heartless and fluctuating crust of human rest and unrest, — to alight on the solid earth where the sun shines, or rest in the checkered shade. The fact that Edwin of Northumbria “caused stakes to be fixed in the highways where he had seen a clear spring,” and that “brazen dishes were chained to them, to refresh the weary sojourner, whose fatigues Edwin had himself experienced,” is worth all Arthur’s twelve battles. The sun again shines along the highway, the landscape presents us sunny glades and occasional cultivated patches as well as dark primeval forests, and it is merry England after all. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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A WEEK: Ancient history has an air of antiquity. It should be more PEOPLE OF modern. It is written as if the spectator should be thinking of A WEEK the backside of the picture on the wall, or as if the author expected that the dead would be his readers, and wished to detail to them their own experience. Men seem anxious to accomplish an orderly retreat through the centuries, earnestly rebuilding the works behind, as they are battered down by the encroachments of time; but while they loiter, they and their works both fall a prey to the arch enemy. History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us, — when did burdock and plantain sprout first? It has been so written for the most part, that the times it describes are with remarkable propriety called dark ages. They are dark, as one has observed, because we are so in the dark about them. The sun rarely shines in history, what with the dust and confusion; and when we meet with any cheering fact which implies the presence of this luminary, we excerpt and modernize it. As when we read in the history of the Saxons that Edwin of Northumbria “caused stakes to be fixed in the highways where he had seen a clear spring,” and “brazen dishes were chained to them to refresh the weary sojourner, whose fatigues Edwin had himself experienced.” This is worth all Arthur’s twelve battles.

SHARON TURNER, F.A.S. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1838

January 3, Wednesday: Enoch Cobb Wines wrote from St. Louis to the President of Brown University, the Reverend Doctor Barnas Sears (1802-1880, Class of 1825).

In the evening, before a lecture at the Salem Lyceum, Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody introduced Jones Very to Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Elijah Hinsdale Burritt died of the yellow fever, not yet 44 years of age.

April 5, Thursday: In the morning, Waldo Emerson wrote to Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody to thank her for forwarding “such wise men as Mr. Very.” Edwin Gittleman’s take on this is “To hear a Harvard divinity student JONES VERY sounding so unlike a student of Harvard Divinity was reassuring.”

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 5th of 4th M 1838 / Attended meeting, which tho’ small was a pleasant comfortable season Father had a little offering to make RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

June 16, Saturday: Representative John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts continued his speech before the US House of Representatives on the expansive topic of Texas for a 2d day.

It was on about this day that Waldo Emerson confided to his journal:

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody brought me yesterday Hawthorne’s Footprints on the seashore to read. I complained that there was no inside to it. Alcott & he together would make a man.

ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE HDT WHAT? INDEX

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September 16, Sunday: Early in the morning Jones Very made the rounds, attempting to baptize the ministers of Salem as they were attempting to make their final preparations for church worship and sermonizing performances. “The coming of Christ is at hand.” What confrontations these must have been. When he attempted to baptize the Reverend Lucius Bolles, the local Baptist, he was bodily put out of the home. The Reverend Charles Wentworth Upham of Salem’s upscale First Church, by way of contrast, did not lay his own hands on Very, but did advise him that his hero Waldo Emerson was nothing but an Atheist, and did warn him that, by force if necessary, he was very likely on his way to the insane asylum. I don’t know the sequence of the baptisms, but Very did not overlook to attempt to baptize his own Unitarian minister, the Reverend John Brazer of the North Church that Very had joined during the summer of 1836. Among the houses that Very then visited was 53 Charter Street, the home of his friend Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. Standing uncomfortably close to her, he placed his hand on her head and declaimed: “I come to baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire.” “I am the Second Coming.” “This day is this fulfilled.” Etc. Peabody’s understanding was that “These impulses from above I think are never sound minded. The insanity of Quakers (which is very frequent under my observation) always grows out of it or rather begins in it.” Edwin Gittleman’s comment is that the young lady was “relieved that it was nothing worse than the consummation of a spiritual marriage.” By noon Peabody had gone rushing off in a fruitless attempt to placate the furious Reverend Upham, and was with Lydia Very, the mother, at the Very home at 54 Federal Street, with Very upstairs resting in his chamber. That evening Very again appeared at her door, and presented her with a folio sheet on which he had inscribed four double columns of sonnets written under the control of the Holy Ghost. Very had exaggerated ideas of his own status, but our polite society has no difficulty tolerating this in any number of individuals. What the established religious society cannot tolerate, however, point number one, is competition. Ministers, for instance, react with peculiar hostility to other ministers who are attempting to spirit away contributing members of their own flock. Very was attempting to make converts and obtain followers, and that sort of conduct was in another category from simple grandiloquence. What an established religious society cannot tolerate, also, point number two, is being held up to ridicule in front of other established religious societies. What the Salem Unitarians in particular could not tolerate was that the local religion people were perceiving, in Very’s difficulties, a manifestation of the presumptuousness of their Unitarianism. They were embarrassed, they were intensely embarrassed. Edwin Gittleman’s comment on this is “Further scandal could be avoided only by providing him with an audience immune to his corrupting influence. Such an audience was conveniently available at the McLean Hospital in nearby Charlestown.” That night the Very home was raided and Very was escorted away, clutching his dog- eared Bible, over the screams of his mother that –at least physically– he was “endangering no one, not even himself.”

September 24, Monday: Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody wrote to Waldo Emerson in regard to the situation of Jones Very: ... I have feared insanity before. — I thought (at the time) that the visit to Groton showed it. — These impulses from above I think are never sound minded — the insanity of Quakers — (which is very frequent under my observation) always grows out of it — or rather begins in it. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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October 20, Saturday: Jones Very visited Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and apologized for having been so “intoxicated with the Holy Spirit.” He was completing his “Hamlet” essay and preparing to deliver it to Waldo Emerson in Concord. When Very told her about the visit he had just been paid by their Unitarian pastor of Salem’s North Church, the Reverend John Brazer, Elizabeth was enraged with the man’s insolence. A miracle, indeed! But she also told him that he should take this medication. —Because if he was sick the medicine could purge him, but no medicine could purge Truth.7

Emerson to his journal:

What said my brave Asia concerning the paragraph writers, today? that “this whole practice of self justification & recrimination betwixt literary men seemed every whit as low as the quarrels of the Paddies.”

November: Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody persuaded George Bancroft to offer Nathaniel Hawthorne a job.

During this period Jones Very was in the habit of sending offprints of his poems from the Salem Observer to friends and acquaintances. For at time Bronson Alcott was receiving such clippings each week, and was pasting or copying them into his journal. Henry Thoreau received at least three such clippings of at least six sonnets and during this month copied a couple of them into his “Miscellaneous Extracts” notebook. Unannounced, Very appeared at the home of Hawthorne and performed his ceremony of laying on of hands — Hawthorne meekly bowed his head for this and afterward commented that Very had managed to attain the “entire subjectiveness” which he had attempted to depict in 1833 in his “The Story Teller” in the figure of the minister (refer to the story “The Seven Vagabonds” which Hawthorne would insert into the December 1851 edition of TWICE-TOLD TALES). Hawthorne also suggested that as long as Very could author good sonnets, he might remain as he was. Edwin Gittleman comments that “It is almost as if Very were an invention of Hawthorne’s own Gothic imagination, a character whom he felt he understood completely, and for whom he was in a sense morally responsible.” However, for years Hawthorne would avoid Jones, although the fellow kept turning up at his doorstep: “Night before last came Mr. Jones Very; and you know he is somewhat unconscionable as to the length of his calls.”

During this and the following month, Jones Very would be coming gradually to the recognition that his function was being entirely fulfilled in the teaching of the message he was receiving, with no obligation to seek the assent of his victims. He was becoming, if unpleasant, at least tolerable. Also, he was coming to an appreciation of the fact that his orders to chop down the tree of self could not be implemented, because the recipients of this advice could not imagine what acceptable small step, which they understood how to take, could come first, and because they were wary of beginning a journey in which they might lose themselves and be unable to retrace their steps. He began to attempt to identify specifically what it was, for each person, that that person was clutching in the place of God, and demand of that person that he or she let go of their attachment to that specific thing. Because, of course, that was what sin was: attachment to something other than or in place of God, however innocent the thing might be in itself. When people began to receive the reward

7. Hey, good thinking! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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of the Holy Spirit for their sacrifice of their most precious clutching, then of their own free will they would accept Very as their Savior. Of course, this psychodrama of confrontation has always worked well at the level of story. (The story is, Buddha was able to pull off such a confrontation, on occasion. The story is, Jesus was able to pull off such a confrontation, on occasion. There aren’t many stories in which Jesus or Buddha went “Follow me!” and somebody went “Oh, get a life, will you?” Nevertheless, the reaction to Very was such at to make one wonder whether these confrontations ever actually worked, except at the indirect level, the level at which they are a story being recounted of some alleged prior confrontation rather than an actual face-to-face contemporary confrontation. It may well be that we have a category mistake here, a category mistake which keeps recurring due to our presumption that we can’t pay attention to such a story unless the event “actually happened.”) Anyhoo, here is the cast and the sins of which they were guilty: • The Reverend William Ellery Channing was clutching “Rectitude” instead of God. • Elizabeth Palmer Peabody was clutching “Truth” instead of God. • Waldo Emerson was clutching “Thought” instead of God. • Bronson Alcott was clutching “Spiritual Curiosity” instead of God. • Sophia Amelia Peabody was clutching “Imagination” and “Resignation to Pain” instead of God.

Of course, an immediate riposte would be to accuse Jones Very himself of clutching “Obedience” instead of God, and ask him to pry his damn fingers off it. As inversion-advice goes that wouldn’t have been half bad, but of course Very was no more capable of letting go of “Obedience” than Waldo would have been of letting go of “Thought.” One is reminded of the Sufi poet who went (I paraphrase) “When one renounces all things, the final item one must renounce is Renunciation.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1839

January: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Lily’s Quest” was published. He became engaged to Sophia Amelia Peabody. At the suggestion of Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, the historian George Bancroft, Collector of the Port, arranged for him to become a Weigher and Gauger at the Boston Custom House. As a political appointee in the customs administration, Hawthorne would willingly take part in a kickback scheme in which his subordinates who were authorized for overtime work and the payment for such overtime were to share their additional pay half and half with his political party. In addition, he personally suspended from their employment those of his inspectors who refused to submit to such extortion (in today’s political climate, had he been detected in such schemes he would most assuredly have gone to prison, like his son Julian later — but HDT WHAT? INDEX

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there’s no indication whatever that he experienced such activity as morally repugnant). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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November 6, Wednesday-April 1844: Margaret Fuller was supporting herself (and other members of her family, I suppose) through offering two-hour “Conversations” for 25-40 women at a time, in Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s parlor on West Street in Boston. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY

1840

James Pierrepont Greaves wrote to Bronson Alcott from England. Harriet Martineau had taken Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s RECORD OF MR. ALCOTT’S SCHOOL8 back to London with her, and had been showing it around as an example of the bad things she had found in America, and Greaves had seen this book

RECORD OF A SCHOOL

and instead of being dismayed by it — was fascinated. In this era of hopelessly high postage rates, when people were writing on tissue paper and were over-writing their left-to-right lines with bottom-to-top lines in order to save on postage weight, the intercontinental letter which Greaves would post to Alcott would be all of 30 pages long. Greaves was translating the works of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi into English and had for a time been associated with Robert Dale Owen in the Infant School Society. He believed that the world was midway on a journey toward what he termed Love Spirit, and that this unfolding spirit could manifest itself in lives only through people’s being, never their mere doing.

Spirit alone can whole.

