PROFESSOR HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

1878

September 6, Friday: Henry Seidel Canby was born in Wilmington, Delaware, a son of Friend Edward Tatnall Canby and Ella Augusta Seidel, who was a Presbyterian. Because of his mother not being a Quaker, Henry would not be considered a “birthright” Friend but would have needed to apply for “convinced” membership — something he never would do, although he would be educated at Wilmington Friends School. “The Quaker has been unfortunate in fiction and drama.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

1896

In Andover, Massachusetts, a monument was erected over the grave of Harriet Beecher Stowe in the Chapel Cemetery of Phillips Academy on Main Street.

The 1st telephones came to Oberlin, Ohio (by some accounts, private telephone lines had been being strung among a very few Oberlinians as early as 1877).

At Oberlin College, James Wilbur Monroe retired at the age of 75. He and his wife Julia would live out his remaining years at their home on College Place. He continued his large adult Bible class at the 1st Congregational Church.

Henry Seidel Canby matriculated at Yale College. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

1899

Henry Seidel Canby received his bachelor’s degree from Yale College.

Introduction by Nathan Haskell Dole to Emerson, Ralph Waldo. EARLY POEMS OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON. NY, Boston: Thomas Y. Crowell & Company. In the early years of the nineteenth century, when Boston was as yet only a comfortable little seaport town, and its principal streets still gave room for gardens and cow pastures, there stood at the corner of what is now Summer and Chauncy streets a gambrel-roofed wooden building, shaded by elms and Lombardy poplars, and surrounded by ample grounds. This was the parish house of the oldest church in Boston, called the First or “Old Brick Church.” The minister of this church and occupant of this mansion was the Rev. William Emerson, who on the 25th of May, 1803, wrote in his diary: “This day, whilst I was at dinner at Governor Strong’s, my son Ralph Waldo was born.” The Rev. William Emerson was one of the notable men of his day. Although his life was cut off at the early age of forty-two, he had accomplished a work the influence of which is still definitely, if unconsciously, felt, and always will be felt in the culture of Boston. Science and learning as represented by the Lowell Institute, literature as represented by the Athenæum, art as represented by the Museum, point back to that vivacious, liberal-minded, and eloquent young minister. He had been settled in the town of Harvard at a yearly salary of less than six hundred dollars, but Boston heard him preach, wanted him and, in 1799, bought him off from the Harvard parish for a bonus of a thousand dollars, giving rise to the epigram perpetrated at the expense of the Old Brick Church: “You bought your minister and sold your bell.” William Emerson traced his descent from Thomas Emerson, who emigrated from England to America in 1635, was thrifty, and left a large estate for those days. His son John, minister at Gloucester, was the common ancestor of Phillips Brooks and Wendell Phillips. His son Joseph, preacher successively at Wells, at Milton, and at Mendon, married Elizabeth, granddaughter of Peter Bulkeley, a wealthy and learned dissenting minister, who rounded Concord and Concord church. Edward, son of Joseph and Elizabeth, married Rebecca Waldo, and his son Joseph married Mary Moody and had ten children, the ninth of whom was William, who was the minister at Concord, and built the Old Manse celebrated by Hawthorne. When he died at the early age of thirty-three, his widow married his successor, the Rev. Ezra Ripley, who was a kindly and wise step-father to the lively young William, his mother’s only son. It is said that he had no drawing to the ministry, but, on hearing Dr. Ripley pray for the fulfilment of his mother’s desire, he studied divinity and was settled at Harvard at the age of twenty-three. His letters are full of wit and vivacity. He was extremely fond of society and liked to sing and to play on the bass viol. He was too poor to keep a horse, but in 1796, when his salary was only $330.30, he married Miss Ruth Haskins, sold his bass fiddle, took boarders, HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY taught, and worked his farm. At the time of his death he was receiving $2500 a year, thirty cords of wood, and the rent on his house. He raised potatoes, corn, and other vegetables in his garden on Summer Street. He was the founder of the Philosophical Society, and the leading member of the Anthology Club, which established a library, a museum, a course of lectures, and a monthly magazine. Ralph Waldo Emerson was eight at the time of his father’s death. The parish voted to continue the salary to the widow for six months longer, to pay her $500 a year for seven years, and permitted her to occupy the parish house for more than three years. She took boarders, did her own work, and managed to educate the children, as she felt that they were born to be educated. The distance between her little vessel and the lee shore of poverty was very small. Mrs. Ripley found the family one day without any food, except the stories of heroic endurance with which their aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, was regaling them. Ralph and his brother Edward had but one overcoat between them, and had to take turns going to school. This aunt, Miss Emerson, was a thorn in the spirit for the whole family. Of great intellect, of lofty views, ambitious, religious, sceptical, a burning brand in the household, she stimulated, she exasperated, she made herself and every one about her unhappy. She wanted every one but herself to be orthodox. Emerson said of her: “She tramples on the common humanities all day, and they rise as ghosts and torment her all night.” Mr. Charles Eliot Cabot says: “She was an ever-present embodiment of the Puritan conscience.” Her influence on the Emerson children was, on the whole, injurious. Even Ralph Waldo, who was less susceptible to it than the others, felt it severely. Ralph was sent to school before he was three years old. At ten he writes his Aunt Mary of his studies in the Latin School, which were supplemented by two hours’ attendance at a private school where he learned to write and cipher. Once or twice he played truant during this midday recess of extra work, and was punished for it by imprisonment with bread and water. He was not a brilliant scholar, nor was he inclined to mingle with his associates in play. He never owned a sled, and, though there was a good pond for skating not far away, he did not learn to skate till he was a freshman in college. According to Dr. Furness he held aloof from “Coram” and “Hy-spy,” and other sports, simply because from his earliest years he dwelt in a higher sphere. He could not remember the time when Emerson was not literary in his pursuits. When he was thirteen his uncle, Samuel Ripley, asked him how it was that all the boys disliked him and quarrelled with him. In 1814 the price of provisions became so high in Boston that Mrs. Emerson and her family took refuge in Concord with Dr. Ripley, with whom they spent a year. On their return to Boston they lived in a house on Beacon Hill lent by its owner in exchange for board for his wife and children. Emerson remembered driving the cow to pasture on Carver Street. That year he was reading “Télémaque” in French and Priestley’s lectures on history, and his letters are pretty well peppered with original verse. In October, 1817, he went to Cambridge, having passed a very good examination, and his mother rejoiced because he did not have to be admonished to study. He was appointed President’s Freshman, a position which gave him a room free of charge. He HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY waited at Commons, and this reduced the cost of board to one quarter, and he received a scholarship. He added to his slender means by tutoring and by teaching during the winter vacations at his Uncle Ripley’s school in Waltham. Mr. Conway says that during his college course his mother moved to Cambridge and took student boarders, but Emerson had his room in the college buildings, occupying 5, 15, and 9 Hollis, during the last three years, respectively. Even in his fourteenth year he was described as being “just what he was afterward, kindly, affable, but self-contained, receiving praise or sympathy without taking much notice of it.” He was fonder of desultory reading than of regular study, and naturally came into some disfavor with the authorities. In mathematics he confessed himself “a hopeless dunce,” and laughingly declared that a possible English congener, William Emerson of Durham, a famous mathematician, must have appropriated all his talents in that line. “I can’t multiply seven by twelve with security,” he added. George Ticknor, who taught modern languages, and Edward Everett, Greek professor, gave lectures, and Emerson attended them with profit. He took two Bowdoin prizes for dissertations, and the Boylston prize of $30 for declamation. He graduated just above the middle of a class of fifty-nine, and had one of the twenty- nine commencement parts, but, disgusted at its insignificance, took no pains to learn it, and had to be frequently prompted. He was not entitled to admission to the [Phi Beta Kappa] Society, but he was elected class poet, and his poem was regarded as a superior production. His future seemed indefinite. All he would promise was “to try to be a minister and have a house.” The house was for his mother, so that he might “in some feeble degree repay her for the cares and woes and inconveniences she had so often been subject to on her son’s account alone.” After he graduated he for two years assisted his brother William in a school for young ladies established in his mother’s house, and when William went to Göttingen to study divinity, he remained another year in sole charge. During these three years he earned nearly $3000 and was enabled to help his mother and brothers. But he always remembered his terrors at entering the school, his timidities at French, “the infirmities of his cheek,” and his occasional admiration of some of his pupils, and his vexation of spirit when the will of the pupils was a little too strong for the will of the teacher. He regretted that his teaching was perfunctory. He wished that he had shown his pupils the poems and works of imagination which he himself delighted in. Then teaching might have been for him also “a liberal and delicious art.” He always wondered why the poorest country college never offered him a professorship of rhetoric. He wrote in his journal: “I think I could have taught an orator, though I am none.” In 1823 Mrs. Emerson hired a house on Canterbury Lane, also called Light Lane, Dark Lane, or Featherbed Lane, Roxbury, about four miles from the State House. In Franklin Park a tablet in the Overlook on Schoolmaster Hill commemorates the fact that Emerson there, stretched out beneath the pines, wrote his poem. “Good-by, proud world; I’m going home.” His letters from there show that the teaching in town, which he still kept up, was not much more irksome than the communion with nature which had been recommended to him. “I cannot find myself quite as perfectly at HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY home on the rock and in the wood as my ancient, and I might say infant, aspirations led me to suspect he wrote on the 19th of June of that year. “When I took my book to the woods I found nature not half poetical, not half visionary, enough.... I found that I had only transplanted into the new place my entire personal identity, and was grievously disappointed.” In 1825 Emerson wrote his aunt that Channing was “preaching sublime sermons every Sunday morning in Federal Street.” The influence of Channing may have determined him to fit for the ministry, though his brother William, much to his mother’s grief, had found it impossible to subscribe to creeds and had decided against that profession. But Ralph Waldo confessed that, while he inherited from his “sire a formality of manners and speech,” he also “derived from him or his patriotic parent a passionate love for the strains of eloquence.” He therefore elected to study divinity. His brother William advised his going to Göttingen, but he wrote: “Unless I take the wings of the morning for a packet, and feed on wishes instead of dollars, and be clothed with imagination for raiment, I must not expect to go.” And like a true philosopher— like the fox philosopher of the story—he adds: “It might not do me any good.” Certain lands in the city had increased in value and a little money was forthcoming from them; so he decided to go to Cambridge, where “the learned and reverend” had consented to admit him to the middle class. In February, 1825, on the eve of leaving his Canterbury home, he wrote that he had “learned a few more names and dates, additional facility of expression; the gauge of his own ignorance, its sounding-places and bottomless depths.” He added that his “cardinal vice of intellectual dissipation— sinful strolling from book to book, from care to idleness “— was his cardinal vice still—was a malady which “belonged to the chapter of incurables.” He took a floor room in the cold, damp northeast corner of Divinity Hall, and within a month was obliged by ill health and weak eyes to suspend his studies. He went first to Newton and worked on his Uncle Ladd’s farm. Here he fell in with an “ignorant and rude laborer” who was a Methodist, and it is chronicled that Emerson’s first sermon was founded on this man’s dictum, that “men were always praying and all their prayers were answered.” But he added as a saving clause, “We must beware, then, what we ask!” In the summer he instructed a few private pupils, and in September took charge of a public school in Chelmsford, which he left at the beginning of the next year to relieve his brother Edward of the care of his school in Roxbury, and then in April he returned to Cambridge, where his mother had again taken a house. He opened a school there and had among his pupils Richard Henry Dana, 2d, but he was afflicted with rheumatism and threatened with lung complaint. He managed to attend some of the lectures at the Divinity School, and made a show of keeping along with his class. But he afterward declared that if the authorities had examined him on his studies they would not have passed him. They did not examine him, and he was “approbated to preach” by the Middlesex Association of Ministers in October, 1826, and on the fifteenth of that month delivered his first public sermon at Waltham. As cold weather came on, he was obliged to go South. The deferring of his hopes made him heartsick. Mr. M. D. Conway says he preached in Charleston, which had the only Unitarian pulpit HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY south of the Potomac. But the weather was cold and he took a sloop to St. Augustine, where he spent the winter “parading the beach and thinking of his brother barnacles at a distance.” He was amused at the theological and civil manners of the place, where “the worthy father of the Catholic Church was arrested and imprisoned for debt, where the president of the Bible Society was notorious for his profanity, and its treasurer, the marshal of the district, combined meetings of the society with slave- auctions.” Emerson made the acquaintance of Prince Achille Murat, “a philosopher, a scholar, a man of the world, very sceptical but very candid, and an ardent lover of truth.” He long remembered him as “a type Of heroic manners and sweet- tempered ability.” When he reached Alexandria after a direfully tempestuous voyage, he wrote his aunt that he was not a jot better or worse than when he left home. In this same letter he describes how when he reads Walter Scott, a thousand imperfect suggestions arise in his mind, which, if he could give heed, would make him a novelist; and, when he chances to light on a verse of genuine poetry, even in the corner of a newspaper, a forcible sympathy awakened a legion of little goblins in the recesses of his soul, and if he had leisure to attend to the fine tiny rabble, he would straightway be a poet. He confessed that in his day-dreams he hungered and thirsted to be a painter. On his return he “supplied” for some weeks at the First Church, during the absence of its regular minister. Then in the autumn of 1827 he supplied for Mr. Hall at Northampton, where he made the acquaintance of the Lymans. Mrs. Lyman was a descendant of Anne Hutchinson, whom Emerson’s ancestor, Peter Bulkeley, had helped to drive out of Massachusetts; but a warm friendship quickly sprang up between the brilliant and beautiful woman and the pale young student, whom she called an angel unawares. He had several “calls” to accept permanent positions, but his health was still so uncertain that he refused them all, and lived at Cambridge a desultory life, “lounging on a system,” writing a sermon a month, strolling, courting the society of laughing persons, and trying to win “firmer health and solid powers.” He had not as yet shown evidence of remarkable ability; his brothers Edward and Charles entirely eclipsed him. He never jested (so Dr. Hedge said), was slow in speech and in movement, and was never known to run. Yet when his brother Edward, “the admired, learned, eloquent,” lost first his reason and then his health, and died in self-imposed exile, Emerson wrote in his journal that he had little fear for such an evil, even in the line of the constitutional calamity of his family; “I have so much mixture of silliness in my intellectual frame, that I think Providence has tempered me against this.” He had preached temporarily at Concord, N. H., and there he met Miss Ellen Louisa Tucker, the daughter of a former Boston merchant. She had greatly impressed him, but he thought he had “got over his blushes and his wishes.” But when he met her again in December, 1828, he “surrendered at discretion.” “She is seventeen years old and very beautiful by universal consent,” he wrote his brother William. In March of the following year he was settled as colleague of the Rev. Henry Ware, Jr., over the Second or Old North Church, and in September was married and established in a house in Chardon Place. His happiness and success seemed to him too great HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY to last. His intuitions were not ill founded. He found himself unable to administer the Communion in its concrete oral form, and when the church refused to let him continue the service, dropping “the use of the elements,” he resigned, and his resignation was accepted by a vote of thirty against twenty- four. It must have been a relief to him to be free, for all that savored of ritual was distasteful to him, and even. extempore prayer was irksome. He did not excel in the usual pastoral relations. It is related of him that when he was summoned to administer consolation at the bedside of a Revolutionary veteran, and showed some awkwardness in the matter, the dying man rose in his wrath and exclaimed, “Young man, if you don’t know your business, you had better go home.” Even the sexton of the church declared that in his opinion he was not born to be a minister. But his ability in the pulpit was marked, and many of his congregation greatly regretted the step that was forced on him. He had recently suffered the loss of his young wife, who even before her marriage was threatened with consumption. She died in February, 1831. He was like a ship adrift. But great schemes were floating in his mind. One of them was the establishment of “a magazine of his ownty-donty,” in which there should be no coöperation, but only his personal individuality to unify it. Again his health broke down. He was disheartened, and felt that the doom of his race was on him. At first it was suggested that he should go to the West Indies and visit his brother Edward, but at the last moment he found that a 236-ton brig was about to sail for the Mediterranean: he took passage on her and was landed at Malta on the 2d of February, 1832. In his diary written on the vessel one can read the influence of Carlyle. Speaking of the clouds, he says: “What they said goest thou forth so far to seek— painted canvas, carved marble, renowned towns? Yes, welcome, young man, the universe is hospitable; the great God who is love hath made you aware of the forms and breeding of His wide house. We greet you well to the place of history, as you please to style it, to the mighty Lilliput or ant-hill of your genealogy.” And so on quite in the style of “Sartor.” From Malta, where he with a tame curiosity looked about La Valetta, he crossed to Sicily, spent several days in sight of Ætna, drank of the waters of Arethusa, plucked the papyrus on the banks of the Anopus, visited the Catacombs, heard Mass in the ancient Temple of Minerva, and fed on fragrant Hyblæan honey and Ortygian quails; but he felt tormented by his ignorance, wanted his Vergil and his Ovid, his history and his Plutarch. “It is the playground of the gods and goddesses.” “The poor hermit who with saucer eyes had strayed from his study” found himself somewhat at a loss in those “out courts of the Old World.” “Some faces under new caps and jackets,” he says, “another turn of the old kaleidoscope.” He was not sure in the noise and myriads of people, amid the grandeur and poverty that he saw that he was growing much wiser or any better for his travels. “An hour in Boston and an hour in Naples have about equal value to the same person.” Even his judgment of people remind one of Carlyle in his peevish days. He hoped he should not always be “yoked with green, dull, pitiful persons.” The “various little people” with whom he had been “cabined up by sea and land” may have been all better and wiser than he; still they did not help him. He longed for a HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY teacher. He would “give all Rome for one man such as were fit to walk” there. At Florence he dined and breakfasted with Landor, who, he thought, did “not quite show the same caliber in conversation as in his books.” He hoped for better things of Carlyle to whom he was pilgriming through all such inanimate trifles as coliseums and duomos. Even Venice he called “a great oddity, a city for beavers... a most disagreeable residence”; and Paris was “a loud modern New York of a place.” “Pray, what brought you here, grave sir?” “the moving Boulevard” seemed to ask him. A lecture at the Sorbonne, he complains, was far less useful to him than a lecture which he should write himself! He stayed about three weeks in London. He attended service at St. Paul’s. “Poor church,” is his only comment. He visited Coleridge and Bowring and John Stuart Mill, and still in quest for Carlyle reached Edinburgh, where he preached in the Unitarian chapel, and at last, after peculiar difficulties, discovered his ideal living quietly at Craigenputtoch — the youth he sought he called “good and wise and pleasant,” and his wife, “a most accomplished, agreeable woman.” “Truth and peace and faith dwell with them.” His visit with them he called “a white day in his years.” Carlyle, on his part, always declared it was the most beautiful thing in his experience at Craigenputtoch. Yet even Carlyle was not the long-sought master. In the deepest matters the Scotchman had nothing to teach the Yankee. He had met with men, he wrote, of far less power who had got greater insight into religious truth. But the interview on both sides was pleasing and resulted in a lifelong friendship. At Rydal Mount he paid his respects to Wordsworth, and was not offended by the old poet’s egotisms. (Note: For Emerson’s own account of his experiences see “English Traits.”) Having reached Liverpool, he confided to his journal his gratitude to the great God who had led him in safety and pleasure through “this European scene— this last schoolroom” in which He had pleased to instruct him. The sight of Landor, Coleridge, Carlyle, and Wordsworth, though he realized that not one of them was “a mind of the very first class, “had comforted and confirmed him in his convictions. He felt that he would be able to judge more justly, less timidly, of wise men for evermore. It is odd and sounds almost prehistoric to read Emerson quoting the prediction that “the tithe will come when the ocean will be navigated by merchantmen by steam.” With health restored and established, he reached New York early in October, after a voyage which lasted more than a month; and, having rejoined his mother at Newton, where she was then living, he began to preach and lecture as occasion offered. On the second Sunday after his return he occupied his old pulpit in the Second Church and for four years supplied at various places. He might have had a call to New Bedford, but as he stipulated that he must not be expected to administer the Communion or to offer prayer unless the Spirit moved, the church withdrew its invitation. His first lecture was delivered in November, 1883, before the Boston Society of Natural History. His early lectures were on scientific subjects and before scientific bodies. He was expecting to have his wife’s share of her father’s estate, and this expectation was soon satisfied, so that he made sure of a yearly income of about $1200, and he was meditating more HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY seriously than ever the adventure of a periodical paper which should “speak the truth without fear or favor.” This materialized afterward in The Dial. In the summer of 1834 he was the chosen poet for the [Phi Beta Kappa] Society, and the verses contained a word portrait of Daniel Webster. His brother Edward, who had just died, had been Webster’s private secretary and tutor to his children. He went to Bangor to preach for a few Sundays, and wrote to Dr. F. H. Hedge that he was seriously thinking of trying to persuade a small number of persons to join him in a colony thirty miles up the river; but this visionary project of a forest hermitage was never carried out, and in October he went to live in Concord, which was his home throughout the rest of his life. He lived with his mother in the Manse until, in 1835, having become engaged to Miss Lidia Jackson of Plymouth, he bought at a bargain the Coolidge house, which he said was a mean place, and would be till trees and flowers should give it a character of its own. It was a square mansion set rather low in a field, through which flowed a brook down to the sluggish Concord River. In September he was called on as a townsman to deliver a discourse on the two hundredth anniversary of the incorporation of the town, and he made special investigations for the purpose of imparting historic value to it. Two days after this event he drove to Plymouth and was married there at the Winslow house, which belonged to his bride. She would have liked to live in Plymouth, but he preferred Concord, and had written to her that “he was born a poet, though his singing was very husky and for the most Dart in prose,” and therefore must guard and study his rambling propensities. Concord, he intimated, gave him sunsets, forests, snowstorms, and river views, which were more to him than friends, but Plymouth! — “Plymouth is streets!” In the winters of 1835-1836, besides supplying the East Lexington church, he began a course of ten lectures on English literature, and this made such a favorable impression that henceforth his career was assured. Not only was the subject- matter original and unique, but the judgments expressed were sound, and the delivery was marked by a peculiar charm which those who heard him never forgot: “You are filled with delight at his clear demonstration. Each figure. word, gesture, just fits the occasion!” said Lowell. In 1836 Emerson helped to introduce to American readers Carlyle’s “Sartor Resartus,” which had the distinction of selling the first edition and a thousand copies besides, before it was put into book form in England. His efforts in this practical direction elicited the little sneer in Lowell’s “Fable for Critics,” where he speaks of Emerson in these words:— His is, we may say, A Greek head on right Yankee shoulders, whose range Has Olympus for one pole, for t’other the Exchange.

