PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
THE REVEREND JARED SPARKS
“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY
WALDEN: His only books were an almanac and an arithmetic, in which PEOPLE OF last he was considerably expert. The former was a sort WALDEN of cyclopaedia to him, which he supposed to contain an abstract of human knowledge, as indeed it does to a considerable extent.
ALEK THERIEN JARED SPARKS
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project The People of Walden HDT WHAT? INDEX
REVEREND JARED SPARKS JARED SPARKS PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
1789
May 10, Sunday: Jared Sparks was born in Wilmington, Connecticut.
NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT
The People of Walden “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
REVEREND JARED SPARKS JARED SPARKS PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
1809
Jared Sparks matriculated at Phillips Exeter Academy.
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 The People of Walden HDT WHAT? INDEX
REVEREND JARED SPARKS JARED SPARKS PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
1811
Fall: At Harvard College’s divinity school, Dr. Henry Ware, Sr., Hollis Professor, began a course of exercises with the resident Students in Divinity:
Messrs. John Emery Abbot (A.B. Bowdoin College 1810) Joseph Allen (A.B. 1811) John Dudley Andrews (A.B. 1810) Lemuel Capen (A.B. 1810) Jonathan Peale Dabney (A.B. 1811) David Damon (A.B. 1811) Charles Eliot (A.B. 1809) George Bethune English (A.B. 1807) Edward Everett (A.B. 1811) Samuel Gilman (A.B. 1811) Joseph Haven (A.B. 1810) Francis Jackson (A.B. 1810) Cyrus Pierce (A.B. 1810) Thomas Prentiss (A.B. 1811) HDT WHAT? INDEX
REVEREND JARED SPARKS JARED SPARKS PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
Hiram Weston (A.B. 1811)
Between this fall and the following fall, additional graduates would be commencing their studies under the direction of Dr. Henry Ware, Sr. and of Mr. Andrews Norton, who in 1813 would be appointed Dexter Lecturer in Biblical Literature. They would also attend Reverend John T. Kirkland in a few exercises in Dogmatic Theology, Professor Willard in Hebrew, and Professor Frisbie (after his appointment in 1817) in Ethics. As there is no record of the time when they entered on theological studies, their names have been arranged in the order of the College Catalogue, except for the final four who were graduates of other colleges:
Messrs. Thomas Tracy (A.B. 1806) Henry Ware (A.B. 1812) Charles Folsom (A.B. 1813) Rufus Hurlbut (A.B. 1813) HDT WHAT? INDEX
REVEREND JARED SPARKS JARED SPARKS PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
Thomas Savage (A.B. 1813) John Allyn (A.B. 1814) Andrew Bigelow (A.B. 1814) Francis William Pitt Greenwood (A.B. 1814) Alvan Lamson (A.B. 1814) Peter Osgood (A.B. 1814) James Walker (A.B. 1814) Charles Briggs (A.B. 1815) Lyman Buckminster (A.B. 1815) Stevens Everett (A.B. 1815) Convers Francis (A.B. 1815) Elisha Fuller (A.B. 1815) Richard Manning Hodges (A.B. 1815) George Goldthwait Ingersoll (A.B. 1815) Levi Washburn Leonard (A.B. 1815) Joseph Orne (A.B. 1815) George Otis (A.B. 1815) John Gorham Palfrey (A.B. 1815) Jared Sparks (A.B. 1815) Charles Brooks (A.B. 1816) Willard Bourn Oliver Peabody (A.B. 1816) William Ware (A.B. 1816) Azariah Wilson (A.B. 1816) William Winthrop Allen (A.B. 1817) George Bancroft (A.B. 1817) Ira Henry Thomas Blanchard (A.B. 1817) Samuel Brimblecom (A.B. 1817) Samuel Atkins Eliot (A.B. 1817) Benjamin Fessenden (A.B. 1817) Francis Jenks (A.B. 1817) Joseph Augustus Edwin Long (A.B. 1817) Samuel Joseph May (A.B. 1817) Robert Folger Wallcutt (A.B. 1817) Francis Willard Winthrop (A.B. 1817 but not from Harvard) J. Barker (A.B. but not from Harvard) -- Bryant (A.B. but not from Harvard) John Pierpont (A.B. Yale College)
(In these early years of the Harvard Divinity School, there were no formal class graduations as students would be in the habit of studying there for varying periods until they obtained an appropriate offer to enter a pulpit.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
REVEREND JARED SPARKS JARED SPARKS PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project The People of Walden HDT WHAT? INDEX
REVEREND JARED SPARKS JARED SPARKS PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
1815
April 25, Tuesday: Jared Sparks would graduate in this year from Harvard College. An assignment he submitted on this date, “Orbit of a Comet. Elementary Calculation from physical principles, together with a Graphical Representation of the Orbit of the Comet of MDCCCXL” (21 ½ x 28 ¼ inches), is still on file there: ORBIT OF A COMET
CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT
The People of Walden “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
REVEREND JARED SPARKS JARED SPARKS PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
1815
The North American Review was started in Boston under the editorship of William Tudor and would print his “Theology of the Hindoos as Taught by Ram Mohan Roy” as well as Theophilus Parson’s “Manners and Customs of India.” In 1817 it would pass into the control of a club of Boston gentlemen, who would make Jared Sparks chief editor, then Edward Tyrrell Channing, then in 1819 Edward Everett would assume the post. NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW MASTER INDEX
THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project The People of Walden HDT WHAT? INDEX
REVEREND JARED SPARKS JARED SPARKS PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
1819
May 5, Wednesday: Stanislaw Moniuszko was born at 4PM at Ubiel near Minsk, the son of Czeslaw Moniuszko, a poet and painter, and Elzbieta Madzarska, an amateur pianist.
The Decurionato (city council) of Catania, Sicily voted to grant their favorite son, Vincenzo Bellini, a pension enabling him to go to Naples to study.
At the ordination of the Reverend Jared Sparks as the Unitarian minister in the 1st Independent Church of
Baltimore, the Reverend William Ellery Channing delivered his “Pentecost of American Unitarianism” sermon about reflecting God’s love by following the loving example of Christ, upon the text “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good” (I Thessalonians, verse 21) — the definitive sermon of the new faith which eventually would appear under the title “Unitarian Christianity.” READ IT AND WEEP HDT WHAT? INDEX
REVEREND JARED SPARKS JARED SPARKS PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX
REVEREND JARED SPARKS JARED SPARKS PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
William Ellery Channing. “Unitarian Christianity,” published originally in 1819, reprinted as pages 70-102 of HDT WHAT? INDEX
REVEREND JARED SPARKS JARED SPARKS PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
Robinson, David, ed. WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING: SELECTED WRITINGS. NY: Paulist Press, 1986: HDT WHAT? INDEX
REVEREND JARED SPARKS JARED SPARKS PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”
THEOLOGY ”Unitarian Christianity” is William Ellery Channing’s most important theological essay. I wish to call attention to three aspects of Channing’s essay: 1) his hermeneutical strategy with regard to the Bible; 2) the Unitarian and Calvinist doctrines of God and their moral effects; 3) Channing’s abhorrence of “enthusiastic” religion. Channing’s view of the Bible advances so-called “higher criticism.” He regards the Bible, not as the iron standard of truth to which we must submit, but rather the expression of God’s paternal love for his creation, which draws us to him. Its meaning is to be found, he says quite radically, “in the same manner as that of other books” (72). Even more than when interpreting others books, when reading the Bible we must use reason as our guide, Channing insists, to keep us from confusing “what was of temporary and local application” (73) from what is eternally true. The Calvinists complain that Unitarians exalt human reason, Channing avers, only because they feel its sting: “its weapons wound themselves” (75). This emphasis on human reason does not lead Channing to discard the Bible. On the contrary, for Channing, Unitarian views, unlike the Calvinists, are truly Biblical: “Whatever doctrines seem to us to be clearly taught in the Scriptures, we receive without reserve or exception. We do not, however, attach equal importance to all the books in this collection” (72). The hermeneutical key in this system is, of course, what agrees with reason. Hence, the Unitarian disgust with original sin, the election of some to eternal damnation, the Trinity, etc. Of course, the Calvinists always believed that God’s revelation — Calvinistic religion — accorded with reason, but only when seen in the light of the Holy Spirit’s influence. Most problematic for Channing is the doctrine of the Trinity, which he dismisses as “irrational and unscriptural” (79). If Jesus is God’s equal, he asks, why do the New Testament writers fail to mention anything like a doctrine of three persons in one? Channing psychologizes the status accorded to Jesus: “Men want an object of worship like themselves” (81). Perhaps this is ironic, considering Channing’s consistently analogical theology (i.e. because of our reason, we can affirm as good what God esteems good). Nevertheless, Channing’s meaning is clear: we esteem Jesus because he is human as we are. The “Orthodox” are inconsistent at this point; they claim Jesus to be fully human and fully divine. But how is Jesus truly like us, Channing asks, if in his agonies on the cross his “divine half” is blissfully happy, without any doubts of God’s perfect scheme of Redemption? Such a view “robs his death of interest, [and] weakens our sympathy with his sufferings” (86). In addition to his anxiety to separate his views from Calvinism, Channing distances Unitarians from “enthusiasts” as well. Calvinism, he charges, “tends strongly to pervert the moral faculty, to form a gloomy, forbidding, and servile religion” (90). His own “rational” religion, his worship of the moral perfection of God, would be impossible, however, if he were to follow the ecstasies of the revivalists, “whose piety seems at war with reason” (96). Though he claims to prize “forbearance” in religious matters, Channing’s distaste for revivalistic religion is striking: “If religion be the shipwreck of understanding, we cannot keep too far from it.... HDT WHAT? INDEX
REVEREND JARED SPARKS JARED SPARKS PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX
REVEREND JARED SPARKS JARED SPARKS PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
1821
September: Foundation of the Calcutta Unitarian Committee, a precursor group for the British Indian Unitarian Association of Calcutta, with Rajah Rammohan Roy and the Reverend William Adam prominent.1 This group would become involved in correspondence with the Reverend Professor Jared Sparks of the First Independent Church of Baltimore, Dr. Thomas Rees of London, Sir John Bowring, the Reverend Thomas Belsham, the Reverend W.J. Fox, Harriet Martineau, Robert Dale Owen, Dr. Lant Carpenter, and Dr. J.B. Estlin.
DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.
1.There were already Unitarians in India, for the South Indian Unitarians had formed on December 19, 1813 around one William Roberts, “native of Carnatick.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
REVEREND JARED SPARKS JARED SPARKS PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
1822
March 3, Sunday: Rammohan Roy of India and the Reverend Jared Sparks of the First Independent Church of Baltimore began communication by letter. The Reverend Sparks’s cut on what was going down was that “many lovers of truth are zealously engaged in rendering the religion of Jesus clear from corruptions.”
Franz Schubert’s song Geist der liebe D.747 to words of Matthesson was performed for the initial time, in the Redoutensaal of Vienna.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 3rd of 3rd M 1822 / Both our Meetings were Silent & Seasons to some of mental suffering, in reflecting on the situation of some poor individuals who are under great delusion in several parts of this Yearly Meeting, but as a comforter, the language was underneath — “The Foundation remains sure, having this seal the Lord knows them that are his” — RHODE ISLAND RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
REVEREND JARED SPARKS JARED SPARKS PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
1823
The Reverend Jared Sparks resigned from his position as the Unitarian minister of the First Independent Church to become owner/publisher/editor of the NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.
NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW MASTER INDEX HDT WHAT? INDEX
REVEREND JARED SPARKS JARED SPARKS PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX
REVEREND JARED SPARKS JARED SPARKS PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
1825
May 26, Thursday: There was a meeting at the church of the Reverend William Ellery Channing in Boston to determine questions of organization. The Reverends Jared Sparks, Henry Ware, Sr., and John Gorham Palfrey were in attendance. Lewis Tappan was selected as the first treasurer of a new body, the American Unitarian Association. He would discover, however, that these Unitarians were not interested in the state of other people’s souls to the exclusion of an interest in the state of their own souls, and that the practical impact of this was that, in his personal crusade for funds to send a Unitarian missionary off to India, to redeem a few benighted Indians from their pagan savagery, he was shouting up a stump. And this would make him more and more dissatisfied.
WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF
The People of Walden “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
REVEREND JARED SPARKS JARED SPARKS PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
July: The Reverend Jared Sparks reviewed HOBOMOK: A TALE OF EARLY TIMES in the North American Review and found that although the plot was in bad taste, the writing in this first New England historical novel was of “agreeable style.” Sales picked up, and the “anonymous” author Lydia Maria Child would become something of a darling in Boston’s cultured society. One story has it that when the Marquis de Lafayette kissed her hand, the young lady ventured that she would never again wash it. That may or may not be a shaggy-hand story — but Maria did indeed promptly begin to attend a school to learn French.
H OBOMOK HDT WHAT? INDEX
REVEREND JARED SPARKS JARED SPARKS PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
1831
Thomas Sully painted a romantic portrait of the 42-year-old Jared Sparks. (It is now at the Reynolda House, HDT WHAT? INDEX
REVEREND JARED SPARKS JARED SPARKS PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
REVEREND JARED SPARKS JARED SPARKS PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
In another manifestation of the American religiosity –the worship of the great god mammon– the first gold dollar was struck in the United States of America. It was struck, not by the US Mint, but by Christopher Bechtler, a jeweler living in the hills of North Carolina near Rutherford County, which was at that time the nation’s primary gold-mining region. He had recently immigrated from Baden in what is now Germany and 1 was advertising that he would convert any miner’s ore into gold coins for 2 /2% of the ore. What he did was cast larger coins if the carat of the ore was lower, so that a 20-carat coin was slightly larger and heavier than a 22-carat coin for instance. Tests of surviving coins in collections assure us of this man’s scrupulous honesty, and we may speculate that his scrupulous honesty is probably the reason the central government allowed this free enterprise to thrive. A “Christopher Bechtler gold dollar” is now worth several thousand dollars — so don’t use it in the Pepsi machine.2
September 19, Monday: Alexis de Tocqueville interviewed the Reverend Jared Sparks, “a distinguished Boston literary man,” and they discussed the political prospects of the American union under General, then President, Andrew Jackson: • American: “Most enlightened men now recognize that General Jackson is not fitted to fill the office of President; his limited experience of anything to do with civil government and his great age make him incompetent. But he will be re-elected.” • Frenchman: “And why will that be?” • American: “Our people is not like yours. With us public opinion forms slowly. It is never carried away by surprise, although it is very subject to mistakes. It took long and patient work to put it into the head of the public that General Jackson was a great man and that he brought honor to America. The people were persuaded to believe this. There has not been time yet to bring them round to other feelings and the majority is still at the General’s disposal.”
2. The government was buying almost $300,000 worth of gold a year in Rutherford County, but was using it for foreign exchange rather than for domestic currency; it would not mint domestic gold dollars until 1849. HDT WHAT? INDEX
REVEREND JARED SPARKS JARED SPARKS PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
1834
The 2d volume, on water birds, of Professor Thomas Nuttall’s A MANUAL OF THE ORNITHOLOGY OF THE UNITED STATES AND OF CANADA (Cambridge: Hilliard and Brown; Boston: Hilliard, Gray). He resigned as curator of the Botanical Garden of Harvard in order to accompany the Wyeth Expedition to the Pacific coast. NUTTALL’S WATER BIRDS
Horatio Cook Meriam received his A.M. degree from Harvard College: Horatio Cook Meriam; LL.B. 1831; A.M. 1834 1872 HDT WHAT? INDEX
REVEREND JARED SPARKS JARED SPARKS PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
NEW “HARVARD MEN”
James Russell Lowell matriculated at Harvard.
The Reverend Professor Jared Sparks of Harvard began the long-term task of editing a 10-volume series (Boston: Hilliard, Gray; London: Kennett) –and then a 15-volume series– of THE LIBRARY OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY.
LIBRARY OF AM. BIOG. I
February: Volume I of the Reverend Professor Jared Sparks of Harvard College’s THE LIBRARY OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY. LIBRARY OF AM. BIOG. I
This encompassed four contributions: HDT WHAT? INDEX
REVEREND JARED SPARKS JARED SPARKS PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
•LIFE OF JOHN STARK by Edward Everett LIFE OF JOHN STARK
•LIFE OF CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN by William H. Prescott CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN
•LIFE OF RICHARD MONTGOMERY by General John Armstrong RICHARD MONTGOMERY
•LIFE OF ETHAN ALLEN by the Reverend Professor Jared Sparks LIFE OF ETHAN ALLEN
April: Volume II of the Reverend Professor Jared Sparks of Harvard College’s THE LIBRARY OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY. LIBRARY OF AM. BIOG. II
This encompassed two contributions:
•LIFE OF ALEXANDER WILSON, by William B.O. Peabody LIFE OF ALEXANDER WILSON
•LIFE OF CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH, by George Stillman Hillard LIFE OF JOHN SMITH HDT WHAT? INDEX
REVEREND JARED SPARKS JARED SPARKS PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
1835
Volumes III and IV of the Reverend Professor Jared Sparks of Harvard College’s THE LIBRARY OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY. LIBRARY OF AM. BIOG. III LIBRARY OF AM. BIOG. IV
These encompassed three contributions:
•LIFE AND TREASON OF BENEDICT ARNOLD by Jared Sparks LIFE OF BENEDICT ARNOLD
•LIFE OF ANTHONY WAYNE by General John Armstrong LIFE OF ANTHONY WAYNE
•LIFE OF SIR HENRY VANE by Charles W. Upham LIFE OF SIR HENRY VANE HDT WHAT? INDEX
REVEREND JARED SPARKS JARED SPARKS PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
1836
In this year a volume of Harvard College records was published. As you might imagine, they had to do it up in Latin: HARVARD RECORDS
A group of undergraduates had begun to publish a magazine of their own writings in September 1835 and would continue this practice until June 1838. The undergraduate David Greene Haskins would publish several articles anonymously during his Junior and Senior years, but David Henry Thoreau would take no part in such activity.3 At this point the group reissued the accumulating materials as a 2d book volume:4 HARVARDIANA, VOL. II
Harvard French and Spanish instructor Francis Sales in this year put out a revised, emended, improved, and enlarged 7th American edition of Augutin Louis Josse (1763-1841)’s A GRAMMAR OF THE SPANISH LANGUAGE, WITH PRACTICAL EXERCISES (1827; Boston: Munroe and Francis, 128 Washington-Street, corner of Water-Street. 1836, 7th American Edition; Boston: Munroe and Francis, etc. 1842, 10th American Edition: Boston: James Munroe and Company). This 1836 edition would be found in Henry Thoreau’s personal library and is now, with a front free endpaper bearing the notation “D H. Thoreau,” in the special collections of the Concord Free Public Library (having been donated by Sophia E. Thoreau in 1874). GRAMMAR OF SPANISH
Since William Whiting had graduated from Harvard College with the degree of Bachelor of Arts with the Class of 1833, in this year in the normal course of events he would receive in addition the customary degree of Master of Arts.