Note that these English love-enthusiasts, although it appeared they were on the same road as Alcott, were in actuality going in the opposite direction. For Alcott, the world was good and life in the world was to be appreciated as a gift. For these people, the world was evil, propagation was evil, and life itself was to be regarded as an insult and an injury. Nevertheless, Alcott House in England was doing well, and the people there, who had come to think of Bronson as “the Concord Plato,” were even suggesting to Alcott in Concord that he should come and be their Director. THE ALCOTT FAMILY

Waldo Emerson’s “Thoughts on Modern Literature” in THE DIAL praised Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi

8. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. RECORD OF MR. ALCOTT’S SCHOOL, EXEMPLIFYING THE PRINCIPLES AND METHODS OF MORAL CULTURE. Boston, New-York, Philadelphia: James Munroe and Company, 1835, 208 pages (2d edition 1836, Boston, New-York: Russell, Shattuck and Company, 198 pages; 3d edition 1874, Boston: Roberts Brothers) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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(see boldface) as a change agent:

The favorable side of this research and love of facts is the bold and systematic criticism, which has appeared in every department of literature. From Wolf’s attack upon the authenticity of the Homeric Poems, dates a new epoch in learning. Ancient history has been found to be not yet settled. It is to be subjected to common sense. It is to be cross examined. It is to be seen, whether its traditions will consist not with universal belief, but with universal experience. Niebuhr has sifted Roman history by the like methods. Heeren has made good essays towards ascertaining the necessary facts in the Grecian, Persian, Assyrian, Egyptian, Ethiopic, Carthaginian nations. English history has been analyzed by Turner, Hallam, Brodie, Lingard, Palgrave. Goethe has gone the circuit of human knowledge, as Lord Bacon did before him, writing True or False on every article. Bentham has attempted the same scrutiny in reference to Civil Law. Pestalozzi out of a deep love undertook the reform of education. The ambition of Coleridge in England embraced the whole problem of philosophy; to find, that is, a foundation in thought for everything that existed in fact. The German philosophers, Schelling, Kant, Fichte, have applied their analysis to nature and thought with an antique boldness. There can be no honest inquiry, which is not better than acquiescence. Inquiries, which once looked grave and vital no doubt, change their appearance very fast, and come to look frivolous beside the later queries to which they gave occasion. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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July: Early in this month Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody opened, in the front parlor of the building she had leased at 13 West Street in Boston, her Foreign Library, a bookstore and circulating library.9

At the suggestion of Washington Allston she would stock imported art supplies. One section was allocated to the homeopathic nostrums created by her father, Dr. Nathaniel Peabody. She displayed on the walls the paintings her sister Sophia was offering for sale. Margaret Fuller had staged her “conversations” here in late 1839 and this would continue in the early 1840s. The Reverend William Ellery Channing would stop by to read the newspaper. Sophia would marry Nathaniel Hawthorne at West Street in 1842. The editors of and contributors to THE DIAL would meet there, and for a time in 1842 and 1843 she would publish this journal as well as writing for it (her “A Glimpse of Christ’s Idea of Society,” a piece about Brook Farm, would appear in the October 1841 issue, and her “Fourierism” would appear in the April 1844 issue). I had ... a foreign library of new French and German books, and then I came into contact with the world as never before. The Ripleys were starting Brook Farm, and they were friends of ours. Theodore Parker was beginning his career, and all these things were discussed in my book-store by Boston lawyers and Cambridge professors. Those were very living years for me.

9. Circulating libraries were privately owned collections of books and periodicals lent out for profit at fixed rates; this institution had its heyday in America in the first half of the 19th Century, just prior to the rise of the public library movement. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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In this year Miss Peabody issued the first of two printed catalogs of her book collection.10 The collection included such titles as GERMAN LITERATURE. TR. FROM THE GERMAN OF WOLFGANG MENZEL. BY C.C. FELTON.... (3 volumes, Boston: Hilliard, Gray, and Company, 1840),11 Miss Peabody’s edition of Anna Cabot Lowell’s THEORY OF TEACHING, Lamartine’s HISTORY OF THE GIRONDISTS and TRAVELS IN THE EAST, Michelet’s MÉMOIRES DE LUTHER, Waldo Emerson’s NATURE, the Reverend Ripley’s LETTERS ON THE LATEST FORM OF INFIDELITY (a response to Andrews Norton’s attack on Transcendentalism), Robespierre’s MÉMOIRES, and Rosini’s LUISA STROZZI, in addition to classic works by Æschylus, Ludovico Ariosto, Honoré de Balzac, George Bancroft, George Gordon, Lord Byron, Thomas Carlyle, Miguel de Cervantes, the Reverend Channing, Chateaubriand, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Cousin, Dante, Dumas, Euripides, Gerando, Goethe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hesiod, Homer, Victor Hugo, Mirabeau, Molière, Petrarch, Plato, Racine, Richter, Rousseau, George Sand, Schiller, Schlegel, William Shakespeare, Madame de Staël, Alexis de Tocqueville, Vol tair e, William Wordsworth, and Xenophon. The collection also included various periodicals such as the Annales des Sciences Naturelles, Blackwood’s Magazine, the Boston Quarterly Review, THE DIAL, the Edinburgh Review, the Journal des Literarische Unterhaltung, the London and Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine, the Musical Journal, the New-York Review, the Revue des Deux Mondes, and the Western

10. A facsimile of this catalog still exists, as part of Madeleine B. Stern’s “Elizabeth Peabody’s Foreign Library (1840),” American Transcendental Quarterly, No. 20 Supplement, Part 1, pages 5-12. 11. Henry Thoreau would consult this on December 5, 1840. His extracts would consist of quotations from Lorenz Oken and from Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert. GERMAN LITERATURE, I GERMAN LITERATURE, II GERMAN LITERATURE, III HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Messenger. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1841

September 8, Thursday: Frederick Douglass took part in the annual meeting of the Strafford County Anti-Slavery Society at the Town House and the Congregational Meetinghouse in Dover (the 8th and 9th, into the 10th).

Henry Thoreau wrote from Concord to Mrs. Lucy Jackson Brown in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Concord Wednsy eve. Sep. 8th

Dear Friend Your note came wafted to my hand, like the first leaf of the Fall on the [S]eptember wind, and I put only another interpretation upon its lines, than upon the veins of those which are soon to be strewed around me. It is nothing but Indian summer here at present — I mean that any weather seems reserved expressly for our late purposes, whenever we happen to be fulfilling them. I do not know what right I have to so much happiness, but rather hold it in [reserve] till the time of my desert. What with the crickets, and the lowing of kine, and the crowing of cocks, our Concord life is sonorous enough. Sometimes I hear the cock bestir himself on his perch under my feet, and crow shrilly long before dawn, and I think I might have been HDT WHAT? INDEX

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born any year for all the phenomena I know.

Page 2 We count about sixteen eggs daily now, when arithmetic will only fetch the hens up to thirteen, — but the world is young, and we wait to see this eccentricity complete its period. My verses on Friendship are already printed in the Dial, not expanded but reduced to completeness, by leaving out the long lines, which always have, or should have, a longer or at least another, sense, than^do short ones. Just now I am in the mid-sea of verses, and they actually rustle round me, as the leaves would round the head of Autu[mmus] himself, should he thrust it up through some vales which I know.[;—]but alas! many of them are but crisped and yellow leaves like his, I fear, and will deserve no better fate than to make mould for new harvests. I see the stanza[s] rise around me, verse upon verse, far and near, like the mountains from Agiochook [Agiocochook], not all having a terrestrial existence as yet,

Page 3 even as some of them may be clouds, but I fancy I see the gleam of some Sebago lakes and Silver Cascades, at whose well I may drink one day. I am as unfit for any practical purpose, I mean for the fur- therance of the world’s ends, as gossamer for ship timber— And I who am going to be a pencil-maker to-morrow, can sympathize with god Apollo, who served king Admetus for awhile on earth— But I believe he found it for his advantage at last –as I am sure I shall– though I shall hold the nobler part at least out of the service. Dont attach any undue seriousness this threnody — for I love my fate to the very core and rind, and could swallow it without paring I think You ask if I have written any more poems — excepting those which Vulcan is now forging, I have only discharged a few more thunder bolts into the horizon, in all three hundred verses, and sent them as I may say over the mountains to Miss Fuller, who may

Page 4 have occasion to remember the old rhyme “Three scipen gode Comen mid than flode, Three hundred cnihten—” but these are far more Vandalic than they. {written perpendicular to text:

Postmark: CONCORD HDT WHAT? INDEX

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SEP

MAS[]

Postage: 10

Address: Mrs. L. C. Brown

Plymouth

Mass.}

In this narrow sheet there is not room even for one thought to root itself, but you must consider this an odd leaf of a volume, and that volume

Your Friend

Henry D. Thoreau HDT WHAT? INDEX

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I do not know what right I have to so much happiness, but rather hold it in reserve till the time of my desert…. Sometimes I hear the cock … crow shrilly before dawn; and I think I might have been born any year for all the phenomena I know.

Thoreau responded to Isaiah T. Williams in Buffalo NY. Concord Sept. 8th 1841. Dear Friend, I am pleased to hear from you out of the west, as if I heard the note of some singing bird from the midst of its forests which travellers report so grim and solitary — It is like the breaking up of Winter and the coming in of Spring, when the twigs glitter and tinkle, and the first sparrow twitters in the horizon. I doubt if I can make a good echo— Yet it seems that if a man ever had the satisfaction to say once entirely and irrevocably what he believed to be true, he would never leave off to cultivate that skill. I suppose if you see any light in the east it must be in the eastern state of your own soul and not by any means in these New England states. Our eyes perhaps do not rest so long on any as on the few who especially love their own lives — who dwell apart at more generous intervals, and cherish a single purpose behind the formalities of HDT WHAT? INDEX

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society with such steadiness that of all men only their two eyes seem to meet in one focus. They can be eloquent when they speak — they can be graceful and noble when they act. For my part if I have any creed it is so to live as to preserve and increase the susceptibleness of my nature to noble impulses — first to observe if any light shine on me and then faithfully to follow it. The Hindoo scripture says “Single is each man born; single he dies; single he receives the reward of his good, and single the punishment of his evil, deeds.” Let us trust that we have a good conscience. The steady light whose ray every man knows will be enough for all weathers. If any soul look abroad even today it will not find any word which does it more justice than the New Testament, yet if it be faithful enough it will have experience of a revelation fresher and di- recter than that, which will make that to be only the best tradition. The strains of a more heroic faith vibrate through the week days and the fields than through the sabbath and the church. To shut the ears to the immediate voice of God, and prefer to know him by report will be the only sin. Any respect we may yield to the paltry expedients of other men like ourselves — to the Church — the State — or the School — seems purely gratuitous, for in our most private experience we are never driven to expediency. Our religion is where our love is. How vain for men to go musing one way and worshipping another! Let us not fear to worship the muse. Those stern old worthies— Job, and David, and the rest, had no sabbath day worship—but sung and revelled in their faith, and I have no doubt that what true faith and love of God there is in this age will appear to posterity in the happy rythm of some creedless poet. I think I can sympathise with your sense of greater freedom — The return to truth is so simple that not even the nurses can tell when we began to breathe healthily, but recovery took place long before the machinery of life began to play freely again, when on our pillow at midnoon or midnight some natural sound fell naturally on the ear. As for creeds and doctrines we are suddenly grown rustic — and from walking in streets and squares — walk broadly in the fields — as if a man were wise enough not to sit in a draft, and get an ague — but moved boyantly in the breeze. It is curious that while you are sighing for New England the scene of our fairest dreams should lie in the west — it confirms me in the opinion that places are well nigh indifferent. Perhaps you have experienced that in proportion as our love of nature is deep and pure we are independent upon her. I suspect that erelong when some hours of faithful and earnest life have imported serenity into your Buffalo day the sunset on lake Erie will make you forget New Eng- HDT WHAT? INDEX

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land. It was the Greeks made the Greek isles and sky, and men are beginning to find many an Archipelago elsewhere as good. But let us not cease to regret the fair and good, for perhaps it is fairer and better than to possess them. I am living with Mr. Emerson in very dangerous prosperity. He gave me three pamphlets for you to keep, which I sent last Saturday. The “Explanatory Preface” is by Eliza- beth Peabody who was Mr. Alcotts assistant, and now keeps a bookstore and library in Boston. Pray let me know with what hopes and resolutions you enter upon the study of law — how you are to make it a solid part of your life. After a few words interchanged we shall learn to speak pertinently and not to the air. My brother and Mr. Al- cott express pleasure in the anticipation of hearing from you — and I am sure that the communication of what most nearly concerns you will always be welcome to Yrs sincerely H.D.T. ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1842

Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody presented to Waldo Emerson a copy of William Blake’s illuminated 1789 collection of poems, SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND OF EXPERIENCE SHOWING THE TWO CONTRARY STATES OF THE HUMAN SOUL (sales of this book were almost never occurring during this period, either in England or America). Now, in Emerson’s library, we can see his copy inscribed “R.W. Emerson from his friend E.P.P.” with notes throughout made by Emerson.

