“THE FIRST PERSON TO EXPRESS THE AMERICAN IDEA”1

His interest in the moral questions of the day has supplied the want of vitality in himself; his great facility at versification has enabled him to fill the ear with a copious stream of pleasant sound. But his verse is stereotyped; his thought sounds no depth, and posterity will not remember him. — Margaret Fuller I’ve come up with a new theory to account for the hostility displayed by James Russell Lowell, as an editor of The Atlantic Monthly, toward Henry Thoreau. As you are presumably aware, these two knew each other early, both during their school years together at Harvard in Cambridge, and after Thoreau’s graduation in Concord where Lowell had been exiled (“rusticated”) from Cambridge for lack of attention to his studies, to be privately tutored by the Reverend Barzillai Frost. Lowell grew fond of making snippy derogations of Thoreau — after all, Lowell was one of the effete Boston nobs, of inheritance and family social standing, who moved in the hoity-toity circles of the downtown movers and shakers, whereas Thoreau was a mere village Frenchie nobody who, sniff, needed to get his hands all dirty. When in 1858 Thoreau offered an essay on the Maine woods to The Atlantic Monthly, Lowell arbitrarily deleted a sentence about a pine tree in Maine, “It is as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still,” and Thoreau was powerless to correct him. Lowell simply refused to respond. Then Thoreau couldn’t get Lowell to pay him for the article, or even to communicate about the nonpayment. Thoreau would respond with fighting words, pointing out to Lowell that “his life is a kind of nightmare continued into broad daylight.” Ellery Sedgwick’s THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY 1857-1909: YANKEE HUMANISM AT HIGH TIDE AND EBB (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1994, page 60) commented that “The incident shows Lowell at his worst — high- handed and subject to personal pique. The quarrel with Thoreau 1. The above phrase was self-description. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL also shows that Lowell and Phillips were reluctant, as later editors and publishers would be, to engage too often in religious controversy.” In other words, Lowell supposedly had deleted the sentence because he had a religious objection to its “pantheism.” What I have uncovered, which it seems no-one has known about before, is a poem “To a Pine-Tree” by Lowell on pages 122-3 of the magazine put out by Brook Farm, The Harbinger: Devoted to Social and Political Progress, printed in 1845 thirteen years earlier, in which a roughly similar trope about a Maine pine tree had appeared: “Thou alone know’st the glory of summer, / Gazing down on thy broad seas of forest, / On thy subjects that send a proud murmur / Up to thee, to their sachem, who towerest / From thy bleak throne to heaven.” Could Lowell have been merely considering that Thoreau was “stealing his thunder”? —That Thoreau had been illicitly accessing and recycling Lowell’s 1845 poem about a pine tree in Maine? Is the “religious objection” theory of Sedgwick quite beside the point?

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1767

Elmwood, a three-story Georgian home, was constructed on Tory Row near the Charles River (Quinobequin) in Cambridge for the last Lieutenant-Governor of the Royal Province of Massachusetts. (It would be acquired by the family of origin of James Russell Lowell in 1818, and would eventually become the official residence

of whoever happens to be the president of Harvard University.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1818

Elmwood, a three-story Georgian house on Tory Row near the Charles River (Quinobequin) in Cambridge that had been the home of the last Lieutenant-Governor of the Royal Province of Massachusetts in 1767 when it was new, was acquired by the family of origin of James Russell Lowell.

NEW “HARVARD MEN”

(It, would eventually become the official residence of whoever happens to be the president of Harvard University.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1819

February 22, Monday: The Adams/Onis Treaty was agreed to by Spain and the United States. Spain ceded East Florida and gave up all claim to West Florida. The southern boundary of the Louisiana Purchase was defined. The US gave up its claim to Texas.

James Russell Lowell was born at “Elmwood,” the Lowell family home on Tory Row near the Charles River (Quinobequin) in Cambridge that eventually would become the home of the president of Harvard University, the child of the Reverend Charles Lowell and Mrs. Harriet Traill Spence Lowell.

The purchase of Spanish Florida. A Treaty of Amity, Settlement, and Limits with His Catholic Majesty was entered into by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams and Luis de Onis, the Spanish minister to Washington DC, according to which Spain would cede that peninsula to the USA and in addition renounce all its claims to the Oregon country west of the Rockies and north of the 42d parallel. A joint commission would be established to define a border between the dominions of the US and those of Spain from the 42d parallel southwest to the Sabine River, which would be accepted as the western border of the Louisiana territory. (This treaty would be ratified by the US Senate in 1821.) READ THE FULL TEXT HDT WHAT? INDEX

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NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

James Russell Lowell “Stack of the Artist of HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1830

By about this point the writings of the naturalist Reverend Gilbert White had become so popular in England, that what has been termed “the cult of Gilbert White” was beginning to reach even into America. The steady stream of visitors to Selborne, England would eventually include both Charles Darwin and John Burroughs, and the money that was being made off the sale of such books would eventually draw even the American editor and critic wannabee James Russell Lowell. The rise of the natural history essay in the latter half of the nineteenth century was an essential legacy of the Selborne cult. It was more than a scientific-literary genre of writing, modeled after White’s pioneering achievement. A constant theme of the nature essayists was the search for a lost pastoral haven, for a home in an inhospitable and threatening world.... [N]atural history was the vehicle that brought readers to the quiet peace of hay barns, orchards, and mountain valleys. These virtuosi of the nature essay were among the best selling writers of their age.

In this regard, here is a quote from Professor Lawrence Buell’s analysis of the manner in which Henry Thoreau has entered the American canon:

A generation after Henry Thoreau, John Burroughs, America’s leading nature essayist at the turn of the twentieth century, wrote about Thoreau in somewhat the same way eighteenth- century and romantic poets tended to write about John Milton: as the imposing precursor figure whose shadow he must disown or destroy in order to establish his own legitimacy. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1834

The 2d volume, on water birds, of Professor Thomas Nuttall’s A MANUAL OF THE ORNITHOLOGY OF THE UNITED STATES AND OF CANADA (Cambridge: Hilliard and Brown; Boston: Hilliard, Gray). He resigned as curator of the Botanical Garden of Harvard in order to accompany the Wyeth Expedition to the Pacific coast. NUTTALL’S WATER BIRDS

Horatio Cook Meriam received his A.M. degree from Harvard College: Horatio Cook Meriam; LL.B. 1831; A.M. 1834 1872 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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NEW “HARVARD MEN”

James Russell Lowell matriculated at Harvard.

John Witt Randall graduated from Harvard, and would study medicine. He was described by a classmate of that time: “Though among us, he was not wholly of us, but seemed to have thoughts, pursuits and aspirations to which we were strangers.”

The Reverend Professor Jared Sparks of Harvard began the long-term task of editing a 10-volume series (Boston: Hilliard, Gray; London: Kennett) –and then a 15-volume series– of THE LIBRARY OF AMERICAN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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BIOGRAPHY.

LIBRARY OF AM. BIOG. I HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1837

August 31, Thursday: La preghiera di un popolo, a hymn by Gaetano Donizetti for solo voices, chorus and orchestra, was performed for the initial time, in Teatro San Carlo, Naples.

At noon, at University Hall in Cambridge, 200 academics lined up in their pecking order and marched west, to the music of a band, into the 1st Parish Church that had been erected where Mrs. Anne Hutchinson had been examined before her exile for heresy. In this structure they intended to hear an address “Man Thinking” by the Reverend Waldo Emerson,2 an honorary member of the  society who had been retained at the eleventh hour (after they had been turned down by the orator of their choice).

THE LIST OF LECTURES

The records of that society assert that the Reverend Emerson’s oration, of 1¼ hour, was “in the misty, dreamy, unintelligible style of Swedenborg, Coleridge, and Carlyle.” The last paragraph of this address included a quote from Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, here rendered in boldface:

2. Which would be retitled and printed in 1841 as “THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR”. VIEW THIS ONLINE HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Another sign of our times, also marked by an analogous political movement, is, the new importance given to the single person. Every thing that tends to insulate the individual, — to surround him with barriers of natural respect, so that each man shall feel the world is his, and man shall treat with man as a sovereign state with a sovereign state; — tends to true union as well as greatness. “I learned,” said the melancholy Pestalozzi, “that no man in God’s wide earth is either willing or able to help any other man.” Help must come from the bosom alone. The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must be an university of knowledges. If there be one lesson more than another, which should pierce his ear, it is, The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all. …this confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American Scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice make the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant. See already the tragic consequence. The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There is no work for any but the decorous and the complaisant. Young men of the fairest promise, who begin life upon our shores, inflated by the mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars of God, find the earth below not in unison with these, — but are hindered from action by the disgust which the principles on which business is managed inspire, and turn drudges, or die of disgust, — some of them suicides. What is the remedy? They did not yet see, and thousands of young men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the career, do not yet see, that, if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him. Patience, — patience; — with the shades of all the good and great for company; and for solace, the perspective of your own infinite life; and for work, the study and the communication of principles, the making those instincts prevalent, the conversion of the world. Is it not the chief disgrace in the world, not to be an unit; — not to be reckoned one character; — not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted geographically, as the north, or the south? Not so, brothers and friends, — please God, ours shall not be so. We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds. The study of letters shall be no longer a name for pity, for doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The dread of man and the love of man shall be a wall of defence and a wreath of joy around all. A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Richard Henry Dana, Jr., once Emerson’s pupil, was there, back from his two years before the mast and graduating first in his Harvard College class and preparing to take up the study of law at Harvard’s Dane Law School. James Russell Lowell was there and later stated that the day was “an event without any parallel in our

literary annals” (it is hard to imagine how what the lecturer had to offer might have been without any parallel in our literary annals, since basically he was merely channeling schoolmaster Noah Webster, Jr.’s bloviation of 1783, “America must be as independent in literature as she is in politics, as famous for arts as for arms”). Emerson’s heresy lasted however an hour and a quarter, after which all dined in University Hall. Davidem HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Henricum Thoreau was not apparent either at this Cambridge bloviation, or at its festive table.

Thoreau had not really won much recognition in college, except for a couple of $25.00 scholarships, and except for the recognition a student obtains by being difficult. The administration summed up his attitude in this manner, carefully pointing out that it had, despite his resistance, done everything that might be expected of it:

He had … imbibed some notions concerning emulation and college rank which had a natural tendency to diminish his zeal, if not his exertions. His instructors were impressed with the conviction that he was indifferent, even to a degree that was faulty…. I appreciate very fully the goodness of his heart and the strictness of his moral principle; and have done as much for him as, under the circumstances, was possible.

But today we would say he was, for a Comp Lit undergrad student, well “trained:” by the time he left, he had read not only the Greek and Latin canon, but also widely in Italian, French, Spanish, and German literatures (Sanskrit, Chinese, and Arabic literatures were of course encountered in translation). Luckily, as he left higher 3 education, he was able to retain his access to that omphalos of the universe, the Harvard library. We can only be grateful that there was no Sierra Press in 1843, and that no publisher cut a contract with this writer fresh from college, to produce a series of glossy-illustration nature books or “miscellanies” to lay on the nation’s coffee-tables for beaucoup bucks, and that for lack of a such a contract, this young writer had to go back to his home town and rusticate and take nature hikes. Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson’s comment on this significant HDT WHAT? INDEX

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3. There’s an oft-repeated story that Thoreau refused to accept his Harvard diploma, which I showed you above. This is from Lawrence and Lee’s play “The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail”:

HENRY: (embracing him) John! JOHN: Welcome home. How’s your overstuffed brain? HENRY: I’ve forgotten everything already. JOHN: At least you’ve got a diploma! HENRY: No, I don’t. JOHN: Why not? HENRY: They charge you a dollar. And I wouldn’t pay it. JOHN: But think how Mama would love it — your diploma from Harvard, framed on the wall! HENRY: Let every sheep keep his own skin.

He did pay his $2.50 diploma fee, he did go to his commencement, he did receive his A.B. sheepskin. Davidem Henricum Thoreaus did say “Let every sheep keep but his own skin” ( November 14, 1847) and “Harvard College was partly built by a lottery. My father tells me he bought a ticket in it” ( January 27, 1855). When he made a speech at this commencement, as we have seen, what he told his classmates and superiors was “This curious world which we inhabit is more wonderful than it is convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.” What happened, how this repudiation-of-diploma story got started, was that Harvard offered, for an extra $10.00 and no additional work, to magically transform A.B. degrees into A.M. degrees, that is, despite Thoreau’s academic record, to make him a Master after the fact. Six members of the class of 1837 earned an advanced degree, and an additional 21 received the advanced degree through this painless learning, but Mr. Thoreau entirely ignored Harvard’s meretricious fund-raising scheme ( Cameron). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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ceremonial day, late in his life, was:

Highly interesting it is to find that Thoreau at twenty, in his “Part” at Commencement, pleaded for the life that, later, he carried out. An observer from the stars, he imagines, “of our planet and the restless animal for whose sake it was contrived, where he found one man to admire with him his fair dwelling-place, the ninety and nine would be scraping together a little of the gilded dust upon its surface.... Let men, true to their natures, cultivate the moral affections, lead manly and independent lives; ...The sea will not stagnate, the earth will be as green as ever, and the air as pure. This curious world ... sublime revelations of Nature.”

