JAMES THOMAS FIELDS OF TICKNOR & FIELDS1

Per JAMES T. FIELDS (Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1881, page 102): “I like to see him [Thoreau] come in, he always smells of the pine woods.”

1817

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

1. “It was part of his reputation that he was generous with his authors.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES T. F IELDS JAMES T. F IELDS

1830

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

1831

James Thomas Fields went to work at the age of 14 in the Old Corner Bookshop in Boston.

1838

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

1832-1834 Allen & Ticknor 1834-1843 William D. Ticknor

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

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

Early in September, Jones Very had felt within himself the gradual coming of a new will, somewhat like his old wicked self-will but different in that “it was not a feeling of my own but a sensible will that was not my own,” a will “to do good.” There was “a consciousness which seemed to say —‘That which creates you creates also that which you see or him to whom you speak.’” By Thursday, September the 13th, Very was convinced that he had acquired an “identification with Christ.” Moved entirely by this spirit within, he began to declare to all about him at Harvard College that the coming of Christ was at hand. That evening he went to the study of the Reverend Henry Ware, Jr., who was working up his alarmed response to Waldo Emerson’s address at the Divinity School, a response directed against Emerson’s “doctrine of the Divine Impersonality,” which he was scheduled to deliver at the Divinity Hall Chapel on September 23d. Ignoring theology students who happened to be in the professor’s study, Very proceeded to parse Matthew chapter 24 to the professor and to insist that what he was offering was eternal, revealed truth. Ware could not agree with Very’s parsing of the chapter, so Very pulled out his big gun: “You are doing your own will, and not the will of your Father.”2

1842

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

1832-1834 Allen & Ticknor 1834-1843 William D. Ticknor 1843-1849 William D. Ticknor & Co. 1849-1854 Ticknor, Reed & Fields

2. Which although it was true enough to be painful –for in fact the Reverend Professor Henry Ware, Jr. was one of these “heroic champion of the consensual reality” types– or false enough –for in fact the Reverend Professor Ware Junior was trudging along as un-clumsily as he could in the theological footprints of his father, the Reverend Professor Ware Senior– definitely was not a helpful thing to point out. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 3 HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES T. F IELDS JAMES T. F IELDS

1854-1868 Ticknor and Fields 1868-1871 Fields, Osgood & Co. 1871-1878 James R. Osgood & Co.

1849

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

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

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

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JAMES T. F IELDS JAMES T. F IELDS Darting about. Cell of seclusion, Haunt of old time, Rid of confusion, Empty of crime, Landscape! where the richest element Is a little sunshine innocent; In thy insidious marsh, In thy cold opaque wood, Thy artless meadow, And forked orchard's writhing mood, Still Baker Farm! There lies in them a fourfold charm. Alien art thou to God and Devil! Man too forsakes thee, No one oms to revel On thy rail-fenced lea, Save gleaning Silence gray-headed, Who drains the frozen apple red, Thin jar of winter’s jam, Which he will with gipsy sugar cram. And here a Poet builded, In the completed years, For behold a trivial cabin That to destruction steers. Should we judge it was built? Rather by kind nature spilt To interfere with circumstance, And put a comma to the verse And west trends blue Fairhaven bay, O’er whose stained rocks the white pines sway, And south slopes Nobscot grand, And north the still Cliffs stand. Pan of unwrinkled cream, May some Poet dash thee in his churn, And with thy beauty mad, Verse thee in rhymes that burn; Thy beauty, — the beauty of Baker Farm! In the drying field, And the knotty tree, In hassock and bield, And marshes at sea! Thou art expunged from to-day, Rigid in parks of thy own, Where soberly shifts the play, And the wind sighs in monotone. Debate with no man hast thou, With questions art never perplexed, As tame at the first sight as now, In thy plain, russet gabardine dressed. I would hint at thy religion, Hadst thou any, Piny fastness of wild pigeon, Squirrel's litany,. Never thumbed a gilt Prayer Book, Here the cawing, sable rook!

Art thou orphan of a deed, Title that a court can read, Or dost thou stand For the entertaining land, That no man owns, Pure grass and stones? Idleness is in the preaching, Simpleness is all the teaching,

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JAMES T. F IELDS JAMES T. F IELDS Churches in the steepled woods, Galleries in green solitudes, Fretted never by a noise, Eloquence that each enjoys. Here humanity may trow, It is feasible to slough The corollary of the village, Lies, thefts, clothes, meats, and tillage! Come, ye who love, And ye who hate, Children of the Holy Dove, And Guy Faux of the State, And hang conspiracies, From the tough rafters of the trees! Still Baker Farm! So fair a lesson thou dost set, Commensurately wise, Lesson no one may forget. Consistent sanctity, Value that cannot be spent, Volume that cannot be lent, Passable to me and thee, For Heaven thou art meant!

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

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

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1850

Thomas De Quincey began to write frequently for James Hogg’s Instructor.

ATTITUDES ON DE QUINCEY

At Boston, the firm of Ticknor, Reed, and Fields began publication of DE QUINCEY’S WRITINGS, reprinting them with permission directly from magazines without any revision by the author (this project would amount to a grand total of 24 volumes not completed by James Thomas Fields until 1859; Henry Thoreau would be reading frequently in this convenient series, obtaining the volumes evidently from the Concord Town Library).

I. CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER, AND SUSPIRA DE PROFUNDIS. CONFESSIONS, SUSPIRA...

II. BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAYS. BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAYS

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JAMES T. F IELDS JAMES T. F IELDS III. MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS

IV. THE CÆSARS. THE CÆSARS

V. LITERARY REMINISCENCES. VOL. I. AUTOBIOGRAPHY LITERARY REMINISCENCES I

VI. LITERARY REMINISCENCES. VOL. II. AUTOBIOGRAPHY LITERARY REMINISCENCES II

VII. NARRATIVE AND MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS. VOL. I. NARRATIVE MISC. VOL. I

VIII. NARRATIVE AND MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS. VOL. II. NARRATIVE MISC. VOL. II

IX. ESSAYS ON THE POETS, AND OTHER ENGLISH WRITERS. ESSAYS ON THE POETS

X. HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL ESSAYS. VOL I. HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL I

XI. HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL ESSAYS. VOL II. HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL II

3 ? AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES, 1853. AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES

XII. AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES, 1854. AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES

XIII. ESSAYS ON PHILOSOPHICAL WRITERS, AND OTHER MEN OF LETTERS. VOL. I. PHILOSOPHICAL WRITERS I

XIV. ESSAYS ON PHILOSOPHICAL WRITERS, AND OTHER MEN OF LETTERS VOL. II. PHILOSOPHICAL WRITERS II

XV. LETTERS TO A YOUNG MAN, AND OTHER PAPERS. LETTERS TO A YOUNG MAN 3. This volume issued in 1853 took the place in the series of an 1851 “Life and Manners” in regard to which, at least as captured now in Adobe Books electronic PDF, there seems to have been something very seriously doofus in the manner in which the pages had been assembled into signatures, at the 19th-Century print shop. LIFE AND MANNERS

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JAMES T. F IELDS JAMES T. F IELDS XVI. THEOLOGICAL ESSAYS AND OTHER PAPERS. VOLUME I. THEOLOGICAL ESSAYS I

XVII. THEOLOGICAL ESSAYS AND OTHER PAPERS. VOLUME II. THEOLOGICAL ESSAYS II

XVIII. THE NOTE BOOK OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. NOTE BOOK OF AN ENGL...

XIX. MEMORIALS, AND OTHER PAPERS. VOLUME I. MEMORIALS, ETC. I

XX. MEMORIALS, AND OTHER PAPERS. VOLUME II. MEMORIALS, ETC. II

1857. TO THE ABOVE WAS ADDED A VOLUME OF “SKETCHES, CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHIC.” SKETCHES, CRITICAL AND BIO.

Note that Thoreau was not reading in Thomas De Quincey in order to learn how to write well. In Thoreau’s estimation this English writer, like Charles Dickens, was insufficiently moderate in his writing. They flow too readily, do not affect us by a reserve of meaning, they say all they mean, their sentences are not concentrated and nutty; in particular Thoreau found the style of De Quincey to be no where kinked and knotted up into something hard and significant. What Thoreau was striving toward –by way of extreme contrast– were sentences which suggest far more than they say, which have an atmosphere about them — which do not merely report an old but make a new impression. To frame these that is the art of writing. Thoreau’s desire was to be able to state a fact simply and adequately, to digest some experience cleanly. Most things are said with reference to certain conventions or existing institutions, he pointed out, rather than absolutely, while if the writer can state a fact truly and absolutely that fact is taken out of the region of commonsense and acquires a mythologic or universal significance. Say it and have done with it was Thoreau’s considered advice — express it without expressing yourself, see neither with the barren eye of science nor the impotent eye of youthful poetry, but taste the world and digest it:

It is the fault of some excellent writers –De Quincy’s first impressions on seeing London suggest it to me– that they express themselves with too great fullness & detail. They give the most faithful natural & living account of their sensations mental & physical –but they lack moderation and sententiousnes —they do not affect us by an ineffictual earnesst and a reserve of meaning –like a stutterer— they say all they mean. Their sentences are not concentrated and nutty. Sentences which suggest far more than they say, which have an atmosphere about them, which do not merely report an old, but make a new impression— Sentences which suggest far mor than they say, which have an atmosphere about them — which do not merely report an old by make a new impression— Sentences which suggest as many things and are as durable as a Roman Acqueduct To frame these that is the art of writing. Sentences which are expensive towards which so many volumes — so much life went — which lie like boulders on the page — up & down or across. Not mere repetition but creation. Which a man might sell his grounds & castle to build. If De Quincey had suggested each of his pages in a sentence and passed on, it would have been far more excellent writing. — His style is no where kinked and knotted up into something hard & significant which you could swallow like a diamond without digesting.

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JAMES T. F IELDS JAMES T. F IELDS February 3: Nathaniel Hawthorne read to Sophia Peabody Hawthorne the concluding three chapters of THE SCARLET LETTER. This experience sent her to bed with “a grievous headache,” which the husband interpreted as a good omen. He sent the ending along to publisher James Thomas Fields. In the final rush to publication a reference to the volume, in the Salem Custom House sketch, as consisting of a collection of tales, was not corrected to show its new status as a single romance.

THE SCARLET LETTER: It will be seen, likewise, that this Custom- House sketch has a certain propriety, of a kind always recognised in literature, as explaining how a large portion of the following pages came into my possession, and as offering proofs of the authenticity of a narrative therein contained. This, in fact – a desire to put myself in my true position as editor, or very little more, of the most prolix among the tales that make up my volume – this, and no other, is my true reason for assuming a personal relation with the public. In accomplishing the main purpose, it has appeared allowable, by a few extra touches, to give a faint representation of a mode of life not heretofore described, together with some of the characters that move in it, among whom the author happened to make one.