July 9, Saturday: In an apartment at 13 West Street in Boston, the apartment in which Margaret Fuller had held her “conversations” and out of which Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody had published THE DIAL, the Reverend James Freeman Clarke united Sophia Amelia Peabody and Nathaniel Hawthorne in holy matrimony, and then the married couple traveled by carriage to Concord, through occasional showers, arriving at their new/old home, the Old Manse which they had agreed to rent, at about 5PM. The Peabodys had attended this ceremony, but the Hawthornes, sensitive to the loss of the man of the family, had refrained. (The honeymoon couple would occupy the tiny rooms of the Old Manse, a colossal antique dollhouse, for the next three and a half years.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1843

February 26, Sunday: Henry Thoreau was written to by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody in Boston: Feb. 26th 1843 My dear Sir I understand you have begun to print the Dial and I am very glad of it on one account —viz— [that] if [it] gets out early enough to go to England by the steamer of the 1s[t] of the month — it does not have to wait another month — as was [t]he case [with] the last number — But I mean[t] to have had as a firs[t] article a letter to the “Friends of the Dial” somewhat like the rough draf[t] I enclose — [And] was waiting [Mr.] Emerson’s arrival to consult him about the manner of it. I have now written him a[t] New York on the subject & told him my whys & wherefores. The regu lar income of the Dial does no[t] pay the cost of its printing & paper — & [t]here are readers enough of it to support i[t] if they would only subscribe & they will only subscribe if they are [convinced] that only by doing so can they secure its continuance — He will probably write you on the subject — I want to ask a favour of you — It is to procure me a small phial of that black lead dust which is to be found as Dr C. Jackson tells me at a certain lead pencil manu factory in Concord — & send it to me by the first opportunity. — I want lead in this fine dust to use in a chemical Experiment[.] — Respec[t]fully yrs E P Peabody P.S. — I hope you have got your money from Bradbury & Soden. — I have done all I could about it. {written perpendicular to text in left margin: Will you drop the enclosed letter for Mrs. Hawthorne into the Post Office —} HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Page 2 E.P. Peabody {written perpendicular to text in center of page: Address: Mr. Henry D. Thoreau Concord —} HDT WHAT? INDEX

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April: In this month and the following one, two articles on Buddhist thought by Professor Eugène Burnouf were appearing in La Revue Indépendante, a prominent French journal which was presumably being stocked by Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody at her bookstore in downtown Boston. This month’s article was entitled Fragments des Prédications de Buddha. Professor Burnouf was the 1st to translate the LOTUS SUTRA from Sanskrit into a European language and eventually Henry Thoreau would possess a personal copy of the 1852 edition of his LE LOTUS DE LA BONNE LOI, TRADUIT DU SANSCRIT, ACCOMPAGNÉ D’UN COMMENTAIRE ET DE VINGT ET UN MÉMOIRES RELATIFS AU BUDDHISME, PAR M. E. BURNOUF (Paris: Imprimerie nationale). An English translation of this French translation of Chapter V of the Sanskrit of THE LOTUS SUTRA would appear in THE DIAL for January 1844, and presumably either Thoreau or Peabody, busy as beavers, prepared that translation — which would amount to the very 1st presentation of any part of this essential Buddhist scripture in the English language! THOREAU AND CHINA

Thoreau edited this issue (Volume III, Number 4) of THE DIAL. THE DIAL, APRIL 1843

The issue carried 21 quotes in its “Ethnical Scriptures: Sayings of Confucius” section, but these are not the ones which Thoreau would (probably later in this same year) retranslate from the French of M.J. Pauthier’s CONFUCIUS ET MENCIUS. Thoreau was still relying upon English editions, at least three of which he had at this point perused, and the translation he was relying upon at this point was one made in 1809 by the Reverend Joshua J. Marshman.12 JOSHUA J. MARSHMAN

Heaven speaks, but what language does it use to preach to men, that there is a sovereign principle from which all things depend; a sovereign principle which makes them act and move? Its motion is its language; it reduces the seasons to their time; it agitates nature, it makes it produce. This silence is eloquent. (ANALECTS or LUN-YÜ, one of THE FOUR BOOKS), Book XVII, Chapter 19)

MENCIUS LIGHT FROM CHINA

12. We know he read the English translation by Father Couplet, a Jesuit in China from 1658 to 1680, which had been in 1687 the very first notice of the writings of Confucius for an European audience, in an 1835 edition, plus two by a Baptist missionary in India in 1809, the Reverend Joshua J. Marshman, and one done in 1828 by David Collie, a member of the London Missionary Society who was at one time the principal of the Protestant Anglo-Chinese College at Malacca. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Ethnical Scriptures. Sayings Of Confucius.

1. Chee says, if in the morning I hear about the right way, and in the evening die, I can be happy. 2. A man’s life is properly connected with virtue. The life of the evil man is preserved by mere good fortune. 3. Coarse rice for food, water to drink, and the bended arm for a pillow — happiness may be enjoyed even in these. Without virtue, riches and honor seem to me like a passing cloud. 4. A wise and good man was Hooi. A piece of bamboo was his dish, a cocoa-nut his cup, his dwelling a miserable shed. Men could not sustain the sight of his wretchedness; but Hooi did not change the serenity of his mind. A wise and good man was Hooi. 5. Chee-koong said, Were they discontented? The sage replies, They sought and obtained complete virtue;—how then could they be discontented? 6. Chee says, Yaou is the man who, in torn clothes or common apparel, sits with those dressed in furred robes without feeling shame. 7. To worship at a temple not your own is mere flattery. 8. Chee says, grieve not that men know not you; grieve that you are ignorant of men. 9. How can a man remain concealed! How can a man remain concealed! Have no friend unlike yourself. 10. Chee-Yaou enquired respecting filial piety. Chee says, the filial piety of the present day is esteemed merely ability to nourish a parent. This care is extended to a dog or a horse. Every domestic animal can obtain food. Beside veneration, what is the difference? 11. Chee entered the great temple, frequently enquiring about things. One said, who says that the son of the Chou man understands propriety? In the great temple he is constantly asking questions. Chee heard and replied– “This is propriety.” 12. Choy-ee slept in the afternoon. Chee says, rotten wood is unfit for carving: a dirty wall cannot receive a beautiful color. To Ee what advice can I give? 13. A man’s transgression partakes of the nature of his company. Having knowledge, to apply it; not having knowledge, to confess your ignorance; this is real knowledge. 14. Chee says, to sit in silence and recall past ideas, to study and feel no anxiety, to instruct men without weariness; —have I this ability within me? HDT WHAT? INDEX

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15. In forming a mountain, were I to stop when one basket of earth is lacking, I actually stop; and in the same manner were I to add to the level ground though but one basket of earth daily, I really go forward. 16. A soldier of the kingdom of Ci lost his buckler; and having sought after it a long time in vain; he comforted himself with this reflection; “A soldier has lost his buckler, but a soldier of our camp will find it; he will use it.” 17. The wise man never hastens, neither in his studies nor his words; he is sometimes, as it were, mute; but when it concerns him to act and practice virtue, he, as I may say, precipitates all. 18. The truly wise man speaks little; he is little eloquent. I see not that eloquence can be of very great use to him. 19. Silence is absolutely necessary to the wise man. Great speeches, elaborate discourses, pieces of eloquence, ought to be a language unknown to him; his actions ought to be his language. As for me, I would never speak more. Heaven speaks, but what language does it use to preach to men, that there is a sovereign principle from which all things depend; a sovereign principle which makes them to act and move? Its motion is its language; it reduces the seasons to their time; it agitates nature; it makes it produce. This silence is eloquent.13

13. This last of the Marshman translations which Thoreau inserted into THE DIAL is now considered to have been a Taoist inclusion in the Confucian ANALECTS, so we cannot ever allege that Thoreau had no contact whatever with Taoism. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Dark Ages.

WE should read history as little critically as we consider the landscape, and be more interested by the atmospheric tints, and various lights and shades which the intervening spaces create, than by its groundwork and composition. It is the morning now turned evening and seen in, the west, — the same sun, but a new light and atmosphere. Its beauty is like the sunset; not a fresco painting on a wall, flat and bounded, but atmospheric and roving or free. In reality history fluctuates as the face of the landscape from morning to evening. What is of moment is its hue and color. Time hides no treasures; we want not its then but its now. We do not complain that the mountains in the horizon are blue and indistinct; they are the more like the heavens. Of what moment are facts that can be lost, — which need to be commemorated? The monument of death will outlast the memory of the dead. The pyramids do not tell the tale that was confided to them; the living fact commemorates itself. Why look in the dark for light? Strictly speaking, the historical societies have not recovered one fact from oblivion, but are themselves instead of the fact that is lost. The researcher is more memorable than the researched. The crowd stood admiring the mist, and the dim outlines of the trees seen through it, when one of their number advanced to explore the phenomenon, and with fresh admiration, all eyes were turned on his dimly retreating figure. It is astonishing with how little cooperation of the societies, the past is remembered. Its story has indeed had a different muse than has been assigned it. There is a good instance of the manner in which all history began, in Alwakidi’s Arabian Chronicle. “I was informed by Ahmed Almatin Aljorhami, who had it from Rephaa Ebn Kais Alamiri, who had it from Saiph Ebn Fabalah Alchatquarmi, who had it from Thabet Ebn Alkamah, who said he was present at the action.” These fathers of history were not anxious to preserve, but to learn the fact; and hence it was not forgotten. Critical acumen is exerted in vain to uncover the past; the past cannot be presented; we cannot know what we are not. But one veil hangs over past, present, and future, and it is the province of the historian to find out not what was, but what is. Where a battle has been fought, you will find nothing but the bones of men and beasts; where a battle is being fought there are hearts beating. We will sit on a mound and muse, and not try to make these skeletons stand on their legs attain. Does nature remember, think you, that they were men, or not rather that they are bones ? Ancient history has an air of antiquity; it should be more modern. It is written as if the spectator should be thinking of the backside of the picture on the wall, or as if the author expected the dead would be his readers, and wished to detail to them their own experience. Men seem anxious to accomplish an orderly retreat through the centuries, earnestly rebuilding the works behind, as they are battered down by the encroachments of HDT WHAT? INDEX

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time; but while they loiter, they and their works both fall a prey to the arch enemy. It has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us— when did burdock and plantain sprout first ? It has been so written for the most part, that the times it describes are with remarkable propriety called dark ages. They are dark, as one has observed, because we are so in the dark about them. The sun rarely shines in history, what with the dust and confusion; and when we meet with any cheering fact which implies the presence of this luminary, we excerpt and modernize it. As when we read in the history of the Saxons, that Edwin of Northumbria “caused stakes to be fixed in the highways where he had seen a clear spring,” and “brazen dishes were chained to them, to refresh the weary sojourner, whose fatigues Edwin had himself experienced.” This is worth all Arthur’s twelve battles. But it is fit the past should be dark; though the darkness is not so much a quality of the past, as of tradition. It is not a distance of time but a distance of relation, which makes thus dusky its memorials. What is near to the heart of this generation is fair and bright still. Greece lies outspread fair and sunshiny in floods of light, for there is the sun and day-light in her literature and art, Homer does not allow us to forget that the sun shone — nor Phidias, nor the Parthenon. Yet no era has been wholly dark, nor will we too hastily submit to the historian, and congratulate ourselves on a blaze of light. If we could pierce the obscurity of those remote years we should find it light enough; only there is not our day. — Some creatures are made to see in the dark. — There has always been the same amount of light in the world. The new and missing stars, the comets and eclipses do not affect the general illumination, for only our glasses appreciate them. The eyes of the oldest fossil remains, they tell us, indicate that the same laws of light prevailed then as now. Always the laws of light are the same, but the modes and degrees of seeing vary. The gods are partial to no era, but steadily shines their light in the heavens, while the eye of the beholder is turned to stone. There was but the eye and the sun from the first. The ages have not added a new ray to the one, nor altered a fibre of the other. T. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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THE CULT OF NOTHINGNESS