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 31st of 8th M 1837 / Took a Carryall & rode to Portsmouth with my wife & Mary Williams to attend the Monthly Meeting — Mary Hicks & Hannah Hale preached — To me both Meetings were hard uncomfortable seasons - We dined at Shadrach Chases & it being Rainy came home early. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

The Phi Beta Kappa address that the Reverend Emerson delivered at the Brattle Street Church in Cambridge on this occasion has been described by Philip Cafaro as “what remains America’s most famous commencement speech.” –Silly me, I thought America’s most famous commencement address was this one that Kurt Vonnegut did not deliver at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1997:

Ladies and gentlemen of the class of ’97. Wear Sunscreen. If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now. Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they’ve faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine. Don’t worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 pm on some idle Tuesday. Do one thing every day that scares you. Sing. Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts. Don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours. Floss. Don’t waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind. The race is long and, in the end, it’s HDT WHAT? INDEX

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only with yourself. Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how. Keep your old love letters. Throw away your old bank statements. Stretch. Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don’t. Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees. You’ll miss them when they’re gone. Maybe you’ll marry, maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll have children, maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll divorce at 40, maybe you’ll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else’s. Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it or of what other people think of it. It’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own. Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room. Read the directions, even if you don’t follow them. Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly. Get to know your parents. You never know when they’ll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings. They’re your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future. Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young. Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft. Travel. Accept certain inalienable truths. Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too will get old. And when you do, you’ll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble, and children respected their elders. Respect your elders. Don’t expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund. Maybe you’ll have a wealthy spouse. But you never know when either one might run out. Don’t mess too much with your hair or by the time you’re 40 it will look 85. Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth. But trust me on the sunscreen. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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September: James Russell Lowell took over as secretary of the Hasty Pudding Club, with responsibility for keeping the club minutes in rhyme

(consult Kenneth Walter Cameron’s “Undergraduate verse: rhymed minutes of the Hasty Pudding Club by James Russell Lowell,” Thistle Press, 1956).

David Greene Haskins, a member of this self-congratulatory club, having just graduated from Harvard College, would initially be employed for several years as an assistant in the academy of his uncle Charles W. Greene, at Jamaica Plain, an academy with which he was familiar because it had been there that he himself had been fitted for higher education. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1838

While the rather humorlessly self-righteous James Russell Lowell was rusticating in Concord, Massachusetts during this year, having been temporarily expelled from Harvard College for some infraction of college regulations. He was being tutored by the utterly humorlessly self-righteous Reverend Barzillai Frost. They

must have made quite a pair! In this year Lowell would graduate from Harvard as Class Poet despite being quite unable to attend his Class Day and deliver the poem which he had composed for the occasion because he HDT WHAT? INDEX

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was being ostracized in Concord, so the poem would be published in Cambridge by Metcalf, Torry & Ballou.

One of the poetaster’s biographers would speak of this poem as “immortalizing, to Lowell’s later regret, his reactionary tendencies and sophomoric opposition to the new thoughts and reforms then coming into fashion [such as] Transcendentalism, abolition, woman’s rights, and temperance … Typical of the poem’s style … are these lines directed against Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had just delivered his famous address before the Divinity College students in Cambridge … [lines the level of which] never rises above that of diatribe: they are abusive in their denunciation, unmemorable in phrasing, and humorlessly self-righteous”: They call such doctrines startling, strange, and new, But then they’re his, you know, and must be true; The universal mind requires a change, Its insect wings must have a wider range, It wants no mediator — it can face In its own littleness the Throne of Grace; WALDO EMERSON For miracles and “such things” ’t is too late, To trust in them is now quite out of date, They’re all explainable by nature’s laws— Ay! if you only could find out their CAUSE!… Alas! that Christian ministers should dare To preach the views of Gibbon and Vol tair e !

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

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project James Russell Lowell HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Late that summer, James Russell Lowell, who was to become the most influential literary figure of the mid- 19th century, came in contact with Henry Thoreau at Waldo Emerson’s place: I saw Thoreau last night and it is exquisitely amusing to see how he imitates Emerson’s tone and manner. With my eyes shut I shouldn’t know them apart. [from a letter quoted in Harding, THOREAU AS SEEN, page 180] This was how Priscilla Rice Edes, another Concord resident, saw him in those years: “David Henry” after leaving college was eccentric and did not like to, and so would not, work. The opposite of John in every particular, he was [a] thin, insignificant, poorly dressed, careless looking young man,... [Harding, THOREAU AS SEEN, page 181] HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1839

Lemuel Shattuck retired from the bookstore he had opened in Cambridge in 1834 in order to devote himself to public service. In this year he became a founding member of the American Statistical Association. He also began to work toward the enactment of a Massachusetts law that would require registration of all births, marriages, and deaths — a law that would be enacted in 1842. (For the birth of David Henry Thoreau in 1817, for instance, there is no public record whatever.)

The following entry was made in the Harvard College Faculty’s Book in regard to the deficiencies of senior James Russell Lowell and the tutorship of the Reverend Barzillai Frost: Voted, that Lowell, Senior, on account of continued neglect of his college duties, be suspended till the Saturday before Commencement to continue his studies with Mr. Frost in Concord ... and not to visit Cambridge during the period of his suspension. Placing a cocked pistol against his skull, Harvard Man and Class Poet Lowell feared to pull the trigger — so he began to study law. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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October 19, Saturday: On this Cornwallis Day –in order to avoid the excesses of military competition experienced in the previous year when the Concord Light Infantry and the Concord Artillery had hired two competing bands from Boston and had paraded on Concord Common, with each attempting to crowd out their enemy’s marching formation and tangle their enemy’s feet by the beat from a different drummer– instead of competing, the Concord Light Infantry unit and the Concord Artillery unit united and began to portray the British soldiers under the leadership of General Cornwallis. Meanwhile, the state militia, attired in clothing

from attics, portrayed the Americans under the leadership of General Washington. James Russell Lowell, who

DIFFERENT DRUMMER

was present, has reported that after firing blanks at each other, these citizen soldiers adjourned to taverns to fraternize and tell war stories. (This sort of training was the only experience the soldiers would receive in fighting, and the only experience their officers would receive in ordering men to fight, prior to some training they would conduct near Manassas Junction, Virginia on July 21, 1861!) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project James Russell Lowell “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project James Russell Lowell HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1840

James Russell Lowell obtained his LL.B. law degree and became engaged to the sister of a classmate and set up his practice in Court Square in Boston.

BECAME LAWYER GOT MARRIED SET UP PRACTICE

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project James Russell Lowell HDT WHAT? INDEX

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THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project James Russell Lowell HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1841

James Russell Lowell’s volume of utterly unmemorable poems, A YEAR’S LIFE (Cambridge: Folsom, Wells, and Thurston, Printers to the University). I saw a gate : a harsh voice spake and said, “This is the gate of Life;” above was writ, “Leave hope behind, all ye who enter it;” Then shrank my heart within itself for dread ; But, softer than the summer rain is shed, Words dropt upon my soul, and they did say, “Fear nothing, Faith shall save thee, watch and pray!” So, without fear I lifted up my head, And lo! that writing was not, one fair word Was carven in its stead, and it was “Love.” Then rained once more those sweet tones from above With healing on their wings: I humbly heard, “I am the Life, ask and it shall be given! I am the way, by me ye enter Heaven!” A YEAR’S LIFE

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

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

James Russell Lowell “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project James Russell Lowell “Stack of the Artist of HDT WHAT? INDEX

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January: George R. Graham merged The Casket and Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine into Graham’s Magazine. Edgar Allan Poe became the literary editor of the magazine. This was predicated on the promise that the job would involve mostly the writing of book notices and thus wouldn’t require more than a couple of hours a day of his valuable time. For this the poet was to receive $800 a year — which was comparable to a salary of perhaps $60,000 today and thus was nothing to sneeze at for part-time work. The new publication would retain the serial numbering of The Casket but would use the policy of Burton’s. Some of the writers in this 1st year would be James Russell Lowell, Poe, Lydia Howard Huntley

Sigourney, and Park Benjamin. The following year the principal contributors would include William Cullen Bryant, James Fenimore Cooper, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. During his editorship the poet would contribute several of his better tales and a few important literary essays. By June, however, he would be writing to a friend that he was disgusted by his situation, and in the following year he would resign, partly because of an argument with fellow editor Charles Peterson and partly because he would be feeling supplanted by Samuel Griswold Goodrich, the gent who would later replace him as literary editor. During this year Poe’s “A Chapter on Autobiography” would include a general denunciation of Emerson as a twaddler: Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson belongs to a class of gentlemen with whom we have no patience whatever — the mystic for mysticism’s sake. Quintilian mentions a pedant who taught obscurity, and who once said to a pupil “this is excellent, for I do not understand it myself.” How the good man would have chuckled over Mr. E.! His present role seems to be the out-Carlyling Carlyle. Lycophron Tenebrosus is a fool to him. The best answer to his twaddle is cui bono?.... His love of the obscure does not prevent him, nevertheless, from the composition of occasional poems in which beauty is apparent by flashes.... His [handwritten signature] is bad, sprawling, illegible, and irregular — although sufficiently bold. This latter trait may be, and no doubt is, only a portion of his general affectation. A young boy named Alex McCaffery was living with the Emersons to help out with household chores. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1842

In approximately this year, James Russell Lowell abandoned the practice of law for the editing of a literary magazine The Pointer which would fail after but 3 issues.

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

James Russell Lowell “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” James Russell Lowell “Stack of the Artist of HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1843

James Russell Lowell’s POEMS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Lydia Maria Child’s LETTERS FROM NEW YORK, popular collections of her regular columns in the National Anti-Slavery Standard. LETTERS FROM NEW YORK

The laws of the state of New York had been protecting her from having her property attached on account of her husband’s debts, but at this point family obligations overwhelmed, and the couple elected to return to Massachusetts to reside with Maria’s aging father in his Wayland home. This would be, despite occasional periods elsewhere, Maria’s home for the remainder of her life.

In Boston, the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Fair put out for sale a printing entitled THE LIBERTY BELL, as a fund-raising effort of the “Friends of Freedom,” and both Maria and her husband David contributed:

• Weston, Anne Warren. “The Faithful Dead” • Bowring, John. “The Liberty Bell” • Bowditch, Henry Ingersoll. “Slavery and the Church” • James Russell Lowell. “Elegy on the Death of Dr. Channing” • Webb, Richard D. “A Word from Ireland” • Burleigh, George S. “Sonnets: World-Harmonies” • Martineau, Harriet. “Persevere” • Follen, Eliza Lee. “To the Martyrs for Freedom” • Morpeth, Viscount. “Letter” • Chapman, Maria Weston. “Impromptu: To Viscount Morpeth” • Phillips, Wendell. “A Fragment” • Milnes, Richard Monckton. “To Harriet Martineau: Christian Endurance” • Channing, William Henry. “A Day in Kentucky” • Story, William W. “Sonnet [Be of good cheer, ye firm and dauntless few]” • ---. “Sonnet [Slavery is wrong, most deeply, foully wrong]” • ---. “Sonnet [Freedom! August and spirit-cheering name!]” • Quincy, Edmund. “Two Nights in St. Domingo: ‘An Ower True Tale’” HAITI This lurid tale, set in Haiti, justifies slave revolt. • Pierpont, John. “The Chase” • Parker, Theodore. “Socrates in Boston: A Dialogue Between the Philosopher and a Yankee” • David Lee Child. “Thoughts of a Stone-splitter, on Finding the Figure of a Bell, Beautifully and Wonderfully Marked by Shining Hornblend, in the Heart of an Immense Granite Rock” • Lydia Maria Child. “Slavery’s Pleasant Homes: A Faithful Sketch” • Garrison, William Lloyd. “Sonnet: On the Death of James Cropper, the Distinguished Philanthropist of England” • Hopper, Isaac T. “Story of a Fugitive” • Collins, John A. “Irish Philanthropists” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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• Samuel Gridley Howe. “Scene in a Slave Prison” • Parkman, John. “Slavery and the Pulpit” • Allen, Richard. “A Sketch” • Sewall, Samuel E. “Harrington’s Decision”

I have passed ten days in New Orleans, not unprofitably, I trust, in examining the public institutions, — the schools, asylums, hospitals, prisons, &c. With the exception of the first, there is little hope of amelioration. I know not how much merit there may be in their system; but I do know that, in the administration of the penal code, there are abominations which should bring down the fate of Sodom [Genesis 19:24-25] upon the city. If Howard or Mrs. Fry ever discovered so ill-administered a den of thieves as the New Orleans prison, they never described it. In the negro’s apartment I saw much which made me blush that I was a white man, and which, for a moment, stirred up an evil spirit in my animal nature. Entering a large paved court-yard, around which ran galleries filled with slaves of all ages, sexes and colors, I heard the snap of a whip, every stroke of which sounded like the sharp crack of a pistol. I turned my head, and beheld a sight which absolutely chilled me to the marrow of my bones, and gave me, for the first time in my life, the sensation of my hair stiffening at the roots. There lay a black girl flat upon her face, on a board, her two thumbs tied, and fastened to one end, her feet tied, and drawn tightly to the other end, while a strap passed over the small of her back, and, fastened around the board, compressed her closely to it. Below the strap she was entirely naked. By her side, and six feet off, stood a huge negro, with a long whip, which he applied with dreadful power and wonderful precision. Every stroke brought away a strip of skin, which clung to the lash, or fell quivering on the pavement, while the blood followed after it. The poor creature writhed and shrieked, and, in a voice which showed alike her fear of death and her dreadful agony, screamed to her master, who stood at her head, “O, spare my life! don’t cut my soul out!” But still fell the horrid lash; still strip after strip peeled off from the skin; gash after gash was cut in her living flesh, until it became a livid and bloody mass of raw and quivering muscle. It was with the greatest difficulty I refrained from springing upon the torturer, and arresting his lash; but, alas! what could I do, but turn aside to hide my tears for the sufferer, and my HDT WHAT? INDEX

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blushes for humanity! This was in a public and regularly-organized prison; the punishment was one recognized and authorized by the law. But think you the poor wretch had committed a heinous offence, and had been convicted thereof, and sentenced to the lash? Not at all. She was brought by her master to be whipped by the common executioner, without trial, judge or jury, just at his beck or nod, for some real or supposed offence, or to gratify his own whim or malice. And he may bring her day after day, without cause assigned, and inflict any number of lashes he pleases, short of twenty-five, provided only he pays the fee. Or, if he choose, he may have a private whipping-board on-his own premises, and brutalize himself there. A shocking part of this horrid punishment was its publicity, as I have said; it was in a court-yard surrounded by galleries, which were filled with colored persons of all sexes — runaway slaves, committed for some crime, or slaves up for sale. You would naturally suppose they crowded forward, and gazed, horror- stricken, at the brutal spectacle below; but they did not; many of them hardly noticed it, and many were entirely indifferent to it. They went on in their childish pursuits, and some were laughing outright in the distant parts of the galleries; so low can man, in God’s image, be sunk to brutality. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1844

Harriet Martineau’s general health somewhat improved, and she authored LIFE IN THE SICKROOM.