Or again a little farther down he says he is composed of “one part pure earth, ninety-nine parts pure lecturer.” Lowell was even more severe on Emerson’s poetry. After comparing his rich words to “gold nails in temples to hang trophies on, “he says, his — Prose is grand verse. while his verse, the Lord knows, Is some of it pr— No, ’t is not even prose. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

And he goes on: — In the worst of his poems are mines of rich matter, But thrown in a heap with a crash and a clatter.

When Lowell was editor of the Atlantic Monthly, Emerson sent him his mystic “Song of Nature.” But Lowell returned it to him, stating that certain lines in it would offend the religious susceptibilities of the community. The lines particularized were those where Homer, Shakespeare, and Plato were united with Christ in one:— Twice have I moulded an image, And thrice outstretched my hand; Made one of day, and one of night, And one of the salt sea-sand. One in a Judean manger And one by Avon stream, One over against the mouths of Nile, And one in the Academe.

Emerson was amazed, and took the poem to Miss Elizabeth Hoar, who was always his kindly censor, and asked her if she could see anything offensive in the lines. Emerson said: “She read them carefully, but failed to help me out, concluding that they were not to be altered and must be allowed to stand. So they will not trouble the readers of the Atlantic.” In 1836, on the day of the two-hundredth anniversary of the founding of Harvard College, Emerson and others met and discussed the state of philosophy and theology. A few days later a project ripened of rounding a periodical to embody their views. Thus was started The Dial, which became the organ of the so-called transcendental movement, though the first number did not appear till July, 1840. Emerson’s book, “Nature,” is regarded as “the first document of that remarkable outburst of Romanticism on Puritan ground.” It was published in September, 1836. Only a few copies were sold, and twelve years elapsed before a new edition was called for. But it was violently attacked by the champions of orthodoxy. Yet Dr. O. W. Holmes said Emerson took down men’s “idols from their pedestals so tenderly that it seemed like an act of worship.” This year was saddened by the death of Charles Emerson, whom Ralph Waldo called “his brother, his friend, his ornament, his joy, and pride”; he “has fallen by the wayside or rather has risen out of this dust,” he wrote in his journal; “now commences a new and gloomy epoch of my life.... Who can ever supply his place to me?” Charles Emerson was a born orator, who would have conferred on the Republic rare gifts of genius had he lived. Emerson’s lament for him was one of the most touching things he ever wrote. This same year Emerson’s first child, a boy “of wonderful promise,” was born, but he lived only five years. Within a few years Margaret Fuller and Amos Bronson Alcott came to him in Concord; but Margaret Fuller, in spite of her genius and in spite of his admiration for her genius, always “froze him to silence,” and he had the same effect on her when they were on the point of coming nearer. But for Alcott he had the highest praise. He called him the most extraordinary man and the highest genius of his time. This admiration lasted till the end of his HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY life. In his later days, when aphasia had so shattered his mind, there is a pathetic picture of him talking over the fence with Alcott with much of his old-time fluency; but in the afternoon Alcott returned and brought back to Emerson the philosophic bread that had been cast on the waters so abundantly. And Emerson, oblivious to the fact that it was his own, dilated with admiration, and exclaimed: “What a wonderful mind my friend over yonder “—he could not remember his name — “has!” Thoreau was also one of Emerson’s intimates, and frequently shared his week-day walks. Yet, curiously enough, Emerson objected to printing Thoreau’s “Winter Walk” in The Dial. Hawthorne lived for four years in Concord, occupying the old Manse, but, though he was a great walker, he is known to have walked with Emerson only once, when they went together to visit the Shakers at Lebanon. Emerson said of Hawthorne, “Alcott and he together would make a man!” Emerson’s reading, as might be imagined, was peculiarly eclectic and erratic. Mr. Cabot says he cared nothing for Shelley, Aristophanes, Don Quixote, Miss Austen, Dickens, Dante, or French literature. He rarely read a novel. But the Neo- Platonists and the Sacred Books of the East particularly engaged him, and were the inspiration of many of his mystic lines. Mr. Cabot says he lived among his books and was never comfortable away from them, yet they did not enter much into his life. In 1836, having finished a course of twelve lectures on the “Philosophy of History,” he was asked to repeat them in various places, though the one on “Religion” gave some offence. The substance of these twelve lectures afterward was included in his first series of “Essays.” He still officiated occasionally as a minister, but the reception of his Phi Beta Kappa oration on “The American Scholar;” given August 31, 1837 cut the last thread of attachment. Lowell said of this: “It was an event without any former parallel in our literary annals.... What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent.” Dr. Holmes called that oration “Our Intellectual Declaration of Independence.” In February he relinquished his charge at East Lexington, though his wife mourned “to see the froward man cutting the last threads that bound him to that prized gown and band, the symbols black and white of old and distant Judah.” A still greater shock came from the discourse which Emerson delivered in July, 1838, on the graduation day of the Divinity School. The Advertiser led in a bitter attack on him. Emerson described the stir that it made as “a storm in our wash-bowl.” But it nearly resulted in excluding him from the lyceum as well as from the church; and he felt a little disturbed that it had placed him on an undeserved pedestal as a champion of heresy. But his annual courses of lectures in Boston were not less popular. Theodore Parker wrote of the first one, given in the early winter of 1839: It “was splendid— better meditated and more coherent than any theory I have ever heard from him. Your eyes were not dazzled by a stream of golden atoms of thought such as he sometimes shoots forth —though there was no lack of these sparklers.” Emerson had at first declined to have editorial control of The Dial, but when, after two years of uphill struggle, Margaret Fuller relinquished it, he took hold most unwillingly and kept it along for two years more at some expense of money and much HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY expense of worry. It lived till April, 1844. His own known contributions numbered not far from fifty. There may have been half as many again. During three years the question of negro emancipation was coming to the fore. Emerson was at first more interested in having the right of free discussion upheld than in the deeper question beyond. In November, 1837, he spoke on Slavery in the vestry of the Second Church in Concord, but the Abolitionists thought his tone was too cool and philosophical; but in 1844 he delivered an address in the Concord courthouse in celebration of the anniversary of the liberation of the British West India Island slaves. All of the Concord churches refused to open their doors to the convention, so Thoreau secured the court-house, and is said to have rung the bell himself. And this time Emerson’s trumpet gave forth no uncertain sound. He took a wise and common-sense view about woman suffrage, and, though he was not inveigled into any of the labor associations, such as Brook Farm and Fruitlands, in which his enthusiastic friends tried to interest him, he was not averse to developing a simpler and fairer way of living, and he invited the Alcotts to come and make common cause with them for a year. But Mrs. Alcott was wiser than the rest, and prevented the experiment being tried. These years were not free from pecuniary anxieties. The most he ever received for a course of ten lectures before 1847 was $570. The country lyceums paid $10 and expenses. His family was increasing, and the town levied heavy taxes on him. His tax-bill for 1839 was more than $160. So he was constantly in debt, and his chief resource was the lecture field, though it revolted his nature to sell “good wine of Castaly.” In 1843 he spent the whole winter away from home, lecturing in New York, Baltimore, and other places. Moreover, in order to preserve a hold on nature, he bought fourteen acres of woodland on Lake Walden, and this was a pecuniary burden for several years. It comes with a sense of relief, like a sea-breeze on a sultry day, to read of him taking a vacation from that strenuous life of the platform by going to the seashore. He wrote his wife: “I read Plato, I swim, and be it known unto you, I did verily catch with hook and line yesterday morning two haddocks, a cod, a flounder, and a pollock, and a perch.... The sea is great!” This touch of the sea, “inexact and boundless,” may be detected in the oration which he tried to write at Nantasket for delivery at Waterville, Me. But “the heat and happiness” of his inspiration were extinguished, as he long afterward confessed, by the cold reception with which it met. It was either at Waterville or in a Vermont town, perhaps both, that the minister at the end of the discourse prayed to be “delivered from ever again hearing such transcendental nonsense from the sacred desk.” Afterward he went a number of times to the Adirondacks, where some of his sweetest poems were composed. He bought a rifle, but never used it. Mr. Cabot says that lecturing, after all, was not the mode of utterance to which he aspired. Verse was, because he could get a larger and freer speech in rhyme. Some of his poems had been circulated, a few had been printed. And in December, 1843, a bookseller proposed to him to furnish a volume of his verses. But four years passed before the crucial impulse came to remedy “the corrigible and reparable places in them,” and to put them together. “It was a small venture,” he said. “My poems did not HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY pay. My cranberry meadows paid much better.” And when he made this remark he added, “My poems fell dead in England.” In 1847 he made his second journey to England, visited Carlyle for four days, and was amazed at “the great and constant stream” of his talk. “Carlyle and his wife,” he says in a home letter, “live on beautiful terms.” He breakfasted with Rogers, drank tea with James Martineau, and found profuse kindness and hospitality in Preston, Leicester, Chesterfield (where he dined with Stephenson, “the old engineer who built the first locomotive “), Birmingham— everywhere he went. At Edinburgh, where he lectured several times, he met all the notables, — “Christopher North,” David Scott the painter, who made a portrait of him, Mrs. Jeffrey, Lord Jeffrey, Thomas De Quincey, and many more. Still more brilliant was the society he met in London, — Macaulay, Bunsen, Milman, Milnes, Hallam, Lord Morpeth, “Barry Cornwall,” Lord and Lady Ashburton, Thackeray, Disraeli, Lord Palmerston, and Tennyson. He was elected a member of the Athenæum Club, where he found some of the best men of England. In May, 1848, he crossed to Paris and saw something of the Revolution and went to the theatre, where he heard Rachel. He complained humorously that his French was far from being as good as Madame de Staël’s. He returned to London in June and gave a course of lectures, at which he had most aristocratic audiences and dined with great lords and brilliant authors. But the pecuniary returns were smaller than he had reason to expect. For the Marylebone course of six he got only £80 instead of £200. On his return to America he made the larger part of his income by lecturing. But he looked on the whole business as rather unseemly. He thought that it was a pity to drive young America to lecture, and as to the lecturer, he said that the “dragging of a decorous old gentleman out of home was tantamount to a bet of $50 a day that he would not leave his library and wade, and freeze, and ride, and run, and suffer all manner of indignities, and stand up for an hour each night reading in a hall.” But he did it, and his pictures of travel in the West in the pre-Pullman days are like the stories of the martyrs. Here we find him sleeping on the floor of a canal-boat, where the cushion allowed him for a bed was crossed at the knees by another tier of sleepers as long-limbed as he, “so that in the air was a wreath of legs”; again occupying a cabin, though in company with governors and legislators, and a cold of minus fifteen degrees. Again, flying through the forests of Michigan in company with college professors and wolverines. And again, ferried across the Mississippi in a skiff, where “much of the rowing was on the surface of fixed ice, in fault of running water.” In 1849 Emerson’s separate addresses and “Nature” were published in one volume, and the next year came “Representative Men.” That year, 1850, also brought with it the Fugitive Slave Law, and Emerson’s voice was lifted nobly against it. He here made a magnificent attack on Daniel Webster, for whose genius he had such an admiration as “the best and proudest, the first man of the North.” He believed in confining slavery to the slave states, and then gradually and effectually making an end of it. He called on “the thirty nations” to do something besides ditching and draining. Said he, “Let them confront this mountain of poison and shovel it once for all down into the bottomless pit. A thousand millions were cheap!” History proved the truth of his prophetic words. At Cambridge he repeated the words containing HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY these wise counsels, but was so interrupted by hisses and cat- calls that he could not go on. The college authorities, like the clergy and merchants, were generally Southern in sentiment. When John Brown was in prison under sentence of death Emerson had the courage to call him “that new saint, than whom none purer or more brave was ever led by love of men into conflict and death— the new saint awaiting his martyrdom.” His attitude on that burning question of the day militated against his success as a lecturer. Invitations to speak were withdrawn, and in 1861 at the meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society “the mob roared” whenever he tried to speak, and he had to withdraw. That was in his native Boston! The war also brought poverty pretty close to Emerson as to so many others. His books did not sell, his income from lecturing almost ceased, his real estate was unproductive, and he found himself struggling with the problem, how to pay three or four hundred dollars’ worth of debts with fifty. On January 1, 1863, when Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, a Jubilee Concert was given at the Music Hall, and Emerson read his “Boston Hymn.” The time which he gave himself for its composition was so short that he was in despair, test he should not be able to do anything worthy of the occasion. But the inspiration flowed and a new treasure was added to English literature. That same evening a gathering of the faithful took place at the house of Major George L. Stearns, at Medford, who perhaps did more than any man in Massachusetts to help along the cause of emancipation, who spent money like water, and himself raised the first two regiments of colored troops. Mrs. Stearns, who, with intellect as keen as ever, still lives to speak eloquently of those great days, thus tells the story of that epic gathering. “Mr. Emerson was persuaded to repeat his poem, the ‘Boston Hymn,’ the original manuscript of which the Rev. Samuel Longfellow promptly begged of the author. “It was a brilliant assembly, filled with exultation over the decree of emancipation which had been wired from Washington. The certainty of this great measure Wendell Phillips had announced as he entered the drawing-room. Instinctively the company burst into the John Brown song, greeting the newly unveiled bust of the martyr of freedom, which the sculptor J.Q.A. Brackett had just made. “It was past midnight when the guests departed, every heart glowing with the sublime event, rejoicing with a mighty joy that deliverance from slavery at last had come.” Then occurred one of those charming little episodes so characteristic of Emerson’s thoughtfulness and simplicity. Mrs. Stearns thus relates it: — “Mr. Emerson and his friend, Mr. Alcott, remained overnight. “When the hostess asked Mr. Emerson his preference of sleeping rooms, he said, ‘Let Mr. Alcott and myself have the same room, then Vesta will have only one instead of two beds to make in the morning.’” Another characteristic anecdote of the same kind may be related here, also from Mrs. Stearns’s recollections: — “On one occasion, after we had been visiting the Emersons, when we were preparing to drive home, the evening being rather chilly, for it was autumn, Mr. Emerson brought his overcoat from the hall, and, holding it up by the collar, said, ‘I am always a little suspicious of the warmth of ladies’ garments, the HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY evening is cool, and the drive is one of seventeen miles; it will oblige me, Mrs. Stearns, if you will put on this overcoat, and wear it home. It can be recommended for warmth if not for elegance.’ “It was beautiful hospitality and consideration, but I instinctively drew back, saying:— “‘Oh, Mr. Emerson, how can I dare to wear the Lion ‘s Skin!’” He could only be persuaded to withdraw the overcoat by being assured that sufficient wraps were stowed away in the carriage. “I have regretted,” says Mrs. Stearns, “the modest scruples that hindered the wearing of the Poet’s Coat, just for once.” In 1863 he was appointed one of the visitors to West Point, where John Burroughs, seeing him, took him to be “an inquisitive farmer.” In 1866 he was granted the degree of Doctor of Laws by Harvard and elected one of the overseers. The following year he was orator for the [Phi Beta Kappa] Society —” not now,” says Mr. Cabot, “as a promising young beginner from whom a fair poetical speech might be expected, but as the foremost man of letters of New England.” It was at this time rumored that he was drifting back from heretical to more conventional opinions in religious matters; and it is stated on good authority that, when it was proposed to dispense with compulsory prayers at Harvard, Emerson’s vote prevented the innovation from prevailing. But he authorized his son to announce that he had not retracted any of his views. Three years later he was gratified to be invited to give a course of university lectures in Cambridge, and for this he prepared his sketches of “The Natural History of the Intellect,” but he was not satisfied with his attempt to make a system of philosophy. The fruit of Emerson’s intellect was not cohesive, but granular, and his thoughts are not easily moulded into a consecutive logical form. Hence it was possible for him to begin a lecture or end it anywhere. In his latter days I remember hearing him read a paper before the Radical Club. Every little while he would stop, saying he had gone far enough. But the audience and his daughter would persuade him to continue. But when he finally paused, the subject had been neither begun nor exhausted. His mind was like a carbon point; when the electricity was turned on, it gave out light, and it was always ready to shine. He repeated his Cambridge course the next year, but felt that he had not succeeded as he had hoped to do. In a letter to Carlyle he called it “a doleful ordeal,” and when it was concluded, accepted with alacrity an invitation to visit California on a six weeks’ trip with near friends and in the most delightful circumstances. After 1870 the decay of his mental powers, particularly of his memory: was very noticeable. He spoke of himself as “a man who had lost his wits.” His last effort of composition was an introduction to Plutarch’s “Morals” edited by Professor Goodwin. He compared it carefully with the original Greek, which he was able to read. In July, 1872, he had just returned from Amherst, where he had delivered an address, when he discovered that his house was on fire. The neighbors rushed to his aid and succeeded in saving the books, manuscript, and furniture; but the house was ruined by fire and water, and Emerson himself contracted a HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY feverish attack from exposure to the dampness. Friends rushed to his aid in even more substantial ways. Mr. Francis Cabot Lowell brought him an envelope containing $5000. Nearly $12,000 more were contributed to rebuild the house, and while the work was in progress he was persuaded to make another journey abroad, to visit London, Italy, and Egypt. He saw Carlyle once more and dined with the Khedive. He and his daughter went up the Nile to Philæ, but on the whole he was disappointed with the sacred land: “the people despise us,” he wrote, “because we are helpless babies who cannot speak or understand a word they say; the sphynxes scorn dunces; the obelisks, the temple-walls, defy us with their histories which we cannot spell.” The journey did him good, however, and on his return to Italy he began to work on a new edition of his poems. In Paris he saw Renan, Taine, Turgenief, and James Russell Lowell; in England he declined all invitations but one to speak, but he breakfasted with Gladstone, and saw Browning and many other notables. When he reached home in May he was surprised and touched by the spontaneous welcome of his townspeople. The church bells rang, the whole town assembled—babies and all—and he was escorted with music to his new house, where a triumphal arch had been erected. He found his study unchanged, but many improvements had been introduced in the restoration of the house. The following year his anthology of collected poems, “Parnassus,” was published, and he was asked to be one of the candidates for the lord rectorship of Glasgow University. For this he received five hundred votes. Disraeli was elected, however. In March, 1875, he went to lecture in Philadelphia, and had a delightful visit with his old friends, Dr. Furhess and Samuel Bradford. The next month he made a little speech at the unveiling of Mr. Daniel C. French’s “Minute Man,” and this is believed to be the last piece written out with his own hand. After this time Mr. James Eliot Cabot served as his literary guide, shaping his lectures, and combining them, and helping him to arrange for the complete edition of his works. Still occasionally reading from his lectures, still enjoying the serene calm of old age, where even his infirmity of memory may have made it all the serener, free from all worriment, he lived on till the spring of 1882, when he died of pneumonia on the 27th of April, at the very end of his seventy-eighth year. One could fill many pages with testimonials of the influence of Emerson with contemporary descriptions of the man and his beneficent life. Henry Crabbe Robinson declared that he had one of the most interesting countenances that he had ever beheld — a quite disarming combination of intelligence and sweetness. N. P. Willis grew enthusiastic over the voice, which he said was the utterance of his soul only, and his soul had sprung to the adult stature of a child of the universe. Dr. Holmes said: “He was always courteous and bland to a remarkable degree; his smile was the well remembered line of Terence written out in living features.” No one who ever heard him speak will forget the play of his features, the lighting up of his eyes with a rapt inner illumination, the emphatic stamp of his foot when some weighty thought required enforcement. He was one of the great souls of the century, and his works will be for all time a source of inspiration to young and old. They are indeed a mine of thought, all the more valuable, perhaps, that they are not welded into a system. Many enthusiasts consider him to have been the greatest poet America has yet produced. Technically this thesis can never HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY be supported. His disdain of mere form led him to produce verses which read with heaviness and halting but the beauty of the thought atones for missing symmetry and freshness of rhyme and Emerson as a poet will always have an audience of admirers and some worshippers, oblivious of his verse’s fault. Once when some one praised his poetry Emerson interrupted, “You forget; we are damned for poetry.” And he wrote to Carlyle that he was “not a poet, but a lover of poetry and poets”—a sort of harbinger of the poets to come. Emerson’s influence was always exerted in the line of the loftiest aspirations. Consequently he will always be dear to thinkers and to poets, and an inspiration to the young. His whole life, however closely examined, shows no flaw of temper or of foible. It was serene and lovely to the end. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY EMERSON BIO BY NATHAN HASKELL DOLE