Here is a review describing how Buddhism was being mis- appreciated, in the West during Thoreau’s lifetime. It is important to understand that Thoreau had no share whatever in any of the various mis-appreciations of Buddhism which are here described. Roger-Pol Droit. THE C ULT OF NOTHINGNESS: THE PHILOSOPHERS AND THE BUDDHA. Translated by David Streight and Pamela Vohnson. Chapel Hill NC: U of North Carolina P, 2003 Reviewed for H_Buddhism by David R. Loy, Bunkyo University Published by H_Buddhism in December 2003 In May this year media headlines announced the discovery that Buddhists are happier. Smaller print summarized the results of new research into the effects of meditation on brain activity, behavior, and even immune responses to flu vaccine. Richard Davidson, director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and a participant in Dharamsala meetings with the Dalai Lama, used new scanning techniques to examine the brain activity of experienced meditators. MRI scanners and EEGs showed dramatic changes in brain function, including high activity in brain centers associated with positive emotions. Similar results were also achieved with new meditators. Although still provisional, these findings led the philosopher Owen Flanagan to comment in New Scientist magazine: The most reasonable hypothesis is that there’s something about conscientious Buddhist practice that results in the kind of happiness we all seek.14 Such scientific results show a rather different perception of Buddhism than the understanding that horrified Westerners throughout most of the nineteenth century. Buddhism today is usually seen as a kind of pragmatic therapy that cures or reduces suffering, but from approximately 1820 to 1890 –the period of focus for Droit’s book– Europe was haunted by the nightmare of an alternative religion that denied existence and recommended annihilation. THE CULT OF NOTHINGNESS: THE PHILOSOPHERS AND THE BUDDHA summarizes and analyzes the history of this (mis)understanding. He concludes that it had less to do with the rudimentary state of Buddhist studies during that period than with Europe’s fears about its own incipient nihilism, which would later ripen into the horrors of the twentieth century. “Thinking they were talking about the Buddha, Westerners were talking about themselves” (p. 21). At the end of the eighteenth century, new translations of Indian 14. The research results are summarized in Dharma Life 21 (Autumn 2003): pp. 8-9. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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texts were exciting European intellectuals, giving rise to hopes for another Renaissance greater than the one that had resulted from the late-medieval rediscovery of Greek texts. But it never happened. About 1820, when scholarly research first clarified the distinction from Brahmanism, “Buddhism” became constructed as a religion that, amazingly, worshiped nothingness, and European commentators reacted in horror. In their descriptions of nirvana, earlier scholars such as Francis Buchanan and Henry Thomas Colebrooke had been careful to deny that it was equivalent to annihilation. Their influence, however, was overwhelmed by the philosophical impact of Hegel and later the unsurpassed authority of Eugene Burnouf at the Collège de France. Hegel established the strong link with Nichts that would endure throughout most of the century. Instead of benefiting from the best scholarship then available, he relied on earlier sources such as de Guignes and the Abbots Banier and Grosier, evidently because their views of Buddhism fit better into his equation of pure Being with pure Nothingness. In Hegel’s system this equation signified the advent of interiority, a “lack of determination” that was not really atheistic or nihilistic in the modern sense — more like the negative theology of Rhineland mystics such as Meister Eckhart. Later, Burnouf’s Introduction a l’histoire du Buddhisme indien (1844) was immensely influential because it provided the first rigorous study of the Buddha’s teachings, thus taking Buddhist studies to a new level of sophistication, but one which firmly established the nihilistic specter: despite making cautious qualifications due to the West’s still-limited knowledge, Burnouf did not hesitate to identify nirvana with total annihilation. Burnouf’s scholarly objectivity was soon supplemented by apologetic and missionary ardor. Catholic preachers such as Ozanam declared that, behind his serene mask, the Buddha was Satan himself in a new incarnation. The Buddha’s cult of nothingness aroused in Felix Neve’s soul the need to liberate Buddhist peoples from their errors, weakness, and immobility. Victor Cousins, who played a major role in establishing philosophical education in mid-century France, and who proclaimed that Sanskrit texts were worthy of Western philosophical attention, nevertheless followed Burnouf in reacting against the Buddhist system: it was not only an anti- religion but a counterworld, a threat to order. His follower Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire took a further step and denied that such a “deplorable and absurd” faith could be philosophically relevant, even asking whether such a strange phenomenon meant that human nature in India “is still the same nature we feel within ourselves,” since Buddhism’s “gloomy meaning” led only to “moral suicide” (pp. 122-23). Ernest Renan called Buddha “the atheistic Christ of India” and attacked his revolting “Gospel of Nihilism” (p. 120). Schopenhauer discovered in Buddhism many of his favorite themes –renunciation, compassion, negation of the will to live– but HDT WHAT? INDEX

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relatively late, so, according to Droit, Buddhism had no significant influence on his system. However, his annexation of Buddhist principles brought the Buddhist challenge back to Europe, from missionary conversion to counteracting home-grown nihilism. Ever the philosopher, however, Schopenhauer was careful to say that nirvana could only be nothingness “for us,” since the standpoint of our own existence does not allow us to say anything more about it. Would that other commentators had been so sensible! The nihilistic understanding of Buddhism had a significant impact on Arthur de Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853), which would become enormously influential for the Nazis and other twentieth-century racists. For Gobineau, humanity was rushing to perdition and nothingness due to degeneration caused by intermingling of the races. He viewed Buddhism as the effort of an inferior people to overthrow the racially superior Aryan Brahmins. The failure of this attempt – the fact that Buddhism was largely eliminated from India– was somewhat inconsistent with his own historical pessimism, which accepted the inevitability of decline; but it may have encouraged the Nazis to attempt their own program of extermination for the sake of racial purity. Nietzsche, too, accepted the view of Buddhism as aspiring to nothingness, although for him it was the similarity with Christianity, not the difference, that was the problem. Despite the undoubted value of Buddhism as a moderate and hygienic way of living that denied transcendence and viewed the world from more rigorous psychological and physiological perspectives, in the end the choice is between Buddhism, Schopenhauer, India, weakness, and peaceful inactivity, or strength, conflict, Europe, pain, and tragedy. Buddhism’s spread in Europe was unfortunate, Nietzsche believed, since “Nostalgia for nothingness is the negation of tragic wisdom, its opposite” (p. 148). About 1864 the annihilationist view of Buddhism began to decline. Carl F. Koppen’s THE RELIGION OF THE BUDDHA (2 vols., 1857- 59), very influential in the 1860s and 70s, emphasized the Buddha’s ethical revolution, which affirmed a human deliverance and proclaimed human equality. Although literary fascination with the worship of nothingness continued, by the early 1890s emphasis was on Buddhism as a path of knowledge and wisdom, a “neo-Buddhist” view attacked by a still-active Burnouf. In place of Christian apologetics, there was a growing tendency to think of different religions as converging, as Vivekananda argued at the 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago (although elsewhere he imagined Buddhism as responsible for various spiritual degenerations). As Droit summarizes: “The cult of nothingness was ending.... The time of wars was soon to come. Another cult of nothingness was beginning” (p. 160). He argues persuasively that the issue at stake was always Europe’s own identity. With “Buddhism” Europe constructed a mirror in which it dared not recognize itself. (Here perhaps HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Droit could have strengthened his case with some more reflections on Darwin, the death of God, and Europe’s own hopes for/fears of a religion of Reason without transcendence.) When the question of the Buddha’s atheism arose, it was the atheism of the Europeans that was really in question. No one really believed, and almost no one ever said, that the beliefs of the Buddhists on the other side of the world were going to come and wreak havoc among the souls of the West. It was not a conversion, a corrosion, a “contamination” of any kind that was threatening, coming from outside. It was in Europe itself that the enemy, and the danger, were to be found. (p. 163) This was not only a threat to the foundations of one’s personal belief-system, but a challenge that threatened to undermine social order. “The nothingness of order corresponded to the nothingness of being. Once again, this nothingness was not the equivalent of a pure and simple absence. It was supposed to undo and disorganize. It was dangerous because it shattered, it leveled, it instigated anarchy” (p. 165). Tragically, the decline of this nihilistic view of Buddhism was accompanied by the unprecedented triumph of a more active nihilism in the following century, with well over a hundred million war-dead, two-thirds of them civilian non-combatants. Today, to say it again, Buddhism for us has become a pragmatic and non-metaphysical kind of therapy that reduces suffering. But how confident should we be about this view, given how well it reflects the postmodern West’s own pragmatic, anti- metaphysical, therapeutic self-understanding? If we cannot leap over our own shadow, must we resign ourselves to “misinterpretations” of Buddhism that always reflect our own prejudices? Or is “Buddhism” better understood as the still- continuing history of its interpretations? Interpretations that must reflect our prejudices because they reflect our own needs. THE CULT OF NOTHINGNESS: THE PHILOSOPHERS AND THE BUDDHA concludes with a 65-page chronological bibliography of Western works on Buddhism, most of it derived from a more extensive (15,073 titles!) bibliography compiled by Shinsho Hanayama and published by the Hokuseido Press in 1961. Droit claims that his own bibliography is almost complete for 1638-1860, omitting only more specialized works on archaeology, philology, etc. for 1860- 1890. The translation is clear and fluent, although I have not compared it with the French original. And, although not a specialist in this field, I do not doubt that this work is indispensable to anyone studying the history of the Western reception of Buddhism. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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May: Several members of the Unitarian Society formed what they termed the Unitarian Missionary Society.

In the previous month and this one, two articles on Buddhist thought by Professor Eugène Burnouf had been appearing in La Revue Indépendante, a prominent French journal which may have been available to Thoreau at the New York Society Library. The previous month’s article had been entitled Fragments des Prédications de Buddha and this month’s article was entitled Considérations sur l’Origine du Bouddhisme. Professor Burnouf was the 1st to translate the LOTUS SUTRA from Sanskrit into a European language and eventually Henry Thoreau would possess a personal copy of the 1852 edition of his LE LOTUS DE LA BONNE LOI, TRADUIT DU SANSCRIT, ACCOMPAGNÉ D’UN COMMENTAIRE ET DE VINGT ET UN MÉMOIRES RELATIFS AU BUDDHISME, PAR M. E. BURNOUF (Paris: Imprimerie nationale). An English translation of this French translation of Chapter V of the Sanskrit of THE LOTUS SUTRA would appear in THE DIAL for January 1844, and presumably either Thoreau or Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, busy as beavers, prepared that translation — which would amount to the very 1st presentation of any part of this essential Buddhist scripture in the English language!

November 6, Tuesday: Until April 1844, Margaret Fuller would be supporting herself (and other members of her family, I think) through offering two-hour “Conversations” for 25-40 women at a time, in Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s parlor on West Street in Boston. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1844

January: Henry Thoreau’s translations from the odes of Pindar and his “Homer. Ossian. Chaucer.” appeared in this current issue of THE DIAL. READ PINDAR’S ODES THE DIAL, JANUARY 1844

So, who then was the translator from French into English of the piece “The Preaching of Buddha” that also appeared? This amounts to the first English version of Chapter V of what we now know as THE LOTUS SUTRA. The piece was based upon two articles by Professor Eugène Burnouf that had appeared in French in the magazine La Revue Indépendante for April/May 1843 (Professor Burnouf having been the first to translate the LOTUS SUTRA from Sanskrit into a European language). In 1885, George Willis Cooke would finger Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, who not only knew French but also presumably carried the French magazine in question at her bookstore, as the English translator for this part of Thoreau’s ethnical scriptures series, but there seems to be no document trail. (According to Sattelmeyer’s THOREAU’S READING, item 1202 on page 264, Thoreau eventually would possess Burnouf’s LE LOTUS DE LA BONNE LOI..., but since this book was not published until 1852 it does not bear upon the issue here.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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May 18, Saturday: An announcement of regret for the closing of THE DIAL appeared in the New-York Daily Tribune, noting that that journal had been “sustained for three years by the free-will contributions of” Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Ellery Channing, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Charles Lane, Charles A. Dana, Henry Thoreau, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, “and others of the deepest thinkers and most advanced minds of our country.”15

Here then are the accumulated issues of this publication, from midyear 1840 to midyear 1844: THE DIAL, 1840 THE DIAL, 1841 THE DIAL, 1842 THE DIAL, 1843 THE DIAL, 1844

15. There would be a successor magazine, and one of the first principles of this successor magazine would be that no contribution would ever be accepted from Thoreau — his participation would be ruled out categorically from the get-go. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1845

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s KEYS TO HEBREW AND GRECIAN HISTORY. KEY TO HISTORY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1846

Charles Kraitsir, M.D.’s THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ALPHABET (Boston: Published by E.P. Peabody), a copy of which would quickly come into the ownership of Henry Thoreau.