In Boston, the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Fair put out for sale a printing entitled THE LIBERTY BELL, as a fund-raising effort of the “Friends of Freedom”:

• Moore, R. R. R. “The Liberty Bell” • Spooner, Allen C. “Words to the Wavering” • James Russell Lowell. “A Chippewa Legend” • Haughton, James. “A Word of Encouragement” • Burleigh, George S. “Our First Ten Years in the Struggle for Liberty” • Hildreth, Richard. “Complaint and Reproach” • Pierpont, John. “Nebuchadnezzar” • Adam, William. “Reminiscences” • Bowring, John. “To America” • Follen, Eliza Lee. “The Melancholy Boy” This story has recently been interpreted as evidence of feminist-abolitionists’ need to “erase” the blackness of the black body (Sanchez-Eppler), however, it could be interpreted much differently, as an indictment of racism’s power to induce self-loathing. • Madden, R. R. “Our Reliance” • Cabot, Susan C. “Letter to a Friend” • Howitt, William. “The Harvest Moon” • Howitt, Mary. “The Blind King” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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• Professor Amasa Walker. “Pater Noster” • Taylor, Emily. “To a Friend, Who Asked the Author’s Aid and Prayers for the Slave” • Webb, Richard D. “Random Reflections” • Poole, Elizabeth. “The Slave-Boy’s Death” This poem dramatizes an account from THE LIFE OF MOSES GRANDY, LATE A SLAVE IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (London: Charles Gilpin, 1843). • Quincy, Edmund. “Lewis Herbert: An Incident of New-England Slavery” • Weston, Anne Warren. “Sonnet: Written After Seeing the Picture, ‘Christus Consolator’” • Mott, Lucretia. “Diversities” This essay argues in favor of pluralism in the anti-slavery movement; a plea to avoid destructive in-fighting by accepting “diversities” of approach. LUCRETIA MOTT • Sutherland, Harriet (Duchess). “Extract of a Letter” • Harriet Martineau. “Pity the Slave” • Whipple, Charles K. “The Church and the Clergy” • Wilson, Susan. “The Fugitives in Boston” • Garrison, William Lloyd. “No Compromise with Slavery” • Chapman, Maria Weston. “Sonnet: Conversing With His Soul” • Rogers, Nathaniel P. “Blind Guides” • Poole, Elizabeth. “The Soul’s Freedom” • Hilton, John T. “To the Abolitionists” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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December 26, Wednesday: James Russell Lowell got married with Maria White,4 and began to write editorials for the abolitionist paper Pennsylvania Freeman.5

4. A gifted poet educated at the Ursuline Convent that had been torched in 1834, she had inspired his poems in AYEAR’S LIFE (1841). 5. This poet offered, in rhyming dialect, that his readers ought to be in favor of the abolition of the institution of slavery because anyone who would make “niggers” into “black slaves” might also attempt to make “you” into “wite [sic] slaves.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1845

Margaret Fuller’s WOMAN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY was published by Horace Greeley’s publishing house: “There exists in the minds of men a tone of feeling toward women as toward slaves.”

Although this book received, in general, bad reviews –for the reviewers, male, were threatened by her forthrightness– the 1st edition pictured above still sold out within the week. The publishers deducted their 6 expenses and charges and mailed the author $85.00 in full payment. In this year Margaret fell in love with a HDT WHAT? INDEX

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young immigrant Jewish businessman, James Nathan, and wrote some fascinating love letters.

In Boston, the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Fair put out for sale a printing entitled THE LIBERTY BELL, as a fund-raising effort of the “Friends of Freedom”:

• The Liberty Bell. By Friends of Freedom. Boston: Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Fair, 1845. • Barton, Bernard. “Sonnet to the Friends of the Anti-Slavery Cause in America” • Coues, Charlotte H. L. “An Appeal to Mothers” Any mother who has lost a child should sympathize with the slave mother “whose child is removed, not by the commands of a Father 6. It is interesting, is it not, that WALDEN is never criticized, as Margaret’s writings were criticized by James Russell Lowell, for being “dotted as thick as a peacock's tail with I's”? –For in fact the printer of WALDEN quite exhausted the capital letter “I” from his type case and had to print WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS section by section, breaking down the used book plates to restock his type case. Why, it is almost as if a double standard was in effect! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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of infinite love, and by the still hand of death, but at the bidding of the fierce demon of avarice.... “ • Bowring, John. “To the American Abolitionists: Encouragement” • Cabot, Susan C. “The New England Convention” • Follen, Eliza Lee. “To Cassius M. Clay” • Pease, Elizabeth. “Responsibility” Scripture proves that “all mankind, the world over, [is to be regarded] as one great family.” • Longfellow, Henry W. “The Norman Baron” • Clarkson, Thomas. “[Letter] To the Christian and Well-Disposed Citizens of the Northern States of America” • Burleigh, George S. “Worth of the Union” This poem indicts Southern dominance of national culture: “Down with the blood-streaked flag!” • Downes, George. “Character of an Irish Bell-Ringer” • Sturge, Esther. “The Judgment” A vision of the judgment day, on which the “fiend of disquiet” takes possession of slaveholders’ souls. • Placido. “A Dios” Placido was a Cuban ex-slave executed in July 1843 for attempting to free the slaves of Cuba. • Chapman, Maria Weston. “Prayer: From the Spanish of Placido” • Bremer, Fredrika. “Letter on Slavery” • Chapman, Ann Greene. “The Armor and the Prize” • Whipple, Charles K. “The Abolitionists’ Plan” Impassioned argument for immediate, universal emancipation. • Weston, Anne Warren. “The Come-Outers of the Sixteenth and Nineteenth Centuries” • Quincy, Edmund. “Philip Catesby; Or, A Republic’s Gratitude” • James Russell Lowell. “The Happy Martyrdom” • Phillips, Wendell. “The Constitution” • White, Maria. “The Maiden’s Harvest” Allegorical poem depicting the white female liberator as a Christ-like sower of seeds. • May, Samuel J. “The Liberty Bell is not of the Liberty Party” • Poole, Joseph. “Southern Hunting Song” • Frederick Douglass. “The Folly of our Opponents” Rebuts the idea that there exists an “impassable barrier” between this country’s white and non-white people. • Poole, Elizabeth. “Stanzas, Written After a Visit to the Comeragh Mountain, County Waterford” • Clapp, Henry Jr. “Modern Christianity” • Barton, Bernard. “A Sonnet [Heart-stirring text! Proclaim it far and wide]” • Remond, Charles Lenox. “The New Age of Anti-Slavery” Condemns racism as well as slavery. • Garrison, William Lloyd. “The Triumph of Freedom” • May, Samuel J. “Fidelity” • Parkman, John. “Word and Work Worship” 6 (1845): • Kelly, Abby. “What is Real Anti-Slavery Work?” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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• Hempstead, Martha. “The Fugitive” • Grew, Mary. “The Dangers of the Cause” • Crosse, Andrew. “Emancipation in the British Isles” • Wright, Paulina S. “The Grand Difficulty” • Nathaniel Peabody Rogers. “The Anti-Slavery Platform” • William Lloyd Garrison. “The American Union” • Murray, J. Oswald. “To the Ministers of the Free Church of Scotland: On Their Accepting the Contributions of Slave-holders, and Defending Their Doing So by Speeches Palliating Slavery” • Thaxter, Anna Quincy. “Purity of Heart” • Jackson, Francis. “The National Compact” • Harriet Martineau. “[Letter] To Elizabeth Pease” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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James Russell Lowell’s CONVERSATIONS ON SOME OF THE OLD POETS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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July 16, Wednesday: Frederick Douglass lectured in Rome, New York.

James Russell Lowell, at his home “Elmwood” in Cambridge, Massachusetts, placed a poem “To a Pine-Tree” on pages 122-3 of the publication of the Brook Farm Phalanx, The Harbinger: Devoted to Social and Political Progress:

TO A PINE-TREE

Far up on Katahdin thou towerest, Purple-blue with the distance and vast; Like a cloud o’er the lowlands thou lowerest, That hangs poised on a lull in the blast, To its fall leaning awful.

In the storm, like a prophet o’ermaddened, Thou singest and tossest thy branches; Thy heart with the terror is gladdened, Thou forebodest the dread avalanches, When whole mountains swoop valeward. In the calm thou o’erstretchest the valleys With thine arms, as if blessings imploring, Like an old king led forth from his palace, When his people to battle are pouring From the city beneath him. To the lumberer asleep ’neath thy glooming Thou dost sing of wild billows in motion, Till he longs to be swung mid their booming In the tents of the Arabs of ocean, Whose finned isles are their cattle. For the gale snatches thee for his lyre, With mad hand crashing melody frantic, While he pours forth his mighty desire To leap down on the eager Atlantic, Whose arms stretch to his playmate. The wild storm makes his lair in thy branches, Preying thence on the continent under; Like a lion, crouched close on his haunches, There awaiteth his leap the fierce thunder, Growling low with impatience. Spite of winter, thou keep’st thy green glory, Lusty father of Titans past number! The snow-flakes alone make thee hoary, Nestling close to thy branches in slumber, And thee mantling with silence. Thou alone know’st the splendor of winter, Mid thy snow-silvered, hushed precipices, Hearing crags of green ice groan and splinter, And then plunge down the muffled abysses In the quiet of midnight. Thou alone know’st the glory of summer, Gazing down on thy broad seas of forest, On thy subjects that send a proud murmur Up to thee, to their sachem, who towerest From thy bleak throne to heaven.7

7. Note the similarity between this line and the line that editor Lowell would later delete from Henry Thoreau’s essay on the Maine woods for The Atlantic Monthly: “It is as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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July 16: Therien said this morning (July 16th Wednesday) If those beans were mine I should’nt like to hoe them till the dew was off–” He was going to his wood chopping. Ah said I that is one of the notions the farmers have got –but I dont believe it. “How thick the pigeons are” said he, “if working every day were not my trade I could get all the meat I should want by hunting. Pigeons [American Passenger Pigeon Ectopistes migratorius] woodchucks –Rabbits – Partridges –by George I could get all I should want for a week in one day.” I imagine it to be some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life –though in the midst of an outward civilization. Of course all the improvements of the ages do not carry a man backward nor forward in relation to the great facts of his existence. Our furniture should be as simple as the Arab’s or the Indians’– At first the thoughtful wondering man plucked in haste the fruits which the boughs extended to him –and found in the sticks and stones around him his implements ready. And he still remembered that he was s sojourner in nature. When he was refreshed with food and sleep he contemplated his journey again. He dwelt in a tent in this world. He was either threading the vallies or crossing the plains or climbing the mountain tops Now the best works of art serve comparatively but to dissipate the mind –for they are themselves transitionary and paroxismal and not free and absolute thoughts. Men have become the tools of their tools –the man who independently plucked the fruits when he was hungry –is become a farmer There are scores of pitch pine in my field –from one to three inches in diameter, girdled by the mice last winter– A Norwegian winter it was for them –for the snow lay long and deep –and they had to mix much pine meal with their usual diet– Yet these trees have not many of them died even in midsummer –and laid bare for a foot –but have grown a foot. They seem to do all their gnawing beneath the snow. There is not much danger of the mouse tribe becoming extinct in hard winters for their granary is a cheap and extensive one. Here is one has had her nest under my house, and came when I took my luncheon to pick the crumbs at my feet. It had never seen the race of man before, and so the sooner became familiar– It ran over y shoes and up my pantaloons inside clinging to my flesh with its sharp claws. It would run up the side of the room by short impulses like a squirrel –which resembles –coming between the house mouse and the former– Its belly is a little reddish and its ears a little longer. At length as I leaned my elbow on the bench it ran over my arm and round the paper which contained my dinner. And when I held it a piece of cheese it came and nibbled between my fingers and then cleaned its face and paws like a fly. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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After July 16 and before August 6, 1845: There is a memorable intervale between the written and the spoken language –the language read and the language heard. The one is transient –a sound –a tongue –a dialect –and all men learn it of their mothers– It is loquacious, fragmentary –raw material– The other is a reserved select matured expression –a deliberate word addressed to the ear of nations & generations. This one is natural & convenient –the other divine & instructive– The clouds flit here below –genial refreshing with their showers –and gratifying with their tints – alternate sun & shade– A grosser heaven adapted to our trivial wants –but above them –repose the blue firmament and the stars. The stars are written words & stereotyped on the blue parchment of the skies –the fickle clouds that hide them from our view –which we on this side need though heaven does not These are our daily colloquies our vaporous garrulous breath. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. The herd of men the generations who speak the Greek and Latin, are not entitled by the accident of birth to read the work of Genius whose mother tongue speaks every where, and is learned by every child who hears. The army of the Greeks and Latins are not coaeternary though contemporary with Homer & Plato Virgil & Cicero. In the transition ages nations who loudest spoke the Greek and Latin tongues –whose mothers milk they were, learned not their nobler dialects, but a base and vulgar speech The men of the middle ages who spoke so glibly the language of the Roman & in the eastern empire of the Athenian mob prized only a cheap contemporary learning– The classics of both languages were virtually lost and forgotten. When after the several nations of Europe had acquired in some degree rude and original languages of their own –sufficient for the arts of life & conversation –then the few scholars beheld with advantage from this more distant stand-point the treasures of antiquity –and a new Latin age commenced the era of reading– Those works of genius were then first classical. All those millions who had spoken Latin and Greek –had not read Latin & Greek– The time had at length arrived for the written word –the scripture –to be heard. What the multitude could not hear, after the lapse of centuries a few scholars read. This is the matured thought which was not spoken in the market place unless it be in a market place where the free genius of mankind resorts today. There is something very choice & select in a written word. No wonder Alexander carried his Homer? in a precious casket on his expeditions. A word which may be translated into every dialect and suggests a truth to every mind, is the most perfect work of human art, and as it may be breathed and taken on our lips and as it were become the product of our physical organs as its sense is of our intellectual –it is the nearest to life itself. It is the simplest and purest channel by which a revelation may be transmitted from age to age. How it subsists itself whole and undiminished till the intelligent reader is born to decypher it. These are the tracks of Zoroaster –of Confucius and moses –indelible in the sands of the remotest times. There are no monuments of antiquity comparable to the Classics for interest and importance. It does not need that the scholar should be an antiquarian for these works of art have such an immortality as the works of nature and are modern at the same time that they are ancient –like the sun and stars –and occupy by right no small share of the present. This palpable beauty is the treasured wealth of the world and the proper inheritance of each generation. Books, the oldest and the best, stand rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. They have not plead their cause –but they enlighten their readers and it is gained. When the illiterate and scornful rustic earns his imagined leisure and wealth, he turns inevitably at last, he or his children, to these still higher and yet inaccessible circles, And even when his descendant has attained to move in the highest rank of the wise men of his own age and country he will still be sensible only of the imperfection of his culture and the vanity and inefficiency of his intellectual wealth, if his Genius will not permit him to listen with somewhat of the equanimity of an equal to the fames of godlike men –which yet as it were form an invisible upper class in every society. I have carried an apple in my pocket tonight –a Sopsinwine they call it till now that I take my hand kerchief out it has hot so fine a fragrance that it really seems like a friendly of trick of some pleasant daemon to entertain me with. It is redolent of sweet scented orchards of innocent teeming harvests I realize the existence of a goddess Pomona –and that the gods have really intended that men should feed divinely, like themselves, on their own nectar & ambrosia They have so painted this fruit and freighted it with such a fragrance that it satisfies much more than an animal appetite. Grapes peaches berries nuts &c are likewise provided for those who will sit at their sideboard. I have felt when partaking of this inspiring diet that my appetite was indifferent consideration –that eating became a sacrament –a method of communion –an extatic exercise a mingling of bloods –and sitting at the communion table of the world. And so have not only quenched my thirst at the spring but the health of the universe The indecent haste and grossness with which our food is swallowed, have cast a disgrace on the very act of eating itself. But I do believe that if this process were rightly conducted, its aspect and effects would be wholly changed, and we should receive our daily life and health –Antaeus like –with an extatic delight –and with upright frank –innocent and graceful behavior –take our strength from day to day. This fragrance of the apple in my pocket has I confess deferred me from eating of it– I am more effectually fed by it another way. It is indeed that common notion that this fragrance is the only food of the gods. and inasmuch as we are partially HDT WHAT? INDEX