In the early years of the nineteenth century, when Boston was as yet only a comfortable little seaport town, and its principal streets still gave room for gardens and cow pastures, there stood at the corner of what is now Summer and Chauncy streets a gambrel-roofed wooden building, shaded by elms and Lombardy poplars, and surrounded by ample grounds. This was the parish house of the oldest church in Boston, called the First or “Old Brick Church.” The minister of this church and occupant of this mansion was the Rev. William Emerson, who on the 25th of May, 1803, wrote in his diary: “This day, whilst I was at dinner at Governor Strong’s, my son Ralph Waldo was born.” The Rev. William Emerson was one of the notable men of his day. Although his life was cut off at the early age of forty-two, he had accomplished a work the influence of which is still definitely, if unconsciously, felt, and always will be felt in the culture of Boston. Science and learning as represented by the Lowell Institute, literature as represented by the Athenæum, art as represented by the Museum, point back to that vivacious, liberal-minded, and eloquent young minister. He had been settled in the town of Harvard at a yearly salary of less than six hundred dollars, but Boston heard him preach, wanted him and, in 1799, bought him off from the Harvard parish for a bonus of a thousand dollars, giving rise to the epigram perpetrated at the expense of the Old Brick Church: “You bought your minister and sold your bell.” William Emerson traced his descent from Thomas Emerson, who emigrated from England to America in 1635, was thrifty, and left a large estate for those days. His son John, minister at Gloucester, was the common ancestor of Phillips Brooks and Wendell Phillips. His son Joseph, preacher successively at Wells, at Milton, and at Mendon, married Elizabeth, granddaughter of Peter Bulkeley, a wealthy and learned dissenting minister, who rounded Concord and Concord church. Edward, son of Joseph and Elizabeth, married Rebecca Waldo, and his son Joseph married Mary Moody and had ten children, the ninth of whom was William, who was the minister at Concord, and built the Old Manse celebrated by Hawthorne. When he died at the early age of thirty-three, his widow married his successor, the Rev. Ezra Ripley, who was a kindly and wise step-father to the lively young William, his mother’s only son. It is said that he had no drawing to the ministry, but, on hearing Dr. Ripley pray for the fulfilment of his mother’s desire, he studied divinity and was settled at Harvard at the age of twenty-three. His letters are full of wit and vivacity. He was extremely fond of society and liked to sing and to play on the bass viol. He was too poor to keep a horse, but in 1796, when his salary was only $330.30, he married Miss Ruth Haskins, sold his bass fiddle, took boarders, taught, and worked his farm. At the time of his death he was receiving $2500 a year, thirty cords of wood, and the rent on his house. He raised potatoes, corn, and other vegetables in his garden on Summer Street. He was the founder of the Philosophical Society, and the leading member of the Anthology Club, which established a library, a museum, a course of lectures, and a monthly magazine. Ralph Waldo Emerson was eight at the time of his father’s death. The parish voted to continue the salary to the widow for six months longer, to pay her $500 a year for seven years, and permitted her to occupy the parish house for more than three years. She took boarders, did her own work, and managed to educate the children, as she felt that they were born to be educated. The distance between her little vessel and the lee shore of poverty was very small. Mrs. Ripley found the family one day without any food, except the stories of heroic endurance with which their aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, was regaling them. Ralph and his brother Edward had but one overcoat between them, and had to take turns going to school. This aunt, Miss Emerson, was a thorn in the spirit for the whole family. Of great intellect, of lofty views, ambitious, religious, sceptical, a burning brand in the household, she stimulated, she exasperated, she made herself and every one about her unhappy. She wanted every one but herself to be orthodox. Emerson said of her: “She tramples on the common humanities all day, and they rise as ghosts and torment her all night.” Mr. Charles Eliot Cabot says: “She was an ever-present embodiment of the Puritan conscience.” Her influence on the Emerson children was, on the whole, injurious. Even Ralph Waldo, who was less susceptible to it than the others, felt it severely. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY Ralph was sent to school before he was three years old. At ten he writes his Aunt Mary of his studies in the Latin School, which were supplemented by two hours’ attendance at a private school where he learned to write and cipher. Once or twice he played truant during this midday recess of extra work, and was punished for it by imprisonment with bread and water. He was not a brilliant scholar, nor was he inclined to mingle with his associates in play. He never owned a sled, and, though there was a good pond for skating not far away, he did not learn to skate till he was a freshman in college. According to Dr. Furness he held aloof from “Coram” and “Hy- spy,” and other sports, simply because from his earliest years he dwelt in a higher sphere. He could not remember the time when Emerson was not literary in his pursuits. When he was thirteen his uncle, Samuel Ripley, asked him how it was that all the boys disliked him and quarrelled with him. In 1814 the price of provisions became so high in Boston that Mrs. Emerson and her family took refuge in Concord with Dr. Ripley, with whom they spent a year. On their return to Boston they lived in a house on Beacon Hill lent by its owner in exchange for board for his wife and children. Emerson remembered driving the cow to pasture on Carver Street. That year he was reading “Télémaque” in French and Priestley’s lectures on history, and his letters are pretty well peppered with original verse. In October, 1817, he went to Cambridge, having passed a very good examination, and his mother rejoiced because he did not have to be admonished to study. He was appointed President’s Freshman, a position which gave him a room free of charge. He waited at Commons, and this reduced the cost of board to one quarter, and he received a scholarship. He added to his slender means by tutoring and by teaching during the winter vacations at his Uncle Ripley’s school in Waltham. Mr. Conway says that during his college course his mother moved to Cambridge and took student boarders, but Emerson had his room in the college buildings, occupying 5, 15, and 9 Hollis, during the last three years, respectively. Even in his fourteenth year he was described as being “just what he was afterward, kindly, affable, but self- contained, receiving praise or sympathy without taking much notice of it.” He was fonder of desultory reading than of regular study, and naturally came into some disfavor with the authorities. In mathematics he confessed himself “a hopeless dunce,” and laughingly declared that a possible English congener, William Emerson of Durham, a famous mathematician, must have appropriated all his talents in that line. “I can’t multiply seven by twelve with security,” he added. George Ticknor, who taught modern languages, and Edward Everett, Greek professor, gave lectures, and Emerson attended them with profit. He took two Bowdoin prizes for dissertations, and the Boylston prize of $30 for declamation. He graduated just above the middle of a class of fifty-nine, and had one of the twenty-nine commencement parts, but, disgusted at its insignificance, took no pains to learn it, and had to be frequently prompted. He was not entitled to admission to the .B. K. Society, but he was elected class poet, and his poem was regarded as a superior production. His future seemed indefinite. All he would promise was “to try to be a minister and have a house.” The house was for his mother, so that he might “in some feeble degree repay her for the cares and woes and inconveniences she had so often been subject to on her son’s account alone.” After he graduated he for two years assisted his brother William in a school for young ladies established in his mother’s house, and when William went to Göttingen to study divinity, he remained another year in sole charge. During these three years he earned nearly $3000 and was enabled to help his mother and brothers. But he always remembered his terrors at entering the school, his timidities at French, “the infirmities of his cheek,” and his occasional admiration of some of his pupils, and his vexation of spirit when the will of the pupils was a little too strong for the will of the teacher. He regretted that his teaching was perfunctory. He wished that he had shown his pupils the poems and works of imagination which he himself delighted in. Then teaching might have been for him also “a liberal and delicious art.” He always wondered why the poorest country college never offered him a professorship of rhetoric. He wrote in his journal: “I think I could have taught an orator, though I am none.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY In 1823 Mrs. Emerson hired a house on Canterbury Lane, also called Light Lane, Dark Lane, or Featherbed Lane, Roxbury, about four miles from the State House. In Franklin Park a tablet in the Overlook on Schoolmaster Hill commemorates the fact that Emerson there, stretched out beneath the pines, wrote his poem. “Good-by, proud world; I’m going home.” His letters from there show that the teaching in town, which he still kept up, was not much more irksome than the communion with nature which had been recommended to him. “I cannot find myself quite as perfectly at home on the rock and in the wood as my ancient, and I might say infant, aspirations led me to suspect he wrote on the 19th of June of that year. “When I took my book to the woods I found nature not half poetical, not half visionary, enough.... I found that I had only transplanted into the new place my entire personal identity, and was grievously disappointed.” In 1825 Emerson wrote his aunt that Channing was “preaching sublime sermons every Sunday morning in Federal Street.” The influence of Channing may have determined him to fit for the ministry, though his brother William, much to his mother’s grief, had found it impossible to subscribe to creeds and had decided against that profession. But Ralph Waldo confessed that, while he inherited from his “sire a formality of manners and speech,” he also “derived from him or his patriotic parent a passionate love for the strains of eloquence.” He therefore elected to study divinity. His brother William advised his going to Göttingen, but he wrote: “Unless I take the wings of the morning for a packet, and feed on wishes instead of dollars, and be clothed with imagination for raiment, I must not expect to go.” And like a true philosopher— like the fox philosopher of the story—he adds: “It might not do me any good.” Certain lands in the city had increased in value and a little money was forthcoming from them; so he decided to go to Cambridge, where “the learned and reverend” had consented to admit him to the middle class. In February, 1825, on the eve of leaving his Canterbury home, he wrote that he had “learned a few more names and dates, additional facility of expression; the gauge of his own ignorance, its sounding-places and bottomless depths.” He added that his “cardinal vice of intellectual dissipation— sinful strolling from book to book, from care to idleness “— was his cardinal vice still—was a malady which “belonged to the chapter of incurables.” He took a floor room in the cold, damp northeast corner of Divinity Hall, and within a month was obliged by ill health and weak eyes to suspend his studies. He went first to Newton and worked on his Uncle Ladd’s farm. Here he fell in with an “ignorant and rude laborer” who was a Methodist, and it is chronicled that Emerson’s first sermon was founded on this man’s dictum, that “men were always praying and all their prayers were answered.” But he added as a saving clause, “We must beware, then, what we ask!” In the summer he instructed a few private pupils, and in September took charge of a public school in Chelmsford, which he left at the beginning of the next year to relieve his brother Edward of the care of his school in Roxbury, and then in April he returned to Cambridge, where his mother had again taken a house. He opened a school there and had among his pupils Richard Henry Dana, 2d, but he was afflicted with rheumatism and threatened with lung complaint. He managed to attend some of the lectures at the Divinity School, and made a show of keeping along with his class. But he afterward declared that if the authorities had examined him on his studies they would not have passed him. They did not examine him, and he was “approbated to preach” by the Middlesex Association of Ministers in October, 1826, and on the fifteenth of that month delivered his first public sermon at Waltham. As cold weather came on, he was obliged to go South. The deferring of his hopes made him heartsick. Mr. M. D. Conway says he preached in Charleston, which had the only Unitarian pulpit south of the Potomac. But the weather was cold and he took a sloop to St. Augustine, where he spent the winter “parading the beach and thinking of his brother barnacles at a distance.” He was amused at the theological and civil manners of the place, where “the worthy father of the Catholic Church was arrested and imprisoned for debt, where the president of the Bible Society was notorious for his profanity, and its treasurer, the marshal of the district, combined meetings of the society with slave-auctions.” Emerson made the acquaintance of Prince Achille Murat, “a philosopher, a scholar, a man of the world, very sceptical but very candid, and an ardent lover of truth.” He long remembered him as “a type Of heroic manners and sweet-tempered ability.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY When he reached Alexandria after a direfully tempestuous voyage, he wrote his aunt that he was not a jot better or worse than when he left home. In this same letter he describes how when he reads Walter Scott, a thousand imperfect suggestions arise in his mind, which, if he could give heed, would make him a novelist; and, when he chances to light on a verse of genuine poetry, even in the corner of a newspaper, a forcible sympathy awakened a legion of little goblins in the recesses of his soul, and if he had leisure to attend to the fine tiny rabble, he would straightway be a poet. He confessed that in his day-dreams he hungered and thirsted to be a painter. On his return he “supplied” for some weeks at the First Church, during the absence of its regular minister. Then in the autumn of 1827 he supplied for Mr. Hall at Northampton, where he made the acquaintance of the Lymans. Mrs. Lyman was a descendant of Anne Hutchinson, whom Emerson’s ancestor, Peter Bulkeley, had helped to drive out of Massachusetts; but a warm friendship quickly sprang up between the brilliant and beautiful woman and the pale young student, whom she called an angel unawares. He had several “calls” to accept permanent positions, but his health was still so uncertain that he refused them all, and lived at Cambridge a desultory life, “lounging on a system,” writing a sermon a month, strolling, courting the society of laughing persons, and trying to win “firmer health and solid powers.” He had not as yet shown evidence of remarkable ability; his brothers Edward and Charles entirely eclipsed him. He never jested (so Dr. Hedge said), was slow in speech and in movement, and was never known to run. Yet when his brother Edward, “the admired, learned, eloquent,” lost first his reason and then his health, and died in self- imposed exile, Emerson wrote in his journal that he had little fear for such an evil, even in the line of the constitutional calamity of his family; “I have so much mixture of silliness in my intellectual frame, that I think Providence has tempered me against this.” He had preached temporarily at Concord, N. H., and there he met Miss Ellen Louisa Tucker, the daughter of a former Boston merchant. She had greatly impressed him, but he thought he had “got over his blushes and his wishes.” But when he met her again in December, 1828, he “surrendered at discretion.” “She is seventeen years old and very beautiful by universal consent,” he wrote his brother William. In March of the following year he was settled as colleague of the Rev. Henry Ware, Jr., over the Second or Old North Church, and in September was married and established in a house in Chardon Place. His happiness and success seemed to him too great to last. His intuitions were not ill founded. He found himself unable to administer the Communion in its concrete oral form, and when the church refused to let him continue the service, dropping “the use of the elements,” he resigned, and his resignation was accepted by a vote of thirty against twenty-four. It must have been a relief to him to be free, for all that savored of ritual was distasteful to him, and even. extempore prayer was irksome. He did not excel in the usual pastoral relations. It is related of him that when he was summoned to administer consolation at the bedside of a Revolutionary veteran, and showed some awkwardness in the matter, the dying man rose in his wrath and exclaimed, “Young man, if you don’t know your business, you had better go home.” Even the sexton of the church declared that in his opinion he was not born to be a minister. But his ability in the pulpit was marked, and many of his congregation greatly regretted the step that was forced on him. He had recently suffered the loss of his young wife, who even before her marriage was threatened with consumption. She died in February, 1831. He was like a ship adrift. But great schemes were floating in his mind. One of them was the establishment of “a magazine of his ownty-donty,” in which there should be no coöperation, but only his personal individuality to unify it. Again his health broke down. He was disheartened, and felt that the doom of his race was on him. At first it was suggested that he should go to the West Indies and visit his brother Edward, but at the last moment he found that a 236-ton brig was about to sail for the Mediterranean: he took passage on her and was landed at Malta on the 2d of February, 1832. In his diary written on the vessel one can read the influence of Carlyle. Speaking of the clouds, he says: “What they said goest thou forth so far to seek— painted canvas, carved marble, renowned towns? Yes, welcome, young man, the universe is hospitable; the great God who is love hath made you aware of the forms and breeding of His wide house. We greet you well to the place of history, as you please to style it, to the mighty Lilliput or ant-hill of your genealogy.” And so on quite in the style of “Sartor.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY From Malta, where he with a tame curiosity looked about La Valetta, he crossed to Sicily, spent several days in sight of Etna, drank of the waters of Arethusa, plucked the papyrus on the banks of the Anopus, visited the Catacombs, heard Mass in the ancient Temple of Minerva, and fed on fragrant Hyblæan honey and Ortygian quails; but he felt tormented by his ignorance, wanted his Vergil and his Ovid, his history and his Plutarch. “It is the playground of the gods and goddesses.” “The poor hermit who with saucer eyes had strayed from his study” found himself somewhat at a loss in those “out courts of the Old World.” “Some faces under new caps and jackets,” he says, “another turn of the old kaleidoscope.” He was not sure in the noise and myriads of people, amid the grandeur and poverty that he saw that he was growing much wiser or any better for his travels. “An hour in Boston and an hour in Naples have about equal value to the same person.” Even his judgment of people remind one of Carlyle in his peevish days. He hoped he should not always be “yoked with green, dull, pitiful persons.” The “various little people” with whom he had been “cabined up by sea and land” may have been all better and wiser than he; still they did not help him. He longed for a teacher. He would “give all Rome for one man such as were fit to walk” there. At Florence he dined and breakfasted with Landor, who, he thought, did “not quite show the same caliber in conversation as in his books.” He hoped for better things of Carlyle to whom he was pilgriming through all such inanimate trifles as coliseums and duomos. Even Venice he called “a great oddity, a city for beavers... a most disagreeable residence”; and Paris was “a loud modern New York of a place.” “Pray, what brought you here, grave sir?” “the moving Boulevard” seemed to ask him. A lecture at the Sorbonne, he complains, was far less useful to him than a lecture which he should write himself! He stayed about three weeks in London. He attended service at St. Paul’s. “Poor church,” is his only comment. He visited Coleridge and Bowring and John Stuart Mill, and still in quest for Carlyle reached Edinburgh, where he preached in the Unitarian chapel, and at last, after peculiar difficulties, discovered his ideal living quietly at Craigenputtoch — the youth he sought he called “good and wise and pleasant,” and his wife, “a most accomplished, agreeable woman.” “Truth and peace and faith dwell with them.” His visit with them he called “a white day in his years.” Carlyle, on his part, always declared it was the most beautiful thing in his experience at Craigenputtoch. Yet even Carlyle was not the long-sought master. In the deepest matters the Scotchman had nothing to teach the Yankee. He had met with men, he wrote, of far less power who had got greater insight into religious truth. But the interview on both sides was pleasing and resulted in a lifelong friendship. At Rydal Mount he paid his respects to Wordsworth, and was not offended by the old poet’s egotisms.1 Having reached Liverpool, he confided to his journal his gratitude to the great God who had led him in safety and pleasure through “this European scene— this last schoolroom” in which He had pleased to instruct him. The sight of Landor, Coleridge, Carlyle, and Wordsworth, though he realized that not one of them was “a mind of the very first class, “had comforted and confirmed him in his convictions. He felt that he would be able to judge more justly, less timidly, of wise men for evermore. It is odd and sounds almost prehistoric to read Emerson quoting the prediction that “the tithe will come when the ocean will be navigated by merchantmen by steam.” With health restored and established, he reached New York early in October, after a voyage which lasted more than a month; and, having rejoined his mother at Newton, where she was then living, he began to preach and lecture as occasion offered. On the second Sunday after his return he occupied his old pulpit in the Second Church and for four years supplied at various places. He might have had a call to New Bedford, but as he stipulated that he must not be expected to administer the Communion or to offer prayer unless the Spirit moved, the church withdrew its invitation. His first lecture was delivered in November, 1883, before the Boston Society of Natural History. His early lectures were on scientific subjects and before scientific bodies.