SIGNIFICANCE OF ALPHABET Also, his FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH FOR CHILDREN: BASED UPON THE “SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ALPHABET” (86 pages) (Boston: Published by E.P. Peabody). FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1848

January 26, Thursday: The Daily Hartford Courant carried the following editorial about the deranged dentist and recreational drug user Horace Wells who had committed suicide in prison: The Late Horace Wells. The death of this gentleman has caused profound and melancholy sensation in the community. He was an upright and estimable man, and had the esteem of all who knew him, of undoubted piety, and simplicity and generosity of character. Bronson Alcott wrote about Henry Thoreau in his journal (JOURNALS. Boston MA: Little, Brown, 1938, page 201): Heard Thoreau’s lecture before the Lyceum on the relation of the individual to the State — an admirable statement of the rights of the individual to self-government, and an attentive audience. His allusions to the Mexican War, to Mr. Hoar’s expulsion from Carolina, his own imprisonment in Concord Jail for refusal to pay his tax, Mr. Hoar’s payment of mine when taken to prison for a similar refusal, were all pertinent, well considered, and reasoned. I took great pleasure in this deed of Thoreau’s. Thoreau delivered “The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation to Government”: [W]hat is once well done is done forever…. [T]he world is not governed by policy and expediency…. [F]or thinkers, and those who legislate for all time, he [Daniel Webster] never once glances at the subject [of government]. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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We do not know whether the lecture at this early point already contained the famous words:

“RESISTANCE TO CIVIL GOVERNMENT”: After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule, is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it. Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience? — in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well- disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder- monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power? Visit the Navy Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts — a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments, though it may be “Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note, As his corse to the rampart we hurried; Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot O’er the grave where our hero we buried.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others, as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders, serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it. A wise man will only be useful as a man, and will not submit to be “clay,” and “stop a hole to keep the wind away,” but leave that office to his dust at least:— “I am too high-born to be propertied, To be a secondary at control, Or useful serving-man and instrument To any sovereign state throughout the world.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Lecture16

DATE PLACE TOPIC

January 14, Friday, 1848 Concord “Friendship” January 26, Wednesday, 1848, at 7PM Concord; Unitarian Church, Vestry “The Relation of the Individual to the State” February 16, Wednesday, 1848, at 7PM Concord; Unitarian Church, Vestry “The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation to the State”

16. From Bradley P. Dean and Ronald Wesley Hoag’s “Thoreau’s Lectures before WALDEN: An Annotated Calendar.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Narrative of Event: No minutes were kept during the Concord Lyceum’s 1847-48 season; however, A.G. Fay, the secretary, did include “H D Thoreau of Concord” in a list of nine speakers who “During the Season … lectured before the Lyceum” (THE MASSACHUSETTS LYCEUM DURING THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE, page 163). In part to answer his townspeople’s curiosity about why he had spent a night in jail rather than pay his poll taxes, Thoreau pulled together his thoughts on the relation of the individual to the state into a lecture that he delivered in Concord on 26 January 1848. He lectured at the Concord Lyceum on the same general topic again on 16 February, although the scant evidence we have suggests that the two lectures were considerably different from one another.

Advertisements, Reviews, and Responses: In his diary entry of 26 January 1848,17 Alcott wrote: Heard Thoreau’s lecture before the Lyceum on the relation of the individual to the State — an admirable statement of the rights of the individual to self-government, and an attentive audience. His allusions to the Mexican War, to Mr. Hoar’s expulsion from Carolina, his own imprisonment in Concord Jail for refusal to pay his tax, Mr. Hoar’s payment of mine when taken to prison for a similar refusal, were all pertinent, well considered, and reasoned. I took great pleasure in this deed of Thoreau’s.

Description of Topic: Alcott’s reference to Thoreau’s allusions in this early lecture version of what was to become “Civil Disobedience” indicate that Thoreau included in this lecture at least some topics (for instance, Samuel Hoar’s expulsion from South Carolina and payment of Alcott’s taxes) that he removed during the three weeks intervening between this version of the lecture and the one he delivered on 16 February. Given the probable length of the lecture (about fifty-five handwritten pages), the brief time Thoreau had between deliveries, and the relative paucity of early-draft manuscript leaves, we can assume that substantial portions of this lecture remained in Thoreau’s evolving lecture draft and were published in mid-May 1849, less than four months after this delivery of the lecture.

Quotations Used: It has been pointed out by Hongbo Tan that although it was in this material that Thoreau would first insert a segment of the translation of 96 excerpts from Confucian materials which he had made out of M.J. Pauthier’s CONFUCIUS ET MENCIUS, we do not know that quotation was already in the lecture as he delivered it as of this date since no manuscript of the lecture itself survives. All we know is that the translation was in the text as it would be published by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody published on May 14, 1849 as Article X of her AESTHETIC PAPERS. THOREAU AND CHINA

17.Alcott, MS “Diary for 1848,” entry of 26 January, MH (*59M-308). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1849

April 5, Thursday: Maharajah Dulleep Sing Bahadoor was obliged to sign an instrument by Great Britain which deposed him, and annexed the Punjab to the “Honourable East India Company.”

Austria ordered its deputies removed from the German National Assembly.

Henry Thoreau wrote to Elizabeth Palmer Peabody.

Concord April 5th 1849 Miss Peabody, I have so much writing to do at present, with the printers in the rear of me, that I have almost no time left but for bodily exercise; however, I will send you the article in question before the end of next week. If this will not be soon enough will you please inform me by the next mail. Yrs respecly Henry D. Thoreau

P.S. I offer the paper to your first volume only.

May 14, Monday: Prussia ordered its deputies removed from the German National Assembly.

A Revolutionary Executive Committee for Baden was established in Karlsruhe and Rastatt under Chairman Lorenz Brentano.

Franz Liszt arrived at his home in Weimar and found Richard Wagner. He decided to hide his fellow composer from the authorities. Liszt would organize a false identity and an escape to Switzerland and Paris. Before departing, Wagner would be able to hear Liszt conduct a rehearsal of Tannhäuser, scheduled to be performed on May 20th. Wagner would remember, “I was astounded to recognize in him my second self....”

Henry Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” and, it has been alleged, Charles V. Kraitsir’s language 18 theories, appeared in the ÆSTHETIC PAPERS of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and to some Westerners at that time, “go-ahead” Americans,

THOREAU AND CHINA 18. I am at a loss for how to substantiate this allegation unless it refers to the article “Language. — The Editor” that occupies pages 214-223. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“RESISTANCE TO CIVIL GOVERNMENT”: If a state is governed by the principles of reason, poverty and misery are subjects of shame; if a state is not governed by the principles of reason, riches and honors are the subjects of shame. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Confucius’s reasoning (straight out of the ANALECTS or LUN-YÜ, one of THE FOUR BOOKS) was not CHINA seeming particularly persuasive:

I think that Mr. Thoreau has got into better company than he deserves and doubt if there is much in him.

Better company than he deserved: Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (in 1878)

But there were in addition those were impressed, for the Boston Daily Chronotype, edited by Elizur Wright, Jr., would comment on its page 2 that ÆSTHETIC PAPERS contained an essay by H.D. Thoreau on resistance to civil government which was

a very interesting paper, and quite radical — beautifully so.

Also appearing in ÆSTHETIC PAPERS was the Reverend Samson Reed’s “Genius.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Nathaniel Hawthorne took “Main Street” (and several other stories) out of the future editions of his THE SCARLET LETTER, and included it in his sister-in-law’s volume. (He definitely knew how to recycle: he would also include this story “Main Street” in his 1852 volume THE SNOW-IMAGE AND OTHER TWICE-TOLD TALES.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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THE SCARLET LETTER: A portion of his facts, by-the-by, did me good service in the preparation of the article entitled “MAIN STREET,” included in the present volume. The remainder may perhaps be applied to purposes equally valuable hereafter, or not impossibly may be worked up, so far as they go, into a regular history of Salem, should my veneration for the natal soil ever impel me to so pious a task. Meanwhile, they shall be at the command of any gentleman, inclined and competent, to take the unprofitable labour off my hands. As a final disposition I contemplate depositing them with the Essex Historical Society. But the object that most drew my attention to the mysterious package was a certain affair of fine red cloth, much worn and faded. There were traces about it of gold embroidery, which, however, was greatly frayed and defaced, so that none, or very little, of the glitter was left. It had been wrought, as was easy to perceive, with wonderful skill of needlework; and the stitch (as I am assured by ladies conversant with such mysteries) gives evidence of a now forgotten art, not to be discovered even by the process of picking out the threads. This rag of scarlet cloth –for time, and wear, and a sacrilegious moth had reduced it to little other than a rag– on careful examination, assumed the shape of a letter. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1850

March 16, Saturday: An issue of Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal: CHAMBERS’ EDINBURGH JOURNAL ISSUE OF MARCH 16

Waldo Emerson delivered “The Superlative in Literature, Manners, and Races.”

According to page 79 of Larry J. Reynolds’s influence study EUROPEAN REVOLUTIONS AND THE AMERICAN LITERARY RENAISSANCE (New Haven CT: Yale UP, 1988), there are distinct markings of sexist politics to be discerned within the novel published on this day by Ticknor and Fields, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, THE HDT WHAT? INDEX

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SCARLET LETTER; OR,THE POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF A DECAPITATED SURVEYOR:19

theabsorbingcontemplationofthescarletletterthestoryentitled“THESCARLET LETTER”taleof“TheScarletLetter”thescarletletterandeventoucheditwithher fingerthewearerofthescarletlettertakethescarletletteroffthescarletletterthre waluridwearerofthescarletletterfingeronthescarletletterthescarletletterflam ingonherbreastthescarletletteronherbreastornamentthescarletletterwhichitwas herdoomtowearthescarletletterthescarletletterthescarletletteronHester’sbos omgazemightneveroncebefixeduponthescarletlettertouchedthescarletletterthe scarletletterthescarletletterendowedwithlifethescarletletterthewomanofthe scarletletterthelikenessofthescarletletterthescarletletterthewearerofthesca rletletterherchildandthescarletletterlinesofthescarletletterthatdecoratedthem aternalbosomthescarletletteronherbosomthescarletletteronherbreastherfingero nthescarletletterlookuponthescarletletterasthetokenthescarletletterThesca rletletterhadnotdoneitsofficeThescarletletterburnedonHesterPrynne’sbosom“Ih avelefttheetothescarletletter”Iwhomthescarletletterhasdisciplinedtotruthunder thetortureofthescarletletterasforthescarletletter“Mother”saidshe“whatdoesthe scarletlettermean?”investigationsaboutthescarletletterthescarletletterHema deastepnigheranddiscoveredthescarletletterthescarletletterthescarletletterT hescarletletterwasherpassportthescarletletterthescarletletteragainthescarl etletterbrought“Lookyourlastonthescarletletteranditswearer!”thescarletletter thescarletletterenvelopeditsfatedwearer“Thymotherisyonderwomanwiththesca rletletter”hadoftenheardofthescarletletterthescarletletterinthemarketplaceHe againextendedhishandtothewomanofthescarletletterLothescarletletterthesca rletletterthemiddaysunshineonthescarletletterwearerofthescarletletterThesto ryofthescarletlettergrewintoalegendrecluseofthescarletlettertheabsorbi

HEADCHOPPING

19. A claim of copyright has been made for THE SCARLET LETTER in 1962, for FANSHAWE and THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE in 1964, for THE HOUSE OF SEVEN GABLES in 1965, and for THE MARBLE FAUN in 1968, by Ohio State UP. (We presume that those ostensibly appropriative and global copyright claims could actually have covered not more than whatever value was added to the works by that press at that time, such as their reformatting and pagination and suchlike.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Near the end of THE SCARLET LETTER, Hawthorne in a summary tells us about Hester’s eventual change of heart, about how she at last forsook radicalism and recognized that the woman who would lead the reform movements of the future and establish women’s rights must be less “stained with sin,” less “bowed down with shame” than she. This woman must be “lofty, pure, and beautiful, and wise, moreover, not through dusky grief, but the ethereal medium of joy.” More than one reader has correctly surmised that this ending to the novel constitutes a veiled complement to Hawthorne’s little Dove, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, and a veiled criticism of Margaret Fuller — radical, advocate of women’s rights, and subject of gossip because of her child and questionable marriage. Hawthorne’s ambivalent feelings toward Fuller indeed informed this and other parts of the novel, and although a number of women have been discussed as models for Hester, including Anne Hutchinson, Ebe Hawthorne, and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Fuller seems to have served in this capacity most provokingly. As Francis E. Kearns has pointed out, a number of parallels exist between Fuller and Hester: both had the problem of facing a Puritan society encumbered by a child of questionable legitimacy; both were concerned with social reform and the role of woman in society; both functioned as counselor and comforter to women; and both had children entitled to use the armorial seals of a non-English noble family. A more important parallel, which Kearns does not mention, is that for Hawthorne both women were linked to the figures of Liberty and Eve, that is, to the ideas of revolution and temptation, which lie at the heart of the novel. For certain sure the benevolent Boston presence of George Stillman Hillard and the benign influence of Waldo HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Emerson, among other notables, had been immortalized in Hawthorne’s preamble “The Custom-House”:

THE SCARLET LETTER: Such were some of the people with whom I now found myself connected. I took it in good part, at the hands of Providence, that I was thrown into a position so little akin to my past habits; and set myself seriously to gather from it whatever profit was to be had. After my fellowship of toil and impracticable schemes with the dreamy brethren of Brook Farm; BROOK FARM after living for three years within the subtle influence of an intellect like Emerson’s; after those wild, free days on the WALDO EMERSON Assabeth, indulging fantastic speculations, beside our fire of fallen boughs, with Ellery Channing; after talking with Thoreau ELLERY CHANNING about pine-trees and Indian relics in his hermitage at Walden; after growing fastidious by sympathy with the classic refinement of Hillard’s culture; after becoming imbued with poetic sentiment at Longfellow’s hearthstone – it was time, at length, that LONGFELLOW I should exercise other faculties of my nature, and nourish myself with food for which I had hitherto had little appetite. BRONSON ALCOTT Even the old Inspector was desirable, as a change of diet, to a man who had known Alcott. I looked upon it as an evidence, in some measure, of a system naturally well balanced, and lacking no essential part of a thorough organization, that, with such associates to remember, I could mingle at once with men of altogether different qualities, and never murmur at the change.