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1854

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

1832-1834 Allen & Ticknor 1834-1843 William D. Ticknor 1843-1849 William D. Ticknor & Co. 1849-1854 Ticknor, Reed & Fields 1854-1868 Ticknor and Fields 1868-1871 Fields, Osgood & Co. 1871-1878 James R. Osgood & Co. 1878-1880 Houghton, Osgood, & Co. 1880-1908 Houghton, Mifflin, & Co. 1908-2007 Houghton Mifflin Company 2007-???? Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

June 10, Saturday: Henry Thoreau walked to Conantum. He was being written to by William Davis Ticknor of Ticknor & Co. in Boston, to advise that Mr. James Thomas Fields would be carrying proof sheets of WALDEN; OR, LIFE 4 IN THE WOODS to England in order to secure the English copyright. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

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

4. Actually, this wouldn’t happen because Fields would be so seasick as to turn back. WALDEN would not see publication in England until 1886. 12 Copyright  Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES T. F IELDS JAMES T. F IELDS July 9, Sunday: The Reverend Thomas Starr King of the Universalist Church in Charlestown, Massachusetts thanked 5 James Thomas Fields for a “luscious copy” of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN The Reverend would review the gift for the Christian Register: A young man, eight years out of college, of fine scholarship and original genius, revives, in the midst of our bustling times, the life of an anchorite. By the side of a secluded pond in Concord, he builds with his own hands a hut which cost him twenty-eight dollars and twelve and a half cents; and there he lived two and a half years, “cultivating poverty,” because he “wanted to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and suck out all its marrow.” Here he found that the labor of six weeks would support him through the year; and so he had long quiet days for reading, observation, and reflection, learning to free himself from all the hollow customs and false shows of the world, and to pity those who by slavery to inherited property seemed to be doing incredible and astonishing penance. 5. James T. Fields. BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES AND PERSONAL SKETCHES. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 188, page 89. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 13 HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES T. F IELDS JAMES T. F IELDS In the account he gives us of his clothes, house, food, and furniture, we find mingled many acute and wise criticisms upon modern life; while in his descriptions of all living things around him, birds, fishes, squirrels, mice, insects, trees, flowers, weeds, it is evident that he had the sharpest eye and the quickest sympathy. One remarkable chapter is given to the sounds that came to his ear, with suggestions, full of poetry and beauty, of the feelings which these sounds awakened. But nothing interested him so much as the Pond, whose name gives the title to his book. He describes it as a clear sheet of water, about a mile in circumference; he bathed in it every morning; its cool crystal depths were his well, ready dug; he sailed upon its bosom in summer, he noted many curious facts pertaining to its ice in winter; in short, it became to him a living thing, and he almost worshiped it. But we must not describe the contents of this book any farther. Its opening pages may seem a little caustic and cynical; but it mellows apace, and playful humor and sparkling thought appear on almost every page.... Rarely have we enjoyed a book more, or been more grateful for many and rich suggestions... As we shut the book up, we ask ourselves, will the great lesson it teaches of the freedom and beauty of a simple life be heeded? Shall this struggle for wealth, and this bondage to the impedimenta of life, continue forever? Will the time ever come when it will be fashionable to be poor, that is, when men will be so smitten with a purpose to seek the true ends of life that they will not care about laying up riches on the earth? Such times we know there have been, and thousands listened reverently to the reply, given in the last of these two lines, to the inquiry contained in the first; “O where is peace, for thou its path hast trod?” “In poverty, retirement, and with God.” Who can say that it is impossible that such a time may come round, although the fashion of this world now runs with such a resistless current in the opposite direction.

In the afternoon Henry Thoreau went to Hubbard’s Bathing-Place (and from there to Fair Haven).

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JAMES T. F IELDS JAMES T. F IELDS This day saw the first meeting of Concord’s “Vigilance Committee,” organized in the wake of Anthony Burns’s return to slavery earlier that year (Thoreau doesn’t mention such a meeting in his journal entry for the day). Attendees were: Mary Merrick Brooks, Waldo and Lidian Emerson, Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau and John Thoreau, Mary Rice, Charles Bowers, Joshua R. Brown, Nathan B. Stowe, Nathan Henry Warren, James Weir, Stearns Wheeler, and William Whiting. Since, at this informal meeting, the attenders signed a pledge that they would do whatever was in their power to aid fleeing slaves, some incautious commentators have presumed that this meeting, and this new committee, had something to do with the Underground Railroad! What the attenders did, however, was merely to agree to sponsor a weekly series of public meetings on the topic of slavery. Emerson for instance agreed to invite the Reverend Theodore Parker to deliver an opening lecture. Of course they would honor their pledge, but of course, the Emersons couldn’t be expected to invite persons of color to enter their home, so it wouldn’t be within their power to interpret this pledge as including the aiding of any actual fleeing slave individuals. Surely such a pledge should be categorized as pious attitudinizing, or as righteous posturing, or as good public relations proselytizing, rather than as some incautious historians have supposed, the sort of Underground Railroad activism in which Cynthia and John and Henry Thoreau, were involved, for which they were putting their own persons and the assets of their family on the line. (I cannot presently cite any occasion on which any person of color ever was allowed to enter the Emerson home in Concord at any point during the 19th Century, before or after the Civil War, even as a servant. If a person is to be categorized as “vomit” on the basis of the color of his or her skin, would they then proceed to allow such a “vomit” person through the door — just because they were in need?)

My guess would be that we can take a clue from the fact that Thoreau hadn’t bothered to attend this meeting, and recognize from that, that actually this meeting didn’t have one doggone thing to do with the Underground Railroad. (If it did have something to do with such covert agendas — then this would be the very first instance of which we have any record of anyone ever putting anything having to do with that clandestine operation into incriminating ink on an incriminating piece of paper other than Bronson Alcott scribbling in a voluminous personal journal that he could be quite confident nobody but himself would trouble themselves to glance at.)

We need constantly to bear in mind that there were two very distinct types of white abolitionist, the non-racist abolitionist and the racist abolitionist. The non-racist abolitionists wanted to help improve the lives of black Americans and were opposed to race slavery because it harmed the lives of black Americans. The racist abolitionists didn’t think there even ought to be such a thing as a black American, and were opposed to race slavery because it created a place for black people in America, where they ought not to have any place at all. Likewise, there were two reasons for being in favor of the Underground Railroad, because it helped black people who needed help, and because it helped remove black people from the local area by shuffling them off toward the north where there might or might not be a place for them and that didn’t matter. (The genius of the abolition movement was to make strange bedfellows of these two very different sorts of personality, the non- racist Thoreau personality and the racist Emerson personality, enabling them to work together at a common task.) The point is that people like Thoreau, who wanted to help improve people’s lives, would sometimes be willing to place their own homes at risk of confiscation, but people like Emerson who just wanted weeds to grow somewhere else than in their own vicinity would never place their fine homes at risk of confiscation. That, to mix a metaphor, would be to risk throwing the clean white baby out with the dirty black bathwater!

August 11, Friday: Henry Thoreau sent a book, presumably WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, to Senator Charles Sumner, and also wrote (presumably) to James Thomas Fields. Concord Aug 11th ’54 Mr Fields, Dear Sir[,] I shall feel still more under obligations to you if you will send the ac- companying volume to Mr. Sumner in one of your parcels. I find that I omitted to count the volume sent to Greeley — & so have one more than my due.

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JAMES T. F IELDS JAMES T. F IELDS Will you please charge me with it. Yrs truly Henry D. Thoreau

In the afternoon he went to Assabet Bath (Gleason 4/E5). There was a review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS under the heading “New Publications” in the Salem, Massachusetts Gazette, page 2, column 6.

This is a very noticeable work, the production of an educated, eccentric man, who thinks much, and often justly, and expresses his thoughts in a clear and agreeable style. The author lived more than two years alone in the woods of Concord, Mass., a mile from any neighbors, earning his living by the labor of his hands, and his life-like sketches of solitary and rural life will be read with interest and pleasure. At present he is a sojourner in civilized life again. He says: [Reprints “Conclusion,” pages 323.29-324.6.]

Review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS on the front page of the Providence, Rhode Island Daily Journal:

Reprinted in CRITICAL ESSAYS ON HENRY DAVID THOREAU'S WALDEN, ed. Joel Myerson (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1988), page 19.

August 14, Monday: Henry Thoreau donated a copy of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS to the Harvard Library, gave a copy to Richard F. Fuller inscribed “from H.D.T.,” and presented a copy to Mrs. Lidian “Asia” Jackson 6 Emerson inscribed “from her friend Henry Thoreau.” After a cursory scan of the copy of WALDEN which he had just purchased, John Greenleaf Whittier commented to its publisher James Thomas Fields that it was

capital reading, but very wicked and heathenish. The practical moral of it seems to be that if a man is willing to sink himself into a woodchuck he can live as cheaply as that quadruped; but after all, for me I prefer walking on two legs.

Well, but this was a bit different, as a reaction, from the reaction Whittier had had when he had received a presentation copy of Walt Whitman’s LEAVES OF GRASS: after looking that book over, he had tossed it — into the fireplace.7

6. These three copies are now in the Houghton Library of Harvard University. The records of the Boston Society of Natural History indicate that Thoreau had donated copies of A WEEK and WALDEN to them as well. 7. Thoreau’s copy of LEAVES OF GRASS would be knocked down on auction at Sotheby’s in 2002 or 2003, evidently to a Walt Whitman collector, for US$119,500. 16 Copyright  Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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

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

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

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

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

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JAMES T. F IELDS JAMES T. F IELDS

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

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

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

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JAMES T. F IELDS JAMES T. F IELDS December 9, Saturday: Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade,” to become incomparably more famous as a poem than his “Charge of the Heavy Brigade,” which of course you’ve not so much as heard of.

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

Also, on December 9, Thoreau surveyed a 7 1/2 acre woodlot, belonging to Tilly Holden, that was part of the property near the north part of Nut Meadow Brook (Gleason H4) on Sudbury Road (Gleason H5) and Old Marlborough Road (Gleason H3) which he had surveyed for Amos and Noah Wheeler in November of 1853.

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

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

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

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JAMES T. F IELDS JAMES T. F IELDS http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/137.htm

Also, Louisa May Alcott published the stories she had originally created while caring for Ellen Emerson, as FLOWER FABLES, in time for the Christmas Book gift season, and took her essay “How I Went Out to Service” to James Thomas Fields, the Boston publisher — but was informed she could not write.8 “Pondering shadows, colors, clouds Grass-buds, and caterpillar shrouds Boughs on which the wild bees settle, Tints that spot the violet’s petal.” — Emerson’s WOOD-NOTES.

To Ellen Emerson, For whom they were fancied, These flower fables Are inscribed, By her friend, — The Author. Boston, Dec. 9, 1854.

Chapter I: The Frost King: or, The Power of Love Chapter II: Eva’s Visit to Fairy-Land Chapter III: The Flower’s Lesson Chapter IV: Lily-Bell and Thistledown Chapter V: Little Bud Chapter VI: Clover-Blossom Chapter VII: Little Annie’s Dream: or, The Fairy Flower Chapter VIII: Ripple, the Water-Spirit Chapter IX: Fairy Song THE ALCOTT FAMILY

1861

From this year into 1870, as the successor of James Russell Lowell, James Thomas Fields would be editing The Atlantic Monthly.