1. For Emerson’s own account of his experiences see “English Traits.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY He was expecting to have his wife’s share of her father’s estate, and this expectation was soon satisfied, so that he made sure of a yearly income of about $1200, and he was meditating more seriously than ever the adventure of a periodical paper which should “speak the truth without fear or favor.” This materialized afterward in The Dial. In the summer of 1834 he was the chosen poet for the .B.K. Society, and the verses contained a word portrait of Daniel Webster. His brother Edward, who had just died, had been Webster’s private secretary and tutor to his children. He went to Bangor to preach for a few Sundays, and wrote to Dr. F. H. Hedge that he was seriously thinking of trying to persuade a small number of persons to join him in a colony thirty miles up the river; but this visionary project of a forest hermitage was never carried out, and in October he went to live in Concord, which was his home throughout the rest of his life. He lived with his mother in the Manse until, in 1835, having become engaged to Miss Lidia Jackson of Plymouth, he bought at a bargain the Coolidge house, which he said was a mean place, and would be till trees and flowers should give it a character of its own. It was a square mansion set rather low in a field, through which flowed a brook down to the sluggish Concord River. In September he was called on as a townsman to deliver a discourse on the two hundredth anniversary of the incorporation of the town, and he made special investigations for the purpose of imparting historic value to it. Two days after this event he drove to Plymouth and was married there at the Winslow house, which belonged to his bride. She would have liked to live in Plymouth, but he preferred Concord, and had written to her that “he was born a poet, though his singing was very husky and for the most Dart in prose,” and therefore must guard and study his rambling propensities. Concord, he intimated, gave him sunsets, forests, snowstorms, and river views, which were more to him than friends, but Plymouth! — “Plymouth is streets!” In the winters of 1835-1836, besides supplying the East Lexington church, he began a course of ten lectures on English literature, and this made such a favorable impression that henceforth his career was assured. Not only was the subject-matter original and unique, but the judgments expressed were sound, and the delivery was marked by a peculiar charm which those who heard him never forgot: ”You are filled with delight at his clear demonstration. Each figure. word, gesture, just fits the occasion!” said Lowell. In 1836 Emerson helped to introduce to American readers Carlyle’s “Sartor Resartus,” which had the distinction of selling the first edition and a thousand copies besides, before it was put into book form in England. His efforts in this practical direction elicited the little sneer in Lowell’s “Fable for Critics,” where he speaks of Emerson in these words:— His is, we may say, A Greek head on right Yankee shoulders, whose range Has Olympus for one pole, for t’other the Exchange. again a little farther down he says he is composed of “one part pure earth, ninety-nine parts pure lecturer.” Lowell was even more severe on Emerson’s poetry. After comparing his rich words to “gold nails in temples to hang trophies on, “he says, his — Prose is grand verse. while his verse, the Lord knows, Is some of it pr— No, ’t is not even prose. And he goes on: — In the worst of his poems are mines of rich matter, But thrown in a heap with a crash and a clatter.2 Emerson was amazed, and took the poem to Miss Elizabeth Hoar, who was always his kindly censor, and asked her if she could see anything offensive in the lines. Emerson said: “She read them carefully, but failed to help me out, concluding that they were not to be altered and must be allowed to stand. So they will not trouble the readers of the Atlantic.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY In 1836, on the day of the two-hundredth anniversary of the founding of Harvard College, Emerson and others met and discussed the state of philosophy and theology. A few days later a project ripened of rounding a periodical to embody their views. Thus was started The Dial, which became the organ of the so-called transcendental movement, though the first number did not appear till July, 1840. Emerson’s book, “Nature,” is regarded as “the first document of that remarkable outburst of Romanticism on Puritan ground.” It was published in September, 1836. Only a few copies were sold, and twelve years elapsed before a new edition was called for. But it was violently attacked by the champions of orthodoxy. Yet Dr. O.W. Holmes said Emerson took down men’s “idols from their pedestals so tenderly that it seemed like an act of worship.” This year was saddened by the death of Charles Emerson, whom Ralph Waldo called “his brother, his friend, his ornament, his joy, and pride”; he “has fallen by the wayside or rather has risen out of this dust,” he wrote in his journal; “now commences a new and gloomy epoch of my life.... Who can ever supply his place to me?” Charles Emerson was a born orator, who would have conferred on the Republic rare gifts of genius had he lived. Emerson’s lament for him was one of the most touching things he ever wrote. This same year Emerson’s first child, a boy “of wonderful promise,” was born, but he lived only five years. Within a few years Margaret Fuller and Amos Bronson Alcott came to him in Concord; but Margaret Fuller, in spite of her genius and in spite of his admiration for her genius, always “froze him to silence,” and he had the same effect on her when they were on the point of coming nearer. But for Alcott he had the highest praise. He called him the most extraordinary man and the highest genius of his time. This admiration lasted till the end of his life. In his later days, when aphasia had so shattered his mind, there is a pathetic picture of him talking over the fence with Alcott with much of his old-time fluency; but in the afternoon Alcott returned and brought back to Emerson the philosophic bread that had been cast on the waters so abundantly. And Emerson, oblivious to the fact that it was his own, dilated with admiration, and exclaimed: “What a wonderful mind my friend over yonder” —he could not remember his name — “has!” Thoreau was also one of Emerson’s intimates, and frequently shared his week-day walks. Yet, curiously enough, Emerson objected to printing Thoreau’s “Winter Walk” in The Dial. Hawthorne lived for four years in Concord, occupying the old Manse, but, though he was a great walker, he is known to have walked with Emerson only once, when they went together to visit the Shakers at Lebanon. Emerson said of Hawthorne, “Alcott and he together would make a man!” Emerson’s reading, as might be imagined, was peculiarly eclectic and erratic. Mr. Cabot says he cared nothing for Shelley, Aristophanes, Don Quixote, Miss Austen, Dickens, Dante, or French literature. He rarely read a novel. But the Neo-Platonists and the Sacred Books of the East particularly engaged him, and were the inspiration of many of his mystic lines. Mr. Cabot says he lived among his books and was never comfortable away from them, yet they did not enter much into his life. In 1836, having finished a course of twelve lectures on the “Philosophy of History,” he was asked to repeat them in various places, though the one on “Religion” gave some offence. The substance of these twelve lectures afterward was included in his first series of “Essays.” He still officiated occasionally as a minister, but the reception of his Phi Beta Kappa oration on “The American Scholar;” given August 31, 1837 cut the last thread of attachment. Lowell said of this: “It was an event without any former parallel in our literary annals.... What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent.” Dr. Holmes called that oration “Our Intellectual Declaration of Independence.”

2. When Lowell was editor of the Atlantic Monthly, Emerson sent him his mystic “Song of Nature.” But Lowell returned it to him, stating that certain lines in it would offend the religious susceptibilities of the community. The lines particularized were those where Homer, Shakespeare, and Plato were united with Christ in one:— Twice have I moulded an image, And thrice outstretched my hand; Made one of day, and one of night, And one of the salt sea-sand. One in a Judean manger And one by Avon stream, One over against the mouths of Nile, And one in the Academe. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY In February he relinquished his charge at East Lexington, though his wife mourned “to see the froward man cutting the last threads that bound him to that prized gown and band, the symbols black and white of old and distant Judah.” A still greater shock came from the discourse which Emerson delivered in July, 1838, on the graduation day of the Divinity School. The Advertiser led in a bitter attack on him. Emerson described the stir that it made as “a storm in our wash-bowl.” But it nearly resulted in excluding him from the lyceum as well as from the church; and he felt a little disturbed that it had placed him on an undeserved pedestal as a champion of heresy. But his annual courses of lectures in Boston were not less popular. Theodore Parker wrote of the first one, given in the early winter of 1839: It “was splendid— better meditated and more coherent than any theory I have ever heard from him. Your eyes were not dazzled by a stream of golden atoms of thought such as he sometimes shoots forth —though there was no lack of these sparklers.” Emerson had at first declined to have editorial control of The Dial, but when, after two years of uphill struggle, Margaret Fuller relinquished it, he took hold most unwillingly and kept it along for two years more at some expense of money and much expense of worry. It lived till April, 1844. His own known contributions numbered not far from fifty. There may have been half as many again. During three years the question of negro emancipation was coming to the fore. Emerson was at first more interested in having the right of free discussion upheld than in the deeper question beyond. In November, 1837, he spoke on Slavery in the vestry of the Second Church in Concord, but the Abolitionists thought his tone was too cool and philosophical; but in 1844 he delivered an address in the Concord courthouse in celebration of the anniversary of the liberation of the British West India Island slaves. All of the Concord churches refused to open their doors to the convention, so Thoreau secured the court-house, and is said to have rung the bell himself. And this time Emerson’s trumpet gave forth no uncertain sound. He took a wise and common-sense view about woman suffrage, and, though he was not inveigled into any of the labor associations, such as Brook Farm and Fruitlands, in which his enthusiastic friends tried to interest him, he was not averse to developing a simpler and fairer way of living, and he invited the Alcotts to come and make common cause with them for a year. But Mrs. Alcott was wiser than the rest, and prevented the experiment being tried. These years were not free from pecuniary anxieties. The most he ever received for a course of ten lectures before 1847 was $570. The country lyceums paid $10 and expenses. His family was increasing, and the town levied heavy taxes on him. His tax-bill for 1839 was more than $160. So he was constantly in debt, and his chief resource was the lecture field, though it revolted his nature to sell “good wine of Castaly.” In 1843 he spent the whole winter away from home, lecturing in New York, Baltimore, and other places. Moreover, in order to preserve a hold on nature, he bought fourteen acres of woodland on Lake Walden, and this was a pecuniary burden for several years. It comes with a sense of relief, like a sea-breeze on a sultry day, to read of him taking a vacation from that strenuous life of the platform by going to the seashore. He wrote his wife: “I read Plato, I swim, and be it known unto you, I did verily catch with hook and line yesterday morning two haddocks, a cod, a flounder, and a pollock, and a perch.... The sea is great!” This touch of the sea, “inexact and boundless,” may be detected in the oration which he tried to write at Nantasket for delivery at Waterville, Me. But “the heat and happiness” of his inspiration were extinguished, as he long afterward confessed, by the cold reception with which it met. It was either at Waterville or in a Vermont town, perhaps both, that the minister at the end of the discourse prayed to be “delivered from ever again hearing such transcendental nonsense from the sacred desk.” Afterward he went a number of times to the Adirondacks, where some of his sweetest poems were composed. He bought a rifle, but never used it. Mr. Cabot says that lecturing, after all, was not the mode of utterance to which he aspired. Verse was, because he could get a larger and freer speech in rhyme. Some of his poems had been circulated, a few had been printed. And in December, 1843, a bookseller proposed to him to furnish a volume of his verses. But four years passed before the crucial impulse came to remedy “the corrigible and reparable places in them,” and to put them together. “It was a small venture,” he said. “My poems did not pay. My cranberry meadows paid much better.” And when he made this remark he added, “My poems fell dead in England.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY In 1847 he made his second journey to England, visited Carlyle for four days, and was amazed at “the great and constant stream” of his talk. “Carlyle and his wife,” he says in a home letter, “live on beautiful terms.” He breakfasted with Rogers, drank tea with James Martineau, and found profuse kindness and hospitality in Preston, Leicester, Chesterfield (where he dined with Stephenson, “the old engineer who built the first locomotive”), Birmingham— everywhere he went. At Edinburgh, where he lectured several times, he met all the notables, — “Christopher North,” David Scott the painter, who made a portrait of him, Mrs. Jeffrey, Lord Jeffrey, Thomas De Quincey, and many more. Still more brilliant was the society he met in London, — Macaulay, Bunsen, Milman, Milnes, Hallam, Lord Morpeth, “Barry Cornwall,” Lord and Lady Ashburton, Thackeray, Disraeli, Lord Palmerston, and Tennyson. He was elected a member of the Athenæum Club, where he found some of the best men of England. In May, 1848, he crossed to Paris and saw something of the Revolution and went to the theatre, where he heard Rachel. He complained humorously that his French was far from being as good as Madame de Staël’s. He returned to London in June and gave a course of lectures, at which he had most aristocratic audiences and dined with great lords and brilliant authors. But the pecuniary returns were smaller than he had reason to expect. For the Marylebone course of six he got only £80 instead of £200. On his return to America he made the larger part of his income by lecturing. But he looked on the whole business as rather unseemly. He thought that it was a pity to drive young America to lecture, and as to the lecturer, he said that the “dragging of a decorous old gentleman out of home was tantamount to a bet of $50 a day that he would not leave his library and wade, and freeze, and ride, and run, and suffer all manner of indignities, and stand up for an hour each night reading in a hall.” But he did it, and his pictures of travel in the West in the pre-Pullman days are like the stories of the martyrs. Here we find him sleeping on the floor of a canal-boat, where the cushion allowed him for a bed was crossed at the knees by another tier of sleepers as long-limbed as he, “so that in the air was a wreath of legs”; again occupying a cabin, though in company with governors and legislators, and a cold of minus fifteen degrees. Again, flying through the forests of Michigan in company with college professors and wolverines. And again, ferried across the Mississippi in a skiff, where “much of the rowing was on the surface of fixed ice, in fault of running water.” In 1849 Emerson’s separate addresses and “Nature” were published in one volume, and the next year came “Representative Men.” That year, 1850, also brought with it the Fugitive Slave Law, and Emerson’s voice was lifted nobly against it. He here made a magnificent attack on Daniel Webster, for whose genius he had such an admiration as “the best and proudest, the first man of the North.” He believed in confining slavery to the slave states, and then gradually and effectually making an end of it. He called on “the thirty nations” to do something besides ditching and draining. Said he, “Let them confront this mountain of poison and shovel it once for all down into the bottomless pit. A thousand millions were cheap!” History proved the truth of his prophetic words. At Cambridge he repeated the words containing these wise counsels, but was so interrupted by hisses and cat-calls that he could not go on. The college authorities, like the clergy and merchants, were generally Southern in sentiment. When John Brown was in prison under sentence of death Emerson had the courage to call him “that new saint, than whom none purer or more brave was ever led by love of men into conflict and death— the new saint awaiting his martyrdom.” His attitude on that burning question of the day militated against his success as a lecturer. Invitations to speak were withdrawn, and in 1861 at the meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society “the mob roared” whenever he tried to speak, and he had to withdraw. That was in his native Boston! The war also brought poverty pretty close to Emerson as to so many others. His books did not sell, his income from lecturing almost ceased, his real estate was unproductive, and he found himself struggling with the problem, how to pay three or four hundred dollars’ worth of debts with fifty. On January 1, 1863, when Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, a Jubilee Concert was given at the Music Hall, and Emerson read his “Boston Hymn.” The time which he gave himself for its composition was so short that he was in despair, test he should not be able to do anything worthy of the occasion. But the inspiration flowed and a new treasure was added to English literature. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY That same evening a gathering of the faithful took place at the house of Major George L. Stearns, at Medford, who perhaps did more than any man in Massachusetts to help along the cause of emancipation, who spent money like water, and himself raised the first two regiments of colored troops. Mrs. Stearns, who, with intellect as keen as ever, still lives to speak eloquently of those great days, thus tells the story of that epic gathering. “Mr. Emerson was persuaded to repeat his poem, the ‘Boston Hymn,’ the original manuscript of which the Rev. Samuel Longfellow promptly begged of the author. “It was a brilliant assembly, filled with exultation over the decree of emancipation which had been wired from Washington. The certainty of this great measure Wendell Phillips had announced as he entered the drawing- room. Instinctively the company burst into the John Brown song, greeting the newly unveiled bust of the martyr of freedom, which the sculptor J.Q.A. Brackett had just made. “It was past midnight when the guests departed, every heart glowing with the sublime event, rejoicing with a mighty joy that deliverance from slavery at last had come.” Then occurred one of those charming little episodes so characteristic of Emerson’s thoughtfulness and simplicity. Mrs. Stearns thus relates it: — “Mr. Emerson and his friend, Mr. Alcott, remained overnight. “When the hostess asked Mr. Emerson his preference of sleeping rooms, he said, ‘Let Mr. Alcott and myself have the same room, then Vesta will have only one instead of two beds to make in the morning.’” Another characteristic anecdote of the same kind may be related here, also from Mrs. Stearns’s recollections: — “On one occasion, after we had been visiting the Emersons, when we were preparing to drive home, the evening being rather chilly, for it was autumn, Mr. Emerson brought his overcoat from the hall, and, holding it up by the collar, said, ‘I am always a little suspicious of the warmth of ladies’ garments, the evening is cool, and the drive is one of seventeen miles; it will oblige me, Mrs. Stearns, if you will put on this overcoat, and wear it home. It can be recommended for warmth if not for elegance.’ “It was beautiful hospitality and consideration, but I instinctively drew back, saying:— “‘Oh, Mr. Emerson, how can I dare to wear the Lion ’s Skin!’” He could only be persuaded to withdraw the overcoat by being assured that sufficient wraps were stowed away in the carriage. “I have regretted,” says Mrs. Stearns, “the modest scruples that hindered the wearing of the Poet’s Coat, just for once.” In 1863 he was appointed one of the visitors to West Point, where John Burroughs, seeing him, took him to be “an inquisitive farmer.” In 1866 he was granted the degree of Doctor of Laws by Harvard and elected one of the overseers. The following year he was orator for the .B.K. Society —” not now,” says Mr. Cabot, “as a promising young beginner from whom a fair poetical speech might be expected, but as the foremost man of letters of New England.” It was at this time rumored that he was drifting back from heretical to more conventional opinions in religious matters; and it is stated on good authority that, when it was proposed to dispense with compulsory prayers at Harvard, Emerson’s vote prevented the innovation from prevailing. But he authorized his son to announce that he had not retracted any of his views. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY Three years later he was gratified to be invited to give a course of university lectures in Cambridge, and for this he prepared his sketches of “The Natural History of the Intellect,” but he was not satisfied with his attempt to make a system of philosophy. The fruit of Emerson’s intellect was not cohesive, but granular, and his thoughts are not easily moulded into a consecutive logical form. Hence it was possible for him to begin a lecture or end it anywhere. In his latter days I remember hearing him read a paper before the Radical Club. Every little while he would stop, saying he had gone far enough. But the audience and his daughter would persuade him to continue. But when he finally paused, the subject had been neither begun nor exhausted. His mind was like a carbon point; when the electricity was turned on, it gave out light, and it was always ready to shine. He repeated his Cambridge course the next year, but felt that he had not succeeded as he had hoped to do. In a letter to Carlyle he called it “a doleful ordeal,” and when it was concluded, accepted with alacrity an invitation to visit California on a six weeks’ trip with near friends and in the most delightful circumstances. After 1870 the decay of his mental powers, particularly of his memory: was very noticeable. He spoke of himself as “a man who had lost his wits.” His last effort of composition was an introduction to Plutarch’s “Morals” edited by Professor Goodwin. He compared it carefully with the original Greek, which he was able to read. In July, 1872, he had just returned from Amherst, where he had delivered an address, when he discovered that his house was on fire. The neighbors rushed to his aid and succeeded in saving the books, manuscript, and furniture; but the house was ruined by fire and water, and Emerson himself contracted a feverish attack from exposure to the dampness. Friends rushed to his aid in even more substantial ways. Mr. Francis Cabot Lowell brought him an envelope containing $5000. Nearly $12,000 more were contributed to rebuild the house, and while the work was in progress he was persuaded to make another journey abroad, to visit London, Italy, and Egypt. He saw Carlyle once more and dined with the Khedive. He and his daughter went up the Nile to Philæ, but on the whole he was disappointed with the sacred land: “the people despise us,” he wrote, “because we are helpless babies who cannot speak or understand a word they say; the sphynxes scorn dunces; the obelisks, the temple-walls, defy us with their histories which we cannot spell.” The journey did him good, however, and on his return to Italy he began to work on a new edition of his poems. In Paris he saw Renan, Taine, Turgenief, and James Russell Lowell; in England he declined all invitations but one to speak, but he breakfasted with Gladstone, and saw Browning and many other notables. When he reached home in May he was surprised and touched by the spontaneous welcome of his townspeople. The church bells rang, the whole town assembled—babies and all—and he was escorted with music to his new house, where a triumphal arch had been erected. He found his study unchanged, but many improvements had been introduced in the restoration of the house. The following year his anthology of collected poems, “Parnassus,” was published, and he was asked to be one of the candidates for the lord rectorship of Glasgow University. For this he received five hundred votes. Disraeli was elected, however. In March, 1875, he went to lecture in Philadelphia, and had a delightful visit with his old friends, Dr. Furhess and Samuel Bradford. The next month he made a little speech at the unveiling of Mr. Daniel C. French’s “Minute Man,” and this is believed to be the last piece written out with his own hand. After this time Mr. James Eliot Cabot served as his literary guide, shaping his lectures, and combining them, and helping him to arrange for the complete edition of his works. Still occasionally reading from his lectures, still enjoying the serene calm of old age, where even his infirmity of memory may have made it all the serener, free from all worriment, he lived on till the spring of 1882, when he died of pneumonia on the 27th of April, at the very end of his seventy-eighth year. One could fill many pages with testimonials of the influence of Emerson with contemporary descriptions of the man and his beneficent life. Henry Crabbe Robinson declared that he had one of the most interesting countenances that he had ever beheld —a quite disarming combination of intelligence and sweetness. N. P. Willis grew enthusiastic over the voice, which he said was the utterance of his soul only, and his soul had sprung to the adult stature of a child of the universe. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY Dr. Holmes said: “He was always courteous and bland to a remarkable degree; his smile was the well remembered line of Terence written out in living features.” No one who ever heard him speak will forget the play of his features, the lighting up of his eyes with a rapt inner illumination, the emphatic stamp of his foot when some weighty thought required enforcement. He was one of the great souls of the century, and his works will be for all time a source of inspiration to young and old. They are indeed a mine of thought, all the more valuable, perhaps, that they are not welded into a system. Many enthusiasts consider him to have been the greatest poet America has yet produced. Technically this thesis can never be supported. His disdain of mere form led him to produce verses which read with heaviness and halting but the beauty of the thought atones for missing symmetry and freshness of rhyme and Emerson as a poet will always have an audience of admirers and some worshippers, oblivious of his verse’s fault. Once when some one praised his poetry Emerson interrupted, “You forget; we are damned for poetry.” And he wrote to Carlyle that he was “not a poet, but a lover of poetry and poets”—a sort of harbinger of the poets to come. Emerson’s influence was always exerted in the line of the loftiest aspirations. Consequently he will always be dear to thinkers and to poets, and an inspiration to the young. His whole life, however closely examined, shows no flaw of temper or of foible. It was serene and lovely to the end. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

1900

Henry Seidel Canby became an assistant in English at Yale University’s Sheffield Scientific School.