The publication of volumes V and VI of the Reverend Professor Jared Sparks of Harvard’s THE LIBRARY OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY. LIBRARY OF AM. BIOG. V LIBRARY OF AM. BIOG. VI
These volumes encompassed four contributions:
•LIFE OF JOHN ELIOT by the Reverend Convers Francis. LIFE OF JOHN ELIOT
3. In later life the Reverend Haskins, a relative of Waldo Emerson on his mother’s side, would denigrate his classmate Thoreau for having neglected to contribute to this undergraduate literary effort. He would aver that Thoreau had neither been a good scholar nor a convivial classmate — in addition, he would cast Thoreau as a mere imitator of his cousin the Sage of Concord. HDT WHAT? INDEX
REVEREND JARED SPARKS JARED SPARKS PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
•LIFE OF WILLIAM PINKNEY by Henry Wheaton LIFE OF WILLIAM PINKNEY
•LIFE OF WILLIAM ELLERY by Edward T. Channing LIFE OF WILLIAM ELLERY
•LIFE OF COTTON MATHER by William B.O. Peabody LIFE OF COTTON MATHER
4. There would be three such volumes, labeled Volume I, Volume II, and Volume IV. There does not seem to have been a Volume III published in this book form (apparently it was produced only in monthly magazine form) and no electronic text as yet exists, for the Volume I that had been published. The initial editorial group for his magazine consisted of Charles Hayward, Samuel Tenney Hildreth, Charles Stearns Wheeler, and perhaps for a time Horatio Hale, and their editorial office was a small room on what has become Holyoke Street. Thoreau had volumes II and IV in his personal library, and would give them to F.H. Bigelow. The illustration used on the cover of the magazine represented University Hall: HDT WHAT? INDEX
REVEREND JARED SPARKS JARED SPARKS PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX
REVEREND JARED SPARKS JARED SPARKS PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
January: Professor Edward Everett had written a book review of the latest volume to be published, Volume IV, in the Reverend Professor Jared Sparks’s 10-volume and 15-volume serieses THE LIBRARY OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY. LIBRARY OF AM. BIOG. IV
This appeared as “Biographies of Anthony Wayne and Sir Henry Vane” in the current issue of the North American Review. David Henry Thoreau would possibly extract from this for use in a Harvard College essay on April 7th. NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW
The material in Volume IV on Sir Henry Vane had been written by Charles W. Upham. It is perfectly possible, that Thoreau went on from this recently published book review to consult the full treatment as provided in that volume (the initial volumes of this series were available to Thoreau in the library of the Institute of 1770 and we know that on September 12th Thoreau would consult Volume V) but due to the fragmentary nature of the surviving evidence, we simply do not know. LIFE OF SIR HENRY VANE HDT WHAT? INDEX
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September 12, Monday: A visit by Frédéric François Chopin to Robert Schumann on this day inspired Schumann to complete his “Etudes symphoniques.” Chopin, Schumann, and Clara Wieck spent most of the day at the piano.
David Henry Thoreau was back at Harvard College, for his Senior year, enrolling for German, Italian, English, natural philosophy, intellectual philosophy, rhetoric, and criticism. At this point or shortly afterward he changed from “David Henry” to “Henry David.” His current assignment was an essay on the topic “Whether the Cultivation of the Imagination Conduce to the Happiness of the Individual.” He enrolled in a course in intellectual philosophy which would require all three of his remaining college terms for its completion. Among the works which he would be examining would be John Locke’s AN ESSAY CONCERNING THE HUMAN UNDERSTANDING, Say’s POLITICAL ECONOMY, and Story’s COMMENTARIES ON THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES. This time he was to occupy 23 Hollis Hall. THOREAU RESIDENCES HUMAN UNDERSTANDING
Thoreau supplemented his borrowings from the Harvard Library by checking out, from the library of the “Institute of 1770,” the 5th of the ten volumes of the 1st Series of the Reverend Jared Sparks’s THE LIBRARY OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY (Boston and London, 1836-1839), the one about the Reverend John Eliot written by the Reverend Convers Francis,5
LIBRARY OF AM. BIOG. V
the 1st of the five volumes of Professor Adam Ferguson’s THE HISTORY OF THE PROGRESS AND TERMINATION
5. In 1849 the Reverend Sparks would give over the editing of this series of American biographies in order to become the President of Harvard College — and once in that office he would grant Thoreau a letter by which this former student might continue to check out books from Harvard Library. HDT WHAT? INDEX
REVEREND JARED SPARKS JARED SPARKS PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
OF THE ROMAN REPUBLIC (1773, new edition Edinburgh, 1813),
THE ROMAN REPUBLIC, I
the 1st of the four volumes of THE ILIAD AND ODYSSEY OF HOMER, TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH BLANK VERSE BY THE LATE WILLIAM COWPER, ESQ. (Boston: Printed and published by Joseph T. Buckingham, 1814), HDT WHAT? INDEX
REVEREND JARED SPARKS JARED SPARKS PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
and the 1st and 3d of the three volumes of the Reverend Henry Stebbing (1799-1883)’s LIVES OF THE ITALIAN POETS (London, 1832). (Thoreau would renew the Ferguson, Cowper, and 3rd Stebbing volumes.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
REVEREND JARED SPARKS JARED SPARKS PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
After November 17, Thursday: David Henry Thoreau supplemented his borrowings from the Harvard Library by checking out, from the library of the “Institute of 1770,” Volume 92 of the North American Review — the volume which contains Harvard Professor Charles Beck (1798-1866)’s “Heine’s Letters on German Literature,” a review of LETTERS AUXILIARY, a review “Travellers in America” of the just-published first part of Alexis de Tocqueville’s ONTHE DEMOCRACY OF AMERICA, and critical notices of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s LETTERS, CONVERSATIONS AND RECOLLECTIONS, the Reverend Convers Francis’s LIFE OF JOHN ELIOT, THE APOSTLE TO THE INDIANS (in the 5th of the ten volumes of the 1st Series of the Reverend Jared Sparks’s THE LIBRARY OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY), LIBRARY OF AM. BIOG. V
and Thomas K. Fessenden’s TERRIBLE TRACTORATION!! A POETICAL PETITION AGAINST GALVANISING TRUMPERY, AND THE PERKINISTIC INSTITUTION. IN FOUR CANTOS (BY CHRISTOPHER CAUSTIC) (London: Printed for T. Hurst, 1803).
November 24, Thursday: David Henry Thoreau supplemented his borrowings from the Harvard Library by checking out, from the library of the “Institute of 1770”, SHAKSPEARE’S ROMANCES COLLECTED AND ARRANGED BY SHAKSPEARE II (two volumes, London, 1825 — there is a copy of this rare pseudonymous work in the British Museum), as well as Volume 93 of the North American Review — the volume which contains: HDT WHAT? INDEX
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• a survey of Greek folk lyrics entitled “Romaic Popular Poetry” • a survey of works on education by the Reverend Joseph Emerson of Malden (a great-grandfather of Waldo Emerson who had prayed every night that no descendant of his might ever be rich), Dr. Timothy Dwight, and Warren Burton entitled “Principle of Emulation,” including an account of German universities • an article “Lives of Pinckney, Ellery, and Mather” • a review of Volume VI of the Reverend Jared Sparks’s LIBRARY OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY (LIFE OF WILLIAM PINKNEY, by Henry Wheaton; LIFE OF WILLIAM ELLERY, by Edward T. Channing; LIFE OF COTTON MATHER, by William B.O. Peabody.) LIBRARY OF AM. BIOG. VI • a critical notice of the Reverend John Snelling Popkin’s THREE LECTURES ON LIBERAL EDUCATION (which was a book, published during this year, which Harvard College students would be needing to deal with in taking that professor’s course in “Greek Literature” and the “good taste of the ancients”)
Richard Wagner got married with Christine Wilhelmine (Minna) Planer, an actress, in Tragheim near Konigsberg (Kaliningrad).
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 24th of 11th M / Our first Meeting was a very remarkably favourd one. Father was favourd to exceed almost any thing I ever heard from him then Hannah Dennis, & then Mary Hicks in a well Authorised & truly Gospel testimony - We had considerable buisness in the last & prety well resulted — Benjn. Mott & Jonathon & Hannah Dennis dined with us When I returned home I found two parcells & a letter from my friend Thos Thompson of Liverpool.- Cousin Henry Gould & Thos Nichols called & sat most of the evening with us. — When we returned from Meeting we were shocked with the information that our dear little neighbour Sam Bailey about an hour before had by some means at the Coal grate got shockingly burned & the case was very doubtful as to his living - his stomach, Arm, face & Neck was sad to behold so that he could talk but not sensing his pains — his feet was cold & she rubbed them he asked who it was that rubbed him, some of the by standers told him it was Miss Gould & asked him if he did not know her, he said I cant see her, something is in my eye” he is a little boy not quite three years old grandson for our neighbour Faisneay & came in to see us nearly every day & was a sweet little interesting fellow He died about twelve hours after it happened. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1837
Volumes VII and VIII of the Reverend Professor Jared Sparks of Harvard College’s THE LIBRARY OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY. LIBRARY OF AM. BIOG. VII LIBRARY OF AM. BIOG. VIII
These volumes encompassed six contributions:
•LIFE OF SIR WILLIAM PHIPS by the Reverend Francis Bowen LIFE OF SIR WILLIAM PHIPS
•LIFE OF ISRAEL PUTNAM by Oliver W.B. Peabody LIFE OF ISRAEL PUTNAM
•A MEMORIAL OF LUCRETIA MARIA DAVIDSON by Miss C.M. Sedgwick LUCRETIA MARIA DAVIDSON
•LIFE OF DAVID RITTENHOUSE by James Renwick, LL.D. DAVID RITTENHOUSE
•LIFE OF DAVID BRAINERD, MISSIONARY TO THE INDIANS by William B.O. Peabody LIFE OF DAVID BRAINERD
•LIFE OF JONATHAN EDWARDS by the Reverend Doctor Samuel Miller REV. JONATHAN EDWARDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1838
During this year Professor Cornelius Conway Felton of Harvard College got married with Mary Whitney, who had been born on May 5, 1815 to Asa Whitney and Mary Whitney (she would die on April 12, 1845 at the age of 30, after producing two daughters, Mary S. on April 30, 1839 and Julia W. on August 24, 1842).6
A group of undergraduates had in September 1835 begun to publish a magazine of their own writings and would continue this effort until June 1838. The undergraduate David Henry Thoreau had taken no part in such activity. At this point the group reissued the accumulating materials as a 3d book volume:7 HARVARDIANA, VOL. IV
Volume IX of the Reverend Professor Jared Sparks of Harvard’s THE LIBRARY OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY. LIBRARY OF AM. BIOG. IX
This volume encompassed three contributions:
•LIFE OF BARON STEUBEN by the Reverend Francis Bowen LIFE OF BARON STEUBEN
•LIFE OF SEBASTIAN CABOT by Charles Haywood, Jr. LIFE OF SEBASTIAN CABOT
•LIFE OF WILLIAM EATON by Professor Cornelius Conway Felton LIFE OF WILLIAM EATON
6. According to a genealogy of the Felton family: “Some of the newspapers said in speaking of the wealth of the literary men of Cambridge, that Prof. Felton had been equally fortunate in his matrimonial connections in regard to wealth with the other professors, viz: Everett, Palfrey, Longfellow, Lowell and Norton, by marrying fortunes in expectancy or possession.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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7. There would be three such volumes, labeled Volume I, Volume II, and Volume IV. There does not seem to have been a Volume III published in this book form (apparently it was produced only in monthly magazine form) and no electronic text as yet exists, for the Volume I that had been published. The editorial board for this final volume consisted of Rufus King, George Warren Lippitt, Charles Woodman Scates, James Russell Lowell, and Nathan Hale, Jr., and they worked out of student room #27 at Massachusetts Hall. The illustration that they used on the cover page of their magazine was of University Hall: HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Lecture Season: The 10th course of lectures offered by the Salem Lyceum consisted of:
The Salem Lyceum — 10th Season George Catlin The Character, Customs, Costumes, &c. of the North American Indians (six lectures in all) Jared Sparks Causes of the American Revolution Hubbard Winslow The Sun C.H. Brewster The Sources of National Wealth Charles T. Torrey of Salem Common School Education Ephraim Peabody The Capacity of the Human Mind for Culture and Improvement Henry K. Oliver of Salem The Honey Bee Robert C. Winthrop Popular Education Professor Adams Geology Simon Greenleaf The Legal Rights of Women Henry Ware, Jr. Instinct Joshua H. Ward of Salem Life of Mohammed Henry W. Kinsman Life and Times of Oliver Cromwell Abel L. Peirson of Salem Memoirs of Count Rumford Convers [Converse??] Francis The Practical Man John Lewis Russell of Salem The Poetry of Natural History John Wayland of Salem The Progress of Democracy Alexander H. Everett The Discovery of America by the Northmen Samuel Osgood The Satanic School of Literature and its Reform Horace Mann, Sr. The Education of Children HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1839
The July Monarchy was threatened by Mathieu Molé, who had formed an intermediate government in France. Professor François Pierre Guillaume Guizot and the leaders of the left centre and the left, Thiers and Odilon Barrot, worked together to stop Molé, Victory was secured at the expense of principle and Professor Guizot’s attack on the government gave rise to a crisis and a republican insurrection. None of the three leaders of that alliance were able to secure the ministerial office.