[INSERT COMMENTARY ABOUT DECAPITATION HERE]

This “psychological bondage” book offered its appreciative audience a heroine who learns, finally, after much anguish, that as a woman her best game plan is to accept the cards society has dealt her, suffer passively, endure numbly, and wait, wait and hope for a better day, and that anything else she might try always makes her lot less bearable. To be silent and no bother, and maintain sexual purity, that constitutes female courage. Had slaves formed a reading market in that era, the author could easily have authored a companion volume about a black man who learns, finally, after much anguish, that as a slave his best game plan is to accept the cards society has dealt him, suffer passively, endure numbly, and wait, wait and hope for a better day, and that anything else he might try always makes his lot less bearable. To be silent and no bother, and polish shoes, that constitutes slave courage. Then, of course, the author could have created a grand synthesis, in a tale of a female slave who learns, finally, that her role as female and her role as slave quite reinforce one another.... To use a 19th-Century phrase, “women and Negroes.” Do you get the idea I actively dislike this romance? No, I HDT WHAT? INDEX

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actively dislike the mentality of its author Hawthorne. The best thing I have seen on this subject was written by Jean Fagan Yellin:

Where Hiram Powers had distanced an enchained white woman in space and called her a Greek Slave, Nathaniel Hawthorne distanced an enchained white woman in time and called her Hester Prynne.

Clearly, anyone who is bonded to (or in bondage to — it’s much the same, isn’t it?) such a person has a tough row to hoe (you note I cast this suggestion in the present tense — it’s still the case). In particular Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, who had witnessed slavery while living for an extended period in her youth on a sugar plantation in Cuba, had a tough attitudinal row to hoe, being married to such an author-tarian. Sophia could have hardly become an active abolitionist like her sisters Mary and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. Her solution? –Sophia went for denial, and refused to give credence to various unsettling reports such as that some slave women had to strip to the buff on the auction block (“which I am sure is an exaggeration for I have read of these auctions often and even the worst facts are never so bad as absolute nudity”). Then she also capable of ignoring the BOOK OF JOB in her BIBLE long enough to suppose that a good and benevolent God providentially “makes up to every being the measure of happiness which he loses thro’ the instrumentality of others” — so that it really is of no consequence how we treat each other. And then she could attempt to “lose myself in other subjects of thought,” embracing a sophisticated version of the Emersonian HDT WHAT? INDEX

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trick of resignation. She makes herself sound like a Minnesotan!20

Such were some of the people with whom I now found myself connected. I took it in good part, at the hands of Providence, that I was thrown into a position so little akin to my past habits; and set myself seriously to gather from it whatever profit was to be had. After my fellowship of toil and impracticable schemes with the dreamy brethren of Brook Farm; after living for three years within the subtle influence of an intellect like Waldo Emerson’s; after those wild, free days on the Assabeth, indulging fantastic speculations, beside our fire of fallen boughs, with Ellery Channing; after talking with Henry Thoreau about pine-trees and Indian relics in his hermitage at Walden; after growing fastidious by sympathy with the classic refinement of George Stillman Hillard’s culture; after becoming imbued with poetic sentiment at Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s hearthstone – it was time, at length, that I should exercise other faculties of my nature, and nourish myself with food for which I had hitherto had little appetite. Even the old Inspector was desirable, as a change of diet, to a man who had known Bronson Alcott. I looked upon it as an evidence, in some measure, of a system naturally well balanced, and lacking no essential part of a thorough organization, that, with such associates to remember, I could mingle at once with men of altogether different qualities, and never murmur at the change.

As of mid-century, with the publication of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s THE SCARLET LETTER, it is clear that the

20. We may well note that although Henry Thoreau would have a copy of Hawthorne’s THE SCARLET LETTER in his personal library, he would cross out the reference to that item — indicating that the volume was no longer present (we infer that either the volume was lost, or given away). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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figure of Uncle Sam had become a fixture of our American imagination:

THE SCARLET LETTER: In my native town of Salem, at the head of what, half a century ago, in the days of old King Derby, was a bustling wharf – but which is now burdened with decayed wooden warehouses, and exhibits few or no symptoms of commercial life; except, perhaps, a bark or brig, half-way down its melancholy length, discharging hides; or, nearer at hand, a Nova Scotia schooner, pitching out her cargo of firewood – at the head, I say, of this dilapidated wharf, which the tide often overflows, and along which, at the base and in the rear of the row of buildings, the track of many languid years is seen in a border of unthrifty grass – here, with a view from its front windows adown this not very enlivening prospect, and thence across the harbour, stands a spacious edifice of brick. From the loftiest point of its roof, during precisely three and a half hours of each forenoon, floats or droops, in breeze or calm, the banner of the republic; but with the thirteen stripes turned vertically, instead of horizontally, and thus indicating that a civil, and not a military, post of Uncle Sam’s government, is here established. Its front is ornamented with a portico of half-a-dozen wooden pillars, supporting a balcony, beneath which a flight of wide granite steps descends towards the street. Over the entrance hovers an enormous specimen of the American eagle, with outspread wings, a shield before her breast, and, if I recollect aright, a bunch of intermingled thunderbolts and barbed arrows in each claw. With the customary infirmity of temper that characterizes this unhappy fowl, she appears by the fierceness of her beak and eye, and the general truculency of her attitude, to threaten mischief to the inoffensive community; and especially to warn all citizens careful of their safety against intruding on the premises which she overshadows with her wings. Nevertheless, vixenly as she looks, many people are seeking at this very moment to shelter themselves under the wing of the federal eagle; imagining, I presume, that her bosom has all the softness and snugness of an eiderdown pillow. But she has no great tenderness even in her best of moods, and, sooner or later – oftener soon than late – is apt to fling off her nestlings with a scratch of her claw, a dab of her beak, or a rankling wound from her barbed arrows. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1851

June 8, Sunday to April 1, 1852: UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, OR THE MAN THAT WAS A THING was being published in three installments in a Washington DC antislavery weekly, The National Era.21 It is instructive to compare and contrast the “There is more day to dawn” trope from the last page in WALDEN, which would not be written until 1853-1854,

WALDEN: I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this; PEOPLE OF but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time WALDEN can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

“JOHN” (BULL) “JONATHAN”

21. Harriet Beecher Stowe. UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, OR THE MAN THAT WAS A THING. The National Era, June 8, 1851 to April 1, 1852 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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with the “another and better day is dawning” trope seen on the first page of this enormously popular book. In the case of Harriet Beecher Stowe, what was being offered was a day and era, new and improved but nevertheless “commensurable” with the present day and era. In the case of Henry Thoreau, what would be offered would be specifically the crossing of a boundary, specifically not of the same order or realm with any previous dawning. When light arrives which puts out our eyes, it is a different order of illumination, one which would seem presently as darkness to us. We note that what Stowe was offering in her book on freedom and fairness amounted to mere future-worship, a version of providentialism in theology and of consequentialism in ethics, a hopefulness which proceeded psychologically out of a present lack and longing and operated by way of the pathos of ressentiment,22 whereas what Thoreau would be countering with would be a celebration of plenitude.

It is also interesting to compare the attitude taken toward the law, in Chapter IX of this novel, with the attitude published by Thoreau on May 14, 1849 in his “Resistance to Civil Government” contribution to Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s AESTHETIC PAPERS, paragraph 18 “machinery of government” and “break the law,” where Senator John Bird of Ohio discusses, with Mrs. Bird, a law forbidding the giving of food or water to escaping slaves. The wife exclaims:

You ought to be ashamed, John! Poor, homeless, houseless creatures! It’s a shameful, wicked, abominable law, and I’ll break it, for one, the first time I get a chance; and I hope I shall have a chance, I do!

June 8, Sunday: In F.A. Michaux i.e. the younger Michaux’s Voyage A l’ouest des Monts Alléghanys –1802 printed at Paris 1808 He says the common inquiry in the newly settld west was “From what part of the world have you come? As if these vast and fertile regions would naturally be the point of union and the common country of all the inhabitants 22. As proof of this, consider the verse of the hymn “Jerusalem, My Happy Home” that Harriet Beecher Stowe tacked into John Newton’s 1772 hymn “Amazing Grace”:

When we’ve been there ten thousand years, Bright shining as the sun; We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise Than when we first begun! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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of the globe” The current of the Ohio is so swift in the spring that it is not necessary to row –indeed rowing would do more harm than good, since it would tend to turn to the ark out of the current onto to some isle or sand bar –where it would be entangled amid floating trees– This has determined the form of the bateux –which are not the best calculated for swiftness but to obey the current. They are from 15 to 50 feet long by 10 to 12 & 15 with square ends & a roof of boards like a house at one end– The sides are about 41/2 feet above the water “I was alone on the shore of the Monongahela, when I perceived, for the first time, in the distance, five or six of these bateaux which were descending this river. I could not conceive what those great square boxes were which abandoned to the current, presented alternately their ends, their sides, & even their angles As they came nearer I heard a confused noise but without distinguishing anything, on account of the elevation of the sides. It was only on ascending the bank of the river that I perceived, in these bateaux, many families carrying with them their horses, cows, poultry, dismounted carts, plows, harnesses, beds, agricultural implements, in short all that constitute the moveables of a household & the carrying on of a farm” But he was obliged to paddle his log canoe “sans cesse” because of the sluggishness of the current of the Ohio in April 1802 A Vermonter told him that the expense of clearing land in his state was always defrayed by the potash obtained from the ashes of the trees which were burnt –and sometimes people took land to clear on condition that they should have what potash they could make. After travelling more than 3000 miles in North America –he says that no part is to be compared for the “force végétative des forêts” to the region of the Ohio between Wheeling & Marietta. 36 miles above the last place he measured a plane tree on the bank of the Ohio which at four feet from the ground was 47 in circ. It is true it was “renflé d’une manière prodigieuse” Tulip & plane trees his father had said attained the greatest diameter of N A Trees. Ginseng was then the only “territorial” production of Kentucky which would pay the expense of transportation by land to Philadelphia. They collected it from spring to the first frosts. Even hunters carried for this purpose, beside their guns, a bag & a little “pioche” From 25 to 30 “milliers pesant” were then transported annually & this commerce was on the increase. Some transported it themselves from Kentucky to China i.e. without selling it the merchants of the seaboard– Traders in Kentucky gave 20 to 24 “sous” the pound for it. They habituated their wild hogs to return to the house from time to time by distributing corn for them once or twice a week– So I read that in Buenos Ayres they collect the horses into the corral twice a week to keep them tame in a degree Gathered the first strawberries to day. Observed on Fair Haven a tall Pitch Pine, such as some call Yellow P– very smooth yellowish & destitute of branches to a great height. The outer & darker colored bark appeared to have scaled off leaving a fresh & smooth surface –at the ground all round the tree I saw what appeared to be the edges of the old surface scales extending to two inches more in thickness. The bark was divided into large smooth plates 1 to 2 feet long & 4 to 6 inches wide. I noticed that the cellular portion of the bark of the canoe birch log, from which I stripped the epidermis a week or two ago –was turned a complete brick red color very striking to behold –& reminding me of the red man – and all strong natural things –the color of our blood somewhat.– under the epidermis it was still a sort of buff The different colors of the various parts of this bark, at various times, fresh or stale are extremely agreeable to my eye I found the White Pine top full of staminate blossom buds not yet fully grown or expanded.– with a rich red tint like a tree full of fruit –but I could find no pistillate blossom– The fugacious petalled cistus –& the pink –& the lupines of various tints are seen together. Our outside garments which are often thin & fanciful & merely for show –are our epidermis –hanging loose & fantastic like that of the Yellow birch –which may be cast off without harm our thicker & more essential garments are our cellular integument when this is removed the tree is said to be girdled & dies– Our shirt is the liber or true bark. beneath which is found the alburnum or sap wood –while the heart in old stocks is commonly rotten or has disappeared. As if we grew like trees, and were of the exogenous kind.