At this point Barrett Wendell, in his A LITERARY HISTORY OF AMERICA, uncritically bought into the category “American Renaissance” formed in 1876 by Samuel Osgood.

At this point Marcel Proust (according to William H. Carter’s MARCEL PROUST: A LIFE, published by Yale University Press in 2000) was contemplating the abandonment of his diligent pursuit of the idle rich, to take up a serious project, that of translating WALDEN into the French language. —Well, but this would turn out to be yet another idle fancy.

William Sidney Drewry, interviewing still-living witnesses to the death of Nat Turner in 1831, was informed that the doctors who had taken charge of the body had skinned it and then had it rendered into grease. He was informed that, until it had disappeared mysteriously, Turner’s skeleton had been in the possession of a Dr. Massenberg. He was informed that a Mr. R.S. Barham’s father owned “a money purse made of his hide.” There are many citizens still living who have seen Nat’s skull. It was very peculiarly shaped, resembling the head of a sheep, and at least three-quarters of an inch thick. THE MARKET FOR HUMAN BODY PARTS This treatment of the corpse of an insurrectionist, or, this reported treatment, differed greatly from the HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY treatment which would be awarded to a comparison figure, “Captain” John Brown. A professor of anatomy at the University of Virginia had requested that Governor Henry A. Wise provide him with Brown’s head for examination. The body might be supplied too, the professor suggested — so long as shipping costs were not too high. Wise declined this on the curious grounds that he admired Brown’s bravery, but Brown’s body almost wound up decapitated after his hanging, anyway. What would the attending physicians at the white man’s execution be up to? –They would be concerned that, shades of Mary Shelley’s “Dr. Frankenstein’s monster,” perhaps Brown might be revivable by his friends through the use of “galvanic batteries.” However, by the time these physicians enjoyed their lunch, they would note that the corpse had not moved during the interim, and would be sufficiently assured that it was sufficiently discharged of its vital electric fluid as not to be plugged in and recharged, that they would not carry out their agenda to decapitate.3 HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

1902

Jack Marles, a London dentist, devised a mouth guard that boxers could use during training bouts (the English welterweight Ted “Kid” Lewis, who would be prominent from 1915 to 1919, would be the initial pro boxer to regularly wear one of Dr. Marles’s devices while in the prize ring itself). 3. Although this macabre incident may remind us of Mary Shelly’s novel of that century, it may also remind us of a quite recent pseudo-documentary in which Timothy Leary’s head, or what appears to be his head, is removed for cryogenic storage subsequent to his death by currently incurable cancer. It has been suggested that the difference in treatment between the black corpse and the white corpse is an illustration of the Southern code of honor, according to which only a brave man, who scorned death, would have been considered to be worthy of freedom. Consider, for instance, that the story told of Nat Turner’s capture was that he surrendered abjectly to the one white man who discovered him inside his cave, throwing out his sword onto the ground, taking into account that this story of Turner’s capture, a story which needed to be told, was already in circulation while the insurrectionist was in fact still very much at large. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

Henry Seidel Canby’s initial book-length publication, THE SHORT STORY, expounded upon the characteristics of short stories — characteristics such as shortness. In the most frequently quoted excerpt he characterizes the “primal difference” between a novel writer’s impressionism and a short story writer’s artifice: His endeavor is to give a striking narrative picture of one phase of the situation or the character, as the case may be. His aim is toward a strip lengthwise, disregarding much that a cross- section might show. He deals with a series of incidents, closely related to one another but not at all to the byplay of life which, in reality, must accompany them. He treats of a mood always existing, but in the story supremely indicated; perhaps of an adventure or a catastrophe....

Fortunately, this publication is but 30 pages in length. You can read it in a minute or two and are urged to do so, preferably after inserting one of Dr. Marles’s devices. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

1903

Bertrand Russell laid the foundation for his place in the world of philosophy with his THE PRINCIPLES OF MATHEMATICS.

Meanwhile, Henry Seidel Canby advanced to the rank of instructor at Yale University’s Sheffield Scientific School. Meanwhile, the 1st US intercollegiate dual wrestling bout was held in New York City. In this bout the Columbia University team would wrestle the Yale University team to a 2/2 draw (until the mid-20s these Ivies would have the winningest US collegiate wrestling teams, after which schools from heartland venues like Oklahoma and Iowa would dominate). HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

1905

Due to deficiencies in mathematics, George Smith Patton, Jr. was granted a do-over for his Plebe year at West Point. (Go figure, George.)

Henry Seidel Canby received his Ph.D from Yale University and received there the exalted rank of Assistant Professor.

In a premonition of things to come, John Fitzgerald was elected mayor of Boston. Meanwhile, Harry S Truman moved to a rooming house at 1314 Troost Avenue in Kansas City, Missouri, where he was working as a bookkeeper for Union National Bank. He enlisted as a private in Battery B of the Missouri National Guard (and would soon find himself promoted to corporal). HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

1907

The Tonawanda, New York High School basketball team defeated the other high school teams and eventually took on college teams such as those of Keuka College and Yale University varsity. It even managed to score 38 points against its opponent’s 43 in a match against a professional team, the German Orioles of Buffalo. SPORTS

Henry Seidel Canby got married with Marion (“Lady”) Ponsonby Gause. Their union would produce Edward Tatnall Canby in 1912 and Courtlandt Canby in 1914. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

1909

Henry Seidel Canby’s THE SHORT STORY IN ENGLISH. This was more than an order of magnitude longer than his previous publication, THE SHORT STORY! The most frequently quoted excerpt would run as follows: A poem, in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having, for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth; to romance, by having for its object an indefinite instead of a definite pleasure, being a poem only so far as this object is attained; romance presenting perceptible images with definite, poetry with indefinite sensations, to which end music is an essential, since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception. Now that you have comprehended the above, you are prepared to live!

Edward Waldo Emerson pulled together, from a number of commencement and similar addresses his father had made, a piece on education for THE COMPLETE WRITINGS OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON. EMERSON ON EDUCATION