The Reverend Professor Jared Sparks of Harvard College’s LIFE OF GEORGE WASHINGTON (this would be translated into French and would receive an introduction in French in that edition by Professor Guizot — which introduction would then be backtranslated and published in English, and this backtranslation would find a place in the personal library of Henry Thoreau). SPARKS ON G. WASHINGTON GUIZOT ON G. WASHINGTON
Volume X of the Reverend Professor Sparks’s THE LIBRARY OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY. LIBRARY OF AM. BIOG. X
He was appointed McLean Professor of Ancient and Modern History, the first professor of secular history, in which post he would author not merely the above hagiography of Washington, but a hagiography of Franklin as well, not to mention one of Gouverneur Morris — assiduously omitting any events which might be the occasion of “international ill will.”
This tenth volume encompassed four contributions:
•LIFE OF ROBERT FULTON by James Renwick, LL.D. LIFE OF ROBERT FULTON
•LIFE OF JOSEPH WARREN by Alexander H. Everett, LL.D. LIFE OF JOSEPH WARREN
•LIFE OF HENRY HUDSON by Henry R. Cleveland LIFE OF HENRY HUDSON HDT WHAT? INDEX
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•LIFE OF FATHER MARQUETTE by Jared Sparks LIFE OF FATHER MARQUETTE HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1840
Victor Cousin became minister of public instruction in the new French government formed by prime minister François Pierre Guillaume Guizot.
Election of Alexis de Tocqueville to the Académie française.
Professor Guizot offered an introduction, in French, to an edition of the Reverend Jared Sparks’s LIFE OF WASHINGTON, and of selected portions of President Washington’s writings, which appeared in this year in Paris.
The wealthy young Frances Appleton, future wife of the celebrant of the humble laborer Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, recorded her year’s reading. She had studied Marcus Tullius Cicero, the Reverend Jared Sparks, Sir Francis Bacon, and Frances Trollope. She had read essays by John Locke, the letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the letters of Abigail Adams, and three of the novels of Jane Austen. And she had begun Dante Alighieri’s DIVINE COMEDY after finishing Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s FAUST.
In fact the young lady was falling sadly behind in her reading, for this year would see:
• William Makepeace Thackeray’s PARIS SKETCH BOOK. • Thomas Hood’s UP THE RHINE, THE LOVES OF SALLY BROWN AND BEN THE CARPENTER, MISS KILMANSEGG AND HER PRECIOUS LEG (in the New Monthly Magazine). HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1841
Henry Jacob Bigelow, who had been a classmate of David Henry Thoreau until being dismissed on April 24, 1837 for having been in possession of firearms and ammunition in his dorm room and repeatedly discharging a firearm inside that room (MH-Ar Faculty Records UAIII 5.5.2.IX, 311), had completed his studies at Dartmouth College. He was granted the degree of M.D. at Harvard College.
After graduating at Harvard 2d in his class, the impoverished Charles Stearns Wheeler had needed to stay on for a salary. In September 1838, following the “nervous collapse” of Jones Very, he had taken over as Greek tutor under Professor of Greek Literature Cornelius Conway Felton, and in January 1839 he added to this the duties of instructor in history under Professor of Ancient and Modern History Jared Sparks. As a member of the Parietal Committee (a permanent standing committee made up of proctors and officers of instruction who resided within the college walls, or in buildings over which the college had superintendence), Wheeler had some difficulties in managing the students; for instance they broke out the windows of his room. He would come to regard this task of disciplining the general student rowdiness as incompatible with teaching, and eventually he would urge Harvard President Josiah Quincy, Sr. to implement a number of reforms, including eliminating mandatory worship, elevating the study of English literature, and loosening the disciplinary code.
In his “autobiography,” John Shepard Keyes would reminisce about a “Harvard rebellion” created by an attempt by Wheeler to discipline a student, Simmons — from which he had been rescued in the nick of time by his family, which rescue had enabled him to avoid detection and continue as a “student” to his graduation: But all this was lame to what was coming an old friend of mine Stearns Wheeler of Lincoln who had fitted for college in the Concord Academy, and a thoroughly good but obstinate fellow was Greek tutor and chairman of the Parietal Committee. His room in the east end of Holworthy was the place of their meeting, and they looked after the discipline of the students. Wheeler was conscientious and some small escapades of a set of our class coming to his knowledge, he set out to catch them, and in so doing had a personal collision with Simmons on the Delta I think, spying on him For this Simmons was expelled, and his set of fellows severely punished in other ways. The class took it up and bore Simmons off in a barouch and four white horses after prayers at night, with half a dozen of the best scholars as his companions in open defiance of the authorities— That night the college was in an uproar and all rules were openly violated in the yard and buildings. The Parietal met in Wheelers room and occasionally sallied out to stop some disturbances My sober and sedate chum, one of the first eight in scholarship got greatly excited and vowed to lock them into their room when they returned to their session Watching from our window we saw them go back in squads to Hy 20 in the east entry stealing up the stairs Farnsworth quietly turned the key in the lock of the door and he thought he had them fast, but the door was ajar, and they sprang after him. He rushed up stairs hoping to find an open room or an escape but none offered and in the fourth story there HDT WHAT? INDEX
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was only the open window of the entry. Desperate but bold the got out of the window and held on to the ledge by his hands. Not seeing him his pursuers returned for a light to make a closer search, when he kicked his feet through the sash of the 3d story window and with this support he climbed back into the entry. The noise of the breaking glass drew the Parietals out into the yard in a pursuit of the stone throwers, and my chum walked coolly down by them and up to our room unsuspected— It was a feat of nerve and strength few collegians then would have dared and it made him quite a hero for the nonce. That night a meeting of the class was called for the next morning under the Rebellion tree, and with no debate and but little noise and great firmness we decided to attend no exercises until Simmons was returned, the others let up and Wheeler dismissed, and sent it as our ultimatum to the faculty. Every member with the exception of Higginson signed the paper, and we sent it to the President by a committee. The faculty met and refused it, and threatened— But the other classes joined with us and for several days the college was in full Rebellion, no prayers, no recitations, no anything — but gatherings in the yard cheers of defiance, groans for any officer seen in the yard, and general rowdiness. How it ended I never exactly knew for ‘Uncle David’ Jr. going home from Cambridge and stopping to leave my washing that he alway carried, gave such a wildly exciting account of matters there, that Father started in the moonlight and drove to Cambridge to bring me home. Arrived after midnight a knocking at my door though it waked me yet as I thought it some fellow wanting me for some deviltry I slept on tired with the excitement of the day while poor Father finding the college all quiet was forced to try Willards who wasnt easy to rouse up after he had retired at the call of belated students, and I am inclined to the belief kept the old gentleman cooling his wrath and his heels all night— Any way he knocked again before sunrise and after finding Farnsworth, and I quietly abed, and very cool and unexcited over the Rebellion insisted on carrying me home to keep me out of mischief, and as that avoided examinations if there were any I unwillingly consented, and we drove home to a late breakfast. Thus I got an additional vacation of a week or more while the Rebellion simmered down & at last petered out. So after a good time at home I came back to hear my name read out among those having parts at commencement, my first last and only college honor. The class graduated forty four in number, and twenty three or one more than half had parts assigned them Mine was a dis something sertation or quisition I dont remember which with two other fellows Minot and [in pencil, possibly in another hand: Rice] subject Rome Athens & Jerusalem. I was utterly astonished, and so was everbody else, none more so than Father who feared much I should lose my degree. The only way I could ever account for it was that the theme I mentioned carried my marks higher than Minots and as he must have a part, I couldnt be left out of one. Any way I got it, wrote it in the 6 weeks HDT WHAT? INDEX
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before vacation that the senior class then had without lessons for the purpose, and enjoyed those weeks too in many ways till Class Day came. Ours was a failure. Orne the orator was drunk over night and the oration a muddle with out sense or declamation in which he excelled. The poem I dont remember, and the spreads few and poor. The dancing on the green I had anticipated as so many of my lady friends were to be there but it didnt go off well, and the cheering and tree were unenthusiastic. The class supper at the Maverick House East Boston was the best part. Farnsworth and I drove over sat it out and got back at sunrise!! I packed my trunk, said goodbye to my room and college and without a regret left for home in the mail stage that stopped at the same gate as I entered at, and landed me in Concord to breakfast How some trifling incidents cling to the memory I can see that morning and the yard and room as distinctly now after more than forty years while all else even of these recollections are blurred and hazy as was the morning I left home to enter. Why this is thus who can say? J.S. KEYES AUTOBIOGRAPHY HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1848
November 16, Thursday: The Reverend Jared Sparks wrote to the historian Elizabeth F. Ellett, expressing a trepidation which has emphatically been repudiated in the mass of hagiographic invention which has been allowed to accumulate in regard to Thoreau: Traditions have generally a foundation in truth, but they derive numerous accessions in a little time from ignorance, credulity, and a love of the marvellous.