[Version published in 1906: “Our outside garments, which are often thin and merely for show, are our epidermis, hanging loose and fantastic like that of the yellow birch, which may be cast off without harm, stripped off here and there without fatal injury; sometimes called cuticle and false skin. The vital principle wholly wanting in it; partakes not of the life of the plant. Our thicker and more essential garments are our cellular integument. This is removed, the tree is said to be girdled and dies. Our shirt is the cortex, liber, or true bark, beneath which is found the alburnum or sap-wood, while the heart in old stocks is commonly rotten or has disappeared. As if we HDT WHAT? INDEX

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grew like trees, and were of the exogenous kind.”

In 1852, in his 4th version of WALDEN, Thoreau would write: Usually, we don garment after garment as if we grew like exogenous plants by addition without. Our outside and often thin and fanciful clothes are our epidermis or false skin, which partakes not of the life of the plant, and may be stripped off here and there without fatal injury; our thicker garments, constantly worn, are our cellular integument, or cortex; our shirts are our liber or true bark, which cannot be removed without girdling and so destroying the man. I believe that all races at some seasons wear something equivalent to the last. It is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his hands on himself in the dark, and that he live in all respects so compactly & preparedly, that if an enemy take the city, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety. While one thick garment is, for most purposes, as good as three thin ones, and cheap clothing can be obtained at prices really to suit customers; while a thick coat can be bought five dollars, which will last as many years, (for example, the one I have on), thick pantaloons for 2 dollars, cowhide boots for a dollar & a half a pair, a summer hat for a quarter of a dollar, and a winter cap for sixty-two & a half cents, or a better be made at home at a nominal cost, where is he so poor that, clad in such a suit of his own earning, there will not be found wise men to do him reverence?

This eventually would appear in WALDEN:

WALDEN: We don garment after garment, as if we grew like exogenous plants by addition without. Our outside and often thin and fanciful clothes are our epidermis or false skin, which partakes not of our life, and may be stripped off here and there without fatal injury; our thicker garments, constantly worn, are our cellular integument, or cortex; but our shirts are our liber or true bark which cannot be removed without girdling and so destroying the man. I believe that all races at some seasons wear something equivalent to the shirt. It is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his hands on himself in the dark, and that he live in all respects so compactly and preparedly, that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety. While one thick garment is, for most purposes, as good as three thin ones, and cheap clothing can be obtained at prices really to suit customers; while a thick coat can be bought for five dollars, which will last as many years, thick pantaloons for two dollars, cowhide boots for a dollar and a half a pair, a summer hat for a quarter of a dollar, and a winter cap for sixty-two and a half cents, or a better be made at home at a nominal cost, where is he so poor that, clad in such a suit, of his own earning, there will not be found wise men to do him reverence? HDT WHAT? INDEX

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July: The treaty of Traverse des Sioux, by which Dakota headmen ceded all their lands in Iowa, and some in Minnesota, to the US federal government. MINNESOTA

Herman Melville purchased Burton’s ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY in a used bookstore in Pittsfield MA — only to discover on the flyleaf that his father had owned that very volume in 1816.

The chip doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Bronson Alcott was marveling at how his shriveled “heart” was becoming engorged under the ministrations of the attractive and pleasant young lady, Ednah Dow Littlehale. They were walking together each dawn on HDT WHAT? INDEX

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the Boston Common:

She came — the maiden and passed the morning: a long and lavish morning with me, and left me the principal owner of a heart green with youthful regards, of sweet regard for herself the friend and stimulus to Genius.

THE ALCOTT FAMILY Here is a description of this well-endowed daughter of the well-to-do Boston merchant Sargeant Smith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Littlehale, by the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson:

She was a brunette, had a great deal of rich, black hair with large dark eyes, and was talking eagerly between intervals with some male companion.... Not equalling the ablest of early women leaders, like Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Peabody, in extent of early training, she was equalled by no other in a certain clearness of mind and equilibrium of judgement....

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Toward the end of July: The situation was fraught, it was a setup, a middle-aged man was about to make a fool of himself over a well-endowed young lady. Fortunately, a Boston society lady had options, could chose to escape from the heat of the city summer and the passion of the middle-aged fool by a holiday excursion to New Hampshire and to Brattleboro VT. There, while Ednah Dow Littlehale and Bronson Alcott were exchanging a series of very nice letters in which she was laying out an agenda to become his assistant in a prospective school (following in the footsteps of a number of previous ladies such as her own beloved instructor Margaret Fuller), she was also meeting and being romanced by one Seth Wells Cheney, an artist 41 years of age, a man who had made a considerable amount of money in the silk trade but whose young wife had died a year earlier of tuberculosis.

Mister Eligible, let me feel your pain! The couple climbed Mount Monadnock together for the sunset, and then descended that mountain — together — in the dark.

Fuller’s former pupil Ednah Littlehale was not the only person who was profiting from the memory of her during this July-October period. Waldo Emerson has recorded some of these activities in his journal:

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody ransacks her memory for anecdotes of Margaret’s youth, her selfdevotion, her disappointments which she tells with fervency, but I find myself always putting the previous question. These things have no value, unless they lead somewhere. If a Burns, if a De Stael, if an artist is the result, our attention is preengaged; but quantities of rectitude, mountains of merit, chaos of ruins, are of no account without result — ’tis all mere nightmare; false instincts; wasted lives. Now, unhappily, Margaret’s writing does not justify any such research. All that can be said, is, that she represents an interesting hour & group in American cultivation; then, that she was herself a fine, generous, inspiring, vinous, eloquent talker, who did not outlive her influence; and a kind of justice requires of us a monument, because crowds of vulgar people taunt her with want of position.

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1860

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody began the 1st kindergarten in America, on Beacon Hill in Boston. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1862

September 6, Saturday: 1st issue of the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway’s and Franklin Benjamin Sanborn’s antislavery Commonwealth. This paper would publish works by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Lydia Maria Child, Julia Ward Howe, the Reverend David Wasson, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Bronson Alcott, and Louisa May Alcott.

On some date subsequent to Miss Mary Moody Emerson’s death, I haven’t established exactly when, Sanborn would provide a savage “obituary” in which he would declare that this little lady while still among the living had been capable of “saying more disagreeable things in a half-hour than any person living.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1863

May 14, Thursday: There was fighting at Jackson.

The Boston Evening Transcript carried an obituary tribute on Mary Moody Emerson by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody.23 Peabody praised Mary for how unusually undogmatic she had been despite a lifetime of preoccupation with theological speculations. An “adequate” dialog with others, serious thought, she believed, was not merely incidental to life but actually was what constructed the soul.

September 6, Sunday: In Charleston Harbor, the Union forces were putting pressure on Fort Wagner and Battery Gregg by means of advancing siegeworks.

Calvin H. Greene went with Ellery Channing to the “Eastabrook [Estabrook] Country” to take a look at what was left of “the Thoreau Hut, where it had been moved to, yrs before this. Took a memento — a broken shingle, as a fitting emblem.” EMERSON’S SHANTY

That evening he went with Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau to the home of Mrs. Mary Peabody Mann, where he met Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and Horace Mann, Jr. The lad showed Calvin “his $175.00 microscope & something of its power.”

That night, Confederate forces evacuated Fort Wagner and Battery Gregg in Charleston Harbor.

23. This would be privately printed in 1913 as part of NOTES ON THE HISTORY OF WATERFORD, MAINE, edited by the Reverend Thomas Hovey Gage, Jr. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1864

Mary Peabody Mann’s and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s MORAL CULTURE OF INFANCY AND KINDERGARTEN GUIDE. KINDERGARTEN GUIDE

Late January: For the annual antislavery reception in Boston, Lydia Maria Child rode into Boston with Amos Bronson Alcott and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, with Bronson keeping the ladies entertained by informing them at a length approximating the length of their train ride of the significance of the distinction that there was to be made between “personality” and “individuality.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1874

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s RECORD OF MR. ALCOTT’S SCHOOL, EXEMPLIFYING THE PRINCIPLES AND METHODS OF MORAL CULTURE, 3d Edition, Revised. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 297 pages (This edition was prepared because the school kept by Bronson Alcott had become of popular interest after being described in the writings of Louisa May Alcott.) MAKING OF AMERICA HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1876

November: Styling himself “once a pure Transcendentalist,” Octavius Brooks Frothingham offered a treatise on TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND: A HISTORY (New-York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons) within the pages of which various historical persons stood as tropes more or less in the same manner in which, in Æsop’s animal fables, various species stand as tropes (in this treatise, gratefully, Henry Thoreau figured merely as a contributor to The Dial, else who knows how he might have figured!):

Personage Trope Species Trope

W. Emerson The Seer Lion Courage

B. Alcott The Mystic Ant Industry

M. Fuller The Critic Grasshopper Sloth

T. Parker The Preacher Fox Slyness

G. Ripley Man of Letters &c. &c.

This author’s take on what Transcendentalism had amounted to was that it had been a reinvigoration of the tradition of Cambridge Platonism.

The idea that America had undergone a phenomenon akin to the European Renaissance, a literary renaissance in New England in the first half of the 19th Century, surfaced at this point for the first time. It was hypothesized in an review by the Reverend Samuel Osgood. This category arose in opposition to the valorization of the Transcendentalist writers as a category, and one of the functions of the projected categorization was the devalorization and virtual exclusion from the forming canon of the writings of women such as Margaret Fuller, of persons of color such as Frederick Douglass, and of persons of lower origin such as Thoreau.

Frothingham had the following to offer about George Bancroft: The Philosophical Miscellanies of Cousin were much noticed by the press, George Bancroft in especial sparing no pains to commend them and the views they presented. The spiritual philosophy had no more fervent or eloquent champion than he. No reader of his “History of the United States,” has forgotten the noble tribute paid to it under the name of Quakerism, or the striking parallel between the two systems represented in the history by John Locke and William Penn, both of whom framed constitutions for the new world. For keenness of apprehension and fullness of statement the passages deserve to be quoted here. They occur in the XVI. chapter of the History. “The elements of humanity are always the same, the inner light dawns upon every nation, and is the same in every age; and the French revolution was a result of the same principles as those of George Fox, gaining dominion over HDT WHAT? INDEX

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the mind of Europe. They are expressed in the burning and often profound eloquence of Rousseau; they reappear in the masculine philosophy of Kant. The professor of Königsberg, like Fox and Barclay and Penn, derived philosophy from the voice in the soul; like them, he made the oracle within the categorical rule of practical morality, the motive to disinterested virtue; like them, he esteemed the Inner Light, which discerns universal and necessary truths, an element of humanity; and therefore his philosophy claims for humanity the right of ever renewed progress and reform. If the Quakers disguised their doctrine under the form of theology, Kant concealed it for a season under the jargon of a nervous but unusual diction. But Schiller has reproduced the great idea in beautiful verse; Chateaubriand avowed himself its advocate; Coleridge has repeated the doctrine in misty language; it beams through the poetry of Lamartine and Wordsworth; while in the country of beautiful prose, the eloquent Cousin, listening to the same eternal voice which connects humanity with universal reason, has gained a wide fame for the ‘divine principle,’ and in explaining the harmony between that light and the light of Christianity, has often unconsciously borrowed the language, and employed the arguments of Barclay and Penn.”