A new degree of intellectual power seems cheap at any price. The use of the world is that man may learn its laws. And the human race have wisely signified their sense of this, by calling wealth, means — Man being the end. Language is always wise. Therefore I praise New England because it is the country in the world where is the freest expenditure for education. We have already taken, at the planting of the Colonies (for aught I know for the first time in the world), the initial step, which for its importance might have been resisted as the most radical of revolutions, thus deciding at the start the destiny of this country — this, namely, that the poor man, whom the law does not allow to take an ear of corn when starving, nor a pair of shoes for his freezing feet, is allowed to put his hand into the pocket of the rich, and say, You shall educate me, not as you will, but as I will: not alone in the elements, but, by further provision, in the languages, in sciences, in the useful and in elegant arts. The child shall be taken up by the State, and taught, at the public cost, the rudiments of knowledge, and, at last, the ripest results of art and science. Humanly speaking, the school, the college, society, make the difference between men. All the fairy tales of Aladdin or the invisible Gyges or the talisman that opens kings’ palaces or the enchanted halls underground or in the sea, are any fictions to indicate the one miracle of intellectual enlargement. When a man stupid becomes a man inspired, when one and the same man passes out of the torpid into the perceiving state, leaves the din of trifles, the stupor of the senses, to enter into the quasi- omniscience of high thought — up and down, around, all limits disappear. No horizon shuts down. He sees things in their causes, all facts in their connection. One of the problems of history is the beginning of civilization. The animals that accompany and serve man make no progress as races. Those called domestic are capable of learning of man a HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY few tricks of utility or amusement, but they cannot communicate the skill to their race. Each individual must be taught anew. The trained dog cannot train another dog. And Man himself in many faces retains almost the unteachableness of the beast. For a thousand years the islands and forests of a great part of the world have been led with savages who made no steps of advance in art or skill beyond the necessity of being fed and warmed. Certain nations with a better brain and usually in more temperate climates have made such progress as to compare with these as these compare with the bear and the wolf. Victory over things is the office of man. Of course, until it is accomplished, it is the war and insult of things over him. His continual tendency, his great danger, is to overlook the fact that the world is only his teacher, and the nature of sun and moon, plant and animal only means of arousing his interior activity. Enamored of their beauty, comforted by their convenience, he seeks them as ends, and fast loses sight of the fact that they have worse than no values, that they become noxious, when he becomes their slave. This apparatus of wants and faculties, this craving body, whose organs ask all the elements and all the functions of Nature for their satisfaction, educate the wondrous creature which they satisfy with light, with heat, with water, with wood, with bread, with wool. The necessities imposed by his most irritable and all-related texture have taught Man hunting, pasturage, agriculture, commerce, weaving, joining, masonry, geometry, astronomy. Here is a world pierced and belted with natural laws, and fenced and planted with civil partitions and properties, which all put new restraints on the young inhabitant. He too must come into this magic circle of relations, and know health and sickness, the fear of injury, the desire of external good, the charm of riches, the charm of power. The household is a school of power. There, within the door, learn the tragicomedy of human life. Here is the sincere thing, the wondrous composition for which day and night go round. In that routine are the sacred relations, the passions that bind and sever. Here is poverty and all the wisdom its hated necessities can teach, here labor drudges, here affections glow, here the secrets of character are told, the guards of man, the guards of woman, the compensations which, like angels of justice, pay every debt: the opium of custom, whereof all drink and many go mad. Here is Economy, and Glee, and Hospitality, and Ceremony, and Frankness, and Calamity, and Death, and Hope. Every man has a trust of power — every man, every boy a jurisdiction, whether it be over a cow or a rood of a potato- field, or a fleet of ships, or the laws of a state. And what activity the desire of power inspires! What toils it sustains! How it sharpens the perceptions and stores the memory with facts. Thus a man may well spend many years of life in trade. It is a constant teaching of the laws of matter and of mind, No dollar of property can be created without some direct communication with nature, and of course some acquisition of knowledge and practical force. It is a constant contest with the active faculties of men, a study of the issues of one and another course of action, an accumulation of power, and, if the higher faculties of the individual be from time to time quickened, he will gain wisdom and virtue from his business. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY As every wind draws music out of the Aeolian harp, so doth every object in Nature draw music out of his mind. Is it not true that every landscape I behold, every friend I meet, every act I perform, every pain I suffer, leaves me a different being from that they found me? That poverty, love, authority, anger, sickness, sorrow, success, all work actively upon our being and unlock for us the concealed faculties of the mind? Whatever private or petty ends are frustrated, this end is always answered. Whatever the man does, or whatever befalls him, opens another chamber in his soul — that is, he has got a new feeling, a new thought, a new organ. Do we not see how amazingly for this end man is fitted to the world? What leads him to science? Why does he track in the midnight heaven a pure spark, a luminous patch wandering from age to age, but because he acquires thereby a majestic sense of power; learning that in his own constitution he can set the shining maze in order, and finding and carrying their law in his mind, can, as it were, see his simple idea realized up yonder in giddy distances and frightful periods of duration. If Newton come and first of men perceive that not alone certain bodies fall to the ground at a certain rate, but that all bodies in the Universe, the universe of bodies, fall always, and at one rate; that every atom in nature draws to every other atom — he extends the power of his mind not only over every cubic atom of his native planet, but he reports the condition of millions of worlds which his eye never saw. And what is the charm which every ore, every new plant, every new fact touching winds, clouds, ocean currents, the secrets of chemical composition and decomposition possess for Humboldt. What but that much revolving of similar facts in his mind has shown him that always the mind contains in its transparent chambers the means of classifying the most refractory phenomena, of depriving, them of all casual and chaotic aspect, and subordinating them to a bright reason of its own, and so giving to man a sort of property — yea, the very highest property in every district and particle of the globe By the permanence of Nature, minds are trained alike, and made intelligible to each other. In our condition are the roots of language and communication, and these instructions we never exhaust. In some sort the end of life is that the man should take up the universe into himself, or out of that quarry leave nothing unrepresented. Yonder mountain must migrate into his mind. Yonder magnificent astronomy he is at last to import, fetching away moon, and planet, solstice, period, comet and binal star, by comprehending their relation and law. Instead of the timid stripling he was, he is to be the stalwart Archimedes, Pythagoras, Columbus, Newton, of the physic, metaphysic and ethics of the design of the world. For truly the population of the globe has its origin in the aims which their existence is to serve; and so with every portion of them. The truth takes flesh in forms that can express it; and thus in history an idea always overhangs, like the moon, and rules the tide which rises simultaneously in all the souls of a generation. Whilst thus the world exists for the mind; whilst thus the man is ever invited inward into shining realms of knowledge and HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY power by the shows of the world, which interpret to him the infinitude of his own consciousness — it becomes the office of a just education to awaken him to the knowledge of this fact. We learn nothing rightly until we learn the symbolical character of life. Day creeps after day, each full of facts, dull, strange, despised things, that we cannot enough despise — call heavy, prosaic, and desert. The time we seek to kill: the attention it is elegant to divert from things around us. And presently the aroused intellect finds gold and gems in one of these scorned facts — then finds that the day of facts is a rock of diamonds; that a fact is an Epiphany of God. We have our theory of life, our religion, our philosophy; and the event of each moment, the shower, the steamboat disaster the passing of a beautiful face, the apoplexy of our neighbor, are all tests to try our theory, the approximate result we call truth, and reveal its defects. If I have renounced the search of truth, if I have come into the port of some pretending dogmatism, some new church or old church, some Schelling or Cousin, I have died to all use of these new events that are born out of prolific time into multitude of life every hour. I am as a bankrupt to whom brilliant opportunities offer in vain. He has just foreclosed his freedom, tied his hands, locked himself up and given the key to another to keep. When I see the doors by which God enters into the mind; that there is no sot or fop, ruffian or pedant into whom thoughts do not enter by passages which the individual never left open, I can expect any revolution in character. “I have hope,” said the great Leibnitz, “that society may be reformed, when I see how much education may be reformed.” It is ominous, a presumption of crime, that this word Education has so cold, so hopeless a sound. A treatise on education, a convention for education, a lecture, a system, affects us with slight paralysis and a certain yawning of the jaws. We are not encouraged when the law touches it with its fingers. Education should be as broad as man. Whatever elements are in him that should foster and demonstrate. If he be dexterous, his tuition should make it appear; if he be capable of dividing men by the trenchant sword of his thought, education should unsheathe and sharpen it; if he is one to cement society by his all-reconciling affinities, oh! hasten their action! If he is jovial, if he is mercurial, if he is a great-hearted, a cunning artificer, a strong commander, a potent ally, ingenious, useful, elegant, witty, prophet, diviner — society has need of all these. The imagination must be addressed. Why always coast on the surface and never open the interior of nature, not by science, which is surface still, but by poetry? Is not the Vast an element of the mind? Yet what teaching, what book of this day appeals to the Vast? Our culture has truckled to the times — to the senses. It is not manworthy. If the vast and the spiritual are omitted, so are the practical and the moral. It does not make us brave or free. We teach boys to be such men as we are. We do not teach them to aspire to be all they can. We do not give them a training as if we believed in their noble nature. We scarce educate their bodies. We do not train the eye and the hand. We exercise their understandings to the apprehension and: comparison of some HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY facts, to a skill in numbers, in words; we aim to make accountants, attorneys, engineers; but not to make able, earnest, great-hearted men. The great object of Education should be commensurate with the object of life. It should be a moral one; to teach self-trust; to inspire the youthful man with an interest in himself; with a curiosity touching his own nature; to acquaint him with the resources of his mind, and to teach him that there is all his strength, and to inflame him with a piety towards the Grand Mind in which he lives. Thus would education conspired with the Divine Providence. A man is a little thing whilst he works by and for himself, but, when he gives voice to the rules of love and justice, is godlike, this word is current in all countries; and all men, though his enemies, are made his friends and obey it as their own. In affirming that the moral nature of man is the predominant element and should therefore be mainly consulted in the arrangements of a school, I am very far from wishing that it should swallow up all the other instincts and faculties of man. It should be enthroned in his mind, but if it monopolize the man he is not yet sound, he does not yet know his wealth. He is in danger of becoming merely devout, and wearisome through the monotony of his thought. It is not less necessary that the intellectual and the active faculties should be nourished and matured. Let us apply to this subject the light of the same torch by which we have looked at all the phenomena of the time; the infinitude, namely, of every man. Everything teaches that. One fact constitutes all my satisfaction, inspires all my trust, viz., this perpetual youth, which, as long as there is any good in us, we cannot get rid of. It is very certain that the coming age and the departing age seldom understand each other. The old man thinks the young man has no distinct purpose, for he could never get any thing intelligible and earnest out of him. Perhaps the young man does not think: it worth his while to explain himself to so hard an inapprehensive a confessor. Let him be led up with a longsighted forbearance, and let not the sallies of his petulance or folly be checked with disgust or indignation or despair. I call our system a system of despair, and I find all the correction, all the revolution that is needed and that the best spirits of this age promise, in one word, in Hope. Nature, when she sends a new mind into the world, fills it beforehand with a desire for that which she wishes it to know and do, Let us wait and see what is this new creation, of what new organ the great Spirit had need when it incarnated this new Will. A new Adam in the garden, he is to name all the beasts in the field, all the gods in the sky. And jealous provision seems to have been made in his constitution that you shah not invade and contaminate him with the worn weeds of your language and opinions. The charm of life is this variety of genius, these contrasts, and flavors by which Heaven has modulated the identity of truth, and there is a perpetual hankering to violate this individuality, to warp his ways of thinking and behavior to resemble or reflect your thinking and behavior. A low self-love in the parent desires that his child should repeat his character and fortune; an expectation which the child, if justice is done him, will nobly disappoint. By working on the theory that this resemblance exists, we shall do what in us lies to defeat his proper promise HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY and produce the ordinary and mediocre. I suffer whenever I see that common sight of a parent or senior imposing his opinion and way of thinking and being on a young soul to which they are totally unfit. Cannot we let people be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make that man another you. One’s enough. Or we sacrifice the genius of the pupil, the unknown possibilities of his nature, to a neat and safe uniformity, as the Turks whitewash the costly mosaics of ancient art which the Greeks left on their temple walls. Rather let us have men whose manhood is only the continuation of their boyhood, natural characters still; such are able and fertile for heroic action; and not that sad spectacle with which we are too familiar, educated eyes in uneducated bodies. I like boys, the masters of the playground and of the street — boys, who have the same liberal ticket of admission to all shops, factories, armories, town-meetings, caucuses, mobs, target — shootings, as flies have; quite unsuspected, coming in as naturally as the janitor — known to have no money in their pockets, and themselves not suspecting the value of this poverty; putting nobody on his guard, but seeing the inside of the show — hearing all the asides. There are no secrets from them, they know everything that befalls in the fire company, the merits of every engine and of every man at the brakes, how to work it, and are swift to try their hand at every part; so too the merits of every locomotive on the rails, and will coax the engineer to let them ride with him and pull the handles when it goes to the engine-house. They are there only for fun, and not knowing that they are at school, in the court-house, or the cattle-show, quite as much and more than they were, an hour ago, in the arithmetic class. They know truth from counterfeit as quick as the chemist does. They detect weakness in your eye and behavior a week before you open your mouth, and have given you the benefit of their opinion quick as a wink. They make no mistakes, have no pedantry, but entire belief on experience. Their elections at baseball or cricket are founded on merit, and are right. They don’t pass for swimmers until they can swim, nor for stroke-oar until they can row: and I desire to be saved from their contempt. If I can pass with them, I can manage well enough with their fathers. Everybody delights in the energy with which boys deal and talk with each other; the mixture of fun and earnest, reproach and coaxing, love and wrath, with which the game is played — the good-natured yet defiant independence of a leading boy’s behavior in the schoolyard. How we envy in later life the happy youths to whom their boisterous games and rough exercise furnish the precise element which frames and sets off their school and college tasks, and teaches them, when least they think it, the use and meaning of these. In their fun and extreme freak they hit on the topmost sense of Horace. The young giant, brown from his hunting tramp, tells his story well, interlarded with lucky allusions to Homer, to Virgil, to college songs, to Walter Scott; and Jove and Achilles, partridge and trout, opera and binomial theorem, Caesar in Gaul, Sherman in Savannah, and hazing in Holworthy, dance through the narrative in merry confusion, yet the logic is good. If he can turn his books to HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY such picturesque account in his fishing and hunting, it is easy to see how his reading and experience, as he has more of both, will interpentetrate each other. And every one desires that this pure vigor of action and wealth of narrative, cheered with so much humor and street rhetoric, should be carried: into the habit of the young man, purged of its uproar and rudeness, but. with all its vivacity entire. His hunting and campings-out have given him an indispensable base: I wish to add a taste for good company; through his impatience of bad. That stormy genius of his needs a little direction to games, charades, verses of society, song, and a correspondence year by year with his wisest and best friends. Friendship is an order of nobility; from its revelations We come more worthily into nature. Society he must have or he is poor indeed; he gladly enters a school which forbids conceit, affectation, emphasis and dullness, and requires of each only the flower of his nature and experience; requires good will, beauty, wit, and select information; teaches by practice the law of conversation, namely, to hear as well as to speak. Meantime, if circumstances do not permit the high social advantages, solitude has also its lessons. The obscure youth learns there the practice instead of the literature of his virtues; and, because of the disturbing effect of passion and sense, which by a multitude of trifles impede the mind’s eye from the quiet search of that fine horizon-line which truth keeps — the way to knowledge and power has ever been an escape from too much engagement with affairs and possessions; a way, not through plenty and superfluity, but by denial and renunciation, into solitude and privation; and, the more is taken away, the more; real and inevitable wealth of being is made known to us. The solitary knows the essence of the thought, the scholar in society only its fair face. There is no want of example of great men, great benefactors, who have been monks and hermits in habit. The bias of mind is sometimes irresistible in that direction. The man is, as it were, born deaf and dumb, and dedicated to a narrow and lonely life. Let him study the art of solitude, yield as gracefully as he can to his destiny. Why cannot he get the good of his doom, and if it is from eternity a settled fact that he and society shall be nothing to each other, why need he blush so, and make wry faces to keep up a freshman’s seat in the fine world? Heaven often protects valuable souls charged with great secrets, great ideas, by long shutting them up with their own thoughts. And the most genial and amiable of men must alternate society with solitude, and learn its severe lessons. There comes the period of the imagination to each, a later youth; the power of beauty, the power of books, of poetry. Culture makes his books realities to him, their characters more brilliant, more effective on his mind, than his actual mates. Do not spare to put novels into the hands of young people as an occasional holiday and experiment but, above all, good poetry in all kinds, epic, tragedy, lyric. If we can touch the imagination, we serve them, they will never forget it. Let him read TOM BROWN AT RUGBY, read TOM BROWN AT OXFORD, better yet, read HODSON’S LIFE — Hodson who took prisoner the King of Delhi. They teach the same truth — a trust, against all appearances, against all privations, in your own worth, and not in tricks, plotting, or patronage. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY I believe that our own experience instructs us that the secret of Education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained, and he only holds the key to his own secret. By your tampering and thwarting and too much governing he may be hindered from his end and kept out of his own. Respect the child. Wait and see the new product of Nature. Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions. Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude. But I hear the outcry which replies to this suggestion — Would you verily throw up the reins of public and private discipline; would you leave the young child to the mad career of his own passions and whimsies, and call this anarchy a respect for the child’s nature? I answer — Respect the child, respect him to the end, but also respect yourself. Be the companion of his thought, the friend of his friendship, the lover of his virtue — but no kinsman of his sin. Let him find you so true to yourself that you are the irreconcilable hater of his vice and the imperturbable slighter of his trifling. The two points in a boy’s training are, to keep his naturel and train off all but that — to keep his naturel, but stop off his uproar, fooling, and horseplay — keep his nature and arm it with knowledge in the very direction to which it points. Here are the two capital facts, Genius and Drill. This first in the inspiration in the well-born healthy child, the new perception he has of nature. Somewhat he sees in forms or hears in music or apprehends in mathematics, or believes practicable in mechanics or possible in political society, which no one else sees or hears or believes. This is the perpetual romance of new life, the invasion of God into the old dead world, when he sends into quiet houses a young soul with a thought which is not met, looking for something which is not there, but which ought to be there: the thought is dim but it is sure, and he casts about restless for means and masters to verify it; he makes wild attempts to explain himself and invoke the aid and consent of the by-standers. Baffled for want of language and methods to convey his meaning, not yet clear to himself, he conceives that though not in this house or town, yet in some other house or town is the wise master who can put him in possession of the rules and instruments to execute his will. Happy this child with a bias, with a thought which entrances him, leads him, now into deserts now into cities, the fool of an idea. Let him follow it in good and in evil report, in good or bad company; it will justify itself; it will lead him at last into the illustrious society of the lovers of truth. In London, in a private company, I became acquainted with a gentleman, Sir Charles Fellowes, who, being at Xanthos, in the Aegean Sea, had seen a Turk point with his staff to some carved work on the corner of a stone almost buried in the soil. Fellowes scraped away the dirt, was struck with the beauty of the sculptured ornaments, and, looking about him, observed; more blocks and fragments like this. He returned to the spot, procured laborers and uncovered many blocks. He went back to England, bought a Greek grammar and learned the language; he read history and studied, ancient art to explain his stones; he interested Gibson the sculptor; he invoked the assistance of the English Government; he called in the succor of Sir Humphry Davy HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY to analyze the pigments; of experts in coins, of scholars and connoisseurs; and at last: in his third visit brought home to England such statues and marble reliefs and such careful plans that he was able to reconstruct, in the British Museum where it now stands, the perfect model of the Ionic trophy-monument, fifty years older than the Parthenon of Athens, and which had been destroyed by earthquakes, then by iconoclast Christians, then by savage Turks. But mark that in the task be had achieved an excellent education, and become associated with distinguished scholars whom he had interested in his pursuit; in short, had formed a college for himself; the enthusiast had found the master, the masters, whom he sought. Always genius seeks genius, desires nothing so much as to be a pupil and to find those who can lend it aid to perfect itself. Nor are the two elements, enthusiasm and drill, incompatible. Accuracy is essential to beauty. The very definition of the intellect is Aristotle’s: “that by which we know terms or boundaries.” Give a boy accurate perceptions. Teach him the difference between the similar and the same. Make him call things by their right names. Pardon in him no blunder. Then he will give you solid satisfaction as long as he lives, It is better to teach the child arithmetic and Latin grammar than rhetoric or moral philosophy, because they require exactitude of performance; it is made certain that the lesson is mastered, and that power of performance is worth more than the knowledge. He can learn anything which is important to him now that the power to learn is secured: as mechanics say, when one has learned the use of tools, it is easy to work at a new craft. Letter by letter, syllable by syllable, the child learns to read, and in good time can convey to all the domestic circle the sense of Shakespeare. By many steps each just as short, the stammering boy and the hesitating collegian, in the school debates, in college clubs, in mock court, comes at last to full, secure, triumphant unfolding of his thought in the popular assembly, with a fullness of power that makes all the steps forgotten. But this function of opening and feeding the human mind is not to be fulfilled by any mechanical or military method; is not to be trusted to any skill less large than Nature itself. You must not neglect the form, but you must secure the essentials. It is curious how perverse and intermeddling we are, and what vast pains and cost we incur to do wrong. Whilst we all know in our own experience and apply natural methods in our own business — in education our common sense fails us, and we are continually trying costly machinery against nature, in patent schools and academies and in great colleges and universities. The natural method forever confutes our experiments, and we must still come back to it. The whole theory of the school is on the nurse’s or mother’s knee. The child is as hot to learn as the mother is to impart. There is mutual delight. The joy of our childhood in hearing beautiful stories from some skillful aunt who loves to tell them, must be repeated in youth. The boy wishes to learn to skate; to coast, to catch a fish in the brook, to hit a mark with a snowball or a stone; and a boy a little older is just as well pleased to teach him these sciences. Not less delightful is the mutual pleasure of teaching and learning the HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY secret of algebra, or of chemistry, or of good reading and good recitation of poetry or of prose, or of chosen facts in history or in biography. Nature provided for the communication of thought by planting with it in the receiving mind a fury to impart it. ‘Tis so in every art, in every science. One burns to tell the new fact, the other burns to hear it. See how far a young doctor will ride or walk to witness a new surgical operation. I have seen a carriage- maker’s shop emptied of all its workmen into the street, to scrutinize a new pattern from New York. So in literature, the young man who has taste for poetry, for fine images, for noble thoughts, is insatiable for this nourishment, and forgets all the world for the more learned friend — who finds equal joy in dealing out his treasures. Happy the natural college thus self-instituted around every natural teacher; the young men of Athens around Socrates; of Alexander around Plotinus; of Paris around Abelard; of Germany around Fichte, or Niebuhr, or Goethe: in short the natural sphere of every leading mind. But the moment this is organized, difficulties begin. The college was to be the nurse and home of genius; but, though every young man is born with some determination in his nature, and is a potential genius; is at last to be one; it is, in the most, obstructed and delayed, and, whatever they may hereafter be, their senses are now opened in advance of their minds. They are more sensual than intellectual. Appetite and indolence they have, but no enthusiasm. These come in numbers to the college: few geniuses: and the teaching comes to be arranged for these many, and not for those few. Hence the instruction seems to require skillful tutors, of accurate and systematic mind, rather than ardent and inventive masters. Besides, the youth of genius are eccentric, won’t drill, are irritable, uncertain, explosive, solitary, not men of the world, not good for every-day association. You have to work for large classes instead of individuals; you must lower your flag and reef your sails to wait for the dull sailors; you grow departmental, routinary, military almost with your discipline and college police. But what doth such a school to form a great and heroic character? What abiding Hope can it inspire? What Reformer will it nurse? What poet will it breed to sing to the human race? What discoverer of Nature’s laws will it prompt to enrich us by disclosing in the mind the statute which all matter must obey? What fiery soul will it send out to warm a nation with his charity? What tranquil mind will it have fortified to walk with meekness in private and obscure duties, to wait and to suffer? Is it not manifest that our academic institutions should have a wider scope; that they should not be timid and keep the ruts of the last generation, but that wise men thinking for themselves and heartily seeking the good of mankind, and counting the cost of innovation, should dare to arouse the young to a just and heroic life; that the moral nature should be addressed in the school-room, and children should be treated as the high-born candidates of truth and virtue? So to regard the young child, the young man, requires, no doubt, rare patience: a patience that nothing but faith in the medial forces of the soul can give. You see his sensualism; you see his want of those tastes and perceptions which make the power and safety of your character. Very likely, But he has something HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY else. If he has his own vice, he has its correlative virtue. Every mind should be allowed to make its own statement in action, and its balance will appear. In these judgments one needs that foresight which was attributed to an eminent reformer, of whom it was said “his patience could see in the bud of the aloe the blossom at the end of a hundred years.” Alas for the cripple Practice when it seeks to come up with the bird Theory, which flies before it. Try your design on the best school. The scholars are of all ages and temperaments and capacities. It is difficult to class them, some are too young, some are slow, some perverse. Each requires so much consideration, that the morning hope of the teacher, of a day of love and progress, is often closed at evening by despair. Each single case, the more it is considered, shows more to be done; and the strict conditions of the hours, on: one side, and the number of tasks, on the other. Whatever becomes of our method, the conditions stand fast — six hours, and thirty, fifty, or a hundred and fifty pupils. Something must be done, and done speedily, and in this distress the wisest are tempted to adopt violent means, to proclaim martial law, corporal punishment, mechanical arrangement, bribes, spies, wrath, main strength and ignorance, in lieu of that wise genial providential influence they had hoped, and yet hope at some future day to adopt. Of course the devotion to details reacts injuriously on the teacher. He cannot indulge his genius, he cannot delight in personal relations with young friends, when his eye is always on the clock, and twenty classes are to be dealt with before the day is done. Besides, how can he please himself with genius, and foster modest virtue? A sure proportion of rogue and dunce finds its way into every school and requires a cruel share of time, and the gentle teacher, who wished to be a Providence to youth, is grown a martinet, sore with suspicions; knows as much vice as the judge of a police court, and his love of learning is lost in the routine of grammars and books of elements. A rule is so easy that it does not need a man to apply it; an automaton, a machine, can be made to keep a school so. It facilitates labor and thought so much that there is always the temptation in large schools to omit the endless task of meeting the wants of each single mind, and to govern by steam. But it is at frightful cost. Our modes of Education aim to expedite, to save labor; to do for masses what cannot be done for masses, what must be done reverently, one by one: say rather, the whole world is needed for the tuition of each pupil. The advantages of this system of emulation and display are so prompt and obvious, it is such a time-saver, it is so energetic on slow and on bad natures, and is of so easy application, needing no sage or poet, but any tutor or schoolmaster in his first term can apply it — that it is not strange that this calomel of culture should be a popular medicine. On the other hand, total abstinence from this drug, and the adoption of simple discipline and the following of nature involves at once immense claims on the time, the thoughts, on the Life of the teacher. It requires time, use, insight, event, all the great lessons and assistances of God; and only to think of using it implies character and profoundness; to enter on this course of discipline is to be good and great. It is precisely analogous to the difference between the use of corporal punishment and the methods of love. It is so easy to bestow on a bad boy a blow, overpower him, and HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY get obedience without words, that in this world of hurry and distraction, who can wait for the returns of reason and the conquest of self; in the uncertainty too whether that will ever come? And yet the familiar observation of the universal compensations might suggest the fear that so summary a stop of a bad humor was more jeopardous than its continuance. Now the correction of this quack practice is to import into Education the wisdom of life. Leave this military hurry and adopt the pace of Nature. Her secret is patience. Do you know how the naturalist learns all the secrets of the forest, of plants, of birds, of beasts, of reptiles, of fishes, of the rivers and the sea? When he goes into the woods the birds fly before him and he finds none; when he goes to the river bank, the fish and the reptile swim away and leave him alone. His secret is patience; he sits down, and sits still; he is a statue; he is a log. These creatures have no value for their time, and he must put as low a rate on his. By dint of obstinate sitting still, reptile, fish, bird and beast, which all wish to return to their haunts, begin to return. He sits still; if they approach, he remains passive as the stone he sits upon. They lose their fear. They have curiosity too about him. By and by the curiosity masters the fear, and they come swimming, creeping and dying towards him; and as he is still immovable, they not only resume their haunts and their ordinary labors and manners, show themselves to him in their work-day trim, but also volunteer some degree of advances towards fellowship and good understanding with a biped who behaves so civilly and well. Can you not baffle the impatience and passion of the child by your tranquility? Can you not wait for him, as Nature and Providence do? Can you not keep for his mind and ways, for his secret, the same curiosity you give to the squirrel, snake, rabbit, and the sheldrake and the deer? He has a secret; wonderful methods in him; he is — every child — a new style of man; give him time and opportunity. Talk of Columbus and Newton! I tell you the child just born in yonder hovel is the beginning of a revolution as great as theirs. But you must have the believing and prophetic eye. Have the self-command you wish to inspire. Your teaching and discipline must have the reserve and taciturnity of Nature. Teach them to hold their tongues by holding your own. Say little; do not snarl; do not chide; but govern by the eye. See what they need, and that the right thing is done. I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching. No discretion that can be lodged with a school-committee, with the overseers or visitors of an academy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these difficulties and perplexities, but they solve themselves when we leave institutions and address individuals. The will, the male power, organizes, imposes its own thought and wish on others, and makes that military eye which controls boys as it controls men; admirable in its results, a fortune to him who has it, and only dangerous when it leads the workman to overvalue and overuse it and precludes him from finer means. Sympathy, the female force — which they must use who have not the first — deficient in instant control and the breaking down of resistance, is more subtle and lasting and creative. I advise teachers to cherish mother-wit. I assume that you will keep the grammar, reading, writing and arithmetic in order; ‘tis easy and HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY of course you will. But smuggle in a little contraband wit, fancy, imagination, thought. If you have a taste which you have suppressed because it is not shared by those about you, tell them that. Set this law up, whatever becomes of the rules of the school: they must not whisper, much less talk; but if one of the young people says a wise thing, greet it, and let all the children clap their hands. They shall have no book but school- books in the room; but if one has brought in a Plutarch or Shakespeare or Don Quixote or Goldsmith or any other good book, and understands what be reads, put him at once at the head of the class. Nobody shall be disorderly, or leave his desk without permission, but if a boy runs from his bench, or a girl, because the fire falls, or to check some injury that a little dastard is indicting behind his desk on some helpless sufferer, take away the medal from the head of the class and give it on the instant to the brave rescuer. If a child happens to show that he knows any fact about astronomy, or plants, or birds, or rocks, or history, that interests him and you, hush all the classes and encourage him to ten it so that all may hear. Then you have made your school-room like the world. Of course you will insist on modesty in the children, and respect to their teachers, but if the boy stops you in your speech, cries out that you are wrong and sets you right, hug him! To whatsoever upright mind, to whatsoever beating heart I speak, to you it is committed to educate men. By simple living, by an illimitable soul, you inspire, you correct, you instruct, you raise, you embellish all. By your own act you teach the behold how to do the practicable. According to the depth from which you draw your life, such is the depth not only of your strenuous effort, but of your manners and presence. The beautiful nature of the world has here blended your happiness with your power. Work straight on in absolute duty, and you lend an arm and an encouragement to all the youth of the universe. Consent yourself to be an organ of your highest thought, and lo! suddenly you put all men in your debt, and are the fountain of an energy that goes pulsing on with waves of benefit to the borders of society, to the circumference of things. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

1910

Summer: Bobby Leach, an English circus stuntman, had announced that he was going to make himself the 1st person to complete a “triple challenge,” which he described as: 1.) making a barrel trip through the rapids of the Niagara River to the whirlpool, 2.) going over the Niagara Falls in a barrel, and 3.) parachuting from the Upper Suspension Bridge into the Niagara River upstream of the rapids. In 1908 he had leaped from the Upper Steel Arch Bridge using a parachute. At this point he was testing the barrel he planned to use for his adventure over the Niagara Falls. He attempted to ride in this barrel through the Great Gorge Rapids to the Whirlpool. The anchor that he had attached to his barrel, however, was cut loose by rocks, and so Leach bounced from rock to rock down through the rapids and became stuck in an eddy of the Whirlpool. There William “Red” Hill Sr. swam out to Leach’s barrel and dragged it ashore. Inside the barrel Leach turned out to be unconscious, so William “Red” Hill Sr. himself clambered in and rode the barrel down through the lower rapids to Queenston.4

Henry Seidel Canby was a summer lecturer in English at Dartmouth College.

4. During that summer Leach made 3 other trips through the Whirlpool Rapids and failed twice in attempts to swim across the river below the American Falls. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

1911

Newell Convers Wyeth illustrated an edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s TREASURE ISLAND for Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Henry Seidel Canby became editor of the Yale Review (until 1922).

Summer: Richard Bartlett Gregg received the LL.B. from the Harvard Law School and went on a tour of Scotland, England, Germany, and France.

Henry Seidel Canby was again a summer lecturer in English at Dartmouth College. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

1915

New York’s Barge Canal’s Waterford Flight was completed.

Henry Seidel Canby’s COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS.

In New York City, James Gamble Rogers’ 44th Street Yale Club building for use all and only by graduates of Yale University (such as Canby) was completed. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

1916

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi founded a religious school in Ahmedabad, India.

Henry Seidel Canby became an advisor in literary composition at Yale University (until 1922). HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

1918

While doing six months in prison for having damaged “His Majesty’s relationship with the USA,” Bertrand Russell wrote an INTRODUCTION TO MATHEMATICAL PHILOSOPHY.

(Gosh, it sounds like everything was in prison except his mind!)

While engaged in wartime liaison work for the British Ministry of Information during World War I, Henry Seidel Canby in addition lectured at Professor Russell’s Cambridge University.

July: Public health officials in Philadelphia issued a bulletin about the “Spanish influenza.”

Solomon, Thorpe and another island family business name, Deason, held a public meeting at Rickmers urging the UK government to recall St. Helena Acting Governor Dixon.

Henry Seidel Canby visited Thorne in South Yorkshire, England. He would create a FAMILY HISTORY of his Canby relatives (although this would not be printed by the Riverside Press until 1945). HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

1919

When striking textile industry strikers appealed for understanding from the religious community, A.J. Muste became involved in the labor unrest of Lawrence, Massachusetts.

Henry Seidel Canby’s EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE: ESSAYS ON THE WAR AND THE FUTURE. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

1920

Henry Seidel Canby’s EVERYDAY A MERICANS. He founded The Literary Review, a critical literary supplement to the New York Evening Post, which he also would (until 1924) edit.

Professor Bliss Perry’s THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE: [O]ur literature has no more curious story than the evolution of this local crank [Thoreau] into his rightful place of mastership.

Professor Perry offered, in regard to the raid on Harpers Ferry, that:5 Once, toward the close of his too brief life, Thoreau “signed on” again to an American ideal, and no man could have signed more nobly.

5. Somebody really ought to make a study of the tie-in between the search for the dominant author in belletristic pursuits during interwar periods, which expresses itself in the establishment of a dominant “canon,” and the quest for the dominant authority as it is found in times of belligerence, which expresses itself, often, in the placement of rows of cannon. For sure, as we can see here, Professor Perry had something like that going in his mind! HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

1922

Edwin Way Teale received an A.B. from Earlham College (several years later he would receive an A.M. from Columbia University).

Henry Seidel Canby’s DEFINITIONS: ESSAYS IN CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM. After several decades of teaching he was appointed lecturer in English at Yale University with the rank of professor.