Margaret Fuller wrote to her mother: Rome, November 16, 1848. I am again in Rome, situated for the first time entirely to my mind. I have only one room, but large; and everything about the bed so gracefully and adroitly disposed that it makes a beautiful parlor, — and of course I pay much less. I have the sun all day, and an excellent chimney. It is very high, and has pure air and the most beautiful view all around imaginable. Add, that I am with the dearest, delightful old couple one can imagine, — quick, prompt, and kind, sensible and contented. Having no children, they like to regard me and the Prussian sculptor, my neighbor, as such; yet are too delicate and too busy ever to intrude. In the attic dwells a priest, who insists on making my fire when Antonia is away. To be sure, he pays himself for his trouble by asking a great many questions.... You cannot conceive the enchantment of this place. So much I suffered here last January and February, I thought myself a little weaned; but returning, my heart swelled even to tears with the cry of the poet, “O Rome, my country, city of the soul!” Those have not lived who have not seen Rome. Warned, however, by the last winter, I dared not rent my lodgings for the year. I hope I am acclimated. I have been through what is called the grape-cure, much more charming, certainly, than the water-cure. At present I am very well, but, alas! because I have gone to bed early, and done very little. I do not know if I can maintain any labor. As to my life, I think it is not the will of Heaven it should terminate very soon. I have had another strange escape. I had taken passage in the diligence to come to Rome; two rivers were to be passed, the Turano and the Tiber, but passed by good bridges, and a road excellent when not broken unexpectedly by torrents from the mountains. The diligence sets out between three and four in the morning, long before light. The director sent me word that the Marchioness Crispoldi had taken for herself and family a coach extraordinary, which would start two hours later, and that I could have a place in that if I liked; so I accepted. The weather had been beautiful, but on the eve HDT WHAT? INDEX
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of the day fixed for my departure, the wind rose, and the rain fell in torrents. I observed that the river, which passed my window, was much swollen, and rushed with great violence. In the night I heard its voice still stronger, and felt glad I had not to set out in the dark. I rose at twilight and was expecting my carriage, and wondering at its delay, when I heard that the great diligence, several miles below, had been seized by a torrent; the horses were up to their necks in water, before any one dreamed of danger. The postilion called on all the saints, and threw himself into the water. The door of the diligence could not be opened, and the passengers forced themselves, one after another, into the cold water; it was dark too. Had I been there, I had fared ill. A pair of strong men were ill after it, though all escaped with life. For several days there was no going to Rome; but at last we set forth in two great diligences, with all the horses of the route. For many miles the mountains and ravines were covered with snow; I seemed to have returned to my own country and climate. Few miles were passed before the conductor injured his leg under the wheel, and I had the pain of seeing him suffer all the way, while “Blood of Jesus!” and “Souls in Purgatory!” was the mildest beginning of an answer to the jeers of the postilions upon his paleness. We stopped at a miserable osteria, in whose cellar we found a magnificent relic of Cyclopean architecture, — as indeed in Italy one is paid at every step for discomfort and danger, by some precious subject of thought. We proceeded very slowly, and reached just at night a solitary little inn which marks the site of the ancient home of the Sabine virgins, snatched away to become the mothers of Rome. We were there saluted with, the news that the Tiber also had overflowed its banks, and it was very doubtful if we could pass. But what else to do? There were no accommodations in the house for thirty people, or even for three; and to sleep in the carriages, in that wet air of the marshes, was a more certain danger than to attempt the passage. So we set forth; the moon, almost at the full, smiling sadly on the ancient grandeurs half draped in mist, and anon drawing over her face a thin white veil. As we approached the Tiber, the towers and domes of Rome could be seen, like a cloud lying low on the horizon. The road and the meadows, alike under water, Jay between us and it, one sheet of silver. The horses entered; they behaved nobly. We proceeded, every moment uncertain if the water would not become deep; but the scene was beautiful, and I enjoyed it highly. I have never yet felt afraid, when really in the presence of danger, though sometimes in its apprehension. At last we entered the gate; the diligence stopping to be examined, I walked to the gate of Villa Ludovisi, and saw its rich shrubberies of myrtle, so pale and eloquent in the moonlight.... My dear friend, Madame Arconati, has shown me generous love; a Contadina, whom I have known this summer, hardly less. Every Sunday she came in her holiday dress, a beautiful corset of red HDT WHAT? INDEX
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silk, richly embroidered, rich petticoat, nice shoes and stockings, and handsome coral necklace, on one arm an immense basket of grapes, on the other a pair of live chickens to be eaten by me for her sake (“per amore mio”), and wanted no present, no reward: it was, as she said, “for the honor and pleasure of her acquaintance.” The old father of the family never met me but he took off his hat, and said, “Madame, it is to me a consolation to see you.” Are there not sweet flowers of affection in life, glorious moments, great thoughts? Why must they be so dearly paid for? Many Americans have shown me great and thoughtful kindness and none more so than William Story and his wife. They are now in Florence, but may return. I do not know whether I shall stay here or not: I shall be guided much by the state of my health. All is quieted now in Rome. Late at night the Pope had to yield, but not till the door of his palace was half burned, and his confessor killed. This man, Parma, provoked his fate by firing on the people from a window. It seems the Pope never gave order to fire; his guard acted from a sudden impulse of their own. The new ministry chosen are little inclined to accept. It is almost impossible for any one to act, unless the Pope is stripped of his temporal power, and the hour for that is not yet quite ripe; though they talk more and more of proclaiming the Republic, and even of calling to Rome my friend Mazzini. If I came home at this moment, I should feel as if forced to leave my own house, my own people, and the hour which I had always longed for. If I do come in this way, all I can promise is to plague other people as little as possible. My own plans and desires will be postponed to another world. Do not feel anxious about me. Some higher Power leads me through strange, dark, thorny paths, broken at times by glades opening down into prospects of sunny beauty, into which I am not permitted to enter. If God disposes for us, it is not for nothing. This I can say: my heart is in some respects better, it is kinder, and more humble. Also, my mental acquisitions have certainly been great, however inadequate to my desires. ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1849
September 17, Monday: Henry Thoreau wrote to the Reverend Jared Sparks, who had just become President of Harvard College, in an attempt to obtain regular use of the Harvard Library (previously, he had been able to obtain their books only by soliciting special note after special note). Concord Mass. Sep. 17th '49 Sir, Will you allow me to trouble you with my affairs? I wish to get permission to take books from the College library to Concord, where I reside. I am encouraged to ask this, not merely because I am an alumnus of Harvard, residing within a moderate distance of her halls, but because I have chosen letters for my profession, and so am one of the clergy embraced by the spirit at least of her rule. Moreover, though books are to some extent my stock and tools, I have not the usual means with which to purchase them. I therefore regard myself as one whom especially the library was created to serve. If I should change my pursuit or move further off, I should no longer be entitled to this privilege. I would fain consider myself an alumnus in more than a merely historical sense, and I ask only that the University may help to finish the education, whose foundation she has helped to lay. I was not then ripe for her higher courses, and now that I am riper I trust that I am not too far away to be instructed by her. Indeed I see not how her children can more properly or effectually keep up a living connexion with their Alma Mater, than by continuing to draw from her intellectual nutriment in some such way as this. If you will interest yourself to obtain the above privilege for me, I shall be truly obliged to you. Yrs respectly Henry D. Thoreau HDT WHAT? INDEX
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(Personages such as Thoreau were known among the administrators of Harvard College as “country scholars,” an expression of disdain if not of contempt. From time to time, efforts would be mounted to interfere with the access of such personages to Harvard’s facilities — these admin types were almost as snotty then as they are now. Although the response letter from the President would allow the requested privilege, it would specify an expiration date. Thoreau would make arrangements in accordance with this limited permission but then, with the arrangement in place, no-one at the library would think to enforce that expiration date — and Thoreau would simply neglect to remind them that the expiration date had come and gone. Therefore this response letter, granting a limited benefit, would by their bureaucratic negligence and our guy’s cunning and neediness be transformed into an all-but-perpetual privilege.)
The Reverend Sparks, in order to make time to function as President of the college, had given over his editing of THE LIBRARY OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY. He had produced two series, the first of 10 volumes between 1834 and 1838 and the second of 15 volumes between 1844 and 1847, to which he had himself contributed the lives of Ethan Allen, Benedict Arnold, Marquette, La Salle, Count Pulaski, Jean Ribault, Charles Lee, and John Ledyard (the last a reprint of his earlier work). Volume VI is all that is currently available via Google Books: VIEW THE PAGE IMAGES HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1850
Dr. Josiah Clark Nott and Ralph Hermon Major argued against the prevailing “miasma” theory in YELLOW FEVER CONTRASTED WITH BILIOUS FEVER: REASONS FOR BELIEVING IT A DISEASE SUI GENERIS – ITS MODE OF PROPAGATION – REMOTE CAUSE – PROBABLE INSECT OR ANIMALCULAR ORIGIN (Oxford: Blackwell Scientific).
Professor Samuel George Morton became President of the Academy of Natural Sciences.
George Robins Gliddon’s INDIGENOUS RACES OF THE EARTH (in conjunction with Dr. Josiah Clark Nott and others). Also, his ANCIENT EGYPT. THE SCIENCE OF 1850 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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George Robins Gliddon, the American vice-consul to Alexandria, Egypt in 1832, had organized a small shipment of mummies from a friend in Egypt.
In this year this collection if antique desiccated human corpses was placed on exhibit in Boston, and would be viewed by, among others, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the Reverend Professor Jared Sparks, Doctor Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Professor Louis Agassiz.