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divine we are compelled to respect it.

Tell me ye wise ones if ye can Whither and whence the race of man. For I have seen his slender clan Clinging to hoar hills with their feet Threading the forest for their meat Moss and lichens bark & grain They rake together with might & main And they digest them with anxiety & pain. I meet them in their rags and unwashed hair Instructed to eke out their scanty fare Brave race — with a yet humbler prayer Beggars they are aye on the largest scale They beg their daily bread at heavens door And if their this years crop alone should fail They neither bread nor begging would know more. They are the Titmans of their race And hug the vales with mincing pace like Troglodites, and fight with cranes, We walk mid great relations feet What they let fall alone we eat We are only able to catch the fragments from their table These elder brothers of our race By us unseen with larger pace Walk oer our heads, and live our lives embody our desires and dreams Anticipate our hoped for gleams We grub the earth for our food We know not what is good. Where does the fragrance of our orchards go Our vineyards while we toil below– A finer race and finer fed Feast and revel above our head. The tints and fragrance of the flowers & fruits Are but the crumbs from off their table While we consume the pulp and roots Some times we do assert our kin And stand a moment where once they have been We hear their sounds and see their sights And we experience their delights– But for the moment that we stand Astonished on the Olympian land. We do discern no traveller’s face No elder brother of our race. To lead us to the monarch’s court And represent our case. But straightway we must journey back retracing slow the arduous track without the privilege to tell Even, the sight we know so well In my father’s house are many mansions. Who ever explored the mansions of the air –who knows who his neighbors are. We seem to lead our human lives amid a concentric system of worlds of realm on realm, close bordering on each other –where dwell the unknown and the imagined races –as various in degree as our own thoughts are. A system of invisible partitions more infinite in number and more inconceivable in intricacy than the starry one which Science has penetrated. FLUTE When I play my flute tonight earnest as if to leap the bounds that narrow fold where human life is penned, and range the surrounding plain –I hear echo from a neighboring wood a stolen pleasure occasionally not rightfully heard –much more for other ears than ours for tis the reverse of sound. It is not our own melody that comes back to us –but an amended strain. And I would only hear myself as I would hear my echo –corrected and repronounced for me. It is as when my friend reads my verse. The borders of our plot are set with flowers –whose seeds were blown from more Elysian fields adjacent –which our laborious feet have never reached –and fairer fruits and unaccustomed fragrance betray another realm’s vicinity. There too is Echo found with which we play at evening. There is the abutment of the rainbow’s arch HDT WHAT? INDEX

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After this day, Thoreau entered material in his journal that he would recycle directly into WALDEN:

WALDEN: No wonder that Alexander carried the Iliad with him on PEOPLE OF his expeditions in a precious casket. A written word is the WALDEN choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; –not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself. The symbol of an ancient man’s thought becomes a modern man’s speech. Two thousand summers have imparted to the monuments of Grecian literature, as to her marbles, only a maturer golden and autumnal tint, for they have carried their own serene and celestial atmosphere into all lands to protect them against the corrosion of time. Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind. When the illiterate and perhaps scornful trader has earned by enterprise and industry his coveted leisure and independence, and is admitted to the circles of wealth and fashion, he turns inevitably at last to those still higher but yet inaccessible circles of intellect and genius, and is sensible only of the imperfection of his culture and the vanity and insufficiency of all his riches, and further proves his good sense by the pains which he takes to secure for his children that intellectual culture whose want he so keenly feels; and thus it is that he becomes the founder of a family.

ALEXANDER HOMER HDT WHAT? INDEX

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December 11, Thursday: A Sikh army crossed the River Sutlej and attacked British troops.

To protect themselves, 7 Swiss Catholic cantons formed a “Sonderbund.”

James Russell Lowell, in the Boston Courier as a protest against the war upon Mexico: Once to every man and nation, comes the moment to decide, In the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side; Some great cause, some great decision, offering each the bloom or blight, And the choice goes by forever, 'twixt that darkness and that light. Then to side with truth is noble, when we share her wretched crust, Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 'tis prosperous to be just; Then it is the brave man chooses while the coward stands aside, Till the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.

By the light of burning martyrs, Christ, Thy bleeding feet we track, Toiling up new Calv'ries ever with the cross that turns not back; New occasions teach new duties, ancient values test our youth; They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth. Though the cause of evil prosper, yet the truth alone is strong; Though her portion be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong; Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above His own. Waldo Emerson lectured at the lyceum in Boston. This was lecture Number 1 of his “Representative Men” series, entitled “The Uses of Great Men.” Longfellow wrote, “The Odeon was full.... Not so much as usual of that ‘sweet rhetoricke’ which usually flows from his lips; and many things to shock the sensitive ear and heart.” Life II, page 26. He would receive $350 for the series. This was the 1845-1846 lecture series of seven lectures that would be published in 1850 as REPRESENTATIVE MEN. [QUESTION: Is this “Odeon Hall” different from the “Melodeon” mentioned in Midgley’s SIGHTS IN BOSTON AND SUBURBS as a small comfortable hall used for religious, panoramic, and other exhibitions, close to the entrance to the Boston Theatre on Washington Street near the corner of Mason Street, at which the Reverend Theodore Parker’s 28th Congregational Society initially met?]

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

December 31, Wednesday: Blanche Lowell was born. This infant would survive but 15 months, dying during April 1847.

Waldo Emerson began to repeat his current Boston lecture series, “Representative Man,” at the Concord Lyceum. This was the initial lecture of the 7-lecture series: Plato, or the Philosopher. THE LIST OF LECTURES

James Russell Lowell “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1846

James Russell Lowell returned to his family home, Elmwood, on Tory Row near the Charles River (Quinobequin) in Cambridge.

Lowell published the first essay of the nine in THE BIGELOW PAPERS. Margaret Fuller was mean to him in her HDT WHAT? INDEX

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PAPERS ON LITERATURE AND ART, seeing him as “absolutely wanting in the true spirit and tone of poesy”:

His interest in the moral questions of the day has supplied the want of vitality in himself; his great facility at versification has enabled him to fill the ear with a copious stream of pleasant sound. But his verse is stereotyped; his thought sounds no depth, and posterity will not remember him.

RURAL WIT In this year an octogenarian gave a press conference and revealed that he had personal knowledge of why it was that we Americans were referring to ourselves as “Brother Jonathan.” George Washington, he said, used to comment to his counselor, Governor Trumbull of Connecticut, “Let us consult Brother Jonathan,” when what the founding father meant (in our contemporary idiom) was “Let’s run this up the flagpole and see if anybody salutes.” Of course, an alert press would have asked questions, since by counting backward they could have noticed that this octogenarian would have been, in Revolutionary times, when he claimed to have been rendering services as “an active participant in the scenes of the Revolution,” a mere prepubescent — and especially since, 61 years after the death of Trumbull and 47 years after the death of Washington, it was only this one person who had any knowledge of this derivation for the popular figure “Brother Jonathan”!8 FAKELORE

8. But maybe the idea of an interview with an octogenarian was entirely concocted by this “gullible” newsie (we may well take notice of the fact that our newspaper correspondents had, as of 1846, not yet developed any tradition for the “news interview”). FAKELORE HDT WHAT? INDEX

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January 30, Friday: Francis H. Bradley was born.

James Russell Lowell wrote: “A man gains in power as he gains in ease.” — Sort of the TAO TE CHING, seen through a glass darkly.

There appeared in The Liberator what purported to be a lengthy letter from Frederick Douglass to William Lloyd Garrison, making an invidious distinction between Douglass’s complete acceptance as a human being on the other side of the Atlantic and the chronic racism he had experienced while in America: “I seem to have undergone a transformation. I live a new Life. The truth is, the people here know nothing of the republican negro hate prevalent in our glorious land. They measure and esteem men according to their moral and intellectual worth, and not according to the color of their skin.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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June 5, Friday: MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE was published by Wiley and Putnam of New-York. In the Preface to this volume, Nathaniel Hawthorne reminisced about a visit of unknown date to the Battle Bridge in Concord with James Russell Lowell.9

The volume included Hawthorne’s story “Roger Malvin’s Burial” that relied on tales of a famous, or infamous, interracial dustup that had occurred in what would become Maine on May 9, 1725. THE BATTLE OF PEQUAKET HDT WHAT? INDEX

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June 17, Wednesday: James Russell Lowell published the initial of the 9 essays that would be collected as THE BIGLOW PAPERS.

Margaret Fuller was mean to him in her PAPERS ON LITERATURE AND ART, seeing him as “absolutely wanting

9. It is likely that it was this occasion that Lowell would improve in his “Lines (Suggested by the Graves of Two English Soldiers on Concord Battle Ground)” that would be published in the March 29th, 1849 issue of The Anti-Slavery Standard., the poem from which would be drawn the decoration of the graven stone that now adorns the site:

Question: Do we know that the Army soldiers who were killed in the dustup with the militia at the bridge were British enlistees rather than American? Had they actually come 3,000 miles from the places of their birth to kill people to keep the past upon its throne, or had they perhaps come merely 30 or 300 miles from the places of their birth to kill people to keep the past upon its throne? (A significant percentage in the enlistment of such Redcoats was of local colonial lads, you know.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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in the true spirit and tone of poesy”:

His interest in the moral questions of the day has supplied the want of vitality in himself; his great facility at versification has enabled him to fill the ear with a copious stream of pleasant sound. But his verse is stereotyped; his thought sounds no depth, and posterity will not remember him.

RURAL WIT HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1847

September 9, Thursday: Mabel White Lowell was born. This infant in the family of James Russell Lowell and Maria White Lowell would be the only one to survive into adulthood (she would get married with Edward Burnett and would die on December 30, 1898).

In Boston, the hot topic was the outrage to female dignity that was occasioned by the use of male doctors: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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At some point, the following illustration would be generated, graphically depicting how it was that we needed female physicians to properly treat female complaints: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Fall: The initial installment of some 600 lines of “A Fable for Critics,” a testimony to the idle mind of James Russell Lowell, were posted to Charles F. Briggs of G.P. Putnam publishers on Broadway in Manhattan. Successive installments over a period of almost a year would complete this puerile poem, which would come across the presses on October 25, 1848. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1848

James Russell Lowell’s THE BIGLOW PAPERS, in the Brother Jonathan rural wit tradition of New England. Also, his THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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April 12, Wednesday: Friedrich Hecker, leader of the radical liberals, and Gustav von Streuve led a putsch proclaiming a German Republic in Constance. They organized a rag-tag army, and invaded Baden.

According to page 15 of Larry J. Reynolds’s influence study EUROPEAN REVOLUTIONS AND THE AMERICAN LITERARY RENAISSANCE (New Haven CT: Yale UP, 1988), of all the major cities of the US, Boston was the least enthusiastic in its support for the French revolution of this year: Many Bostonians worried about the financial consequences of European upheaval. On April 12 a sympathy meeting was held at Tremont Temple, Mayor Josiah Quincy, Jr. presiding, and the participants drafted a series of resolutions offering congratulations to the French people, but only after several protests and considerable wrangling. (“Somewhat of an eccentric meeting,” the Crescent called it.) Boston did supply a typically civilized response to the revolution, however: the play THE LAST OF THE KINGS, OR THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, on which, according to the announcement of the Boston Museum, “all the artist of the establishment, aided by a powerful force of auxiliaries, have been employed day and night, and which is to be produced with all the splendid adjuncts that the nature of the incidents demand.” The play, which dramatized the “three days” of the February revolution, was indeed hastily put together, taking only eight days to create, complete with scenery and music, but it proved popular; by April 8 it had been performed sixteen times before large audiences.... John Greenleaf Whittier and James Russell Lowell were especially euphoric about the French revolution, because one of the acts of the new government abolished slavery in France’s colonies.