8. That’s “could not” as in “should not,” you understand. Good thing Thoreau had been born a Henry and not a Henrietta! Good thing our Louisa was not one to be so easily turned aside!

As long as THE SPREAD EAGLE paid her a dollar a column for her ‘rubbish,’ as she called it, Jo felt herself a woman of means, and spun her little romances diligently. But great plans fermented in her busy brain and ambitious mind, and the old tin kitchen in the garret held a slowly increasing pile of blotted manuscript, which was one day to place the name of March upon the roll of fame.

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January 28: The Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway spoke for a select audience at Parker House in Boston. Among the attenders were Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, James Thomas Fields, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the Governor of Massachusetts, John Andrew.9

May 6: Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau had been helping her brother revise his AWEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. In the early morning, about eight o’clock, she was completing the reading of the manuscript to Henry. When she read the sentence

A WEEK: We glided past the mouth of the Nashua, and not long after, of Salmon Brook, without more pause than the wind.

9. (Another reference says he spoke at the Tremont Temple. Would this have been the same oration for a more general audience?)

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JAMES T. F IELDS JAMES T. F IELDS he commented TB

Now comes good sailing.

Something about the manner in which Henry David Thoreau died indicates to me that his attitude toward eternality was what he was keeping before him at the end. It is, Thoreau noted in AWEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS, through silence that all revelations have been made. And, in a letter to Isaiah T. Williams on October 8, 1841, he suggested that to stop up our ears against the “immediate” voice of God and prefer to know him by report is “the only sin.” Since the Indian, for Thoreau, is the type case of the human being who understands how to live spontaneously, without mediation, in the presented eternal instant,

THE MAINE WOODS: He does not carry things in his head, nor remember the route exactly, like a white man, but relies on himself at the moment.

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JAMES T. F IELDS JAMES T. F IELDS and since the Indian, like the moose and other animals, relies upon all his senses and “does not give a distinct, conscious attention to any one” and since the Indian finds his way in the wilderness “very much as an animal does,” when those attending Thoreau at the end detected him breathing the identifiable words

moose

and

Indian

then something occurs to me. It has done us no detectable harm to speculate about this thing that we cannot know, speculate for instance that what Thoreau was attempting to do was, in delirium, continue the job he had assumed of editing his manuscripts so as to be able to leave a greater estate for his survivors, but it would also do us no harm, I offer, to hypothecate that Thoreau was in uttering these words emphasizing to himself this similarity between animals and Indians in regard to immediacy and in regard to spontaneity, which he had so often urged us all to emulate, and which he had so often urged upon himself. It seems to me, at the very least, that this is the sort of appropriate thing of which one might need to remind oneself, as one is enduring the difficulties of lying somewhere dying.

We might be able to offer of Henry David Thoreau’s death in 1862 at the age of 44 what John Dryden wrote about the death on November 21, 1695 of Henry Purcell at the age of 36: “He long ere this had tuned the jarring spheres and left no hell below.”

On the day of Henry’s death, Waldo Emerson was visiting Bronson Alcott (Waldo seems to have fancifully associated the timing of his death with the breaking up of the ice on Walden Pond).

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Hearing of Thoreau’s death, Mrs. Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley would write her daughter Sophia Bradford Thayer:

This fine morning is sad for those of us who sympathise with the friends of Henry Thoreau the phylosopher and the woodman. He had his reason to the last and talked with his friends pleasantly and arranged his affairs; and at last passed in quiet sleep from this state of duty and responsibility to that which is behind the veil. His funeral service is to be at the church, and Mr. Emerson is to make an address. I hope Uncle George will get home in season to be there, he will regret it so if he does not.

Joan W. Goodwin, in THE REMARKABLE MRS. RIPLEY: THE LIFE OF SARAH ALDEN BRADFORD RIPLEY (Boston: Northeastern UP, 1998), supplements that letter as follows:10

By May he was gone.... She hoped her brother [George P. Bradford] would get to Concord in time for the funeral, knowing “he will regret it so much if he does not,” having been a close walking and botanizing companion of Thoreau’s over the years.

Waldo Emerson wrote immediately to H.G.O. Blake (“My Dear Blake”) informing him of Thoreau’s death and of arrangements for the pending funeral. (This letter has recently been recovered from between the pages of Herbert W. Gleason’s THROUGH THE YEAR WITH THOREAU, a volume which has been published in 1917.)

The widowed Mrs. Mary Peabody Mann would write to Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: I was made very happy to-day by seeing Miss Thoreau, whose brother died such a happy, peaceful death,—leaving them all so fully possessed of his faith in the Immortal Life that they seem almost to have entered it with him. They said they never could be sad in his presence for a moment; he had been the happiest person they had ever known, all through his life, and was just as happy in the presence of death. This is the more remarkable as he was still in the prime of life, with a vivid sense of its enjoyments. But he was nearer to the heart of Nature than most

10. To give this statement about trusting to one’s life according to the natural laws some context, let us consider the manner in which the people of that era had accepted the normalness of the wasting fever which preceded deaths due to “consumption” or “phthisis,” in an era in which there was no hint of any effective treatment. I will quote from a report which appeared in an 1894 medical journal, as this report was seconded in the Scientific American magazine of the period:

The Medical Record tells of a woman in Ohio who utilized the high temperature of her phthisical husband for eight weeks before his death, by using him as an incubator for hens’ eggs. She took 50 eggs, and wrapping each one in cotton batting, laid them alongside the body of her husband in the bed, he being unable to resist or move a limb. After three weeks she was rewarded with forty-six lively young chickens.

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JAMES T. F IELDS JAMES T. F IELDS men. Sophia said to-day that he once told her when looking at a pressed flower that he had walked 10,000 miles to verify the day on which that flower bloomed. It grew four miles from his home, and he walked there every day in the season of it for many years.... He seemed to walk straight into Heaven. It is animating and inspiring to see a great or a good man take that last step with his thoughts about him, and intent upon the two worlds whose connection he sees with the clairvoyance that death gives. I know it well, and I could fully sympathize in her sense of her brother’s continued presence. Death is not the word to use for such a transit,—but more life,—for which we as yet have no word.

Sophia Peabody Hawthorne would write to Mr. and Mrs. James Thomas Fields: On Friday ... Mr. Thoreau’s funeral is to take place. He was Concord itself in one man — and his death makes a very large vacuum. I ought to be at his funeral for the sake of strewing [sic] my deep respect and value for him to others, though I could much better mourn him at home.... I suppose he believed that beasts and reptiles, birds and fishes fulfilled their ends, and that man generally came short. So he respected the one and avoided the other. His Alpine purity, his diamond truth, his stainless sincerity, his closeness to nature and faithful rendering — these are immortal beauties in him. He has now stepped out of his French body — and his soul has taken up its fitting celestial manifestation. And he has doubtless found the Victoria Regia, which would not grow wild in Concord, even though it were the birthplace of Henry Thoreau! and though he declared he should one day find it here.

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

They had missed a fine opportunity: they should also have placed in the body’s hand that sprig of wild American crab-apple Malus angustifolia, that our guy had just traveled so far to recover. Against the better judgment of surviving members of the family, Waldo Emerson had insisted that the 3PM funeral service be staged at the 1st Parish Church of Concord from which Henry David Thoreau had resigned. (The Unitarians got him at last.) H.G.O. Blake and Theophilus Brown came from Worcester. The Unitarian reverend who had been the 1st person to plunk down one dollar and purchase a copy of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, the Reverend William Rounseville Alger, came out to Concord from Boston specifically to attend (this reverend would demean him as “constantly feeling himself, reflecting himself, fondling himself,

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JAMES T. F IELDS JAMES T. F IELDS reverberating himself, exalting himself, incapable of escaping or forgetting himself”). Nathaniel Hawthorne attended. The Emersons had invited James T. and Annie Fields to their home for dinner. At the funeral, at which the Reverend Grindall Reynolds officiated, Waldo, being the sort of person who can find a way to turn a profit even in the death of a friend, used the opportunity to deliver himself of a judgmental lecture singularly unsuitable as a remembrance upon such an occasion, and, on the church steps after the funeral, he cut a deal with his publisher guest James Thomas Fields for its distribution by Ticknor & Fields as “Thoreau.” Ross/Adams commentary

Emerson’s charge of Stoicism

What Emerson should have said:

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

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

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

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The funeral bell tolled his 44 years and the coffin was lowered into a hole in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.11

Here is how Professor Scott A. Sandage, in BORN LOSERS: A HISTORY OF FAILURE IN AMERICA, would describe the scene of this day: The American Dream died young and was laid to rest on a splendid afternoon in May 1862, when blooming apple trees heralded the arrival of spring. At three o’clock, a bell tolled forty-four 11. Not in the current family plot on Authors Ridge, as in the photo, nor with the current stone. The original stone was red and bore his name and his date of death. When the body was later moved to Authors Ridge, the stone was put with many another stone to be recycled, and used to cover over one or another drainage gutter in the cemetery. It is probably still there somewhere alongside one of the cemetery paths, with its inscription facing downward: “HENRY / MAY 6, 1862.” 28 Copyright  Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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

In the summation paragraphs to a general derogation of the author and all his works in 1866 (considering Henry, for example, to have led a life that consisted primarily of “fondling himself”), the Reverend William Rounseville Alger would describe this day’s procession, bells, funeral, and interment: While we walked in procession up to the church, though the bell tolled the forty-four years he had numbered, we could not deem that he was dead whose ideas and sentiments were so vivid in our souls. As the fading image of pathetic clay lay before us, strewn “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 29 HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES T. F IELDS JAMES T. F IELDS with wild flowers and forest sprigs, thoughts of its former occupant seemed blent with all the local landscapes. We still recall with emotion the tributary words so fitly spoken by friendly and illustrious lips. The hands of friends reverently lowered the body of the lonely poet into the bosom of the earth, on the pleasant hillside of his native village, whose prospects will long wait to unfurl themselves to another observer so competent to discriminate their features and so attuned to their moods. And now that it is too late for any further boon amidst his darling haunts below, There will yet his mother yield A pillow in her greenest field, Nor the June flowers scorn to cover The clay of their departed lover.

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

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JAMES T. F IELDS JAMES T. F IELDS July: The short Scots sergeant and second tenor, Sgt. John Brown, the real subject of the song “John Brown’s Body,” was drowned while attempting to ford the Rappahannock River with his unit of the 2d Battalion of Boston Light Infantry, Massachusetts Volunteer Militia.