While at the AAAS meeting of scientists in Charleston arguing on behalf of the idea that the races of man were separately created, Professor Agassiz found he was much, much more welcome than the Hoars of Concord had been in 1844, when they had visited this port to protest the systematic imprisonment of innocent free northern
THE HOARS CONCORD’S “ROYAL FAMILY”
black sailors. The good people of Charleston knew a kindred white soul when they saw one. Agassiz was trustworthy, he was a friend, they knew what conclusions he would arrive at after seeing the evidence: he was invited to visit their plantations and to inspect their black slaves. He commissioned a series of daguerreotypes of type specimens, and then these shockingly invasive and unsettling photographs lay in a box at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology for many, many years, until they were rediscovered in 1977 — long after the Harvard institution had conveniently forgotten all about the rabid “scientific” racism of one of its illustrious father figures. EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS HDT WHAT? INDEX
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“Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline. We may therefore be sorely tempted to misuse that power in furthering a personal prejudice or social goal — why not provide that extra oomph by extending the umbrella of science over a personal preference in ethics or politics?” — Stephen Jay Gould BULLY FOR BRONTOSAURUS NY: Norton, 1991, page 429
Coincidentally, this was the year in which the astronomer Maria Mitchell was installed as an honorary member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.8
Subsequent to the death of his 1st wife, Professor Agassiz remarried with the writer Elizabeth Cabot Cary of Boston, a promoter of education for females. During this year he prepared his volume LAKE SUPERIOR.
8. How could she, not only as a woman but also as an abolitionist, have been acceptable to these good ol’ white racist boys? –Did they maybe notice that she wore a skirt but neglect to notice that she was wearing nothing made of cotton cloth because such cotton cloth was a product of the slave system? No, that wasn’t what it was, what it was was that she was not becoming a member, but only an honorary member. On her printed certificate, signed by the scientist Asa Gray, the salutation “Sir” had needed to be struck through and above it penned the substitute “Madam,” which is not particularly problematic, but also, the word “fellow” had needed to be struck through — and what had been substituted for this was the invidious descriptor “honorary member.” — There’s a big difference between an honorable member and an honorary member, and the difference is that a woman is not a real human being because an honorary member is not a real member. The lady scientist has eyes and can see a comet and a tongue and can report a comet, but she lacks a penis and therefore cannot interfere with processes of reality formation. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1851
February 12, Wednesday: Gold was discovered by Edward Hammond Hargreaves in Summer Hill Creek near Bathurst, New South Wales. This would precipitate an influx of immigration into Australia.9
The Reverend Jared Sparks was publicly attacked for alleged literary dishonesty, in that some discrepancies had been noted between his edition of George Washington’s letters and another more recent book in which some of these letters were re-transcribed from source records. Sparks would find himself excoriated in print as one of “those whom the God of the Jews accursed as the movers and destroyers of landmarks.” Sparks had, for instance, substituted “General Putnam” at a point at which Washington had referred to him as “Old Put.” He had “spoiled Washington’s bad grammar,” the Democratic Review would complain.
(What had happened was that the Reverend, succumbing to “Editor’s Disease,” had committed the egregious and unscholarly blunder of attempting to make the letters he transcribed more legible to his intended audience.)10
February 12, Wednesday: A beautiful day with but little snow or ice on the ground. Though the air is sharp, as the earth is half bare the hens have strayed to some distance from the barns. The hens standing around their lord & pluming themselves and still fretting a little strive to fetch the year about. A thaw has nearly washed away the snow & raised the river & the brooks & flooded the meadows covering the old ice which which is still fast to the bottom I find that it is an excellent walk for variety & novelty & wildness to keep round the edge of the meadow –the ice not being strong enough to bear and transparent as water –on the bare ground or snow just between the highest water mark and the present water line A narrow meandering walk rich in unexpected views & objects. The line of rubbish which marks the higher tides withered flags & reeds & twigs & cranberries is to my eyes a very agreeable & significant line which nature traces along the edge of the meadows. It is a strongly marked enduring natural line which in summer reminds me that the water has once stood over where I walk Sometimes the grooved trees tell the same tale. The wrecks of the meadow which fill a thousand coves and tell a thousand tales to those who can read them Our prairial mediterranean shore. The gentle rise of water around the trees in the meadow –where oaks & maples stand far out in the sea– And young elms sometimes are seen standing close around some rocks which lifts its head above the water –as if protecting it preventing it from being washed away though in truth they owe their origin & preservation to it. It first invited & detained their seed & now preserves the soil in which they grow. A pleasant reminiscence of the rise of waters To go up one side of the river & down the other following this way which meanders so much more than the river itself– If you cannot go on the ice –you are then gently compelled to take this course which is on the whole more beautiful –to follow the sinuosities of the meadow. Between the highest water mark & the present water line is a space generally from a few feet to a few rods in width. When the water comes over the road, then my spirits rise –when the fences are carried away. A prairial walk– Saw a caterpillar crawling about on the snow The earth is so bare that it makes an impression on one as if it were catching cold. I saw today something new to me as I walked along the edge of the meadow –every half mile or so along the channel of the river I saw at a distance where apparently the ice had been broken up while freezing by the 9. Henry Thoreau would be underimpressed, but his take contrasted remarkably with the attitude taken by Ashley in his diary: Auri sacra fames. What no motive, human or divine, could effect, springs into life at the display of a few pellets of gold in the hands of a wanderer. This may be God’s chosen way to fulfil his commandment and “replenish the earth.” 10. The blunder, here, was neither dishonesty nor incompetence, but having left himself vulnerable to antagonists who were willing to play the aggressor in the ever-popular game “Now I’ve Got You You Son Of A Bitch” — using him as their designated victim. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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pressure of other ice –thin cakes of ice forced up on their edges & reflecting the sun like so many mirrors whole fleets of shining sails. giving a very lively appearance to the river –Where for a dozen rods thin flakes of ice stood on their edges –like a fleet beating upstream against the sun –a fleet of ice-boats It is remarkable that the cracks in the ice on the meadows sometimes may be traced a dozen rods from the water through the snow in the neighboring fields. It is only necessary that man should start a fence that nature should carry it on & complete it. The farmer can not plough quite up to the rails or wall which he himself has placed –& hence it often becomes a hedge-row & sometimes a coppice. I found to-day apples still green under the snow– And others frozen and thawed sweeter far than when sound. a sugary sweetness. There is something more than association at the bottom of the excitement which the roar of a cataract produces. It is allied to the circulation in our veins We have a waterfall which corresponds even to Niagara somewhere NIAGARA FALLS within us. It is astonishing what a rush & tumult a slight inclination will produce in a swolen brook. How it proclaims its glee –its boisterousness –rushing headlong in its prodigal course as if it would exhaust itself in half an hour – how it spends itself– I would say to the orator and poet Flow freely & lavishly as a brook that is full –without stint –perchance I have stumbled upon the origin of the word lavish. It does not hesitate to tumble down the steepest precipice & roar or tinkle as it goes, –for fear it will exhaust its fountain.– The impetuosity of descending waters even by the slightest inclination! It seems to flow with ever increasing rapidity. It is difficult to believe what Philosophers assert that it is merely a difference in the form of the elementary particles, as whether they are square or globular –which makes the difference between the steadfast everlasting & reposing hill-side & the impetuous torrent which tumbles down it. It is worth the while to walk over sproutlands –where oak & chestnut sprouts are mounting swiftly up again into the sky– And already perchance their sere leaves begin to rustle in the breeze & reflect the light on the hills sides –
“Heroic underwoods that take the air With freedom, nor respect their parent’s death” I trust that the walkers of the present day are conscious of the blessings which they enjoy in the comparative freedom with which they can ramble over the country & enjoy the landscape –anticipating with compassion that future day when possibly it will be partitioned off into so called pleasure grounds where only a few may enjoy the narrow & exclusive pleasure which is compatible with ownership. When walking over the surface of Gods earth –shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman’s grounds. When fences shall be multiplied & man traps & other engines invented to confine men to the public road. I am thankfull that we have yet so much room in America. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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May 26, Monday: Four people were killed and dozens wounded as a nativist mob attacked German immigrants in Hoboken, New Jersey during Pentecost celebrations.
At the American Unitarian Association’s spring convention in Boston, known as the Berry Street Conference, the Reverend Samuel Joseph May introduced a resolution in condemnation of Daniel Webster, Millard Fillmore, Edward Everett, Samuel A. Eliot, the Reverend Professor Jared Sparks, the Reverend Ezra Stiles Gannett, and even the president of the AUS, the Reverend Orville Dewey as accomplices to the wickedness of the Fugitive Slave Law. May charged that Gannett was acting in a manner “utterly subversive of Christian morality and of all true allegiance to God.”11 (Although the initial vote on this day was 72 to 27 to refuse to consider such a resolution, the convention would find that it had not heard the last of it.)
Meanwhile, in England, Unitarianism was doing very well, and thank you for asking:
English Unitarians
1830 200
1851 50,000
The Transcript had been keeping an eye on the more daring ladies: The Turkish Dress. On Saturday afternoon, says the [Boston] Times, a young lady of 18, daughter of a well-known West End citizen, made her appearance on Cambridge Street, accompanied with her father, dressed in a round hat, short dress, fitting tightly, and pink satin trousers.... The same young lady was out yesterday afternoon, for a walk around the Common and upon the Neck.... The “Bee” says the daughter of Dr. Hanson, of this city, appeared in the Bloomer suit at a convention at South Reading last week.
May 29, Thursday: The Worcester Spy was keeping its eye peeled for the more daring ladies: The New Costume. The first Bloomer made its appearance in our city yesterday.
11. The force of such an accusation can be felt if you reflect that this divine here being criticized was a teacher of the new crops of Unitarian reverends, at the Harvard Divinity School. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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SAMUEL JOSEPH MAY
At the Berry Street Conference in Boston, debate began over the Reverend May’s resolution condemning Daniel Webster, Millard Fillmore, Edward Everett, Samuel A. Eliot, the Reverend Professor Jared Sparks, the Reverend Ezra Stiles Gannett, and the Reverend Orville Dewey as “traffickers IN HUMAN FLESH.” May charged that Gannett was acting in a manner “utterly subversive of Christian morality and of all true allegiance to God.” The question became how much the Federal Union was worth, compared with for instance the Laws of God. The Reverend Theodore Parker rose to assert that if and when George Ticknor Curtis, a member of the Reverend Gannett’s Unitarian assembly and an officer charged with local administration of the Fugitive Slave Law, came to his parsonage to take a black fugitive from slavery into custody, he would defend not only with an open Bible but with the sword, the brace of pistols, and the musket which his father had carried at Lexington Green on April 19, 1775. He was, he declared, no “foolish nonresistant,” and one wonders whether he would have had that “open Bible” open to one or another of the same Old Testament passages that would be firmly underlined, while in prison awaiting execution, by Captain John Brown in 1859. This controversy would not be over until 1853, and when it was concluded, it was concluded by instructions to Unitarian ministers that the debate over slavery was driving away potential converts to Unitarianism, and that therefore they should avoid discussion of the peculiar institution of slavery, avoid discussion of Webster, and avoid discussion of the merits of the Fugitive Slave Law — and that those unable to avoid such discussion would be find themselves no longer recognized as Unitarian ministers.