Nevertheless, Reynolds continues on page 24, It is not coincidental that some of the finest works in American literature contain this revolutionary imagery of the day. When Ahab flies the red flag on the mainmast of the Pequod, when Steelkilt and his mob of desperados become “sea-Parisians” on the Town-Ho and entrench themselves “behind the barricade,” when Hester Prynne or Arthur Dimmesdale ascend the scaffold, when Surveyor Nathaniel Hawthorne talks about being guillotined, or even when Henry Thoreau’s neighboring ants become red republicans and black imperialists engaged in internecine war, they reveal their creators’ indebtedness to contemporary events and iconography. All the major writers of the period, Thoreau included, found themselves stirred by the French revolution of 1848 and the revolutionary turmoil it brought in its wake. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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October 25, Wednesday: James Russell Lowell’s “A Fable for Critics” was published on Broadway in Manhattan by G.P. Putnam (bearing the date October 21st).

A FABLE FOR CRITICS

He had farted our nation’s first attempt at literary self-examination!10

(Actually there is a long tradition of such literary bavardage, and, actually, this “Fable for Critics” thingie doesn’t even get close to coming up to the lowest acceptable standard for it. For instance, a Thoreau ancestor who was a poet, William Dunbar, had in the 16th Century authored a “Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie” more or less as a royal roast, or as a “doing of the numbers,” and into 69 stanzas he had packed an extraordinary number of insults of the genre “Your mama is so ugly ... let me tell you how ugly your mama is.” Had Henry deigned to respond to Lowell’s effort, you can be sure that his retort would have been devastating — but Lowell was so notoriously thin-skinned that this wouldn’t have been a good idea. If his derogatory drivel had been responded to in kind, there’s no telling what his response might have been — a duel maybe, or lurking in some dark alley with a short knife.)

In this curious but far inferior piece Lowell satirized the Margaret Fuller who had had the temerity to remark on how “stereotyped” Lowell’s attempts at poetry were, and who had predicted (accurately enough, it now seems!) that “posterity would not remember him” for his literary endeavors. In this curious piece Lowell also

10. His was a busy pen in this year of 1848: in one year appeared his POEMS: SECOND SERIES, his THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL, and the first series of THE BIGELOW PAPERS. It really is too bad that none of this work has survived the test of time by remaining highly regarded! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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satirized Henry Thoreau and Ellery Channing, depicting them as Waldo Emerson impersonators:11 • His dismissal of Bronson Alcott as a writer who does follow the first rule of writing –that to learn to write one must write and write and write– but who will never be able to write intelligibly because he lives on some other planet:

Yonder, calm as a cloud, Alcott stalks in a dream, And fancies himself in thy groves, Academe, With the Parthenon nigh, and the olive-trees o’er him, And never a fact to perplex him or bore him, With a snug room at Plato’s, when night comes, to walk to, And people from morning till midnight to talk to, And from midnight till morning, nor snore in their listening; So he muses, his face with the joy of it glistening, For his highest conceit of a happiest state is Where they’d live upon acorns, and hear him talk gratis; And indeed, I believe, no man ever talked better — Each sentence hangs perfectly poised to a letter He seems piling words, but there‘s royal dust hid In the heart of each sky-piercing pyramid. While he talks he is great, but goes out like a taper, If you shut him up closely with pen, ink, and paper; Yet his fingers itch for ’em from morning till night, And he thinks he does wrong if he don’t always write; In this, as in all things, a lamb among men, He goes to sure death when he goes to his pen.

• His uncritical adulation of Nathaniel Hawthorne: There is Hawthorne, with genius so shrinking and rare That you hardly at first see the strength that is there; A frame so robust, with a nature so sweet, So earnest, so graceful, so lithe and so fleet, Is worth a descent from Olympus to meet; ’Tis as if a rough oak that for ages had stood, With his gnarled bony branches like ribs of the wood, Should bloom, after cycles of struggle and scathe, With a single anemone trembly and rathe; His strength is so tender, his wildness so meek, That a suitable parallel sets one to seek— He’s a John Bunyan Fouqué, a Puritan Tieck; When Nature was shaping him, clay was not granted For making so full-sized a man as she wanted, So, to fill out her model, a little she spared From some finer-grained stuff for a woman prepared, And she could not have hit a more excellent plan For making him fully and perfectly man.

• His dismissal of Edgar Allan Poe as a man whose intellect has overruled his affect:1 There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge, Three fifths of him genius and two fifths sheer fudge, Who talks like a book of iambs and pentameters, In a way to make people of common-sense damn metres, Who has written some things quite the best of their kind, But the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by the mind,... HDT WHAT? INDEX

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• His abrupt categorical trashing of “Miranda” (Margaret Fuller): But here comes Miranda. Zeus! where shall I flee to? She has such a penchant for bothering me, too! She always keeps asking if I don't observe a Particular likeness 'twixt her and Minerva. ... She will take an old notion and make it her own, By saying it o'er in her sibylline tone; Or persuade you 't is something tremendously deep, By repeating it so as to put you to sleep; And she may well defy any mortal to see through it, When once she has mixed up her infinite me through it. ... Here Miranda came up and said: Phœbus, you know That the infinite soul has its infinite woe, As I ought to know, having lived cheek by jowl, Since the day I was born, with the infinite soul. • His dismissal of Waldo Emerson as a man who worships himself in place of God: All admire, and yet scarcely six converts he’s got To I don’t (nor do they either) exactly know what; For though he builds glorious temples, ’t is odd He leaves never a doorway to get in a god. ’T is refreshing to old-fashioned people like me To meet such a primitive Pagan as he, In whose mind all creation is duly respected As parts of himself — just a little projected; And who’s willing to worship the stars and the sun, A convert to — nothing but Emerson. • His dismissal of Henry Thoreau as a low-rent Waldo clone: There comes [Thoreau], for instance; to see him’s rare sport, Tread in Emerson’s tracks with legs painfully short; How he jumps, how he strains, and gets red in the face, To keep step with the mystagogue’s natural pace! He follows as close as a stick to a rocket, His fingers exploring the prophet’s each pocket. Fie, for shame, brother bard; with good fruit of your own, Can’t you let neighbor Emerson’s orchards alone? Besides ’t is no use, you’ll not find e’en a core,— ______has picked up all the windfalls before.

11.The year 1848 was to be, according to his biographers, his annus mirabilis, for in the course of the year a total of four volumes would see publication: not only his A FABLE FOR CRITICS but also his POEMS: SECOND SERIES, his THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL, and the first series of THE BIGELOW PAPERS. In one of these volumes he managed to accurately anticipate, some 14 years in advance, what would be Emerson’s attitude toward the Civil War: Ez fer the war, I go agin it,— I mean to say I kind o’ du,— Thet is, I mean thet, bein’ in it, The best way wuz to fight it thru; Not but wut abstract war is horrid, I sign to thet with all my heart,— But civlyzation doos git forrid Sometimes upon a powder-cart. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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READER! walk up at once (it will soon be too late) and buy at a perfectly ruinous rate A FABLE FOR CRITICS: OR, BETTER,

(I like, as a thing that the reader’s first fancy may strike, an old-fashioned title-page, such as presents a tabular view of the volume’s contents)

A GLANCE

AT A FEW OF OUR LITERARY PROGENIES (Mrs. Malaprop’s word)

FROM THE TUB OF DIOGENES; A VOCAL AND MUSICAL MEDLEY, THAT IS, A SERIES OF JOKES BY A WONDERFUL QUIZ

who accompanies himself with a rub-a-dub-dub, full of spirit and grace, on the top of the tub. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“There comes Emerson first, whose rich words, every one, Are like gold nails in temples to hang trophies on, Whose prose is grand verse, while his verse the Lord knows, Is some of it pr— No, ’t is not even prose; I’m speaking of metres; some poems have welled From those rare depths of soul that have ne’er been excelled; They‘re not epics, but that does n’t matter a pin, In creating, the only hard thing’s to begin; A grass-blade’s no easier to make than an oak, If you‘ve once found the way, you‘ve achieved the grand stroke; In the worst of his poems are mines of rich matter, But thrown in a heap with a crush and a clatter; Now it is not one thing nor another alone Makes a poem, but rather the general tone, The something pervading, uniting the whole, The before unconceived, unconceivable soul, So that just in removing this trifle or that, you Take away, as it were, a chief limb of the statue; Roots, wood, bark, and leaves, singly perfect may be, But, clapt hodge-podge together, they don’t make a tree. “But, to come back to Emerson, (whom by the way, I believe we left waiting,) — his is, we may say, A Greek head on right Yankee shoulders, whose range Has Olympus for one pole, for t’ other the Exchange; He seems, to my thinking, (although I‘m afraid The comparison must, long ere this, have been made,) A Plotinus-Montaigne, where the Egyptian’s gold mist And the Gascon’s shrewd wit cheek-by-jowl coexist; All admire, and yet scarcely six converts he’s got To I don’t (nor they either) exactly know what; For though he builds glorious temples, ’t is odd He leaves never a doorway to get in a god. ’T is refreshing to old-fashioned people like me, To meet such a primitive Pagan as he, In whose mind all creation is duly respected As parts of himself — just a little projected; And who’s willing to worship the stars and the sun, A convert to — nothing but Emerson. So perfect a balance there is in his head, That he talks of things sometimes as if they were dead; Life, nature, love, God, and affairs of that sort, He looks at as merely ideas; in short, As if they were fossils stuck round in a cabinet, Of such vast extent that our earth’s a mere dab in it; Composed just as he is inclined to conjecture her, Namely, one part pure earth, ninety-nine parts pure lecturer; You are filled with delight at his clear demonstration, Each figure, word, gesture, just fits the occasion, With the quiet precision of science he‘ll sort ’em, But you can’t help suspecting the whole a post mortem. “There are persons, mole-blind to the soul’s make and style, Who insist on a likeness ’twixt him and Carlyle; To compare him with Plato would be vastly fairer, Carlyle’s the more burly, but E. is the rarer; He sees fewer objects, but clearlier, truelier, If C.’s as original, E.’s more peculiar; That he’s more of a man you might say of the one, Of the other he’s more of an Emerson; C.’s the Titan, as shaggy of mind as of limb, — E. the clear-eyed Olympian, rapid and slim; The one’s two-thirds Norseman, the other half Greek, Where the one’s most abounding, the other’s to seek; C.’s generals require to be seen in the mass, — E.’s specialties gain if enlarged by the glass; C. gives nature and God his own fits of the blues, And rims common-sense things with mystical hues, — E. sits in a mystery calm and intense, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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And looks coolly around him with sharp common sense; C. shows you how every-day matters unite With the dim transdiurnal recesses of night, — While E., in a plain, preternatural way, Makes mysteries matters of mere every day; C. draws all his characters quite à la Fuseli, — Not sketching their bundles of muscles and thews illy, He paints with a brush so untamed and profuse They seem nothing but bundles of muscles and thews; E. is rather like Flaxman, lines strait and severe, And a colorless outline, but full, round, and clear; — To the men he thinks worthy he frankly accords The design of a white marble statue in words. C. labors to get at the centre, and then Take a reckoning from there of his actions and men; E. calmly assumes the said centre as granted, And, given himself, has whatever is wanted. “He has imitators in scores, who omit No part of the man but his wisdom and wit, — Who go carefully o’er the sky-blue of his brain, And when he has skimmed it once, skim it again; If at all they resemble him, you may be sure it is Because their shoals mirror his mists and obscurities, As a mud-puddle seems deep as heaven for a minute, While a cloud that floats o’er is reflected within it. “There comes, for instance; to see him’s rare sport, Tread in Emerson’s tracks with legs painfully short; How he jumps, how he strains, and gets red in the face, To keep step with the mystagogue’s natural pace He follows as close as a stick to a rocket, His fingers exploring the prophet’s each pocket. Fie, for shame, brother bard; with good fruit of your own, Can’t you let neighbor Emerson’s orchards alone? Besides, ’t is no use, you’ll not find e’en a core, — E. has picked up all the windfalls before. They might strip every tree, and E. never would catch ’em, His Hesperides have no rude dragon to watch ’em When they send him a dishfull, and ask him to try ’em, He never suspects how the sly rogues came by ’em; He wonders why ’t is there are none such his trees on, And thinks ’em the best he has tasted this season. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Yonder, calm as a cloud, Alcott stalks in a dream, And fancies himself in thy groves, Academe, With the Parthenon nigh, and the olive-trees o’er him, And never a fact to perplex him or bore him, With a snug room at Plato’s, when night comes, to walk to, And people from morning till midnight to talk to, And from midnight till morning, nor snore in their listening; So he muses, his face with the joy of it glistening, For his highest conceit of a happiest state is Where they’d live upon acorns, and hear him talk gratis; And indeed, I believe, no man ever talked better — Each sentence hangs perfectly poised to a letter He seems piling words, but there‘s royal dust hid In the heart of each sky-piercing pyramid. While he talks he is great, but goes out like a taper, If you shut him up closely with pen, ink, and paper; Yet his fingers itch for ’em from morning till night, And he thinks he does wrong if he don’t always write; In this, as in all things, a lamb among men, He goes to sure death when he goes to his pen.