After hearing a debate featuring the Russian mystic George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, Alfred Orage started publishing articles that introduced middle-class British readers to Sufism and other non-Western philosophies. Arcane blends of these Eastern philosophies would become known as “New Age” because of the name of Orage’s literary magazine. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

1923

The most popular of the works of the Reverend Oswald Chambers, a daily devotional entitled MY UTMOST FOR HIS HIGHEST, was based in this year on shorthand notes taken during his life by his wife. In its pages Christians are urged to expend their lives for Christ as if they were “broken bread and poured out wine.”

On Mount Cahuenga above Hollywood, California, at a cost of $21,000, to advertise a housing development, a sign was erected proclaiming in big block letters HOLLYWOODLAND.

Professor Henry Seidel Canby was a summer lecturer at the University of California. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

1924

In New York City, the American Radiator Building (later the American Standard Building) was completed.

Publication of Wall Street stockbroker Alfred Graham Miles’s A FISHERMAN’S BREEZE, an account of a couple of weeks spent on the fishing schooner Ruth M. Martin in 1904. Also, Gilbert W. Gabriel’s BROWNSTONE FRONT was published (different people, different adventures, different books).

The Statue of Liberty became a National Monument.

Seton Porter’s bankrupt distillery was bought and became the National Distillers Products Corporation (later the Quantum Chemical Company).

For attempting to bribe an opposing player, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis banned New York Giants coach Cozy Dolan and player Jimmy O’Connell for life.

Walter Huston appeared in Mr. Pitt in Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms.”

French milliner Lilly Dache moved to New York City.

In New York City, Dr. Frank Peer Beal invented paddle tennis.

William Jennings Bryan made his initial political speech, at the Democratic national convention in New York City.

RCA purchased Newark, New Jersey, radio station WJZ (later WABC), moving it to the Aeolian Hall on Manhattan Island.

Actress Judith Anderson made her major New York City debut in “The Cobra.”

Future travel agent Joseph Perillo emigrated to the US, settling in the Bronx area of New York City.

Louis Cohen opened the Argosy Book Store and Gallery on Book Row (4th Avenue) in New York City.

Writer Alvah Bessie graduated from Columbia University in New York City.

William Randolph Hearst began the New York Daily Mirror.

When the New York Evening Post changed ownership, Henry Seidel Canby and others established The Saturday Review of Literature. He would be this literary magazine’s editor until 1936, when he would be designated as chairman of its Board of Editors (he would remain in such a post until his retirement in 1958). HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY May 19, Monday: Professor Henry Seidel Canby made the cover of TIME Magazine, which is something that only happens to people who are thought of as Very Important People: HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

1926

T.M. Raysor, an English professor specializing in Coleridge, had married a descendant of Miss Prudence Ward and of Ellen Devereux Sewall, and had learned a thing or to from the idle chatter of his in-laws. What had he

learned? That they were of the opinion that their lodger ancestor living in the Thoreau boardinghouse had had a conversation with Henry Thoreau, in which he had confessed to her the following simplistic equivalences:

lost hound Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr. lost bay horse John Thoreau, Jr. lost turtle-dove Ellen Devereux Sewall

Was there any sort of document to support the “memory” of these in-laws? No. There was nothing whatever to indicate that one of them had not simply made this up. Nevertheless, the good professor placed a “Love Story of Thoreau” in Studies in Philology 23, alleging the above. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

WALDEN: In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men’s, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and never paint “No Admittance” on my gate. I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves. To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine! No doubt many of my townsmen have met me returning from this enterprise, farmers starting for Boston in the twilight, or woodchoppers going to their work. It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it.

(Refer to Raymond Adams’s “Thoreau’s Growth at Walden,” Christian Register 224 [1945]: 268-70.)

The The WALDEN other parable analyses

According to Professor Thomas Middleton Raysor, his in-laws made him do it: Miss Sewall ... told her story to her daughters, who have now expressed their willingness for its publication. Two of Ellen Sewall’s daughters, Mrs. George Davenport of Los Angeles and Mrs. L. O. Koopman of Cambridge, Mass., wrote down the story which she had told them separately. This account ... is the basis of this article. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY Since the account supplied to Professor Raysor by these 2 of his in-laws, Mrs. George Davenport of Los Angeles, California and Mrs. L.O. Koopman of Cambridge, Massachusetts –that Thoreau’s lost hound was their relative Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr., that his lost bay horse was his brother John Thoreau, Jr., and that his lost turtle-dove was their relative Ellen Devereux Sewall– is patently absurd as an interpretation of the passage, it is obvious that somebody has concocted out of whole cloth what they considered to be a plausible literary exegesis. Now it may be that Miss Prudence Crandall was the liar, or it may be that some intermediary descendant was the liar, or that Mrs. Davenport and Mrs. Koopman were liars, or that Professor Raysor was a liar. —This family tale can only have originated as a plausible invention because Thoreau simply was not, at the time of its origination, in search for any one of this trio of personages. However, I don’t care enough to investigate which of these persons it was who originated this obvious fabrication.

The identification of these fabulous animals with Edmund Sewall, John Thoreau, and Ellen Sewall ... is both naïve and absurd. For no one of these three was Thoreau, by any stretch of the imagination, still searching.

— Henry Seidel Canby, THOREAU (Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1939)

By the way, you won’t need to remind me to never look at anything that Professor Raysor, a Coleridge expert, ever wrote about Samuel Taylor Coleridge. As far as I am concerned, merely by passing along a fabrication like this, whether or not he personally originated it, he has discredited himself as a scholar.

During this year Henry Seidel Canby became editor-in-chief for the newly formed Book-of-the-Month Club (he would fill that position until 1954). HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

1929

In the Great Depression, Roland Wells Robbins lost his job. His mother, Lucy May Robbins, died.

Henry Seidel Canby’s AMERICAN ESTIMATES. A reviewer, Theodore Hornberger, was unkind: The perspective would have been better had there been narrower limits or had the author retired for five years’ meditation abroad, but by that time the day and the need thereof would be past and Mr. Canby no doubt gone over to art and writing nature essays. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

1931

The so-called “Swiss Thoreau” Henri-Frédéric Amiel’s posthumous ESSAIS, CRITIQUES.

Bob Pepperman Taylor has remarked, in his AMERICA’S BACHELOR UNCLE: THOREAU AND THE AMERICAN POLITY (Lawrence KA: UP of Kansas, 1996, page 7), that “Thoreau is, on the whole, the political thinker scholars of American political thought love to either ignore or hate,” and that this has allowed environmentalist interpreters of Henry Thoreau’s corpus to disregard his writings about social and political life, treating him as if he had been merely another of our crew of nature writers, who have tended to become single-issue advocates of biocentrism.

One of the early instances which he offers of this is Professor Henry Seidel Canby, opinioning in this year in CLASSIC AMERICANS that Thoreau “had sold his heart to nature, as Faust sold his soul to the devil, and it was HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY hard for him afterwards to turn back to the needs of the town.” Taylor points out, on page 36 of his treatise, how sharp the contrast has been, between the inadequacy of this scholarship trend, and the excellence of the understanding that would be attained by Professor F.O. Matthiessen in 1941, John C. Broderick in 1955, Leo Stoller in 1957, Sherman Paul in 1958, Wilson Carey McWilliams in 1973, and Stanley Cavell in 1981:

[next screen]

This qualifies Sherman Paul, according to Taylor, as one of the scholars who have been able to swim against the stream of calumny leveled against Thoreau by the Emerson-worshipers.

In a footnote within this context, on page 149, Taylor continues about Sherman Paul’s prescience as of 1958: Paul’s comment, that “one of the most persistent errors concerning Thoreau that has never been sufficiently dispelled is that Thoreau was an anarchical individualist,” is as true today as when he wrote it in 1958. Jane Bennett is just one of the most recent scholars to repeat this conventional wisdom when she writes of Thoreau’s “rejection of politics,” his fundamental anarchism.... Perhaps this mistake grows out of the assumption by so many interpreters that Thoreau is only an echo of Emerson. Kateb rightly explains that “Emerson would be an anarchist if he could” [George Kateb, EMERSON AND SELF-RELIANCE. Thousand Oaks CA: Sage, 1995, page 189], but we must be careful not to allow this fact to influence our evaluation of Thoreau’s politics. Taylor’s take on the above snippet of derogation by the early biographer Professor Henry Seidel Canby, among all the other snippets of derogation down the years by Robert Lewis Stevenson (1924), Vernon L. Parrington (1927), C. Carroll Hollis (1949), Henry Miller (1954), Vincent Buranelli (1957), C. Roland Wagner (1967), Hubert H. Hoeltje (1968), Emma Goldman (1969), John Patrick Diggins (1972), Donald Worster (1977), Professor Nancy L. Rosenblum (1981 and again in 1987), Professor Laraine Rita Fergenson (1982), Irving Howe (1986), Philip Abbott (1987), George Hochfield (1988), Max Oelschlaeger (1991), Quentin Anderson (1992), Richard Ellis (1993), Jane Bennett (1994), and most recently and at great length Lawrence Buell (1995), is: These commentators, and many others like them, observe that Thoreau encourages his readers to take an active role in establishing their independence, and conclude that the message of the book is private, apolitical, and personal. There is no reason to believe this is so. Yes, Thoreau is speaking to individual citizens about the way they will understand and practice their freedom. This project, however, has profound civic implications, since it goes to the heart of American political culture. As Stanley Cavell writes [in 1981], As against the usual views about Thoreau’s hatred of society and his fancied private declaration of independence from it, it is worth hearing him from the outset publicly accept a nation’s promise. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY Modern environmentalists frequently interpret Thoreau as a forbear of radical contemporary environmentalism, claiming the mantle of a great writer as a cloak of legitimacy for their own biocentrism. Donald Worster calls Thoreau “a seeker of the primitive forest,” arguing that his romanticism is “fundamentally biocentric.” Max Oelschlaeger claims that Thoreau sought to discover the truths of premodern peoples through the experience of wilderness unmediated by modern society: “The seeker of Indian wisdom is clearly not a classicist imposing timeless Virgilian and Homeric categories on nature. Rather the search is for presocial meaning through primary experience in the wilderness, through encounter with a nonhuman other outside the domain of conventional wisdom.... Thoreau’s goal is to rekindle a primitive (savage, Paleolithic, archaic, or Indian) awareness of the Magna Mater.” Most recently, Lawrence Buell admits that Thoreau’s biocentrism is not consistent, but he chooses to read this as a case in which a prophet is unable to fully grasp and develop his own idea. Although Thoreau “could not get past the Emersonian axiom that ‘nature must be viewed humanly to be viewed at all,’” Buell presumes that Thoreau should have gotten beyond that axiom, and that his own ideas in fact lead in that direction. As “Thoreau became less interested in himself ... he became more interested in nature,” and “appearances of self-contradiction notwithstanding, the development of Thoreau’s thinking about nature seems pretty clearly to move along a path from homocentrism toward biocentrism.” Thoreau is an early, if confused, biocentrist, and we can appreciate the degree to which his ideas at least opened the door for what Buell believes is our more consistent and enlightened biocentric environmentalism today. These environmental interpreters are part of a broader tradition that detaches Thoreau’s “nature writings” from his writings about social and political life. Henry Seidel Canby, for example, suggests that Thoreau “had sold his heart to nature, as Faust sold his soul to the devil, and it was hard for him afterwards to turn back to the needs of the town.” And when Emerson comments, in his eulogy for Thoreau, that “his visits to Maine were chiefly for love of the Indian,” the implication is that this was another of Thoreau’s eccentric excursions into the natural world (of which the Indian was a part) and that this purpose reflected no general concern about American society at large. These comments suggest that nature (and the Indian in nature) is a private and even antisocial interest of Thoreau’s.... The view that Thoreau’s involvement in nature is fundamentally biocentric, antihumanist, private, or apolitical stands in the sharpest contrast with the best of the previous generation of Thoreau scholarship. Sherman Paul, in what is perhaps the foremost intellectual biography of Thoreau (THE SHORES OF AMERICA. Urbana IL: U of Illinois P, 1958), writes that “Thoreau’s love of man was always greater than his love of nature; he loved nature for its human possibilities — it was the bulwark against the ‘shivering heavens’ of the city, and the lamentable depersonalization.” For Paul, “Nature was not Thoreau’s final goal, but rather the place of renewal, and out of it, as his own utopian descriptions of ideal human relations and communities revealed, he hoped would come a higher, a spiritually or inwardly formed —that is, an organic— society.” Leo Stoller, too, argues that “it was humanized nature that provided the only adequate natural environment for civilized man.” Far from the biocentrism described by Worster and Buell, Paul and Stoller find not only a deeply humanist link with nature in Thoreau’s work but even a link with a broader social and political project.... As Wilson Carey McWilliams writes, Thoreau’s desire is “to redirect the state and its citizens, to shift the goal of politics from the purposes of commerce and the machine to the goal of human development.” Such a reformation requires the encouragement of a respectable and common moral life, while rejecting all methods of blunt moral imposition. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1934

The Dionne quintuplets were the 1st 5 (human) infants on record to be born in one delivery and survive. They would become will a marketing phenomenon, with their likenesses appearing on calendars and trinkets.

Henry Seidel Canby sought in THE AGE OF CONFIDENCE: LIFE IN THE NINETIES to recreate life as he had experienced it in the Wilmington, Delaware of 4 decades earlier — Quaker homes, and a social life that could only be understood by those born and bred in it (he has begun by presuming that his book would have the title NOSTALGIA). “What the modern gets from music, if he is capable of music, we got from nature for the taking and with no technique but — desire.”

Roger Tory Peterson’s 1st FIELD GUIDE TO THE BIRDS.

The Worldwide church was founded by Herbert Armstrong. He and his son Garner Ted Armstrong would use a radio program “The World Tomorrow” to develop a worldwide following.

Shirley Temple made her initial full-length film debut.

Harlem’s Apollo theatre opened.

Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker died in a hail of bullets. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

1936

Richard Bartlett Gregg’s Pendle Hill Pamphlet (#3), “The Value of Voluntary Simplicity.”

VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY Speaking of voluntary simplicity, this was the year in which Penguin Editions was introducing its pocket-sized paperbacks.

Henry Seidel Canby continued the recounting of his personal memories that he had begun in THE AGE OF CONFIDENCE: LIFE IN THE NINETIES, in ALMA MATER: THE GOTHIC AGE OF THE AMERICAN COLLEGE, describing his early years at Yale College as a student and then as a teacher. Also, his SEVEN YEARS HARVEST: NOTES ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE. These books were of course available in hardcover only.

The Berlin Olympics pioneered closed-circuit television and electronic timing devices. Among the contestants this year were 107 Chinese athletes, one of them being Chang Wen-quang, a Chinese Muslim who was exhibiting taijicao, a variant of t’ai chi ch’uan. An old man, Pierre de Frédy, Baron de Coubertin, orating over the loudspeaker system, asked the assembled masses in the grandstands to remember that “the important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part. Just as in life, the aim is not to conquer, but to struggle well.” However, nobody was paying any attention for at the time all these assembled masses were preoccupied with a chant: “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!” HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

1937

The Thoreau pencil sheds near the Concord railroad station burned down.

THE WORKS OF THOREAU SELECTED AND EDITED BY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY (Riverside Press, Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin Company). HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

1939

Henry Seidel Canby, in his THOREAU (Boston: Houghton Mifflin), trying to recuperate Henry Thoreau from having been known to us, through the writings of Robert Louis Stevenson, as a “skulker,” or at best known to us since our childhoods only “as a man who wrote about birds and animals for children,” revealed that Henry had more recently been discovered by certain unnamed critics as perhaps “the greatest critic of values among modern writers in English.” Walden in its cup of the hills above, and only a mile from the edge, of Concord is still beautiful; and Thoreau’s sojourn there in his cabin by a cove, if less significant than St. Francis’ retirement among the birds and beasts, or Christ’s retreat to the wilderness, is, nevertheless, one of the memorable gestures of the spirit of man. Many of Thoreau’s own contemporaries, like Lowell and Alger, thought that the escape to Walden was a pose, or sheer eccentricity. Even his youthful admirer, Hecker, called him in later years a consecrated crank. And admirers of Thoreau since have been too ready to think and write of his Walden adventure as the bravado of a perverse idealism, or as a hermit’s challenge to a society which had to carry on with the responsibilities he left behind. Robert Louis Stevenson, with this in mind, thought he was a skulker. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

Canby attempted to explicate the parable of the hound, the bay horse, and the turtle-dove as no search for any lost maid or boy,

WALDEN: In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men’s, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and never paint “No Admittance” on my gate. I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves. To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine! No doubt many of my townsmen have met me returning from this enterprise, farmers starting for Boston in the twilight, or woodchoppers going to their work. It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it.

but instead a search “for that sense of the spiritual reality behind nature, which again and again in his JOURNAL he deplores as something felt in youth, but never quite regained.”

The The WALDEN other parable analyses

The identification of these fabulous animals with Edmund Sewall, John Thoreau, and Ellen Sewall ... is both naïve and absurd. For no one of these three was Thoreau, by any stretch of the imagination, still searching. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY On page xii in this new volume Ellery Channing was given a final opportunity to explore what wisdom he had accumulated over the decades about the essence of Henry Thoreau, and this blazing amazing comment is what he was able to come up with: Nothing bothered him so much as the friendships. Those and his moral sensitiveness. I have never been able to understand what he meant by his life.... Why was he so disappointed with everybody else &c. Why was he so much interested in the river and the woods and the sky &c. Something peculiar I judge.

“What a gump!...On the whole, he is but little better than an idiot. He should have been whipt often and soundly in his boyhood; and as he escaped such wholesome discipline then, it might be well to bestow it now.” — Nathaniel Hawthorne, about Ellery Channing

On page 234, Jane Hosmer had the following to relate: When his mother heard of his arrest, she hastened to the Jail, then to the Thoreau house in the Square, at which Misses Jane and Maria Thoreau then lived, and one of the latter, putting a shawl over her head, went to the jailer’s door, and paid the tax and fees to Ellen Staples, her father the jailer being absent.

AUNT MARIA THOREAU AUNT JANE THOREAU HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY [In this year, at the end of the “Wizard of Oz” movie, Dorothy summed up the lesson that she has learned out of all her questing down the yellow brick road: “If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard, because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with.” She had learned that in order to get back to her Kansas, all she needs to do is repeat her mantra, “There’s no place like home.” — Would it be legitimate to consider this to be a possible interpretation of Thoreau’s parable of the hound, the bay horse, and the turtledove?] HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

1941

The carol “Little Drummer Boy,” which one hears so persistently in stores during the Christmas sales season, originated in this year on Lexington Road in Concord. It was penned by a Katherine Davis who gave it authenticity by offering it (falsely) as a translation, by one C.R.W. Robertson, of “an old Czech carol” titled “Carol of the Drum” (it would first be recorded by the von Trapp family singers of Stowe, Vermont).

Henry Seidel Canby’s THE BRANDYWINE (a volume in the “Rivers of America” series). HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

1943

Lin Yu-t’ang returned briefly to China only to discover that his individualistic, self-expressive journalism was in disfavor among the socially committed Marxist Leninists.

Henry Seidel Canby’s WALT WHITMAN, AN AMERICAN: A STUDY IN BIOGRAPHY. (A reviewer of this volume, Howard F. Lowry, informs us that Canby been able to offer to us a Whitman who, although he never formally met President Abraham Lincoln, must have passed him so often on the streets of Washington DC during our Civil War that a silent understanding must have arisen between these two, so that eventually they must have exchanged bows, “and very cordial ones.” Wow, I’m ready to believe!) HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

1945

The ballpoint pen. Tupperware Corporation. Ebony Magazine. E.B. White’s STUART LITTLE: OR NEW YORK THROUGH THE EYES OF A MOUSE. Paul de Kruif’s THE MALE HORMONE popularized the use of synthetic testosterone by bodybuilders. A firestorm started by American B-29 bombers killed a quarter of a million Japanese. Susan Travers, who had served as a French general’s driver throughout World War II, despite being an Englishwoman, was admitted into the French Foreign Legion as a sergeant major. The Japanese Army started teaching karate to members of its special attack squadrons. According to Nishizono Takatoshi, a teacher of the Wado Ryu technique, this training involved little more than teaching highly fit young men to punch to the face and kick to the testicles. As elementary as this sounds, it is also something easier said than done, as Allied prisoners-of-war had long ago discovered that the average Japanese soldier punched, in the vernacular of the day, “roundarm,” which is to say, like a girl. Etc.