At the Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, the letter of May 20th from Henry C. Wright was read: FLUSHING, Long Island, May 20, 1851. TO THE WOMAN'S RIGHTS CONVENTION. Dear Friends;— * * * The effort being made by yourselves and others to secure to woman her rights as a human being, and her true position in reference to the customs and institutions of society, ought to be, and ere long will be, regarded as one of the most important movements HDT WHAT? INDEX
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of the age. It involves all that is pure, elevating and endearing in domestic life; all that is lovely, good and great in social life; all that is useful and enduring in religious and social institutions. The abolition of intemperance, war, slavery, and all the individual and social wrongs of mankind, and the regeneration and redemption of the race from the physical, intellectual, social and moral evils that now crush it, must be associated with this movement. I see not how any being, whose destiny is linked with that of human-kind, can treat this subject lightly, or remain indifferent to it. Man and Woman cannot be separated in their destiny. Where woman goes, man must go; where man goes, woman must go; as the one rises or sinks in intelligence, in wisdom and virtue, so must the other rise or fall. * * * Man cannot be saved without the aid of woman; woman cannot be saved without the aid of man. United in love, in counsel and effort, progress in wisdom and goodness, towards the heavenly and divine, is certain; disunited in affection, in interest, in plans or in their execution, degradation and ruin must follow. This should be settled as a fixed fact in the minds of all who take part in this movement. * * * Whatever right of property or person, of government or religion; in the family, in the market, in the church, the court, the cabinet, legislative hall, or in the public assembly, belongs to man, belongs also to woman. In arranging and conducting the affairs of life in regard to our domestic, pecuniary, social, religious and civil concerns, this fact is denied or disregarded. To enlighten the understanding and consciences of men, and to arouse their moral nature in regard to this great law of our being, should be one great aim of all who are interested in this enterprise. In asserting your Humanity, you assert the fact that whatever right belongs to one human being, belongs to each and every one, without regard to sex, complexion, condition, caste or country. Woman is a human being; and it is a self-evident truth that whatever right belongs to man by virtue of his membership in the human family, belongs to her by the same tenure. This truth is not to be reasoned about; it is self-evident. No power in the universe can have the right to put woman in a position of subjection to man, or man in subjection to woman. As regards their relations to each other, they are equals; and neither can justly be held responsible, as subject to any power but the Divine. It is not right or expedient to submit this question to the contingency of a discussion, for you could not submit it if the decision were against you. Why appeal to a tribunal at all, whose decision, in this matter you have determined not to abide by, if it is against you? To do so would be neither dignified nor honest. Dear friends, permit me to remind you not to be disheartened though few join you. There are tens of thousands interested in HDT WHAT? INDEX
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this movement who have not courage to become a part of it. Be more anxious to plant yourselves on the rock of eternal truth, and to abide there, than to increase your numbers. Truth goes not by numbers, but is instinct with divine life, and it must triumph. * * * May truth, in regard to the rights and position of woman, and to her connexion with the true development and destiny of our nature, be your aim, and uncompromising fidelity to that truth, your endeavor. Yours truly, HENRY C. WRIGHT HDT WHAT? INDEX
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May 29: It is evident that the virtues of plants are almost completely unknown to us– And we esteem the few with which we are better acquainted unreasonably above the many which are comparatively unknown BIGELOW to us. Bigelow says –“It is a subject of some curiosity to consider, if the knowledge of the present Materia Medica were by any means to be lost, how many of the same articles would again rise into notice and use. Doubtless a variety of new substances would develop unexpected powers, while perhaps the poppy would be shunned as a deleterious plant, and the cinchona might grow unmolested upon the mountains of Quito.” Sawyer regards Nux vomica among the most valuable. B. says 1817 “We have yet to discover our anodynes & our emetics, although we abound in bitters, astringents, aromatics, and demulcents. In the present state of our knowledge we could not well dispense with opium and ipicacuanha, yet a great number of foreign drugs, such as gentian, columbo, chamomile, kino, catechu, cascarilla, canella, &c. for which we pay a large annual tax to other countries, might in all probability be superceded by the indigenous products of our own. It is certainly better that our own country people should have the benefit of collecting such articles, than that we should pay for them to the Moors of Africa, or the Indians of Brazil.” The Thorn apple Datura stramonium (Apple of Peru –Devil’s Apple –Jamestown Weed) “emigrates with great facility, and often springs up in the ballast of ships, and in earth carried from one country to another.” It secretes itself in the hold of vessels –& migrates –it is a sort of cosmopolitan weed –a roving weed –what adventures– What historian knows when first it came into a country! He quotes Beverly’s Hist. of Virginia as saying that some soldiers in the days of Bacon’s rebellion –having eaten some of this plant –which was boiled for salad by mistake –were made natural fools & buffoons by it for 11 days, without injury to their bodies?? The root of a biennial or perennial will accumulate the virtues of the plant more than any other part. BIGELOW B says that Pursh states that the sweetscented Golden Rod Solidago odora “has for some time (i.e. before 1817] been an article of exportation to China, where it fetches a high price.” And yet it is known to very few New Englanders. BIGELOW “No botanist, says B. even if in danger of starving in a wilderness, would indulge his hunger on a root or fruit taken from an unknown plant of the natural order Luridae, of the Multisiliquae, or the umbelliferous aquatics. On the contrary he would not feel a moment’s hesitation in regard to any of the Gramina, the fruit of the Pomaceae, and several other natural families of plants, which are known to be uniformly innocent in their effects” The aromatic flavor of the Checquer Berry is also perceived in the Gaultheria hispidula; in Spiraea ulmaria and the root of Spiraea lobata –and in the birches. GINSENG He says Ginseng, Spigelia, Snake-root, &c. form considerable articles of exportation. The odor of Skunk cabbage is perceived in some N.A. currants –as Ribes rigens of MX on high mts– At one time the Indians above Quebec & Montreal were so taken up with searching for Ginseng that they could not be hired for any other purpose. It is said that both the Chinese & the Indians named this plant from its resemblance to the figure of a man The Indians used the bark of Dirca palustris or Leather Wood for their cordage. It was after the long continued search of many generations that these qualities were discovered. BIGELOW Of Tobacco, Nicotiana Tabacum, B. says after speaking of its poisonous qualities “Yet the first person who had courage & patience enough to persevere in its use, until habit had overcome his original disgust, eventually found in it a pleasing sedative, a soother of care, and a material addition to the pleasures of life. Its use, which originated among savages, has spread into every civilized country; it has made its way against the declamations of the learned, and the prohibitions of civil & religious authority, and it now gives rise to an extensive branch of agriculture, or of commerce, in every part of the globe.” Soon after its introduction into Europe –“The rich indulged in it as a luxury of the highest kind; and the poor gave themselves up to it, as a solace for the miseries of life.” Several varieties are cultivated. BIGELOW In return for many foreign weeds we have sent abroad, says B. “The Erigeron Canadense & the prolific families HDT WHAT? INDEX
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of Ambrosia & Amaranthus.”
“The Indians were acquainted with the med. properties of more than one species of Euphorbia” Night shade is called bitter sweet. Poke also called Garget V root of Arum Triphyllum –Dragon Root or Ind. turnip V Gold Thread Coptis trifolia V sanguinaria Canadensis or Blood Root V Conium Maculatum Hemlock V Cicuta maculata Am. Hemlock V Asarum Canadense Wild Ginger snake root–colt’s foot– V Hyoscyamus Niger Henbane V sweetscented Golden rod GINSENG V Panax quinquefolium Ginseng. V Polygala Senega Seneca snake root V veratrum viride Am. Hellebore V Dirca palustris Leather Wood.
I noticed the button bush May 25th around an elevated pond or mudhole –its leaves just beginning to expand– This slight amount of green contrasted with its –dark craggly naked looking stem & branches –as if subsiding waters had left them bare –looked Dantesque –& infernal. It is not a handsome bush at this season it is so slow HDT WHAT? INDEX
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to put out its leaves & hide its naked & unsightly stems. The Andromeda ligustrina is late to leave out. malus excelsa –amara –florida –palustris –gratissima –ramosa –spinosa ferruginea –aromatica –aurea – rubigenosa –odorata –tristis –officinalis!! herbacea –vulgaris –aestivalis –autumnalis riparia –odora –versicolor –communis –farinosa –super septa pendens malus sepium virum Nov. Angliae –succosa saepe formicis preoccupata –vermiculosa aut verminosa –aut a vermisbus corrupta vel erosa –Malus semper virens et viridis viridis –cholera –morbifera or dysenterifera –(M. sylvestrispaludosa –excelsa et ramosa superne –difficilis conscendere (aut adoepere), fructus difficillimus stringere –parvus et amara.) Picis perforata or perterebata – rupestris –agrestis –arvensis –Assabettia –Railroad apple –Musketaquidensis –dew apple rorifera. The apple whose fruit we tasted in our youth which grows passim et nusquam,– Our own particular apple malus numquam legata vel stricta. (Malus cujus fructum ineunte aetate gustavi quae passim et nusquam viget) cortice muscosâ Malus viae-ferreae HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1853
The long-term Harvard College language instructor Francis Sales wrote an autobiographical sketch that is now filed in Box HUG1763 at Harvard Library.
Professor Cornelius Conway Felton’s “Life of William Eaton” in the Reverend Jared Sparks’s THE LIBRARY OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY (New York: Harper & Brothers).
In this year the Reverend Sparks resigned and James Walker became president of Harvard. Although he would experiment with a new idea, that of offering elective courses, he would revert to Harvard’s traditional fixed curriculum.