The famous “Water Celebration” on Boston Common, as the first of Loammi Baldwin III’s upland water reached the Boston metropolitan area from the new Cochituate System. A jet of Lake Cochituate water rose from the fountain in Boston’s Frog Pond. For the next two generations Boston would have an adequate supply of clean water.12

James Pierson Beckwourth and his party of travelers arrived at Los Angeles, California. From there they would continue north to Monterey, which at the time was the capital of California. Jim would take on a job as a courier for a ranch near the present-day city of Santa Maria, north of Los Angeles. On his way there he would come across the remains of a massacre, of the Reed family who had been living in the old Mission of San Miguel, and would lead a posse that would apprehend the murderers.

Niles’ Register published an account of the Women’s Rights Convention that had occurred in Rochester, New York:

WOMAN'S RIGHTS CONVENTION. A Convention appointed to be held in Rochester, (N.Y.) to advocate Women's Rights, was organized some weeks ago, in that city in the Unitarian Church. There was quite a respectable attendance, the body of the church being pretty well filled, mostly with females, some of whom seemed to have deeply at heart the professed objects of the meeting, but many more seemed to be drawn thither by motives of curiosity. Soon after the appointed hour the committee (all ladies) reported the following list of officers, who were duly appointed Mrs. ABIGAIL BUSH, President. Mrs. LAURA MURRAY, Vice President. Mrs. CATHARINE A. T. STEBBENS, } Mrs. SARAH L. HALLOWELL, }Sec’taries. Mrs. MARY H. HALLOWELL, }

The officers being appointed, Mr. William C. Nell proposed to read an essay upon Woman's Rights, but the President said it was not then in order to do so, and one of the Secretaries commenced 12. These Framingham MA reservoirs have not been tapped by Boston since 1931. Pollution forced the metropolis to turn first to the Wachusett Reservoir, and then to the Quabban Reservoir some 65 miles inland. The Sudbury Reservoirs are, however, on a standby basis to be utilized in times of emergency, after heavy chlorination. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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reading the minutes of the preliminary meeting, but in so low a tone that she could not be heard by only a few {sic}, when a gentleman in a remote part of the house said the proceedings, to be made interesting, should be understood by all. After one or two more interruptions, Lucretia Mott, who was present, said it was not a fitting excuse for a woman to make that her voice could not be heard. The call for the Secretary to read louder was right, and, with sufficient practice, women could and would make themselves heard in a public assembly. Finally, Mrs. Burtis read the minutes, and they were adopted. The President then called upon Mr. Nell to read his essay, which he did. After the reading, Lucretia Mott stated her objections to a portion of the paper read. She did not believe in holding up woman as a superior to man, because it was untrue -- she was only an equal. When invested with power woman as well as man was tyrannical. Mr. Nell briefly replied. A letter was read from Gerritt Smith, assigning his bodily infirmities and private business as reasons for his non- attendance, but concurring in the objects sought to be accomplished. Mrs. Elizabeth Stanton {Elizabeth Cady Stanton}, of Seneca Falls, read the declaration adopted at the meeting held in that village, and the discussion of this document appeared to be the principal business of the forenoon session. The President having called for remarks for and against the sentiments it embodied, one gentleman said his objection was that there was too much truth in it! Mr. Burtis approved of the declaration, and was glad to see the women asserting their rights. Mr. Colton, of New Haven, briefly stated his objections, which appeared to be of a general nature. Lucretia Mott wished to know what the speaker considered the proper sphere of woman. It was not strange that he thought she should not be in the pulpit, he having been educated in New Haven, Connecticut. He should read his Bible again, as he may have pinned his faith upon the sleeve of some minister. W.C. Bloss, Esq. made some very humorous remarks, which were received with much applause. He then went on to show the different tastes of male and female children, and inquired whether these were not in accordance with the instincts of nature. Mrs. Sanford, of Michigan, made a forcible and eloquent address, in which she contended for the right of women to exercise the elective franchise, and their eligibility to office. It might, she said, be for women to break the bands of slavery, and she urged them to nerve for the effort. One of the consequences of the proposed enfranchisement of women would be less extravagance and waste in dress — fashion would be neglected. They could be as daughters, as wives, and as mothers, dutiful, gentle, and submissive, even if we hang the domestic wreath upon the eagle's talons! Her remarks called forth considerable applause. At the suggestion of Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth McClintock read a poetical composition, by Mrs. Chapman, of Boston. Mr. Cutting objected to that part of the declaration which held out the idea that voting was the first right of women. He regarded education as the first right, and it was the peculiar province of women to teach. If mothers teach their sons, wives their husbands, and sisters their brothers, how to vote, it was all the same as though they voted themselves. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Mr. Sanford deprecated the occupation of so much time by the men. He hoped the ladies would assert their rights. Frederick Douglass went for equal rights of all classes, without regard to sex. After he had finished, the Convention adjourned till two o'clock P.M. When we went in at the afternoon session the house was crowded, and Mrs. Owen was reading a report. Several resolutions were adopted, of which the following was one “That, as obedience and submission to the husband is taught and enjoined in the marriage service, we will hereafter use our endeavors to have such a law entirely abrogated.” Lucretia Mott objected to them, as being too milk and water. She was not only for declaring, but for taking and maintaining her rights, and something more than these tame resolutions was necessary. In the course of her remarks, Lucretia said she was not a theologian, but yet she believed that people were as much inspired now as in former times. Mrs. Roberts made a report in relation to the condition of females who are employed as seamstresses in the city, setting forth the hardships under which they labor, &c. She said they were compelled to work fourteen or fifteen hours a day to earn from thirty-one to thirty-eight cents; that they seldom earned fifty cents, or, if they did, it was by the most extreme exertion. It appeared that those who can endure the most are only able to save some fifty cents per week beyond their board. Mrs. Stanton offered another resolution, asserting that it is duty of those who believe females are oppressed in their wages to pay them better prices. Lucretia Mott thought little good would be done by efforts to improve the physical condition of woman. The axe must be laid to the root of the corrupt tree. A radical change must be effected in her civil condition before much improvement would be visible. “Overturn, overture {sic}, overturn,” must be the motto, until these changes are effected, until all classes are levelled to the same common platform of equality. A slave, however treated, cannot be materially bettered until made free. It is the nature of slavery to debase. Just so it is with women; and, so long as the present usages of society prevailed, nothing would be done by passing resolutions. Mrs. Stanton offered another resolution, asserting that it is the duty of women, whatever their complexion, to assume as soon as possible their true position of equality, in the social circle, in church and in State. Other resolutions were also offered, when Mrs. Owen proposed the appointment of a committee to form a society for redressing the wrongs and hardships of laboring females, but Lucretia Mott thought this was foreign to the objects of the Convention. This has been a remarkable Convention. It was composed of those holding to some one of the various “isms” of the day, and some, we should think, who embraced them all. The only practical good proposed -- the adoption of measures for the relief and amelioration of females -- was almost scouted by the leading ones composing the meeting. The great effort seemed to be to bring out some few, impracticable, absurd, and ridiculous propositions, and the greater their absurdity the better. In HDT WHAT? INDEX

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short, it was a regular “emeute” of a congregation of females, gathered from various quarters, who seem to be really in earnest in their aim at revolution, and who evince entire confidence that “the day of their deliverance” is at hand. Verily, this is a “progressive” era. -- “Rochester Democrat.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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November 7, Tuesday: Presidential election day. The candidates were the Whig Zachary Taylor, the Democrat Lewis Cass, and the Free Soil Party candidate Martin Van Buren. Until this point the Whigs had been the expectable victors in Massachusetts elections. However, dramatic “Free-Soil” gains over the Whigs in this election marked the beginning of a long period of political instability. From this point until December 1853, when the tenuous aggregation of the Free-Soilers, Know-Nothings, temperance one-issue people, and Irish Catholics with the Democratic Party would begin to unravel, this uneasy coalition would have to hope for divisions within the Whig Party in order to achieve any victory at the Massachusetts polls. THE 2D GREAT AMERICAN DISUNION

This defeat marked the end of Martin Van Buren’s political career. Henry Clay had been betrayed by his friends and denied the Whig nomination. He commented ironically, in a speech at New Orleans, in regard to the presidential candidacy of the uncouth General Zachary Taylor, “I wish I could slay a Mexican” (what he meant was that maybe, could he have brought himself to be similarly uncouth, it might have been him that the Whigs nominated). There would be an echo of Clay’s sarcastic political remark “I wish I could slay a Mexican” in Henry Thoreau’s WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS: “I felt as if I could spit a Mexican with a good relish.” TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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WALDEN: On gala days the town fires its great guns, which echo PEOPLE OF like popguns to these woods, and some waifs of martial music WALDEN occasionally penetrate thus far. To me, away there in my bean- field at the other end of the town, the big guns sounded as if a puff ball had burst; and when there was a military turnout of which I was ignorant, I have sometimes had a vague sense all the day of some sort of itching and disease in the horizon, as if some eruption would break out there soon, either scarlatina or canker- rash, until at length some more favorable puff of wind, making haste over the fields and up the Wayland road, brought me information of the “trainers.” It seemed by the distant hum as if somebody’s bees had swarmed, and that the neighbors, according to Virgil’s advice, by a faint tintinnabulum upon the most sonorous of their domestic utensils, were endeavoring to call them down into the hive again. And when the sound died quite away, and the hum had ceased, and the most favorable breezes told no tale, I knew that they had got the last drone of them all safely into the Middlesex hive, and that now their minds were bent on the honey with which it was smeared. I felt proud to know that the liberties of Massachusetts and of our fatherland were in such safe keeping; and as I turned to my hoeing again I was filled with an inexpressible confidence, and pursued my labor cheerfully with a calm trust in the future. When there were several bands of musicians, it sounded as if the village was a vast bellows, and all the buildings expanded and collapsed alternately with a din. But sometimes it was a really noble and inspiring strain that reached these woods, and the trumpet that sings of fame, and I felt as if I could spit a Mexican with a good relish, –for why should we always stand for trifles?– and looked round for a woodchuck or a skunk to exercise my chivalry upon. These martial strains seemed as far away as Palestine, and reminded me of a march of crusaders in the horizon, with a slight tantivy and tremulous motion of the elm-tree tops which overhang the village. This was one of the great days; though the sky had from my clearing only the same everlastingly great look that it wears daily, and I saw no difference in it.

VIRGIL FELICIA DOROTHEA HEMANS WAR ON MEXICO

After the election of a Whig as president, Zachary Taylor, the friends of Nathaniel Hawthorne, such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell, took up a subscription for his support.

William J. Brown of Providence, Rhode Island would recollect a tactful speech he made (we will forgive him if what he would report later is perhaps more like the speech he could have made, would have made, should have made, than like the speech he actually did make, as such is a common failing among aged recollectors), as follows: PAGES 94-95: The Law and Order party broke up, the colored voters HDT WHAT? INDEX

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went over to the Whig party, the most of the Law and Order party being Whigs, still claiming our support. Their candidate for President was a slaveholder, Zachary Taylor. We did not like the idea of voting for a slaveholder, and called a meeting on South Main Street to see what we should do. I opposed the meeting being held in that part of the city, fearing it would prove injurious to my interest. I was in that part of the city working at shoe making, my custom was good, and I knew that if I attended that meeting and spoke in favor of the Whig candidate, I should lose their custom and perhaps get hurt. I could not speak in favor of the Democratic candidate for I was opposed to that party. I was obliged to attend the meeting in the third ward. I was at my wit’s ends to know what to do. I attended the meeting and found the place packed with people, and about one hundred and fifty people filled out to the hall door. The meeting was opened when I arrived, Mr. Thomas Howland presiding as chairman. I went in and took the farthest corner of the room. George C. Willis was called, and took his position in front of the stage; addressing the chairman, he remarked, that we were in a very curious position; we must be decided in favor of one party or the other, and his opinion was of the two evils, we must choose the least; and his choice was in favor of Zachary Taylor, the Whig candidate. Several others spoke, and in harsh terms denounced the Democratic party. I was then called, and tried to decline, but the call came from every one, Brown, Brown. I was compelled to speak. I arose, addressed the president, and told the audience we were called together to settle a very grave question, which as citizens, it was our duty to decide which of the two parties we were to support. We were not to decide upon the man, but the party. If we were to decide on the candidate, it would be not to cast a vote for Taylor, for he is a slaveholder; and this I presume is the feeling of every colored voter, but we are identified with the Whig party, and it is the duty of every colored person to cast his vote for the Whig party, shutting his eyes against the candidate; as he is nothing more than a servant for the party; but I wish it understood that I am not opposed to either party as such; because I believe there are good and bad men in both parties. I have warm friends in the Democratic party, which I highly esteem, and who would take pleasure at any time in doing me a favor. Some of them are my best customers; but in speaking of the party, those men know well the duty demanded of them by their party, and would not neglect it for the sake of accommodating me. I blame no man for carrying out the principles of his party. He has a perfect right to do so, for this is a free country, and we all have a right alike to enjoy our own opinion; there being two parties we are stirred up to action. It makes lively times, and I hope the times will continue to be lively, and our meetings to increase in number, for the more we have, and the larger the attendance upon them, the more my business will increase, for the more shoes that are worn out in attending these meetings, the more custom I shall have. I sat down amid loud cheering. It was a bitter pill for us to vote for a man who was a slaveholder; but placing him in the light of a servant for the party, and we identified with that party, we managed to swallow it down whole. After HDT WHAT? INDEX

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voting to sustain Zachary Taylor as a candidate for the next Presidential election, we closed the meeting. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1849

In Boston, the National Anti-Slavery Bazaar had out for sale a printing entitled THE LIBERTY BELL, as a fund- raising effort of the “Friends of Freedom”:

• Bowring, John. “Europe to America” • Dall, Caroline W. Healy. “Amy: A Tale” Another short story in the tradition of Lydia Maria Child’s “The Quadroons.” • James Russell Lowell. “The Burial of Theobald” • Maria White Lowell. “Africa”13 Long poem whose narrator appears to be the sphinx. • May, Samuel J. “The Emblem of Our Country: A Chained Eagle, with Torn and Dishevelled [sic] Plumage” • Hornblower, Jane E. “Sonnet [Cast to the winds thy great and glorious scroll]” • Pillsbury, Parker. “Dissolution of the Union” • Hall, Louisa J. “Birth in the Slave’s Hut” One of The Liberty Bell’s many poems by women writers, that treat, like Barrett Browning’s “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point,” the subject of infanticide. • Harriet Martineau. “Letter” • Fletcher, Eliza. “Letter to Harriet Martineau” • Follen, Eliza Lee. “Stanzas [When through long bitter strife, and weary years]” • Bauer, Juliette. “The Daughter of the Riccarees” • Byron, Annabella Milbanke, Lady. “To the Anti-Slavery Advocate” • Johnson, Samuel. “Practical Anti-Slavery” • Chapman, Edwin. “The Dying Slave: A Pro-Slavery Minister of Religion Offering Him Spiritual Aid” • Webb, Richard D. “Liverpool Fifty Years Ago” • C., M. “The Ocean Monarch and the Pearl” • Rushton, Edward. “Letter to Thomas Paine” • Weston, Caroline. “St. Dennis” • May, Samuel Jr. “Our National Idolatry” 13. During this year this poet would give birth to Rose Lowell — but the infant would survive only a few months. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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• Sturge, Thomas. “Reminiscences” • Arnold, Jane M. “Nature’s Teachings” “Many and penetrating are the voices which speak to us through nature,” begins this meditation on the ocean. The narrator’s communion with nature is interrupted by the sight of a slave- ship. • Poole, Elizabeth. “Prayer of the Captain’s Clerk” • Whipple, Charles K. “A. B. C. F. M. [American Board of Commissions for Foreign Missions]” • Anonymous. “Sonnet [Three million men, by God created free]” • Haughton, James. “Liberty” • Phillips, Wendell. “Everything Helps Us” • Channing, William Henry. “Religion and Politics: Extract from a Discourse Preached the Sunday before the Presidential Election, 1848” • Garrison, William Lloyd. “A True Hero” HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL March 29, Thursday: Nathan Johnson went with his step-grandson George Page to New Bedford’s Custom House to take out a seaman’s protection paper. He had already formally given his wife power of attorney to manage his assets in his absence, and was preparing to go to the California gold fields. Evidently he had been attempting to carry more mortgage debt than his business income could cover.

James Russell Lowell described the grave of two Army soldiers at the Battle Bridge in Concord in “Lines (Suggested by the Graves of Two English Soldiers on Concord Battle Ground)” in The Anti-Slavery Standard. It is the last quatrain of the poem’s third stanza (there are seven stanzas in all) that now graces the graven stone tablet there:

Point of interest: it’s not the job description of the soldier to keep the past upon its throne — soldiers are people who get paid to kill people. Actually the job of keeping the past upon its thrones is one that is always being volunteered for by enthusiasts, amateur identity politicians, people with one or another self-serving agenda, etc. (People of the ilk of this Lowell poetaster.)

Further afield even than this: it’s the job of the professional historian to keep knocking the past off its thrones. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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May 2, Wednesday: At the business meeting of the Town and Country Club, Waldo Emerson declared as in favor of a general gender bar to membership but as opposed to a general color bar. He suggested that they leave the door open, at least a crack, just in case some man of color might someday distinguish himself as “clubable”:14

He was one of those who thought it desirable to have the Club consist entirely of men. “With regard to color,” he continued, “I am of the opinion that there should be no exclusion. Certainly, if any distinction be made, let it be in the colored man’s favor. if there be a black who is superior for his acquirements in letters or science, or for his clubable qualities, let him be elected. [But] it seems to me so essential a change –though I am still in the night a little– to make the Club a saloon for ladies, that I really hope the proposed amendment will not pass.

The new club immediately achieved over 100 members despite Amos Bronson Alcott’s failure to secure the admission of females. Such a question couldn’t have arisen for Henry Thoreau, for he wasn’t a member. The story that is told is that he was unable to cope with the haze of cigar smoke — but we may wonder how complete, or how completely self-exculpatory, such a proffered explanation is. This event occurred as the courts were deciding that Boston’s policy of racial segregation of its schools was quite within the discretion of the public officials and not inherently discriminatory. At some point during this summer James Russell Lowell would be unable to persuade Emerson to allow Frederick Douglass to join their “T & C” or “Saturday” Club — a club which they had claimed to have founded to enable

better acquaintance between men of science, literary, and philanthropic pursuits

14. An indignant letter-writer to the New York Times pointed out, in the September 21, 2008 Sunday issue, that the frequently retailed account of Emerson’s having “blackballed” Frederick Douglass goes too far. Although Douglass did submit an application for membership, and Emerson did object to his membership, and the application was rejected, Emerson also commented at the time that of course no-one was ever to be blackballed simply for the unfortunate circumstance of being born black, since that sort of blackballing would be unfair to such a victim of birth circumstances, and such invidious racial discrimination would speak poorly of any white man who exhibited it. Since the matter did not come to a vote there could not be said to have been a blackball (the letter-writer seems not to grasp that the blackball functions by preventing such a vote). Therefore –the author of this indignant letter indignantly concluded– Emerson cannot accurately be said to have “blackballed” Douglass’s application for membership! (A similar situation was described in an OP-ED opinion piece in that same edition of the newspaper. Nicholas D. Kristof described the attitude of certain Democratic voters he had interviewed in rural Oregon, who would not even dream of voting against Barack Hossein Obama for President on the basis of the color of his skin — no, they were going to vote against him because they have heard rumors that he might possibly, conceivably, perhaps, maybe have at one early moment been a Moslem rather that what he now claims to be, a Christian. They will vote against him not because of his race but because of a suspicion as to his religion. As good non-racist Christians they would rather vote for John McCain, who although he is a Republican, has honestly stayed as far away from church as is humanly possible: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/opinion/21kristof.html) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The plain fact of the matter is that, although it is true that “One of the barriers that Emerson … wanted most to transcend was that which separated life from the merely literary,” etc., it is also true that another of the barriers, one that Emerson most assuredly did not want to see transcended, was the barrier between the worthy and the unworthy –and Emerson as a white man of the right sort was, inherently, not only tall and benevolent but high, and blacks were, effectually all of them regardless of altitude, inherently, low, and associating with them made him feel uncomfortable– and so in protest, the biographer McFeely alleges, Lowell resigned from this club.15 At this first meeting, over and above the indicated busyness with business, Emerson delivered his “Books.” THE ALCOTT FAMILY

An anonymous article about the recent Thoreau lecture appeared in the Worcester Palladium: Lake Philosophy The “Walden Pond” philosopher, (Mr. Thoreau, of Concord,) delivered his second lecture at Brinley Hall Friday evening. It was a continuation of his history of two years of “life in the woods;” a mingled web of sage conclusions and puerility—wit and egotistical effusions—bright scintillations and narrow criticisms and low comparisons. He has a natural poetic temperament, with a more than ordinary sensibility to the myriad of nature’s manifestations. But there is apparent a constant struggle for eccentricity. It is only when the lecturer seems to forget himself, that the listener forgets that there is in the neighborhood of “Walden Pond” another philosopher [Emerson] whose light Thoreau reflects; the same service which the moon performs for the sun. Yet the lecturer says many things that not only amuse the hour, but will not be easily forgotten. He is truly one of nature’s oddities; and would make a very respectable Diogenes, if the world were going to live its life over again, and that distinguished citizen of antiquity should not care to appear again upon the stage.

15. We might be tempted to categorize this as the only indecent thing Emerson ever did and the only decent thing Lowell ever did — but this de facto exclusion of Douglass was never brought to a formal vote and so Lowell never needed to make good on his empty threat. Here is the story as it has been told more carefully and fully in Duberman’s JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL:

James Russell Lowell, who had hoped Frederick Douglass’ presence would help rid “many worthy persons of a very unworthy prejudice,” had intended to pay his entrance fee. But opposition developed to Douglass’ admittance, and Lowell was astonished at the quarter from which it came. For it was Waldo Emerson, at least so Lowell believed, who would have blackballed Douglass had the matter been put to a vote, which it was not (Thomas Wentworth Higginson claimed that Emerson “always confessed to a mild instinctive colorphobia”). Angered at this failure to take in a man “cast in so large a mould,” Lowell declared that he, for one, was “an unfit companion for people too good to associate” with Douglass. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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July 23, Monday: The last stronghold of German democratic-revolutionaries, Rastatt, fell to Prussian troops. The Prussians would execute most of those associates with the leftist army, essentially ending the German revolution.

The New York Protection Insurance Company of Rome, New York, was chartered.

The Venetian government issued food ration cards.

James Russell Lowell wrote from Elmwood (above) to Thomas Wentworth Higginson in regard to his suspicion of a Waldo Emerson blacklist against the attendance of Frederick Douglass at the dinner meetings HDT WHAT? INDEX

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of Town and Country Club in downtown Boston: MY DEAR FRIEND, I agree with you entirely as to the importance of getting Frederick D. quietly into the T. and C. Club. I intended to have paid his entrance fee when I paid my own, but had not the money at that time. But I will see that it is done before the 1st October. I was surprised, I confess, that there should have been any opposition to so entirely desireable a member. Especially was I astonished at the quarter from which it came, for, if I am not mistaken, Emerson would have blackballed him, had it been put to the vote. I cannot help thinking that the presence of a man cast in so large a mould as D. certainly is, & with such a fine tropical exuberance of mental & physical development, will do a great deal in ridding many worthy persons of a very unworthy prejudice. I am quite sure that I, for one, am an unfit companion for people too good to associate with him. Our American chromatic scale is a very complicated affair. You will be glad to hear that God has sent us another little daughter — outwardly perfect. She was born just a week ago today, & both mother [Maria Lowell] & child are prospering. As soon as Maria is up again, I am to fulfil my long delayed purpose of paying Levi [Lincoln Thaxter] a visit at the Shoals. I shall hope to see you as I pass through Newburyport.

I remain affectionately yours J.R. LOWELL.

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

James Russell Lowell “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Winter: Moses Ely Ring departed with other men of Rhinebeck, New York in a joint overland expedition to the gold fields of California.

Edgar Allan Poe chose to be offended, or appear to be offended, by James Russell Lowell’s A FABLE FOR CRITICS: There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge, Three fifths of him genius and two fifths sheer fudge, Who talks like a book of iambs and pentameters, In a way to make people of common-sense damn metres, Who has written some things quite the best of their kind, But the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by the mind,...

James Pierson Beckwourth near Los Angeles had also been unable to resist temptation (he seems never to have been able to resist temptation!), and had gone off to open a store in Sonoma. He would soon sell out, however, and relocate to Sacramento to get his living on the gold dust bags of the panners, as a professional gambler. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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December: Before Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, attorney Charles Sumner argued that the doctrine of “separate but equal” treatment of the races was an inherent contradiction — simply because Boston’s 2,085 black students were being educated in segregated schools, their education was obviously unequal and therefore essentially discriminatory and therefore contrary to the legal principle of indifference to person. Judge Shaw found this argument unpersuasive.

In Russia, a most exceedingly realistic mock execution of Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevski and others was staged by the Tsar.

BANG-Hey-I’m-Still-Alive!

After Waldo Emerson declined to keep his promise to write a review of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS, James Russell Lowell reviewed it for Massachusetts Quarterly Review. Briefly, it would seem he felt that Henry Thoreau might make a good nature writer or travel writer if some editor were to discover some way to prevent this author from being so self-indulgently digressive and philosophical and autobiographical. Here is Lowell as he would seem in 1880 to an English caricaturist: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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December: 9th issue of the Massachusetts Quarterly Review: • Senatorial Speeches on Slavery, by James G. Birney • A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. By HENRY D. THOREAU. Boston and Cambridge: James Monroe & Company. 1849. pp. 413 [this review was by James Russell Lowell]. • A Scientific Statement of the Doctrine of the Lord, or Divine Man, by Henry James • Validity of Instruments and Contracts executed on Sunday, by Richard Hildreth • European Agriculture and Rural Economy. From Professional Observation. By HENRY COLMAN, Honorary Member of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, of the National Agricultural Society of France, and of the National Agricultural Society of the United States. 1849. Boston: Little & Brown. London: John Petheram. 2d Edition: 2 vols. 8vo. pp. xxvi. and 492, and xxiv. and 588 [this review was by Frederic Howes]. • The Financial Condition of Russia, by Major Pelt, (Leipsic.) • Report of the Commissioners relating to the Condition of the Indians in Massachusetts, by Wendell Phillips • The Administration of the Late Mr. Polk, by Theodore Parker • Ten Discourses on Orthodoxy. By JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN, Pastor of the Unitarian Church, Washington, D.C. Boston: Crosby & Nichols. Washington: Taylor & Maury. • List of New Publications Received. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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• Pamphlets. CONSULT THIS ISSUE

December 27, Thursday: The National Era of Washington DC (Volume III, Number 156, page 208) provided a series of literary notices which incidentally include a derivative mention of James Russell Lowell’s review of Henry Thoreau’s A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS, drawn from that month’s Massachusetts Quarterly Review: London Quarterly Review for October 1849: We do not undertake to say what the other articles may be, but those on the Signs of Death and the Great Tubular Bridge, are among the most interesting of the general reading one finds in a review. They are followed by one on the Peace Congress, which is a curiosity of spitefulness. The same may be said of that on Italy. But Sir F. Head’s account of the great hollow iron beams, pinned with nine hundred tons of rivets, and resting on a central tower ten feet higher than the Bunker Hill Monument, needs no recommendation to one who knows his powers of description, and the odd liveliness of his style. Westminster Review for October 1849: The articles on Human Progress, and on Malthus, are excellent specimens of that sort of optimism, or faith in the future, which is not afraid of facts, and defends itself by a thorough scrutiny of them. This is what we especially admire in the Westminster. Another article gives a pleasant biographical notice of Jasmin, a genuine descendant of the Troubadours, a popular poet in the dialect of the south of France –the old Langue d’oc– spoken still by ten millions of people, according to this writer. For the remainder, see advertisement. People’s and Howitt’s Journal for November 1849: The pieces are very numerous, and the types are very small, so we can only speak of the illustrations, which are pretty good for wood cuts, but do not compare with the engravings of American magazines. The array of titles promises well for the work this journal is doing among the people of England. Massachusetts Quarterly Review for December 1849: The editor still carries the weight of this Review on his own strong shoulders. What his history of Mr. Polk’s Administration is, we need not try to say to those who know his power of blending terrible facts with more terrible satire; and to those who do not, we recommend (in one of their most good-humored moods) to read his account of South Carolina chivalry. There is a very droll article respecting Thoreau’s “Week on the Concord and Merrimack,” including remarks on travellers and naturalists in general. We offer no comment on the remainder, the titles of which, with the writers’ names, (here given,) will recommend them to those interested in the topics of which they treat.