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

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

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER

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

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

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

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JAMES T. F IELDS JAMES T. F IELDS December 21, day: Visiting James Thomas Fields, the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway met Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry James, Sr. Meanwhile, on the bank of the Rappahannock River in Virginia, in the rooms of the Conway plantation home, Walt Whitman was searching fruitlessly for his wounded brother:

Begin my visits among the camp hospitals in the army of the Potomac. Spent a good part of the day in a large brick mansion on the banks of the Rappahannock, used as a hospital since the battle — seems to have received only the worst cases. Out doors, at the foot of a tree, within ten yards of the front of the house, I notice a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, etc., a full load for a one-horse cart. Several dead bodies lie near, each cover’d with its brown woolen blanket. In the door-yard, towards the river, are fresh graves, mostly of officers, their names on pieces of barrel- staves or broken boards, stuck in the dirt. (Most of these bodies were subsequently taken up and transported north to their friends.) The large mansion is quite crowded upstairs and down, everything impromptu, no system, all bad enough, but I have no doubt the best that can be done; all the wounds pretty bad, some frightful, the men in their old clothes, unclean and bloody. Some of the wounded are rebel soldiers and officers, prisoners. One, a Mississippian, a captain, hit badly in leg, I talk’d with some time; he ask’d me for papers, which I gave him. (I saw him three months afterward in Washington, with his leg amputated, doing well.) I went through the rooms, downstairs and up. Some of the men were dying. I had nothing to give at that visit, but wrote a few letters to folks home, mothers, &c. Also talk’d to three or four, who seem’d most susceptible to it, and needing it.

You can still see the hammering marks on the lock of this house, made when Union troops broke in:

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1863

September 7, Monday: With the Confederate forces having evacuated Fort Wagner and Battery Gregg, Federal troops were able to occupy all of Morris Island in Charleston Harbor. Calvin H. Greene went for a walk outside Concord and found a young maple that had already turned fire-red. He broke off a branch with leaves and, on his return to the Thoreau home, tossed this up into an evergreen tree where it could be seen from the windows of the house. “It caught Mrs T’s eyes — after breakfast, & she went to wondering what it meant. When I showed her, she exclaimed, “There that was just like my son, Henry” (Calvin of course felt most highly honored by such a comparison of himself by the mother Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau with her beloved son Henry Thoreau — as she undoubtedly had grasped full well that her house guest would be — she was slathering the icing onto the cake of his trip to Concord). After dinner with the Thoreaus, and sad farewells, he went on the train to Boston and put up at the Parker House.

Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau and Waldo Emerson met to plan for Emerson to represent her interests before James Thomas Fields in contracting for the publication of EXCURSIONS: Boston MA: Ticknor and Fields, 1863 (stereotyped and printed by H.O. Houghton in Cambridge MA). First edition. Edited by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Sophia Thoreau. Biographical sketch [by Emerson] — Natural history of Massachusetts. — A walk to Wachusett. — The landlord. — A winter walk. — The succession of forest trees. — Walking. — AUTUMNAL TINTS. — Wild apples. — Night and moonlight. 319 p. incl. front. (port.) 18 cm. PS3045 .A1 1863

I learn from Topsell’s Gesner, whose authority appears to be Albertus, that the following is the way in which the hedgehog collects and carries home his apples. He says,— His meat is apples, worms, or grapes: when he findeth apples or grapes on the earth, he rolleth himself upon them, until he have filled all his prickles, and then carrieth them home to his den, never bearing above one in his mouth; and if it fortune that one of them fall off by the way, he likewise shaketh off all the residue, and walloweth upon them afresh, until they be all settled upon his back again. So, forth he goeth, making a noise like a cart-wheel; and if he have any young ones in his nest, they pull off his load wherewithal he is loaded, eating thereof what they please, and laying up the residue for the time to come.

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JAMES T. F IELDS JAMES T. F IELDS October 19, day: There was fighting at Buckland Mills / Buckland Races / Chestnut Hill.

Waldo Emerson wrote to James T. Fields about publishing another book by Henry Thoreau.

The Salem, Massachusetts Register carried a review, under “New Publications,” of EXCURSIONS:

This volume contains nine of Thoreau’s thoughtful and observant shorter literary productions, full of the teachings of his close study and keen appreciation of nature, with a biographical sketch of our Concord hermit and stoic by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who knew him thoroughly and does ample justice to the many fine points in his truly remarkable character.... And so his admirers are gathering up every fragment he has left and putting on record in books or in the public press every relic of the recluse Thoreau.

1864

May 28, day: There was fighting at Haw’s Shop / Enon Church. Fighting began at Totopotomoy Creek / Shady Grove Road that would continue into the 30th.

James Thomas Fields had given Louisa May Alcott a copy of Henry Thoreau’s THE MAINE WOODS, and she wrote to him on this day that it was as if he “were walking with me again.”12 TIMELINE OF THE MAINE WOODS ALCOTT FAMILY

12. This is one of the few indications we have that Louisa ever glanced at anything Henry wrote. 36 Copyright  Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1867

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

HISTORY OF THE PRESS

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

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JAMES T. F IELDS JAMES T. F IELDS During this year and the following one, Charles Dickens would be on a 2d reading tour of the United States. In his later years his personality seemed to have changed remarkably, perhaps due to his being sadly disappointed in the conduct of his children. Coming through Boston, the wife of his American publisher, James Thomas Fields, commented that for a sad man he seemed remarkably happy. He somewhat distressed his local tour guides when there was only one thing that interested him this 2nd time, about the Boston area:

I want to see where Dr. Parkman was killed.

Cleveland Amory would explain the incident in this way in 1957 in his THE PROPER BOSTONIANS (NY: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., page 226): Tremors of the Parkman earthquake continued to be felt by Boston Society often at times when they were least desired. Twenty years later, when Boston was privileged to play proud host to Charles Dickens, there was a particularly intense tremor. Dickens was asked which one of the city’s historic landmarks he would like to visit first. “The room where Dr. Parkman was murdered,” he replied, and there being no doubt he meant what he said, nothing remained for a wry-faced group of Boston’s best but to shepherd the distinguished novelist out to the chemistry laboratory of the Harvard Medical School. (Don’t go looking for this two-story brick building set on piers at the waterfront near Massachusetts General Hospital associated with the Professor John White Webster/Doctor George Parkman case. Harvard Medical College there was long ago relocated, and the old edifice demolished.)

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JAMES T. F IELDS JAMES T. F IELDS January: Friend John Greenleaf Whittier’s THE TENT ON THE BEACH AND OTHER POEMS. (In this poem “The Tent on the Beach” he depicted his publisher friend James Thomas Fields.)

It can scarcely be necessary to name as the two companions whom I reckoned with myself in this poetical picnic, Fields the lettered magnate, and Taylor the free cosmopolite. The long line of sandy beach which defines almost the whole of the New Hampshire sea-coast is especially marked near its southern extremity, by the salt-meadows of Hampton. The Hampton River winds through these meadows, and the reader may, if he choose, imagine my tent pitched near its mouth, where also was the scene of THE WRECK OF RIVERMOUTH. The green bluff to the northward is Great Boar’s Head; southward is the Merrimac, with Newburyport lifting its steeples above brown roofs and green trees on its banks.

I would not sin, in this half-playful strain,- Too light perhaps for serious years, though born

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JAMES T. F IELDS JAMES T. F IELDS Of the enforced leisure of slow pain,- Against the pure ideal which has drawn My feet to follow its far-shining gleam. A simple plot is mine: legends and runes Of credulous days, old fancies that have lain Silent from boyhood taking voice again, Warmed into life once more, even as the tunes That, frozen in the fabled hunting-horn, Thawed into sound:-a winter fireside dream Of dawns and sunsets by the summer sea Whose sands are traversed by a silent throng Of voyagers from that vaster mystery Of which it is an emblem;-and the dear Memory of one who might have tuned my song To sweeter music by her delicate ear. When heats as of a tropic clime Burned all our inland valleys through, Three friends, the guests of summer time, Pitched their white tent where sea-winds blew. Behind them, marshes, seamed and crossed With narrow creeks, and flower-embossed, Stretched to the dark oak wood, whose leafy arms Screened from the stormy East the pleasant inland farms. At full of tide their bolder shore Of sun-bleached sand the waters beat; At ebb, a smooth and glistening floor They touched with light, receding feet. Northward a green bluff broke the chain Of sand - hills southward stretched a plain Of salt grass, with a river winding down, Sail-whitened, and beyond the steeples of the town,- Whence sometimes, when the wind was light And dull the thunder of the beach, They heard the bells of morn and night Swing, miles away, their silver speech. Above low scarp and turf-grown wall They saw the fort-flag rise and fall; And, the first star to signal twilight’s hour, The lamp-fire glimmer down from the tall light-house tower. They rested there, escaped awhile From cares that wear the life away, To eat the lotus of the Nile And drink the poppies of Cathay,- To fling their loads of custom down, Like drift - weed, on the sand-slopes brown, And in the sea-waves drown the restless pack Of duties, claims, and needs that barked upon their track. One, with his beard scarce silvered, bore A ready credence in his looks, A lettered magnate, lording o’er An ever-widening realm of books In him brain-currents, near and far, Converged as in a Leyden jar; The old, dead authors thronged him round about, And Elzevir’s gray ghosts from leathern graves looked out. He knew each living pundit well, Could weigh the gifts of him or her, And well the market value tell Of poet and philosopher. But if he lost, the scenes behind, Somewhat of reverence vague and blind, Finding the actors human at the best, No readier lips than his the good he saw confessed. His boyhood fancies not outgrown,

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JAMES T. F IELDS JAMES T. F IELDS He loved himself the singer’s art; Tenderly, gently, by his own He knew and judged an author’s heart. No Rhadamanthine brow of doom Bowed the dazed pedant from his room; And bards, whose name is legion, if denied, Bore off alike intact their verses and their pride. Pleasant it was to roam about The lettered world as he had done, And see the lords of song without Their singing robes and garlands on. With Wordsworth paddle Rydal mere, Taste rugged Elliott’s home-brewed beer, And with the ears of Rogers, at fourscore, Hear Garrick’s buskined tread and Walpole’s wit once more. And one there was, a dreamer born, Who, with a mission to fulfil, Had left the Muses’ haunts to turn The crank of an opinion-mill, Making his rustic reed of song A weapon in the war with wrong, Yoking his fancy to the breaking-plough That beam-deep turned the soil for truth to spring and grow. Too quiet seemed the man to ride The winged Hippogriff Reform; Was his a voice from side to side To pierce the tumult of the storm? A silent, shy, peace-loving man, He seemed no fiery partisan To hold his way against the public frown, The ban of Church and State, the fierce mob’s hounding down. For while he wrought with strenuous will The work his hands had found to do, He heard the fitful music still Of winds that out of dream-land blew. The din about him could not drown What the strange voices whispered down; Along his task-field weird processions swept, The visionary pomp of stately phantoms stepped. The common air was thick with dreams,- He told them to the toiling crowd: Such music as the woods and streams Sang in his ear he sang aloud; In still, shut bays, on windy capes, He heard the call of beckoning shapes, And, as the gray old shadows prompted him, To homely moulds of rhyme he shaped their legends grim. He rested now his weary hands, And lightly moralized and laughed, As, tracing on the shifting sands A burlesque of hid paper-craft, He saw the careless waves o’errun His words, as time before had done, Each day’s tide-water washing clean away, Like letters from the sand, the work of yesterday.