In Hollywood, 2 large groupings of filmworkers unions, the “CSU” versus the “IATSE,” squared off for a showdown over which one was going to dominate movie production. Henry Seidel Canby conducted a series of lectures at the University of Melbourne and other Australian universities under the auspices of the United States Office of War Information. General Henry Arnold of the United States Army Air Force obtained a $10,000,000 grant from the war budget to establish a private company in Santa Monica, California. This was not corruption but the initiation of a Research and Development Corporation, RAND, the missions of which would include designing intercontinental missiles, and supersonic airplanes, and nuclear wars. The corporation would employ German scientists by the score. To design nuclear wars of the future, RAND researchers would invent hexagonal movement tables to be used in military war games, deriving that idea from a scientifically popular mathematical game that would be created by John Nash of Princeton University in 1948. In 1958, a Maryland company named Avalon Hill would utilize these RAND hexagonal movement tables in a commercial war game “Gettysburg.” The success of this Avalon Hill format would generate imitators, and in 1991 Coalition planners would use a direct descendant named “Gulf Strike” to rehearse our ground war against Iraq. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

1947

Van Wyck Brooks’s THE TIMES OF MELVILLE AND WHITMAN (Scranton PA: E.P. Dutton & Company).

Henry Seidel Canby’s AMERICAN MEMOIR and INTRODUCTION TO FAVO RI TE POEMS OF HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

1948

Ansel Adams’s YOSEMITE AND THE SIERRA NEVADA, which contains not only Adams’s photographs but also selections from the writings of John Muir.

Henry Seidel Canby collaborated with Robert Spiller and others on THE LITERARY HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

1951

Henry Seidel Canby’s TURN WEST, TURN EAST: MARK TWAIN AND HENRY JAMES.

At the Brooklyn Eagle, Ed Reid won a Pulitzer Prize for his stories on the Harry Gross bookmaking scandal, whatever that was. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

1961

April 5, Wednesday: Henry Seidel Canby died in Ossining, New York.

On the TV that evening, on “Tonight Starring Jack Paar,” moderated for that evening by Orson Bean substituting for Jack Paar, a singer described as “Barbara Strysand” made her national television debut. On this night Barbra Streisand sang “A Sleepin’ Bee,” a song that had been composed by Harold Arlen for the Broadway show “House of Flowers” with lyrics by Arlen and Truman Capote. Her performance was praised by another guest on the show that night, Phyllis Diller. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

1977

Bob Pepperman Taylor has remarked, in his AMERICA’S BACHELOR UNCLE: THOREAU AND THE AMERICAN POLITY (Lawrence KA: UP of Kansas, 1996, page 7), that “Thoreau is, on the whole, the political thinker scholars of American political thought love to either ignore or hate,” and that this has allowed environmentalist interpreters of Thoreau’s corpus to disregard his writings about social and political life, treating him as if he had been merely another of our crew of nature writers, who have tended to become single-issue advocates of biocentrism. One of the early instances which he offers of this had been Professor Henry Seidel Canby, the early biographer who had opinioned in 1931 that Henry Thoreau “had sold his heart to nature, as Faust sold his soul to the devil, and it was hard for him afterwards to turn back to the needs of the town.” In this year the egregious offender was Donald Worster, referring to Thoreau as “a seeker of the primitive forest” and arguing that this romanticism of his was “fundamentally biocentric.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY Robert F. Sayre. THOREAU AND THE AMERICAN INDIANS. Princeton NJ: Princeton UP “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

RACE In this book Sayre explores the relationship between American Indians and Thoreau and his thoughts and writings. Thoreau’s ideas on Indians and nature are intertwined, and human’s connection to nature was a preoccupation of the Transcendentalists. The book, concentrating on A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS, WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, THE MAINE WOODS, and Thoreau’s “Indian Books” (12 volumes written over a span of fourteen years where he collected facts and recorded his thoughts on Indians), begins with the premise that Thoreau, “to a great extent … was prejudiced, favorably and unfavorably, by the white stereotypes of Indian life” in the nineteenth century. He didn’t study Indians and their complex life and society, he studied “‘the Indian,’ the ideal solitary figure that was the white American’s symbol of the wilderness and history. This symbol had been created by European-Americans as a part of ‘savagism,’ their universal myth of the condition of uncivilized people …. Savagism was the anti-and pro-Indian racism of the nineteenth century.” Sayre shows how integral “the Indian” is to Thoreau’s writing, and how Thoreau, in part, out-grew the savagism theories of his time. In the seven chapters (plus the appendix on the “Name and Number of the ‘Indian Books’”) Sayre fleshes out his thesis with many specific examples and details. Chapter I, “Savagism,” explains this concept which is essential to understand Thoreau’s work. “With its intricate and influential relationships to other American ideas of civilization and manifest destiny, Christianity and the purpose of Europeans in the New World, savagism was the complex of theories about Indians held by nearly all Americans of Thoreau’s time.” In Chapter II, “As Long as Grass Grows and Water Runs” (a phrase which appears in treaties and an allusion to the Indian name for the Concord River), Sayre contends that although Indians aren’t the major subject of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS, the book contains the history of savage-civilized relations in America. Chapter III, “The Vision Quest ,” compares WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS to the traditional Indian vision quest. Sayre argues the book follows the pattern of a Transcendentalist Indian vision quest: rejection of village society, meditation, vision, and finally renewal. Sayre says Thoreau “enacted the white fantasy of living like an Indian.” (I’ve only barely touched the surface of his ideas on these two works; his subtitles within the chapters show the range of his discussion: Religion, War, Commerce, Friendship, Art, and Originality in Chapter II; and Primitivism, Meditation, Vision and Creation Tales in Chapter III. Sayre’s arguments are insightful and enlightening.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Sayre calls Chapter IV “A Book about Indians?.” Thoreau wrote only magazine pieces — no books — during the last eight years of his life, and many people, including some of his closest friends, speculate that Thoreau was working on a book about Indians. Sayre thinks, judging from Thoreau’s first two books where “Indians are the personifications of prehistoric America, ideals of simple economy and heroic poetry, holders of an intimate knowledge of nature which he sought himself, and representatives of his own nonconforming attitudes towards the white village,” that a book about Indians could have had a great impact on American life and literature. But despite Thoreau’s “Indian Books,” which Sayre believes aided all his writing, there is no hard evidence he intended to write that book. And he didn’t. In Chapter V, “Beyond Savagism,” Sayre says he wants to come back to the fundamentals: why was Thoreau so occupied with Indians, and what did he learn? Sayre wonders whether his interest in Indians was a romantic primitivism, guilt, a rejection of civilization, or something else. Sayre re-examines the effect of “the Indian” and things Indian in Thoreau’s art. With examples, Sayre shows how the concept of savagism won’t contain Thoreau’s attitudes. Readers can see Thoreau’s growth in THE MAINE WOODS, which Sayre discusses in Chapter VI, “Maine The Lessons of the Forest.” Sayre says, “From the standpoint of Thoreau’s Indian education, it is his most important book.” The Thoreau of 1838 and “Ktaadn” saw Indians as an inferior race, and the cliche’s he uses to describe them show little sympathy or understanding. The Indian guides he hired didn’t meet him as planned, so there are no in-depth character sketches. Thoreau says at the beginning of “Chesuncook,” in 1853, that he “employed an Indian mainly that [he] might have an opportunity to study his ways,” and Joe Aitteon, a governor’s son, was selected carefully. Joe was a synthesis of white and Indian cultures, and he didn’t live up to Thoreau’s expectations and an ambivalent attitude comes across in the writing. Sayre calls “The Allegash and East Branch” (1857), a masterpiece in Thoreau’s diaristic form of travel narrative,” and calls the Indian guide on the trip, Joe Polis, “the most realistic and attractive Indian in nineteenth century American literature.” Emerson ranked Polis with John Brown and Walt Whitman as the three who had the greatest effect on Thoreau in the last years of his life. After the 1857 trip, Thoreau wrote a letter to a friend and told him that he thinks the world is larger … [He had] extended his range. He began to have the idea that Indian knowledge begins where we [white’s] leave off. He also began to study Indian language more thoroughly in order to understand Indians. ”On the Sky-Tinted River,” Sayre’s last chapter on Thoreau’s trip to Minnesota (Minnesota means sky-tinted in Dakota language) attempts to show how a man like Thoreau could be so affected by cultural allusions. Thoreau was a tourist in Indian country — to a lesser degree in Maine, but still a tourist. As a tourist he didn’t have to deal with the complexities of Indian society.

(Jonathan S. Byrne, May 1, 1989). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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PAGES 194-5: Thoreau was once thought to be the one white American in the early nineteenth century who really valued and understood Indians. While Lewis Cass, Andrew Jackson, and others pretended to be their friends, Thoreau was. His sympathy with them and independence from popular American clichés somehow redeemed this whole white “century of dishonor.” But as anyone can see, the record is not that simple. He himself held and used a great deal of savage prejudice. Instead of taking Thoreau as a redeemer, people might reflect on how even an independent, critical person like him was affected by these cultural illusions. The illusions were that strong. Nevertheless, rather than feel morally superior to him for the prejudices he used and fought, we should wonder about our own prejudices.... As a person who attempted to synthesize the best of the red and white cultures as he knew them, Thoreau is an extremely interesting kind of witness to both, a center of conscience and consciousness. We can learn from what he saw and felt and from trying to imagine what he might have written. Conversely, we can learn more about his own strengths and limitations.

(One might be tempted to steal such words as are applied above by Sayre, to Henry Thoreau’s appreciation of the surviving indigenous Americans, and apply them to the surviving intrusive Irish who were passing through Concord. Thoreau was once thought to harbor an indecent contempt for these desperate Irish immigrants as they fled the Great Potato Famine. His alleged abuse of them in one chapter of WALDEN was considered to have tainted and invalidated all his writings. But as anyone can see, the record is not that simple. He aided and commiserated in personal and direct and appropriate ways. His general stereotypical evaluations were always set aside in individual cases, so he could learn from the behavior and attitudes of the particular person before him. Instead of taking Thoreau as a bigot, people might reflect on how even such an independent, critical person as him was affected by general cultural perceptions. The reaction of the white intrusives already established here to the white intrusives recently arriving was that strong. Nevertheless, rather than feel morally superior to him for the prejudices he used and fought, we should wonder about our own prejudices, such as that it is not understandable for a person to become exasperated during close encounters with a people which as a victim of conditions beyond their control, seem to be adding to their own misery by their own misconduct and their own race prejudice. Would my own reactions be better were I now to be placed in some similar circumstance?)

Professor Sayre uncritically repeats, on pages 207 and 208, the misinformation that Henry Thoreau was present at an oration by Little Crow, who would become the famous leader of the great Minnesota race war. The only item which could possibly count as excuse for such misinformation, that Thoreau heard an oration by the Little Crow of the Dakotas, is in something he wrote back to his home. In describing the Dakota natives assembled at the village of Redwood on the Minnesota River for their promised Distribution, he observed that “The most prominent chief was named Little Crow.” Note that this is a very offhand remark in a letter. Note what actually Thoreau did not write: He did not write that he had met or heard such a personage as this headman Little Crow; he did not allege that the Little Crow of the Dakotas was present at this Distribution; he did not necessarily infer incorrectly that the name “Little Crow” was a personal name rather than what it actually was, an inherited position title held at the time by a man named xxxxxxxxx. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

1991

The surviving Mashantucket Pequot, a tribe of a few hundred mixed bloods (up from a surviving pair of sisters in the 1970), having obtained federal recognition as a tribe, began expansion of their successful bingo operation with financing from Lim Goh Tong, an ethnic Chinese from Maylasia, and would in the following year open a casino which would prove phenomenally profitable, the Foxwoods Resort Casino on the Connecticut coast near Ledyard.

Chen Changfang, in THOREAU AND CHINA (Taipei: Sanmin Press), presented similarities and differences between Thoreau’s ideas and ancient Confucianism and Taoism.

The US federal government sponsored an archaeological study of New York’s historic Five Points area, which is now beneath that city’s Chinatown.

Bob Pepperman Taylor has remarked, in his AMERICA’S BACHELOR UNCLE: THOREAU AND THE AMERICAN HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY POLITY (Lawrence KA: UP of Kansas, 1996, page 7), that “Thoreau is, on the whole, the political thinker scholars of American political thought love to either ignore or hate,” and that this has allowed environmentalist interpreters of Thoreau’s corpus to disregard his writings about social and political life, treating him as if he had been merely another of our crew of nature writers, who have tended to become single-issue advocates of biocentrism. One of the early instances which he offers of this is Professor Henry Seidel Canby, the biographer

who had opinioned in 1931 that Henry Thoreau “had sold his heart to nature, as Faust sold his soul to the devil, and it was hard for him afterwards to turn back to the needs of the town.” In this year the egregious offender, Taylor points out, was Max Oelschlaeger, who was claiming that Thoreau had sought to discover the truths of premodern peoples through the experience of wilderness unmediated by modern society:6 The seeker of Indian wisdom is clearly not a classicist imposing timeless Virgilian and Homeric categories on nature. Rather the search is for presocial meaning through primary experience in the wilderness, through encounter with a nonhuman other outside the domain of conventional wisdom.... Thoreau’s goal is to rekindle a primitive (savage, Paleolithic, archaic, or Indian) awareness of the Magna Mater.

6. Max Oelschlaeger. THE IDEA OF WILDERNESS. FROM PREHISTORY TO THE AGE OF ECOLOGY. New Haven CT & London: Yale UP, page 181. He’s quoting John Muir’s OUR NATIONAL PARKS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY Here’s what Oelschlaeger had come to suspect about John Muir’s disappointment in Emerson: [Muir] apparently believed that Emerson had a better way of explaining God’s relation to creation. Not satisfied with his own exposition of this relation, Muir greatly anticipated Emerson’s visit to the Sierras in 1871. “I had read his essays, and felt sure that of all men he would best interpret the sayings of these noble mountains and trees. Nor was my faith weakened when I met him in Yosemite. He seemed as serene as a sequoia, his head in the empyrean.” This is strong praise, but Muir was to be disappointed; Emerson was not allowed to accompany him on an extended backwoods excursion. “His party, full of indoor philosophy, failed to see the natural beauty and fullness of promise of my wild plan, and laughed at it in good-natured ignorance, as if it were necessarily amusing to imagine that Boston people might be led to accept Sierra manifestations of God at the price of rough camping.” [...] But [Muir] remained loyal to Emerson the man, still thinking of him as a friend even though he was disappointed in the visit and with the “glorious transcendentalism.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1995

Bob Pepperman Taylor would remark, in his AMERICA’S BACHELOR UNCLE: THOREAU AND THE AMERICAN POLITY (Lawrence KA: UP of Kansas, 1996, page 7), that “Thoreau is, on the whole, the political thinker scholars of American political thought love to either ignore or hate,” and that this has allowed environmentalist interpreters of Thoreau’s corpus to disregard his writings about social and political life, treating him as if he

had been merely another of our crew of nature writers, who have tended to become single-issue advocates of biocentrism. One of the early instances which he offers of this is Professor Henry Seidel Canby, the biographer who opinioned in 1931 that Henry Thoreau “had sold his heart to nature, as Faust sold his soul to the devil, and it was hard for him afterwards to turn back to the needs of the town.” In this year the egregious offender, Taylor would point out, was Lawrence Buell, who, although he did acknowledge in his environmentalist treatise THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMAGINATION (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP) that Thoreau’s biocentrism had

not been consistent, chose to read this as a case in which a prophet was unable to fully grasp and develop his own idea. Although Thoreau “could not get past the Emersonian axiom that ‘nature must be viewed humanly to be viewed at all,’” Taylor points out, Buell was presuming that Thoreau should have, as Buell had, gotten beyond that axiom. Buell presented Thoreau as if he had been an early, still confused biocentrist, not yet so sharp and clear and comprehending as are today’s standardbearers of biocentric environmentalism. Buell’s major thesis that Thoreau had developed an increasingly biocentric view as his life went on is a thesis which simply cannot be supported on the basis of Thoreau’s JOURNAL, and that over and above this lack of any evidence to support his allegation, Buell’s analysis amounts to a patronization and an exploitation:7

7.Yet it was in this same year that George Kateb explained Emerson in EMERSON AND SELF-RELIANCE (Thousand Oaks CA: Sage, 1995, page 189) by offering that the man “would be an anarchist if he could.” In 1996, Taylor would remind us to be careful not to confuse Thoreau with Emerson in this, not allow this curious factoid about Emerson’s rich psyche any longer to perturb our evaluation of Thoreau’s quite different politics. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY Lawrence Buell’s analysis is, of course, remarkably patronizing toward Thoreau as a thinker. The unargued presumption is that our (Buell’s) ideas are correct, and that the task is to legitimate these ideas by tracing them back to Thoreau, even though the fit is certainly less than perfect. In the process, Thoreau is made to look like little more than an immature, imperfect version of ourselves. There is no recognition that Thoreau’s ideas might have coherence, consistency, and integrity on their own terms, or that we might consider the possibility that Thoreau knew something that we do not, or has good reason to believe something that does not fit neatly with our own convictions. Buell gives away the game at the end of his book: “Thoreau’s importance as an environmental saint lies in being remembered, in the affectionate simplicity of public mythmaking, as helping to make the space of nature ethically resonant.” Instead of discovering in Thoreau a powerful thinker, Buell finds only an “environmental saint,” a symbol we can exploit in promoting our own views and fighting our own battles. Here Henry Thoreau has been completely drained of his critical and philosophical power.

Lawrence Buell, in his THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMAGINATION, made a remark, about Stanley Cavell’s remark, about Thoreau’s parable, of the unreality of loss: “The writer” composing “his book” becomes movingly personalized here, when Stanley Cavell retrieves WALDEN from the antiseptic operating room of textuality to become work, the labor of a complicated living person about whose losses we are required to think as we imagine him conjuring them up and trying to lay them at rest. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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WALDEN: In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men’s, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and never paint “No Admittance” on my gate. I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves. To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine! No doubt many of my townsmen have met me returning from this enterprise, farmers starting for Boston in the twilight, or woodchoppers going to their work. It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it.

The The WALDEN other parable analyses

Thus, in regard to Thoreau’s nostalgic “pastoral return” to his memories, Lawrence Buell offers on page 127 of THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMAGINATION that: Walden, both the experience and the book, was a pastoral return in two symbolic senses as well as the literal: a psychocultural return, in the spirit of romantic sentimentalism defined by Schiller, to the Homeric world; and a psychobiographical return, driven by Wordsworthian reminiscences of former times spent HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY fully within nature, glimpses of which Thoreau allows us in the boyhood boating memories noted earlier. This nostalgia for youth later became intensified by nostalgia for life at Walden, kept alive by hundreds of additional visits, in body and in recollection, that Thoreau made to the site and memory of the experiment. So the parable from 1846-1847 of the author’s long- lost hound, turtledove, and bay horse (WALDEN 17) came to apply as much to the Walden experience itself as to the past before the experience. Taylor’s major thesis is to be found on his page 117 (why he waited to page 117 to announce the major thesis of his book I do not understand, unless like so many of us he found out what he was writing about while writing). The folks like Buell who have been supposing that Thoreau was primarily a nature writer or an environmentalist are just wrong, as wrong as the folks who have been supposing that Thoreau was above political concern or had determined to flee from all responsibility for his fellow human beings. Taylor’s major thesis, flat out, has to do with the central focus which is there to be discovered in Thoreau’s literary oeuvre: “It is a just polity, not the natural world, that is Thoreau’s primary concern.” Taylor does not leave it at that. He continues, Thoreau’s primary political concern, as America’s “bachelor uncle,” is consistently focused on the character of the America that will emerge after the issue of slavery is resolved, after our social and political life is no longer distorted by such an obvious contradiction between our ideals and our institutions.... The America that can grow once the most obvious insults to its principles are removed is what demanded Thoreau’s unremitting attention throughout his career ... the individualism Thoreau is promoting in no way precludes a commitment to citizenship or a just political order. This is certainly the most misunderstood element of Thoreau’s political thought. Because his main focus is on fostering resistance to unjust political power, most interpreters assume he objects to political power in general ... this interpretation is simply not justified by a close reading of Thoreau’s texts. Just because his attention is primarily directed toward resistance to contemporary political evils, we must not conclude that Thoreau believes all politics to be evil. And just because he sometimes despaired of American civic life, we must not conclude that he was an anarchist. There is ample evidence to the contrary, suggesting that Thoreau looked forward to a time when responsible democratic citizens could establish a legitimate political order. For the sake of this higher citizenship, however, we often have to learn to be “not too good” as citizens in the present state of affairs, at least from the perspective of the modern liberal state.... Thoreau’s understanding of individual responsibility appears anarchic, even antisocial. This view of Thoreau, however, is both an exaggeration and based upon a misunderstanding. It is an exaggeration since, as we have seen, Thoreau’s objection is to unjust, abusive, and illegitimate authority and not to authority per se. His disrespect is reserved for those elements of the polity that deserve disrespect, and, frankly, Thoreau identified the shameful elements of our social and political life about as accurately as anyone can ask for. The conservative’s dislike of Thoreau is based upon a misunderstanding since Thoreau shares with the conservative a view that political power and authority can and should be deployed for the purpose of promoting good human lives. Far from desiring the dissolution of all authority, HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY Thoreau, as we have seen, demands only that authority be exerted for the promotion of the desirable ends. Conservatives share more with Thoreau than they suspect.

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 2017. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

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

Prepared: December 25, 2017 HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

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

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in HDT WHAT? INDEX

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

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