A few pages he attempts to characterize the essential difference between this Transcendentalism and the philosophy of Locke: “Locke, like William Penn, was tolerant; both loved freedom, both cherished truth in sincerity. But Locke kindled the torch of liberty at the fires of tradition; Penn at the living light in the soul. Locke sought truth through the senses and the outward world; Penn looked inward to the divine revelations in every mind. Locke compared the soul to a sheet of white paper, just as Hobbes had compared it to a slate on which time and chance might scrawl their experience. To Penn the soul was an organ which of itself instinctively breathes divine harmonies, like those musical instruments which are so curiously and perfectly formed, that when once set in motion, they of themselves give forth all the melodies designed by the artist that made them. To Locke, conscience is nothing else than our own opinion of our own actions; to Penn, it is the image of God and his oracle in the soul.... In studying the understanding Locke begins with the sources of knowledge; Penn with an inventory of our intellectual treasures.... The system of Locke lends itself to contending factions of the most opposite interests and purposes; the doctrine of Fox and Penn, being but the common creed of humanity, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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forbids division and insures the highest moral unity. To Locke, happiness is pleasure, and things are good and evil only in reference to pleasure and pain; and to ‘inquire after the highest good is as absurd as to dispute whether the best relish be in apples, plums or nuts.’ Penn esteemed happiness to lie in the subjection of the baser instincts to the instinct of Deity in the breast; good and evil to be eternally and always as unlike as truth and falsehood; and the inquiry after the highest good to involve the purpose of existence. Locke says plainly that, but for rewards and punishments beyond the grave, ‘it is certainly right to eat and drink, and enjoy what we delight in.’ Penn, like Plato and Fenelon, maintained the doctrine so terrible to despots, that God is to be loved for His own sake, and virtue to be practised for its intrinsic loveliness. Locke derives the idea of infinity from the senses, describes it as purely negative, and attributes it to nothing but space, duration and number; Penn derived the idea from the soul, and ascribed it to truth and virtue and God. Locke declares immortality a matter with which reason has nothing to do; and that revealed truth must be sustained by outward signs and visible acts of power; Penn saw truth by its own light and summoned the soul to bear witness to its own glory.” The justice of the comparison, in the first part of the above extract, of Quakerism with Transcendentalism, may be disputed. Some may be of opinion that inasmuch as Quakerism traces the source of the Inner Light to the supernatural illumination of the Holy Spirit, while Transcendentalism regards it as a natural endowment of the human mind, the two are fundamentally opposed while superficially in agreement. However this may be, the practical issues of the two coincide, and the truth of the contrast presented between the philosophies, designated by the name of Locke on the one side, and of Penn on the other, will not be disputed. Mr. Bancroft’s statement, though dazzling, is exact. It was made in 1837. The third edition from which the above citation was made, was published in 1838, the year of Mr. Emerson’s address to the Divinity students at Cambridge.

Octavius Brooks Frothingham. TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND. NY: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Putnam’s: [A]s high priests of the Genteel Tradition, the scholars who gave shape to Transcendentalism as an academic field were products of values and assumptions akin to those against which Transcendentalism reacted in the first place, however much these values may have assumed an aspect derived from Transcendentalism to preserve them in a new age. As a result, generations of scholars have both scorned and domesticated Transcendentalist writing, turning it to their own purposes. Transcendentalism has been not so much a subject of study as a placeholder for the ideologies and professional motives of its commentators. In effect, the criticism of Transcendentalism, and of American literature, has been entrusted to the Unitarians. The result is as predictable as if the history of the American Indians had been written exclusively by the cowboys, as until recently, it had.... The first major landmark of Transcendentalist criticism is O.B. Frothingham’s TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND. Frothingham has a privileged place in the discourse about Transcendentalism. The son of N.L. Frothingham, whose prominence as a minister to Boston’s First Church put him at the center of Unitarian society, Frothingham knew the religious and social controversies of the 1840s firsthand. So, in addition to being the first “scholarly” study, TRANSCENDENTALISM IN N EW E NGLAND might also be described as the last account by a “contemporary.” [...It] allows modern scholars to claim a direct connection through Frothingham with their subject, much as Christ’s elevation of Peter allows the church to claim a direct historical connection with God. —Carafiol, Peter C. THE AMERICAN IDEAL: LITERARY HISTORY AS A WORLDLY ACTIVITY. NY: Oxford UP, 1991, pages 43- 44, 46-47. HDT WHAT? INDEX

MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY

1878

During this year and the following one, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody donated to the open shelves of the Concord Free Public Library a number of volumes printed between 1524 and 1878, the bulk of them printed between 1820 and 1850. (Of this gift the original extent of which cannot now be determined, some 415 volumes remain to be counted on the library’s shelves. Refer to Leslie Perrin Wilson’s typescript thesis Introduction to a Bibliography of Books Presented to the Concord Free Public Library by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody with A Bibliography of Books Presented to the Concord Free Public Library by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, done in 1982.)

This was the prison in Concord, Massachusetts:

The old state prison of Rhode Island on Gaspee Street north of the cove, a 2-story granite structure completed in 1838 at a cost of about $1,300 per cell, had cost a total of $51,500. In the following year a more compact county jail had been added next the jailkeeper’s home on the east side of this structure. In this year the prisoners were transferred to new $450,000 state prison complex constructed of bluestone with granite trim, on land purchased in the village of Howard in Cranston in 1869. This edifice consists of a central building and two wings containing 252 cells, connected by iron bridges with the keeper’s house in front and with the mess- room, kitchen, and hospital in the rear. The wall around the prison yard was 20 feet in height and had a granite sentry tower at each corner. These would be served by the Pawtuxet Valley Branch of the New York, Providence, & Boston RR. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY

1880

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s REMINISCENCES OF REV. WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING, D.D. (Boston: Roberts Brothers). HDT WHAT? INDEX

MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY

1882

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s “My Experience as a Teacher,” in Henry Barnard, LL.D.’s American Journal of Education, XXXII, 721-42. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY

1894

January 3, Wednesday: Elizabeth Palmer Peabody died at the Gordon hotel in Boston. HDT WHAT? INDEX

MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY

1907

February: Charles I. Bolton’s “Circulating Libraries in Boston, 1765-1865” in Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Volume 11, pages 196-207. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY

1945

September: Leona Rostenberg’s “Number Thirteen West Street” in Book Collector’s Packet, Volume 4, No. 1, pages 7-9.

In Germany, Allied forces released Dr. Josef Mengele. WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1950

Louise Hall Tharp’s THE PEABODY SISTERS OF SALEM (Boston: Little, Brown). ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY SOPHIA AMELIA PEABODY MARY TYLER PEABODY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Miller, Perry, ed. THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS: AN ANTHOLOGY. Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1950 “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Miller focuses his selections on pamphlets and short articles not readily available, but illustrative of the range of Transcendentalist thought. Hence he includes Andrews Norton’s “A Discourse on the Latest Form of Infidelity” rather than Emerson’s “Divinity School Address.” The chapters are organized thematically, but many entries can be accessed by title and/or author from the table of contents. Included are excerpts from William Ellery Channing, Orestes Brownson, George Ripley, Jones Very, Nathaniel Frothingham, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Amos Bronson Alcott, the Reverend Francis Bowen, Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller, et al. In Miller’s view too little attention has been given to Transcendentalism as a religious movement, for at least two reasons: • because the movement as a whole is viewed through the “not always typical” works of Emerson and Thoreau; and • because the Transcendentalists themselves disguised their religious impulses in a literary rather than a theological idiom. They were aspiring, Miller contends, “to create a living religion without recourse to what is supposed the obsolete jargon of theology.” Miller oversimplifies this religious dimension when he posits close connections between Puritan and Transcendentalist religion. The 19th century developments were attempts, in Miller’s judgment, “to rephrase the ancient religious preoccupations of New England.” Despite this somewhat misleading introductory comment, the anthology as a whole contains many valuable Transcendentalist writings which would otherwise be difficult to obtain. (Johan Christopherson, January 24, 1992)

Professor Perry Miller’s take on it was that Transcendentalism had been fundamentally a religious movement, a counter for the cold rationalism of Unitarianism:

“Unless this literature [Transcendental writings] be read as fundamentally an expression of a religious radicalism in revolt against a rational conservatism, it will not be understood.... The inherently religious character of New England Transcendentalism has not been widely appreciated, mainly because most students are not acquainted with all the writings, and so fall into the habit of judging the whole by the more familiar, but not always typical, works of Emerson and Thoreau. But also, the misapprehension gains credence because all the insurgents strove, like Emerson and Thoreau, to put their cause into the language of philosophy and literature rather than of theology.... [T]hey derived from a society in which theological disputation and fine logical distinguishing had long been a major industry ... this revival of religion had to find new forms of expression instead of new formulations of doctrine, and it found them in literature.... Though the movement was asserted through poems in The Dial, Orphic apothegms, and lyric passages upon the woodchuck, it was ... an effort to create a living religion without recourse to what it supposed the obsolete jargon of theology.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1955

Stanley M. Vogel’s GERMAN LITERARY INFLUENCES ON THE AMERICAN TRANSCENDENTALISTS (New Haven: Yale UP).

Friend Milton Mayer’s study of some ordinary German lives during the period of the Third Reich, THEY THOUGHT THEY WERE FREE: THE GERMANS, 1933-45 (U of Chicago P).

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/1471.ctl WORLD WAR II

(There’s a short sweet explanation for why this book had been written in English rather than in German. The subtext of the monograph might best be expressed as “Uh, yeah, we postwar Americans — yeah, we’re supposing ourselves to be free.”) HDT WHAT? INDEX

ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY

1961

George Willis Cooke’s A HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION TO ACCOMPANY THE DIAL (NY: Russell & Russell). “Elizabeth P. Peabody,” Volume 1, pages 140-157. HDT WHAT? INDEX

MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY

1965

Octavius Brooks Frothingham’s TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND: A HISTORY (Introduction by Sydney E. Ahlstrom; Gloucester MA: Peter Smith); (Facsimile reprint of the 1876 edition published in New York by G.P. Putnam’s Sons). HDT WHAT? INDEX

ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY

1973

Fall: Madeleine B. Stern’s “Elizabeth Peabody’s Foreign Library (1840),” American Transcendental Quarterly, No. 20 Supplement, Part 1, pages 5-12 (this includes a facsimile of Catalogue of the Foreign Library, No. 13 West Street, Boston: S.N. Dickinson, 1840). ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY HDT WHAT? INDEX

MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY

1980

David Kaser’s A BOOK FOR A SIXPENCE: THE CIRCULATING LIBRARY IN AMERICA (Pittsburgh: Beta Phi Mu). HDT WHAT? INDEX

ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY

1981

Frederick Douglas “Rick” Fields’s HOW THE SWANS CAME TO THE LAKE: A NARRATIVE HISTORY OF BUDDHISM IN AMERICA (Shambhala Publications, 1981, 1991) alleged without evidence that it was Thoreau who had provided the English translation of Eugène Burnouf’s French version of the LOTUS SUTRA for THE DIAL of January 1844.

(Of course, actually we have not established that to be the case, regardless of what Rick Fields supposes, because it may well have been that this English translation had been prepared not by Thoreau but by Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody.) One might say that Thoreau was pre-Buddhist in much the same way that the Chinese Taoists were. He forecast an American Buddhism by the nature of his contemplation, in the same way that a certain quality of transparent predawn forecasts a clear morning. He lost himself in nature as the Chinese painters did, by becoming one with nature. He was certainly not the only one of his generation to live a contemplative life, but he was, it seems, one of the few to live it in a Buddhist way. That is to say, he was perhaps the first American to explore the nontheistic mode of contemplation which is the distinguishing mark of Buddhism. Emerson had abstracted God into the Universe, the Over-soul, or infused Him through Nature with a capital “N.” Thoreau was after the bare facts, the hard rock-bottom of existence. His journals were filled with details, precise observations and data. Emerson had an idea of what was real, Melville had ransacked the visible world for the symbols behind it, but Thoreau had no theories. He was content to wait and see HDT WHAT? INDEX

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what was there. There were many gods in Thoreau, as in all the pagans, but precious little God. Deity was not a problem one way or the other for Thoreau; it was more of a function than an absolute principle or existence. “I know that some will have hard thoughts of me, when they hear their Christ named beside my Buddha,” he wrote in A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS, “yet I am sure that I am willing they should love their Christ more than my Buddha, for the love is the main thing.”

— http://www.ralphmag.org/thoreau-swansJ.html

GAUTAMA BUDDHA HDT WHAT? INDEX

ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY

1984

Bruce A. Ronda, LETTERS OF ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY: AMERICAN RENAISSANCE WOMAN (Middletown CT: Wesleyan UP). (The illustration used of the person of Miss Peabody is from this volume.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY

1999

Bruce A. Ronda, ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY: A REFORMER ON HER OWN TERMS (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP).

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody HDT WHAT? INDEX

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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 2015. 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: March 26, 2015 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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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, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY MISS ELIZABETH PEABODY

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process 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 requests with . Arrgh.