And one, whose Arab face was tanned By tropic sun and boreal frost, So travelled there was scarce a land Or people left him to exhaust, In idling mood had from him hurled The poor squeezed orange of the world, And in the tent - shade, sat beneath a palm, Smoked, cross-legged like a Turk, in Oriental calm.

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The very waves that washed the sand Below him, he had seen before Whitening the Scandinavian strand And sultry Mauritanian shore. From ice-rimmed isles, from summer seas Palm-fringed, they bore him messages; He heard the plaintive Nubian songs again, And mule-bells tinkling down the mountain-paths of Spain. His memory round the ransacked earth On Puck’s long girdle slid at ease; And, instant, to the valley’s girth Of mountains, spice isles of the seas, Faith flowered in minster stones, Art’s guess At truth and beauty, found access; Yet loved the while, that free cosmopolite, Old friends, old ways, and kept his boyhood’s dream in sight. Untouched as yet by wealth and pride, That virgin innocence of beach: No shingly monster, hundred-eyed, Stared its gravy sand-birds out of reach; Unhoused, save where, at intervals, The white tents showed their canvas walls, Where brief sojourners, in the cool, soft air, Forgot their inland heats, hard toil, and year-long care. Sometimes along the wheel-deep sand A one-horse wagon slowly crawled, Deep laden with a youthful band, Whose look some homestead old recalled; Brother perchance, and sisters twain, And one whose blue eyes told, more plain Than the free language of her rosy lip, Of the still dearer claim of love’s relationship. With cheeks of russet-orchard tint, The light laugh of their native rills, The perfume of their garden’s mint, The breezy freedom of the hills, They bore, in unrestrained delight, The motto of the Garter’s knight, Careless as if from every gazing thing Hid by their innocence, as Gyges by his ring. The clanging sea-fowl came and went, The hunter’s gun in the marshes rang; At nightfall from a neighboring tent A flute-voiced woman sweetly sang. Loose-haired, barefooted, hand-in-hand, Young girls went tripping down the sand; And youths and maidens, sitting in the moon, Dreamed o’er the old fond dream from which we wake too soon. At times their fishing-lines they plied, With an old Triton at the oar, Salt as the sea-wind, tough and dried As a lean cusk from Labrador Strange tales he told of wreck and storm,- Had seen the sea-snake’s awful form, And heard the ghosts on Haley’s Isle complain, Speak him off shore, and beg a passage to old Spain! And there, on breezy morns, they saw The fishing-schooners outward run, Their low-bent sails in tack and flaw Turned white or dark to shade and sun. Sometimes, in calms of closing day, They watched the spectral mirage play, Saw low, far islands looming tall and nigh,

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JAMES T. F IELDS JAMES T. F IELDS And ships, with upturned keels, sail like a sea the sky. Sometimes a cloud, with thunder black, Stooped low upon the darkening main, Piercing the waves along its track With the slant javelins of rain. And when west-wind and sunshine warm Chased out to sea its wrecks of storm, They saw the prismy hues in thin spray showers Where the green buds of waves burst into white froth flowers. And when along the line of shore The mists crept upward chill and damp, Stretched, careless, on their sandy floor Beneath the flaring lantern lamp, They talked of all things old and new, Read, slept, and dreamed as idlers do; And in the unquestioned freedom of the tent, Body and o’er-taxed mind to healthful ease unbent. Once, when the sunset splendors died, And, trampling up the sloping sand, In lines outreaching far and wide, The white-manned billows swept to land, Dim seen across the gathering shade, A vast and ghostly cavalcade, They sat around their lighted kerosene, Hearing the deep bass roar their every pause between. Then, urged thereto, the Editor Within his full portfolio dipped, Feigning excuse while searching for (With secret pride) his manuscript. His pale face flushed from eye to beard, With nervous cough his throat he cleared, And, in a voice so tremulous it betrayed The anxious fondness of an author’s heart, he read: ...

1868

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

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

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1871

James Thomas Fields’s YESTERDAYS WITH AUTHORS. VIEW THE PAGE IMAGES

January 1, Sunday: James Thomas Fields indicated that he desired to retire from the publishing business in order to focus on his own writing.

January 2, Monday: The other partners with James Thomas Fields in the publishing business bought out his share for $120,000, and the company was renamed James R. Osgood & Co.

1832-1834 Allen & Ticknor 1834-1843 William D. Ticknor 1843-1849 William D. Ticknor & Co. 1849-1854 Ticknor, Reed & Fields 1854-1868 Ticknor and Fields 1868-1871 Fields, Osgood & Co. 1871-1878 James R. Osgood & Co. 1878-1880 Houghton, Osgood, & Co. 1880-1908 Houghton, Mifflin, & Co. 1908-2007 Houghton Mifflin Company 2007-???? Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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1873

October 1, 2PM: In Concord, dedication ceremonies were held for a building designed by architects Snell and Gregerson, which was to house the Concord Free Public Library. William Munroe had provided the funds. The collection at that time amounted to 10,061 volumes, for which the checkout rate was 3.28 checkouts per annum per volume on an average.

Having found a reference in the town records to the lending of books in 1672, Judge Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar announced at the dedication ceremony that Concord had been the 1st American town to have begun a public

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JAMES T. F IELDS JAMES T. F IELDS library. It is unknown whether anyone in the crowd who heard this claim actually paid it any attention.

LOVE ME, LOVE MY TOWN

This is what had been on the site during Henry Thoreau’s years:

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JAMES T. F IELDS JAMES T. F IELDS This is the gothic horror that was at this point created by these infamously over-the-top Boston architects.

(Over the years the building has been periodically renovated and expanded. The most significant such alteration has been as of 1933, when architect Harry Britton Little renovated the exterior from Victorian Gothic style to Georgian style. Despite this external extreme restyling, the octagonal lobby has remained as it was.) Here is an excerpt from Waldo Emerson’s “Address at the Opening of the Concord Free Public Library”: Henry Thoreau we all remember as a man of genius, and of marked character, known to our farmers as the most skillful of surveyors, and indeed better acquainted with their forests and meadows and trees than themselves.... He, too, was an excellent reader. No man would have rejoiced more than he in the event of this day. In a private letter to a lady, he writes: “Do you read any noble verses? For my part, they have been the only things I remembered, —— or that which occasioned them, —— when all things else were blurred and defaced. All things have put on mourning but they: for the elegy itself is some victorious melody in you, escaping from the wreck”.... In saying these things for books, I do not for a moment forget that they are secondary, mere means, and only used in off-hours, only in the pause, and, as it were, the sleep, or passive state of the mind ... when the mind itself wakes, all books, all past acts are forgotten, huddled aside as impertinent in the august presence of the creator.

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JAMES T. F IELDS JAMES T. F IELDS This new CFPL was not simply a continuation of the previously existing Concord Town Library. It was an entirely new organization with new funding and a new administrative structure. It was established as a joint public/private venture and still functions in that manner. The staffing, and the general collections, are supported by tax appropriations, while the property, buildings, special collections, and artwork are owned and supported by a private, self-perpetuating, nonprofit corporation devoted to the protection of the documentary heritage of the town.

Boston publisher James Thomas Fields was unable to attend the dedication ceremonies, but presented, from his The Atlantic Monthly files (along with four other manuscripts), as a generous gift suitable to the occasion, the manuscript for Thoreau’s essay “Walking.”

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1876

George Parsons Lathrop’s A STUDY OF HAWTHORNE.

James Thomas Fields’s HAWTHORNE.

Under pressure of an attack by her brother Julian Hawthorne, who was accusing her of having shared “peculiarly private and delicate” family papers with “an outsider” (to wit her alcoholic biographer husband George Parsons Lathrop), Rose Hawthorne went, at least for the time being, “raving mad.”

Publication of DOLLIVER ROMANCE, in 3 parts.

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JAMES T. F IELDS JAMES T. F IELDS An article on Thomas Green Fessenden was included in FANSHAWE, AND OTHER PIECES (Boston).

THOMAS GREEN FESSENDEN was the eldest of nine children of the Rev. Thomas Fessenden. He was born on the 22d of April, 1771, at Walpole, in New Hampshire, where his father, a man of learning and talent, was long settled in the ministry. On the maternal side, likewise, he was of clerical extraction; his mother, whose piety and amiable qualities are remembered by her descendants, being the daughter of the Rev. Samuel Kendal, of New Salem. The early education of Thomas Green was chiefly at the common school of his native place, under the tuition of students from the college at Hanover; and such was his progress, that he became himself the instructor of a school in New Salem at the age of sixteen. He spent most of his youthful days, however, in bodily labor upon the farm, thus contributing to the support of a numerous family; and the practical knowledge of agriculture which he then obtained was long afterwards applied to the service of the public. Opportunities for cultivating his mind were afforded him, not only in his father’s library, but by the more miscellaneous contents of a large bookstore. He had passed the age of twenty-one when his inclination for mental pursuits determined him to become a student at Dartmouth College. His father being able to give but little assistance, his chief resources at college consisted in his wages as teacher of a village school during the vacations. At times, also, he gave instruction to an evening class in psalmody. From his childhood upward, Mr. Fessenden had shown symptoms of that humorous turn which afterwards so strongly marked his writings; but his first effort in verse, as he himself told me,

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JAMES T. F IELDS JAMES T. F IELDS was made during his residence at college. The themes, or exercises, of his fellow-students in English composition, whether prose or rhyme, were well characterized by the lack of native thought and feeling, the cold pedantry, the mimicry of classic models, common to all such productions. Mr. Fessenden had the good taste to disapprove of these vapid and spiritless performances, and resolved to strike out a new course for himself. On one occasion, when his classmates had gone through with their customary round of verbiage and threadbare sentiment, he electrified them and their instructor, President Wheelock, by reading “Jonathan’s Courtship.” There has never, to this day, been produced by any of our countrymen a more original and truly Yankee effusion. He had caught the rare art of sketching familiar manners, and of throwing into verse the very spirit of society as it existed around him; and he had imbued each line with a peculiar yet perfectly natural and homely humor. This excellent ballad compels me to regret, that, instead of becoming a satirist in politics and science, and wasting his strength on temporary and evanescent topics, he had not continued to be a rural poet. A volume of such sketches as “Jonathan’s Courtship,” describing various aspects of life among the yeomanry of New England, could not have failed to gain a permanent place in American literature. The effort in question met with unexampled success: it ran through the newspapers of the day, reappeared on the other side of the Atlantic, and was warmly applauded by the English critics, nor has it yet lost its popularity. New editions may be found every year at the ballad-stalls; and I saw last summer, on the veteran author’s table, a broadside copy of his maiden poem, which he had himself bought in the street. Mr. Fessenden passed through college with a fair reputation for scholarship, and took his degree in 1796. It had been his father’s wish that he should imitate the example of some of his ancestors on both sides, by devoting himself to the ministry. He, however, preferred the law, and commenced the study of that profession at Rutland, in Vermont, with Nathaniel Chipman, then the most eminent practitioner in the State. After his admission to the bar, Mr. Chipman received him into partnership. But Mr. Fessenden was ill qualified to succeed in the profession of law, by his simplicity of character, and his utter inability to acquire an ordinary share of shrewdness and worldly wisdom. Moreover, the success of “Jonathan’s Courtship,” and other poetical effusions, had turned his thoughts from law to literature, and had procured him the acquaintance of several literary luminaries of those days; none of whose names, probably, have survived to our own generation, save that of Joseph Dennie, once esteemed the finest writer in America. His intercourse with these people tempted Mr. Fessenden to spend much time in writing for newspapers and periodicals. A taste for scientific pursuits still further diverted him from his legal studies, and soon engaged him in an affair which influenced the complexion of all his after-life. A Mr. Langdon had brought forward a newly invented hydraulic machine, which was supposed to possess the power of raising water to a greater height than had hitherto been considered possible. A company of mechanics and others became interested in this machine, and appointed Mr. Fessenden their agent for the purpose of obtaining a patent in London. He was, likewise, a member of the company. Mr. Fessenden was urged to hasten his