NEW “HARVARD MEN” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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This is what Harvard would look like during his administration: HDT WHAT? INDEX
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March 13, Sunday: Moncure Daniel Conway met Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.12
Henry Thoreau made an entry in his journal that he was later to copy into his early lecture “WHAT SHALL IT
12.You must realize, we’re dealing here with a natural aristocrat, and with a person possessing name recognition. Moncure, plus Daniel, plus Conway, equalled somebody. The boy might be virtually penniless and without apparent connections, but he was white and from Virginia, and the dispossessed son of a rich and highly regarded slaveholder. During this period he was also able to meet the Reverend William Henry Furness, Ephraim Peabody, the Reverend John G. Palfrey, Bronson Alcott, James Russell Lowell, and the Reverend Jared Sparks. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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PROFIT” It would be combined with an entry made in January 1851 to form the following:
[Paragraph 38] Perhaps I am more than usually jealous with respect to my freedom. I feel that my connection with and obligation to society are still very slight and transient. Those slight labors which afford me a livelihood, and by which it is allowed that I am to some extent serviceable to my contemporaries, are as yet commonly a pleasure to me, and I am not often reminded that they are a necessity. So far I am successful; and he only is successful in his business who makes that pursuit which affords him the purest and highest pleasure, also afford his body a maintenance. But I foresee that if my wants should be much increased, the labor required to supply them would become a drudgery. If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my birth-right for a mess of pottage.1 “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”2 The great art of life is how to turn the surplus life of the soul into life for the body. The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his poetry. All enterprises must be self-supporting in this sense—must pay for themselves. You must get your living by loving. But as it is said of the merchants that ninety-seven in a hundred fail3—so the life of men generally, tried by this standard, is a failure—and bankruptcy may be surely prophesied. To inherit property is not to be born but to be still-born rather. To be supported by the charity of friends or a government pension—provided you continue to breathe—is to go into the almshouse. On Sundays the poor debtor goes to church to take an account of stock and finds, of course, that his outgoes have been greater than his income.4 In the Catholic church, especially, they go into chancery—make a clean confession—give up all—and think to start again. Thus men will lie on their backs talking about the fall of man and never make an effort to get up.
1.GENESIS 25:32-34 2.MARK 8:36 Bradley P. Dean has emended the manuscript copy-text from ‘What shall it profit &c’ by completing the sentence and adding the quotation marks. 3.Here Thoreau refers to his own book, WALDEN, pages 32-33. He uses the figure “ninety-nine in a hundred” in the journal source of this passage. J. Lyndon Shanley notes the same change in the WALDEN manuscripts (THE MAKING OF WALDEN [Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 1957], page 35). HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1855
The Reverend Jared Sparks, who as President of Harvard College had arranged for Henry Thoreau’s continuing Harvard Library privileges after graduation, issued a well-regarded almanac in this year as he had in previous years. It seems to me that it is appropriate to select this particular almanac issue for use as an illustration of the sort of thing to which Thoreau was referring with approval, when he wrote in his WALDEN manuscript that:
WALDEN: His only books were an almanac and an arithmetic, in which PEOPLE OF last he was considerably expert. The former was a sort WALDEN of cyclopaedia to him, which he supposed to contain an abstract of human knowledge, as indeed it does to a considerable extent.
ALEK THERIEN JARED SPARKS For convenience I have divided this lengthy publication into three Adobe Acrobat PDF files, as follows: HDT WHAT? INDEX
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TABLE OF CONTENTS ASTRONOM. TABLES GENERAL INFO. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1866
March 14, Wednesday: Jared Sparks died in Cambridge, Massachusetts. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1876
It was during this year that this most pleasant photo-op of the series of five still most impressive Harvard College HNICs was created:13
(Mr. Felton had expired in 1862, Mr. Quincy in 1864, Mr. Everett in 1865, Mr. Sparks in 1866, Mr. Walker in 1874 — it would appear from this information that for purposes of PhotoShop they had not been seated in the order of their deaths.)
13. By the way: Then as now, Harvard has been the College of Presidents. Then it was the college which had attempted education upon two Presidents, John Adams and John Quincy Adams, whereas in our later timeframe it would be the college which attempted education upon a brace of President Roosevelts (it would be left to Yale to perpetrate a brace of Bushs). HDT WHAT? INDEX
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2006
February 26, Sunday: A column in the New York Times mentioned the Harvard presidents of Henry Thoreau’s era and quoted Henry, who had as a student been in what today we might term Harvard University’s “comp-lit” concentration: How the Liberal Arts Got That Way By MATTHEW PEARL BEFORE Lawrence Summers announced his resignation as president of Harvard on Tuesday, the last upheaval of equal magnitude at the university was 140 years ago. That older drama was perhaps the most consequential episode in the history of American higher education; one that not only created the institution where a Larry Summers could flourish as a graduate student and professor, but oddly also laid the seeds of his presidential breakdown. From 1846 to 1868, Harvard had five consecutive presidents whose short-lived and frustrated tenures evoke Mr. Summers’s five-year stint. The era, like our own, was one of strong discord over the central purpose of a university. Then, the controlling movement was a reaction against the liberal flowering of the 1830s that had briefly expanded the fields of study offered and the freedoms of students to enjoy them; today’s melees concern, among other lesser disputes, the distribution of money and attention among the many divergently interested departments of the university. Until the 1860s, Harvard presidents were anointed by and answered to the university’s Board of Overseers, a powerful group of political and religious establishment figures that included the governor of Massachusetts, along with other dignitaries appointed by the Legislature. But in 1865 the Legislature passed a law democratizing things, allowing Harvard alumni to elect the overseers, in an effort said to “emancipate” Harvard (a loaded term in 1865) from politics, and render it an independent rather than state institution. In the years leading up to this transition, the Harvard presidents fought against the tide of liberalism, limiting the number of disciplines that could be taught and, within those disciplines, maneuvering student choices toward rigidly designed classical studies. When Ralph Waldo Emerson remarked to Henry David Thoreau that all branches of learning were taught at Harvard, Thoreau recalled of his own time there that, yes, “all the branches, but none of the roots.” Students were insulated, reprimanded for congregating in groups, raising their voices and even “throwing reflections of sunshine around the College Yard.” All five of the transitory line of pre-1865 presidents –Edward HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Everett, Jared Sparks, James Walker, Cornelius Conway Felton and Thomas Hill– had been Harvard students themselves, and all but one were clergymen. They fought in the humanities against the expansion of teaching foreign languages, and in the sciences against the spread of Darwinism, which was seen as antireligious.
Harvard students not only pushed back against the institutional emphasis on recitations, the prevailing pedagogical method of memorization and repetition, but also pushed the culture on campus outward and into the larger world. When the Civil War broke out, Harvard students volunteered to fight in surprisingly large numbers. President Felton, whose death by illness made his HDT WHAT? INDEX
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tenure less than two years, is said to have deducted points from Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s grades when Holmes enlisted in the Army. He was also said to have taken the time to write a letter to another president –Abraham Lincoln– during the height of the war, to inform him that Robert Todd Lincoln, then a Harvard student, had been caught smoking. The 1865 law shaking up the Board of Overseers allowed the university to adjust more nimbly to events outside its gates. But the biggest result, four years later, was the selection of the next president, the chemist Charles William Eliot, who ushered in large-scale reforms that marked the renaissance in liberal arts education, not just at Harvard but also across the country. Eliot, only 35 at the time of his inauguration, published a two- part series on “The New Education” in The Atlantic Monthly, setting forth a national agenda for educational reform. The presidents of colleges like Cornell and Johns Hopkins were compelled to coordinate their efforts with Harvard’s. Appropriately, Eliot remained president for 40 years, the longest term in the university’s history, and brought Harvard into the first years of the 20th century. In a long-gestating paradox, however, the very changes that freed Eliot to renovate Harvard with a more independent and egalitarian framework also did in Larry Summers by leaving Harvard presidents without an identifiable constituency or a body to which, in the end, he may be said to answer. The president could no longer concentrate on pleasing the finite body of individuals who approved and could censure him. From Eliot’s term onward, each president had to be acutely aware of negotiating between competing and in many cases incompatible demands from the various factions — the administrative governing boards, the faculty, the students, the alumni, the donors and those holding the federal purse strings. When Larry Summers, through a series of perceived missteps and affronts, lost the support of the most vocal part of the faculty, the Harvard Corporation could not really have saved him even if it wanted to, because it was no longer clear who was in charge. The Harvard experience had long ago been liberated from politics in its most concrete attachment –that tie to the Massachusetts Legislature– but it has been politicized in a different way, subjected to the realm of public politics and opinion. By removing the president’s identifiable overseers (in name and role), the president himself was divested of concentrated power because any or all pressure groups could cause problems for him. There had been a time –1829, to be precise– when Josiah Quincy had been able to shift seamlessly between being the mayor of Boston and the president of Harvard, and Everett had been governor before taking office in Harvard Yard. Today the Harvard president, in a way, has a much broader constituency than any mayor or governor, but also a blurrier one. Harvard, as our dominant university, has become a stand-in for the national HDT WHAT? INDEX
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education culture, and the Harvard president has become everyone’s college president. So, if the culmination of events at Harvard in 1865 was a factor in reshaping higher education in America for the last 140 years, will we see a similar impact from the Summers affair? I suspect that this time it will be mostly for Harvard alone. The melodrama of the Summers affair has made for a great news story, as does the assumption that any action at Harvard carries a national influence. But overexcited observers on both sides will find few substantive ripples outside Harvard Yard. True, it might make a few other college presidents a bit warier of offending their faculties, or make them think twice before pressing for big changes quickly. But in the end, and in defiance of the overwhelming level of national news media attention all week, this incident may commemorate how America has outgrown Harvard. It is still our most prestigious brand; but as a Harvard alumnus, I find it especially obvious that today there are so many equally outstanding institutions, public as well as private, and such a huge proportion of the public is now college-educated, that Harvard no longer dictates the dominant model for the American university. The uproar of 1865 resulted in Harvard becoming more egalitarian and left nobody in charge — in a sense, American education has made a similar transition over the last century, no longer leaving Harvard with the necessity of being in control. This may also leave Harvard, finally, free to shape its modern identity on its own terms.
Matthew Pearl is the author of “The Dante Club” and the forthcoming novel “The Poe Shadow.”
Copyright 2006, The New York Times Company
“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project The People of Walden 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 2014. 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: December 11, 2014 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 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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request for information we merely push a button.
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