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departure, in consequence of a report that certain persons had acquired the secret of the invention, and were determined to anticipate the proprietors in securing a patent. Scarcely time was allowed for testing the efficacy of the machine by a few hasty experiments, which, however, appeared satisfactory. Taking passage immediately, Mr. Fessenden arrived in London on the 4th of July, 1801, and waited on Mr. King, then our minister, by whom he was introduced to Mr. Nicholson, a gentleman of eminent scientific reputation. After thoroughly examining the invention, Mr. Nicholson gave an opinion unfavorable to its merits; and the question was soon settled by a letter from one of the Vermont proprietors to Mr. Fessenden, informing him that the apparent advantages of the machine had been found altogether deceptive. In short, Mr. Fessenden had been lured from his profession and country by as empty a bubble as that of the perpetual motion. Yet it is creditable both to his ability and energy, that, laying hold of what was really valuable in Langdon’s contrivance, he constructed the model of a machine for raising water from coal-mines, and other great depths, by means of what he termed the “renovated pressure of the atmosphere.” On communicating this invention to Mr. Nicholson and other eminent mechanicians, they acknowledged its originality and ingenuity, and thought that, in some situations, it might be useful. But the expenses of a patent in England, the difficulty of obtaining patronage for such a project, and the uncertainty of the result, were obstacles too weighty to be overcome. Mr. Fessenden threw aside the scheme, and, after a two months’ residence in London, was preparing to return home, when a new and characteristic adventure arrested him. He received a visit, at his lodging in the Strand, from a person whom he had never before seen, but who introduced himself to his good-will as being likewise an American. His business was of a nature well calculated to excite Mr. Fessenden’s interest. He produced the model of an ingenious contrivance for grinding corn. A patent had already been obtained; and a company, with the Lord Mayor of London at its head, was associated for the construction of mills upon this new principle. The inventor, according to his own story, had disposed of one fourth part of his patent for five hundred pounds, and was willing to accommodate his countryman with another fourth. After some inquiry into the stranger’s character and the accuracy of his statements, Mr. Fessenden became a purchaser of the share that was offered him; on what terms is not stated, but probably such as to involve his whole property in the adventure. The result was disastrous. The lord mayor soon withdrew his countenance from the project. It ultimately appeared that Mr. Fessenden was the only real purchaser of any part of the patent; and, as the original patentee shortly afterwards quitted the concern, the former was left to manage the business as he best could. With a perseverance not less characteristic than his credulity, he associated himself with four partners, and undertook to superintend the construction of one of these patent-mills upon the Thames. But his associates, who were men of no respectability, thwarted his plans; and after much toil of body, as well as distress of mind, he found himself utterly ruined, friendless and penniless, in the midst of London. No other event

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could have been anticipated, when a man so devoid of guile was thrown among a set of crafty adventurers. Being now in the situation in which many a literary man before him had been, he remembered the success of his fugitive poems, and betook himself to the pen as his most natural resource. A subject was offered him, in which no other poet would have found a theme for the Muse. It seemed to be his fatality to form connections with schemers of all sorts; and he had become acquainted with Benjamin Douglas Perkins, the patentee of the famous metallic tractors. These implements were then in great vogue for the cure of inflammatory diseases, by removing the superfluous electricity. Perkinism, as the doctrine of metallic tractors was styled, had some converts among scientific men, and many among the people, but was violently opposed by the regular corps of physicians and surgeons. Mr. Fessenden, as might be expected, was a believer in the efficacy of the tractors, and, at the request of Perkins, consented to make them the subject of a poem in Hudibrastic verse, the satire of which was to be levelled against their opponents. “Terrible Tractoration” was the result. It professes to be a poetical petition from Dr. Christopher Caustic, a medical gentleman who has been ruined by the metallic tractors and who applies to the Royal College of Physicians for relief and redress. The wits of the poor doctor have been somewhat shattered by his misfortunes; and, with crazy ingenuity, he contrives to heap ridicule on his medical brethren, under pretence of railing against Perkinism. The poem is in four cantos, the first of which is the best, and the most characteristic of the author. It is occupied with Dr. Caustic’s description of his mechanical and scientific contrivances, embracing all sorts of possible and impossible projects; every one of which, however, has a ridiculous plausibility. The inexhaustible variety in which they flow forth proves the author’s invention unrivalled in its way. It shows what had been the nature of Mr. Fessenden’s mental toil during his residence in London, continually brooding over the miracles of mechanism and science, his enthusiasm for which had cost him so dear. Long afterwards, speaking of the first conception of this poem, the author told me that he had shaped it out during a solitary day’s ramble in the outskirts of London; and the character of Dr. Caustic so strongly impressed itself on his mind, that, as he walked homeward through the crowded streets, he burst into frequent fits of laughter. The truth is, that, in the sketch of this wild projector, Mr. Fessenden had caricatured some of his own features; and, when he laughed so heartily, it was at the perception of the resemblance. “Terrible Tractoration” is a work of strange and grotesque ideas aptly expressed: its rhymes are of a most singular character, yet fitting each to each as accurately as echoes. As in all Mr. Fessenden’s productions, there is great exactness in the language; the author’s thoughts being thrown off as distinctly as impressions from a type. In regard to the pleasure to be derived from reading this poem, there is room for diversity of taste; but that it is an original and remarkable work, no person competent to pass judgment on a literary question will deny. It was first published early in the year 1803, in an octavo pamphlet of above fifty pages. Being highly applauded by the principal

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reviews, and eagerly purchased by the public, a new edition appeared at the end of two months, in a volume of nearly two hundred pages, illustrated with engravings. It received the praise of Gifford, the severest of English critics. Its continued success encouraged the author to publish a volume of “Original Poems,” consisting chiefly of his fugitive pieces from the American newspapers. This, also, was favorably received. He was now, what so few of his countrymen have ever been, a popular author in London; and, in the midst of his triumphs, he bethought himself of his native land. Mr. Fessenden returned to America in 1804. He came back poorer than he went, but with an honorable reputation, and with unstained integrity, although his evil fortune had connected him with men far unlike himself. His fame had preceded him across the Atlantic. Shortly before his arrival, an edition of “Terrible Tractoration” had been published at Philadelphia, with a prefatory memoir of the author, the tone of which proves that the American people felt themselves honored in the literary success of their countryman. Another edition appeared in New York, in 1806, considerably enlarged, with a new satire on the topics of the day. It is symptomatic of the course which the author had now adopted, that much of this new satire was directed against Democratic principles and the prominent upholders of them. This was soon followed by “Democracy Unveiled,” a more elaborate attack on the same political party. In “Democracy Unveiled,” our friend Dr. Caustic appears as a citizen of the United States, and pours out six cantos of vituperative verse, with copious notes of the same tenor, on the heads of President Jefferson and his supporters. Much of the satire is unpardonably coarse. The literary merits of the work are inferior to those of “Terrible Tractoration;” but it is no less original and peculiar. Even where the matter is a mere versification of newspaper slander, Dr. Caustic’s manner gives it an individuality not to be mistaken. The book passed through three editions in the course of a few months. Its most pungent portions were copied into all the opposition prints; its strange, jog-trot stanzas were familiar to every ear; and Mr. Fessenden may fairly be allowed the credit of having given expression to the feelings of the great Federal party. On the 30th of August, 1806, Mr. Fessenden commenced the publication, at New York, of “The Weekly Inspector,” a paper at first of eight, and afterwards of sixteen, octavo pages. It appeared every Saturday. The character of this journal was mainly political; but there are also a few flowers and sweet- scented twigs of literature intermixed among the nettles and burrs, which alone flourish in the arena of party strife. Its columns are profusely enriched with scraps of satirical verse, in which Dr. Caustic, in his capacity of ballad-maker to the Federal faction, spared not to celebrate every man or measure of government that was anywise susceptible of ridicule. Many of his prose articles are carefully and ably written, attacking not men so much as principles and measures; and his deeply felt anxiety for the welfare of his country sometimes gives an impressive dignity to his thoughts and style. The dread of French domination seems to have haunted him like a nightmare. But, in spite of the editor’s satirical reputation, “The Weekly “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 55 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Inspector” was too conscientious a paper, too sparingly spiced with the red pepper of personal abuse, to succeed in those outrageous times. The publication continued but for a single year, at the end of which we find Mr. Fessenden’s valedictory to his readers. Its tone is despondent both as to the prospects of the country and his own private fortunes. The next token of his labors that has come under my notice is a small volume of verse, published at Philadelphia in 1809, and alliteratively entitled “Pills, Poetical, Political, and Philosophical; prescribed for the Purpose of purging the Public of Piddling Philosophers, Penny Poetasters, of Paltry Politicians, and Petty Partisans. By Peter Pepper-Box, Poet and Physician.” This satire had been written during the embargo, but, not making its appearance till after the repeal of that measure, met with less success than “Democracy Unveiled.” Everybody who has known Mr. Fessenden must have wondered how the kindest hearted man in all the world could have likewise been the most noted satirist of his day. For my part, I have tried in vain to form a conception of my venerable and peaceful friend as a champion in the stormy strife of party, flinging mud full in the faces of his foes, and shouting forth the bitter laughter that rang from border to border of the land; and I can hardly believe, though well assured of it, that his antagonists should ever have meditated personal violence against the gentlest of human creatures. I am sure, at least, that Nature never meant him for a satirist. On careful examination of his works, I do not find in any of them the ferocity of the true blood-hound of literature, such as Swift, or Churchill, or Cobbett, — which fastens upon the throat of its victim, and would fain drink his life-blood. In my opinion, Mr. Fessenden never felt the slightest personal ill-will against the objects of his satire, except, indeed, they had endeavored to detract from his literary reputation, — an offence which he resented with a poet’s sensibility, and seldom failed to punish. With such exceptions, his works are not properly satirical, but the offspring of a mind inexhaustibly fertile in ludicrous ideas, which it appended to any topic in hand. At times, doubtless, the all-pervading frenzy of the times inspired him with a bitterness not his own. But, in the least defensible of his writings, he was influenced by an honest zeal for the public good. There was nothing mercenary in his connection with politics. To an antagonist, who had taunted him with being poor, he calmly replied, that he “need not have been accused of the crime of poverty, could he have prostituted his principles to party purposes, and become the hireling assassin of the dominant faction.” Nor can there be a doubt that the administration would gladly have purchased the pen of so popular a writer. I have gained hardly any information of Mr. Fessenden’s life between the years 1807 and 1812; at which latter period, and probably some time previous, he was settled at the village of Bellows Falls, on Connecticut River, in the practice of the law. In May of that year, he had the good fortune to become acquainted with Miss Lydia Tuttle, daughter of Mr. John Tuttle, an independent and intelligent farmer at Littleton, Mass. She was then on a visit in Vermont. After her return home, a correspondence ensued between this lady and Mr. Fessenden, and 56 Copyright  Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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was continued till their marriage, in September, 1813. She was considerably younger than himself, but endowed with the qualities most desirable in the wife of such a man; and it would not be easy to overestimate how much his prosperity and happiness were increased by this union. Mrs. Fessenden could appreciate what was excellent in her husband, and supply what was deficient. In her affectionate good sense he found a substitute for the worldly sagacity which he did not possess, and could not learn. To her he intrusted the pecuniary cares, always so burdensome to a literary man. Her influence restrained him from such imprudent enterprises as had caused the misfortunes of his earlier years. She smoothed his path of life, and made it pleasant to him, and lengthened it; for, as he once told me (I believe it was while advising me to take, betimes, a similar treasure to myself), he would have been in his grave long ago, but for her care. Mr. Fessenden continued to practise law at Bellows Falls till 1815, when he removed to Brattleborough, and assumed the editorship of “The Brattleborough Reporter,” a political newspaper. The following year, in compliance with a pressing invitation from the inhabitants, he returned to Bellows Falls, and edited, with much success, a literary and political paper, called “The Intelligencer.” He held this employment till the year 1822, at the same time practising law, and composing a volume of poetry, “The Ladies’ Monitor,” besides compiling several works in law, the arts, and agriculture. During this part of his life, he usually spent sixteen hours of the twenty- four in study. In 1822 he came to Boston as editor of “The New England Farmer,” a weekly journal, the first established, and devoted principally to the diffusion of agricultural knowledge. His management of the “Farmer” met unreserved approbation. Having been bred upon a farm, and passed much of his later life in the country, and being thoroughly conversant with the writers on rural economy, he was admirably qualified to conduct such a journal. It was extensively circulated throughout New England, and may be said to have fertilized the soil like rain from heaven. Numerous papers on the same plan sprung up in various parts of the country but none attained the standard of their prototype. Besides his editorial labors, Mr. Fessenden published, from time to time, various compilations on agricultural subjects, or adaptations of English treatises to the use of the American husbandman. Verse he no longer wrote, except, now and then, an ode or song for some agricultural festivity. His poems, being connected with topics of temporary interest, ceased to be read, now that the metallic tractors were thrown aside, and that the blending and merging of parties had created an entire change of political aspects, since the days of “Democracy Unveiled.” The poetic laurel withered among his gray hairs, and dropped away, leaf by leaf. His name, once the most familiar, was forgotten in the list of American bards. I know not that this oblivion was to be regretted. Mr. Fessenden, if my observation of his temperament be correct, was peculiarly sensitive and nervous in regard to the trials of authorship — a little censure did him more harm than much praise could do him good; and methinks the repose of total neglect was better for

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him than a feverish notoriety. Were it worth while to imagine any other course for the latter part of his life, which he made so useful and so honorable, it might be wished that he could have devoted himself entirely to scientific research. He had a strong taste for studies of that kind, and sometimes used to lament that his daily drudgery afforded him no leisure to compose a work on calorie, which subject he had thoroughly investigated. In January, 1836, I became, and continued for a few months, an inmate of Mr. Fessenden’s family. It was my first acquaintance with him. His image is before my mind’s eye at this moment; slowly approaching me with a lamp in his hand, his hair gray, his face solemn and pale, his tall and portly figure bent with heavier infirmity than befitted his years. His dress, though he had improved in this particular since middle life, was marked by a truly scholastic negligence. He greeted me kindly, and with plain, old-fashioned courtesy; though I fancied that he somewhat regretted the interruption of his evening studies. After a few moments’ talk, he invited me to accompany him to his study, and give my opinion on some passages of satirical verse, which were to be inserted in a new edition of “Terrible Tractoration.” Years before, I had lighted on an illustrated copy of this poem, bestrewn with venerable dust, in a corner of a college library and it seemed strange and whimsical that I should find it still in progress of composition, and be consulted about it by Dr. Caustic himself. While Mr. Fessenden read, I had leisure to glance around at his study, which was very characteristic of the man and his occupations. The table, and great part of the floor, were covered with books and pamphlets on agricultural subjects, newspapers from all quarters, manuscript articles for “The New England Farmer,” and manuscript stanzas for “Terrible Tractoration.” There was such a litter as always gathers around a literary man. It bespoke, at once, Mr. Fessenden’s amiable temper and his abstracted habits, that several members of the family, old and young, were sitting in the room, and engaged in conversation, apparently without giving him the least disturbance. A specimen of Dr. Caustic’s inventive genius was seen in the “Patent Steam and Hot-Water Stove,” which heated the apartment, and kept up a pleasant singing sound, like that of a tea-kettle, thereby making the fireside more cheerful. It appears to me, that, having no children of flesh and blood, Mr. Fessenden had contracted a fatherly fondness for this stove, as being his mental progeny; and it must be owned that the stove well deserved his affection, and repaid it with much warmth. The new edition of “Tractoration” came out not long afterwards. It was noticed with great kindness by the press, but was not warmly received by the public. Mr. Fessenden imputed the failure, in part, to the illiberality of the “trade,” and avenged himself by a little poem, in his best style, entitled “Wooden Book-sellers”; so that the last blow of hiS satirical scourge was given in the good old cause of authors against publishers. Notwithstanding a wide difference of age, and many more points of dissimilarity than of resemblance, Mr. Fessenden and myself soon became friends. His partiality seemed not to be the result of any nice discrimination of my good and evil qualities (for 58 Copyright  Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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he had no acuteness in that way), but to be given instinctively, like the affection of a child. On my part, I loved the old man because his heart was as transparent as a fountain; and I could see nothing in it but integrity and purity, and simple faith in his fellow-men, and good-will towards all the world. His character was so open, that I did not need to correct my original conception of it. He never seemed to me like a new acquaintance, but as one with whom I had been familiar from my infancy. Yet he was a rare man, such as few meet with in the course of a lifetime. It is remarkable, that, with such kindly affections, Mr. Fessenden was so deeply absorbed in thought and study as scarcely to allow himself time for domestic and social enjoyment. During the winter when I first knew him, his mental drudgery was almost continual. Besides “The New England Farmer,” he had the editorial charge of two other journals, “The Horticultural Register,” and “The Silk Manual”; in addition to which employment, he was a member of the State Legislature, and took some share in the debates. The new matter of “Terrible Tractoration” likewise cost him intense thought. Sometimes I used to meet him in the street, making his way onward apparently by a sort of instinct; while his eyes took note of nothing, and would, perhaps, pass over my face without sign of recognition. He confessed to me that he was apt to go astray when intent on rhyme. With so much to abstract him from outward life, he could hardly be said to live in the world that was bustling around him. Almost the only relaxation that he allowed himself was an occasional performance on a bass-viol, which stood in the corner of his study, and from which he loved to elicit some old- fashioned tune of soothing potency. At meal-times, however, dragged down and harassed as his spirits were, he brightened up, and generally gladdened the whole table with a flash of Dr. Caustic’s humor. Had I anticipated being Mr. Fessenden’s biographer, I might have drawn from him many details that would have been well worth remembering. But he had not the tendency of most men in advanced life, to be copious in personal reminiscences; nor did he often speak of the noted writers and politicians with whom the chances of earlier years had associated him. Indeed, lacking a turn for observation of character, his former companions had passed before him like images in a mirror, giving him little knowledge of their inner nature. Moreover, till his latest day, he was more inclined to form prospects for the future than to dwell upon the past. I remember –the last time, save one, that we ever met– I found him on the bed, suffering with a dizziness of the brain. He roused himself, however, and grew very cheerful; talking, with a youthful glow of fancy, about emigrating to Illinois, where he possessed a farm, and picturing a new life for both of us in that Western region. It has since come to my memory, that, while he spoke, there was a purple flush across his brow, — the harbinger of death. I saw him but once more alive. On the thirteenth day of November last, while on my way to Boston, expecting shortly to take him by the hand, a letter met me with an invitation to his funeral. He had been struck with apoplexy on Friday evening, three days

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before, and had lain insensible till Saturday night, when he expired. The burial took place at Mount Auburn on the ensuing Tuesday. It was a gloomy day; for the first snow-storm of the season had been drifting through the air since morning; and the “Garden of Graves” looked the dreariest spot on earth. The snow came down so fast, that it covered the coffin in its passage from the hearse to the sepulchre. The few male friends who had followed to the cemetery descended into the tomb; and it was there that I took in my last glance at the features of a man who will hold a place in my remembrance apart from other men. He was like no other. In his long pathway through life, from his cradle to the place where we had now laid him, he had come, a man indeed in intellect and achievement, but, in guileless simplicity, a child. Dark would have been the hour, if, when we closed the door of the tomb upon his perishing mortality, we had believed that our friend was there. It is contemplated to erect a monument, by subscription, to Mr. Fessenden’s memory. It is right that he should be thus honored. Mount Auburn will long remain a desert, barren of consecrated marbles, if worth like his be yielded to oblivion. Let his grave be marked out, that the yeomen of New England may know where he sleeps; for he was their familiar friend, and has visited them at all their firesides. He has toiled for them at seed-time and harvest: he has scattered the good grain in every field; and they have garnered the increase. Mark out his grave as that of one worthy to be remembered both in the literary and political annals of our country, and let the laurel be carved on his memorial stone; for it will cover the ashes of a man of genius.

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1878

December: James R. Osgood & Co. merged with Melancthon Hurd’s and Henry Oscar Houghton’s Hurd & Houghton to become Houghton, Osgood, and Co.

1832-1834 Allen & Ticknor 1834-1843 William D. Ticknor 1843-1849 William D. Ticknor & Co. 1849-1854 Ticknor, Reed & Fields 1854-1868 Ticknor and Fields 1868-1871 Fields, Osgood & Co. 1871-1878 James R. Osgood & Co. 1878-1880 Houghton, Osgood, & Co. 1880-1908 Houghton, Mifflin, & Co. 1908-2007 Houghton Mifflin Company 2007-???? Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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1880

James R. Osgood formed a new J.R. Osgood and Co. as Houghton, Osgood and Co., with the participation of George Mifflin, became Houghton, Mifflin, & Co.

1832-1834 Allen & Ticknor 1834-1843 William D. Ticknor 1843-1849 William D. Ticknor & Co. 1849-1854 Ticknor, Reed & Fields 1854-1868 Ticknor and Fields 1868-1871 Fields, Osgood & Co. 1871-1878 James R. Osgood & Co. 1878-1880 Houghton, Osgood, & Co. 1880-1908 Houghton, Mifflin, & Co. 1908-2007 Houghton Mifflin Company 2007-???? Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

This business entity maintaining copyright to the literary productions of, among others in their stable, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau, and an editor of the firm, Horace Scudder, in an introduction to AMERICAN PROSE, alerted the discerning reader to Henry Thoreau’s “protesting attitude” and counseled that because this person had been “against the common order of things,” his texts “could not be relied upon as sound and wholesome.”

1881

April 24, day: Henry James, Sr. very properly informed the readers of the Boston Herald about Henry David Thoreau and his indigestible literary remainders: He was literally the most childlike, unconscious and unblushing egotist it has ever been my fortune to encounter in the ranks of manhood; so that, if he happened to visit you on a Sunday morning, when possibly you were in a devout frame of mind, as like as not you would soon find yourself intoning subaudible praises to the meticulous skill which had at last succeeded in visibly marrying such sheer and mountainous inward self-esteem with such harmless and beautiful force of outward demeanour. I have not had the advantage, to be sure, of knowing Thoreau

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well, through the medium of his books, which so many competent persons praise as singularly witty and sagacious. I have, however, honestly try to read them, but owing, I suppose, to prejudice derived from personal contact with him, their wit always seemed more or less spoiled, to my taste, by intention, and even their sagacity seemed painfully aggressive and alarming; so I relinquished my task without any edifying result.

On this day Thoreau’s publisher, James Thomas Fields, died in Boston. On page 102 of JAMES T. FIELDS, which would be published by Houghton, Mifflin during this year, the publisher would be permitted to make the following comment about his “painfully aggressive and alarming” author: I like to see him come in, he always smells of the pine woods.

During this year The Riverside Press of Cambridge would issue BALLADS AND OTHER VERSES BY JAMES T. FIELDS. BALLADS AND OTHER VERSES

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1884

Julian Hawthorne’s NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE AND HIS WIFE. This is the book in which Julian alleged that as of December 1852 “Thoreau’s hut was still standing on a level, pine-circled spot, near the margin” (actually, Thoreau’s shanty had been for some period of years on the opposite side of town from Walden Pond — and this provides you a clue as to how seriously you ought to receive anything this lad has to offer).

An etching purporting to represent Sophia Peabody Hawthorne at the age of 36 was prepared by S.A. Schoff, evidently on the basis of a Daguerreotype, to be presented opposite page 242 in Volume 1 of the above. The text description to accompany this illustration was given as “Sophia contemplates the viewer with her large, placid eyes. She is quite plain even in this portrait. Her nose and philtrum are a little too large and she looks as if she might need glasses. Her hair and dress are not at all fashionable; she wears no jewellery (is that a locket or a high collar?). Even though she is a dentist’s daughter, we cannot see her teeth. She will be the perfect wife for Nathaniel.”

James D. Hurd became a partner in Houghton, Mifflin, and Co.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI, in Houghton, Mifflin’s American Men of Letters series, made Margaret into an honorary guy.

When presidential candidate Grover Cleveland was attacked for immorality, Thomas Wentworth Higginson sprang to his defense.

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1885

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

1888

James Murray Kay, Thurlow Weed Barnes, and Henry Oscar Houghton, Jr. became partners in Houghton, Mifflin, & Co.

1889

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

1908

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

1832-1834 Allen & Ticknor 1834-1843 William D. Ticknor 1843-1849 William D. Ticknor & Co. 1849-1854 Ticknor, Reed & Fields 1854-1868 Ticknor and Fields 1868-1871 Fields, Osgood & Co. 1871-1878 James R. Osgood & Co. 1878-1880 Houghton, Osgood, & Co. 1880-1908 Houghton, Mifflin, & Co. 1908-2007 Houghton Mifflin Company 2007-???? Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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1991

October 28, Monday: The Central American Parliament was founded by El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

An editorial headlined “On Walden Pond. (Zuckerman and Co.’s plans for an office development in the Walden Woods)” by Richard Lingeman appeared in The Nation.13 One of the most widely quoted phrases Henry Thoreau ever wrote is “in wildness is the preservation of the world.” It originally appeared in “Walking” published in the June 1862 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

Although Thoreau ceased contributing to the magazine when its first editor, James Russell Lowell, censored a sentence from another of his essays, he sent several essays to Lowell’s successor, James Thomas Fields, which were published after his death, in 1862. Certainly he was one of the founding spirits of the magazine, in 1857, along with Waldo Emerson and other leading lights of the New England literary renaissance.

Given this tradition one might have thought that the present publisher of The Atlantic would be the last person to stand in the way of the preservation of the patch of wildness Thoreau knew best and about which he wrote his greatest book.

But no. In 1985 said publisher, real estate magnate Mort Zuckerman, took possession of a bit of hallowed ground 700 yards from Walden Pond, and now a group of preservationists and environmentalists is trying to reclaim it for the public. This is not the first time Zuckerman has aroused the ire of such people with his projects. In the 1970s there was the tower complex he wanted to build near Boston Public Garden; in the 1980s it was the Manhattan mega-skyscraper he planned to erect whose massive shadow would have plunged part of Central Park into artificial gloom daily.

His latest shadow on the land is a proposed three-story office building on an 18.5-acre parcel near Concord, located within the historically and ecologically defined area known as Walden Woods. Zuckerman was a principal in a limited partnership created by his company, Boston Properties, which purchased for $3.1 million a piece of land on which is located Brister’s Hill, which figures in WALDEN, and Brister’s Spring, where the Sage got his drinking water. It abuts the lane down which Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and other Transcendental tourists strolled when they came to

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The office site is part of the 40 percent of Walden Woods still in private hands. A group called the Walden Woods Project was founded in 1990 by rock musician Don Henley to purchase this remaining land, in order to keep it forever wild. The project has so far secured fifty acres of land that had been slated for development. But its drive to save the area came to a temporary halt when it collided with Zuckerman & Co. Not that the owners aren’t willing to deal; it’s just that they want to recover costs. Ed Linde, president of Boston Properties, told The Washington Post that there are now more than $8 million worth, including architectural and engineering work, legal expenses and carrying costs. All that for empty land, with not a trace of any building, which was recently appraised at $2.8 million.

Naturally, suspicions have arisen among the preservationists that the owners are trying to cover their anticipated loss -indeed reap a tidy windfall- by selling to the one group that really wants the land. After all, the Walden Woods Project lists a galaxy of presumably rich celebrities on its letterhead, garners a steady flow of donations from school kids and nice old ladies all over the country and can expect some revenues from fund-raising concerts by Henley and friends like Bonnie Raitt, Sting and Billy Joel, as well as from a recently published book called HEAVEN IS UNDER OUR FEET, a collection of testimonials by entertainers, writers,

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Last month, upset by the brickbats raining on him, Zuckerman announced he had sold his interest in the parcel to a party he refused to name, to protect him or her from future flak. He also charged that Henley “consistently has misstated the facts” and issued an itemized refutation of said misstatements to Michael Thomas, novelist and New York Observer columnist, who, identifying himself as a friend of Zuckerman’s, summarized them in the spirit of fair play.

Zuckerman’s rejoinder asserts, among other things, most of them trivial, that the site of his contemplated building is now a gravel pit and that it is separated from the pond by a dump, a tourist parking lot, a trailer park and Route 2. Kathi Anderson, executive director of the Walden Woods Project, comments that the gravel is actually the natural surface of glacial land after it has been denuded of trees and topsoil; it is now regenerating, as Thoreau, who studied forest regeneration on Brister’s Hill, would have predicted. The dump is being reclaimed; the trailer park is on the way out. But the condition of the land is beside the point, Anderson says. Zuckerman’s implication that “just because land is badly damaged it should not be saved is ludicrous. You have to draw a line somewhere when you have a site of historical value. You have to say, Look, if you let this office project go ahead then you open the floodgates for other developers who are interested in Walden Woods.” Zuckerman has been accused of making his share of misstatements. Henley and others suspect that the anonymous person to whom he sold his interest in the partnership is none other than Ed Linde. Linde says that is “completely false” and that the buyer “has no relationship to me or to Boston Properties.” Anderson says, “Frankly, it doesn’t matter whom Zuckerman sold it to. Linde still owns the majority of the property. We deal with Boston Properties. Zuckerman is chairman of the board. He has control over how the land in question is disposed of.” Linde has rejected an offer from the Trust for Public Land, which acts for the Walden Woods Project, buying up land to take it off the market, then reselling it to the project when it has raised sufficient funds. The trust’s offer consists of an alternative (larger) site plus a “cash incentive,” which Anderson would not describe. She says that the Walden Woods Project will stand pat, preferring not to use its hard-raised money to subsidize a developer’s losses. Linde told Nation intern Elizabeth Ely that he has “no asking price” and is “seeking to cooperate” with the Walden Woods Project to effect a transfer of the land. Thoreau, who earned a living as a surveyor, might be said to have been in the real estate game himself. But his greatness was as a literary surveyor, one who mapped in homespun, incantatory prose a Walden Woods bounded by

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the reaches of his imagination, who consecrated and immortalized a patch of ground, making it a sacred synecdoche for the wildness of earth. As Waldo Emerson said in his eulogy to his friend (published in The Atlantic Monthly), Thoreau’s genius, his talent for divining the universal in the particular, was strengthened by his deep roots in Concord and its environs:

I think his fancy for referring everything to the meridian of Concord ... was a playful expression of his conviction of the indifferency of all places, and that the best place for each is where he stands. He expressed it once in this wise: “I think nothing is to be hoped from you, if this bit of mold under your feet is not sweeter to you to eat than any other in the world or in any world.”

The land where Thoreau stood was sweet to him, and so should it be to us, his literary heirs.

In the Atlantic essay, following “in wildness is the preservation of the world,” come words that are less known, but worth quoting: “Every tree sends its fiber forth in search of the wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plough and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind.”

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How oddly prophetic those words seem. Literally so, in that scientists these days are scouring woods and fields for “tonics and barks” - natural medicines that have a potential for saving lives. Figuratively, in that wildness is dwindling, and the earth grows sicker because of this. The endangered species whose extinction diminishes the universal gene pool, the rain forests and wetlands whose disappearance endangers all species on the planet, represent the wildness in which our salvation urgently lies. Thoreau also wrote in his Atlantic essay, “A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it.”

70 Copyright  Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES T. F IELDS JAMES T. F IELDS

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

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

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 71 HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES T. F IELDS JAMES T. F IELDS

Prepared: April 22, 2013

72 Copyright  Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES T. F IELDS JAMES T. F IELDS ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

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

Commonly, the first output of the program has obvious “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 73 HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES T. F IELDS JAMES T. F IELDS

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

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

74 Copyright  Austin Meredith