Thursday [December] 27th Went up to Sudbury on the river –which was frozen every where excepting a narrow part of the channel in Sudbury meadows

December 27-January 4, 1850: & the hairy wood pecker had a nest in a hollowy apple tree. I longed then to go there & live & never come back to Concord streets– No other boys of my acquaintance knew of it – HDT WHAT? INDEX

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& I occasionally conducted one to it. Far to the south west it lay

December 27-January 4: And then there is sawmill run where I study all the phenomena of waterfalls on a small scale– Where upon may see trout glance big enough to satisfy one who does not tempt them with the angle. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1850

The USA achieved a glorious new health statistic. Half the children born during this year in the USA would still be alive in 1855 at the age of five!

Walter Lowell would be born during this year — he would be one of those that wouldn’t make it, dying in 1852.

April 20, Saturday: Daniel Chester French was born in Exeter, New Hampshire. Note that this infant would grow up to be America’s fave sculptor, and would live in Concord and over the years produce rendition after rendition of illustrious Concord residents such as Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and of various gents of the Hoar persuasion (Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, Sherman Hoar, George Frisbie Hoar), as well as of general literary lions such as James Elliot Cabot, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, and James Russell Lowell. –Why then would such a server of society’s legitimated ones never ever attempt even a rough study of Concord’s Henry Thoreau?

Well, one response might be that he had never encountered Henry Thoreau. But then he never had encountered the Reverend John Harvard, either, and a little detail like that did not prevent him from being the sculptor who would produce the “Three Lies” statue outside Harvard College’s administration building!16

On the previous day, the Boston Daily News reported, “the populations of these towns [Lexington and Concord had] turned out literally en masse, added to which the thousands from the cities of Boston and Lowell, swelled the multitude present to a very numerous gathering,” to commemorate a dustup between local militia units and the regular army which had occurred on April 19, 1774. OLD NORTH BRIDGE PATRIOTS’ DAY

16. Although the inscription on this 1884 statue lists the seated figure as the “founder” of Harvard College, actually he had not been. After his death and apparently without his instruction, his widow had made one of the early bequests. Although the inscription asserts that Harvard College was founded in 1638, actually it had been founded in 1636. Daniel Chester French was a member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology class of 1871 and student French’s buddy Sherman Hoar, who actually served as the model for this statue, may likewise have been an MIT student. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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May: Bidding “farewell forever to this abominable city,” the Hawthornes moved to Lenox in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, a colony of intellectuals which included James Russell Lowell, Doctor Oliver Wendell Holmes, the novelist G.P.R. James, and Fanny Kemble Butler.17 Nathaniel Hawthorne began working on his THE HOUSE OF SEVEN GABLES ms, which would become a later romance or prose-tragedy of the Puritan-American community as he had himself known it —“starving for symbols” as Waldo Emerson put it— defrauded of art and of the joy of life.

17. While in retirement at Lenox, Massachusetts, Fanny would author such autobiographical works as JOURNAL OF A RESIDENCE ON A GEORGIAN PLANTATION (1863), RECORD OF A CHILDHOOD (1878), and RECORDS OF LATER LIFE (1882). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1852

The Riverside Press (manufacturing division of Houghton-Mifflin) moved from Remington Street in Cambridge to the old Almshouse estate at Blackstone Street and the Charles River in Cambridgeport. It was a large employer and its establishment by Henry O. Houghton had coincided with the availability of the cheap labor of the famine Irish. In addition, Houghton visited Glasgow, London, and Paris to recruit skilled printers. Originally a Vermont farm boy, Houghton had learned the printing business at the Burlington Free Press and had attended the University of Vermont. Some of this press’s earliest publications would be The Atlantic Monthly, MERRIAM-WEBSTER’S UNABRIDGED DICTIONARY, and household editions of Charles Dickens. In the late 19th century, the Press’s great accomplishments would be the ten volumes of ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH BALLADS by Francis James Child, and Edward Fitzgerald's “translation” of THE RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM, illustrated by Elihu Vedder. One of the most well-known artists associated with the Press would be Bruce Rogers, a typographical genius who preferred to use older, less commercial methods. In a small, bare studio Rogers would work side by side with an elderly, senior pressman, Dan Sullivan, whom he found indispensable. Together Rogers and Sullivan would produce, on a handpress, the Riverside Press Editions, truly extraordinary works. When Houghton Press would buy out Ticknor and Fields, it would acquire publishing rights to works by Samuel Clemens, Stephen Crane, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Dean Howells, Sarah Orne Jewett, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Friend John Greenleaf Whittier, and, of course, Henry Thoreau:

Hawthorne’s A WONDER BOOK FOR GIRLS AND BOYS (Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, available to the discerning customer in blind-stamped blue cloth, with gilt medallion at center of front cover and with gilt- decorated spine, having all edges gilt, in a slipcase, illustrated with a wood-engraved frontispiece and six plates by Baker after Burrill Billings). Although this edition would consist of 3,067 copies, those ordered with this luxurious binding would be so few that the publishers wouldn’t bother to record the price in their costbooks as they usually did for such bindings (even when sometimes they amounted to as few as 25 or 30 copies). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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June 8, Tuesday: Charles Wesley Slack wrote an account of his travel in Virginia, from Mechums River, Virginia to Eva Evelina E. Vannevar Slack in Boston.

Walter Lowell died in Rome.

November 12, Friday: Arthur Hugh Clough, James Russell Lowell, and William Makepeace Thackeray arrived in Boston on the steamship Canada.

John Wedderburn Halkett died in London at the age of 84. The body would be interred at Petersham.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel, who would be referred to as the “Swiss Thoreau,” wrote in his JOURNAL INTIME: “St. Martin’s summer is still lingering, and the days all begin in mist. I ran for a quarter of an hour round the garden to get some warmth and suppleness. Nothing could be lovelier than the last rosebuds, or than the delicate gaufred edges of the strawberry leaves embroidered with hoar-frost, while above them Arachne’s delicate webs hung swaying in the green branches of the pines, little ball-rooms for the fairies carpeted with powdered pearls and kept in place by a thousand dewy strands hanging from above like the chains of a lamp and supporting them from below like the anchors of a vessel. These little airy edifices had all the fantastic lightness of the elf-world and all the vaporous freshness of dawn. They recalled to me the poetry of the north, wafting to me a breath from Caledonia or Iceland or Sweden, Frithiof and the Edda, Ossian and the Hebrides. All that world of cold and mist, of genius and of reverie, where warmth comes not from the sun but from the heart where man is more noticeable than nature — that chaste and vigorous world in which will plays a greater part than sensation and thought has more power than instinct — in short the whole romantic cycle of German and northern poetry, awoke little by little in my memory and laid claim upon my sympathy. It is a poetry of bracing quality, and acts upon one like a moral tonic. Strange charm of imagination! A twig of pine wood and a few spider-webs are enough to make countries, epochs, and nations live again before her.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1853

March 13, Sunday: Moncure Daniel Conway met Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.18

Henry Thoreau made an entry in his journal that he was later to copy into his early lecture “WHAT SHALL IT

18. You must realize, we’re dealing here with a natural aristocrat, and with a person possessing name recognition. Moncure, plus Daniel, plus Conway, equaled somebody. The boy might be virtually penniless and without apparent connections, but he was white and from Virginia, and the dispossessed son of a rich and highly regarded slaveholder. During this period he was also able to meet the Reverend William Henry Furness, the Reverend Ephraim Peabody, the Reverend John G. Palfrey, Bronson Alcott, James Russell Lowell, and the Reverend Jared Sparks. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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PROFIT” It would be combined with an entry made in January 1851 to form the following:

[Paragraph 38] Perhaps I am more than usually jealous with respect to my freedom. I feel that my connection with and obligation to society are still very slight and transient. Those slight labors which afford me a livelihood, and by which it is allowed that I am to some extent serviceable to my contemporaries, are as yet commonly a pleasure to me, and I am not often reminded that they are a necessity. So far I am successful; and he only is successful in his business who makes that pursuit which affords him the purest and highest pleasure, also afford his body a maintenance. But I foresee that if my wants should be much increased, the labor required to supply them would become a drudgery. If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my birth-right for a mess of pottage.1 “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”2 The great art of life is how to turn the surplus life of the soul into life for the body. The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his poetry. All enterprises must be self-supporting in this sense—must pay for themselves. You must get your living by loving. But as it is said of the merchants that ninety-seven in a hundred fail3—so the life of men generally, tried by this standard, is a failure—and bankruptcy may be surely prophesied. To inherit property is not to be born but to be still-born rather. To be supported by the charity of friends or a government pension—provided you continue to breathe—is to go into the almshouse. On Sundays the poor debtor goes to church to take an account of stock and finds, of course, that his outgoes have been greater than his income. In the Catholic church, especially, they go into chancery—make a clean confession—give up all—and think to start again. Thus men will lie on their backs talking about the fall of man and never make an effort to get up.

1.GENESIS 25:32-34 2.MARK 8:36 Bradley P. Dean has emended the manuscript copy-text from ‘What shall it profit &c’ by completing the sentence and adding the quotation marks. 3.Here Thoreau refers to his own book, WALDEN, pages 32-33. He uses the figure “ninety-nine in a hundred” in the journal source of this passage. J. Lyndon Shanley notes the same change in the WALDEN manuscripts (THE MAKING OF WALDEN [Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 1957], page 35).

Bradley P. Dean has emended the above manuscript copy-text by capitalizing ‘Sunday’ in this sentence and by adding the words ‘account of stock and finds, of course, that his outgoes have been greater’, which were apparently trimmed from the manuscript before it was mounted and bound into set 167 of the Manuscript Edition. Authority for these emendations is derived from an intermediate lecture-draft manuscript at Harvard University (bMS Am 278.5 [20D]; see Dean, “Sound of a Flail,” pages 318-20, for a transcription) and “Life without Principle”13. As this article was going to press, he discovered the manuscript which serves as copy- text for most of “What Shall It Profit” 38 and all of “What Shall It Profit” 39 at NBiSU. The information from the NBiSU manuscript has been incorporated into the text and notes of this article with only one exception: ‘point-blank shots’ in the first sentence of “What Shall It Profit” 39 is an emendation of ‘point blank-shots’ in HDT WHAT? INDEX

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the manuscript copy-text. Authority for this emendation is derived from an intermediate lecture-draft manuscript at Harvard University (bMS Am 278.5 [20D]; see Dean, “Sound of a Flail,” pages 432-35, for a transcription) and “Life without Principle” 14.

June 14, Tuesday: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow threw a going-away party for Nathaniel Hawthorne, and both Waldo Emerson and James Russell Lowell attended.

June 14. ...This seems the true hour to be abroad sauntering far from home– Your thoughts being already turned toward home — your walk in once sense ended– You are in that favorable frame of mind described by De Quincy, open to great impressions — & you see those rare sights with the unconscious side of the eye — which you would not see by a direct gaze before– Then the dews begin to descend in your mind & its atmosphere is strained of all impurities– And home is farther away than ever –here is home –the beauty of the world impresses you– There is a coolness in your mind as in a well– Life is too grand for supper.– The wood thrush [Wood Thrush Catharus mustelina] launches forth his evening strains from the midst of the pines. I admire the moderation of this master. There is nothing tumultuous in his song. He launches forth one strain with all his heart and life and soul, of pure and unmatchable melody, and then he pauses and gives the hearer and himself time to digest this, and then another, and another at suitable intervals. Men talk of the rich song of other birds – the thrasher, mocking-bird, nightingale. But I doubt, I doubt. They know not what they say! There is as great an interval between the thrasher and the wood thrush as between Thomson’s Seasons and Homer. The sweetness of the day crystallizes in this morning coolness.

GOD IN CONCORD by Jane Langton © 1992 . . . to the carpet of sphagnum moss supporting the bog garden

in the middle of Gowing’s Swamp. Silently they stood gazing. Penguin Books USA Inc. “Better not all stand in one place,” whispered Mary, and they moved apart. The mossy surface billowed beneath their feet. It was not a place for talking. Slowly they walked around the green-gold garden among the dwarfed larches, the panicled andromeda, the swamp azalea and summersweet. Cotton grass lifted puffs of white on wiry stems. “Listen,” said Mary. They all looked up as a watery warbling began in the woods, a bell-like melody. A moment later it was Viking Penguin repeated in a higher register, the last notes rising out of hear- ing. They didn’t need to be told what it was. Homer looked at Mary. The singing stopped, then began again, a little nearer. . .

ISBN 0-670-84260-5 — PS3562.A515G58 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Famous Dead White Men (attending a famous dead party?): Whittier-Holmes-Emerson-Motley-Alcott-Hawthorne-Lowell-Agassiz-Longfellow HDT WHAT? INDEX

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October 27, Thursday: James Russell Lowell’s wife Maria White Lowell died at the age of 32 in Cambridge. The widower would tour Europe, write travel sketches about his trip, and then lecture on English poetry.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel, who would be referred to as the “Swiss Thoreau,” wrote in his JOURNAL INTIME: “I thank Thee, my God, for the hour that I have just passed in Thy presence. Thy will was clear to me; I measured my faults, counted my griefs, and felt Thy goodness toward me. I realized my own nothingness, Thou gavest me Thy peace. In bitterness there is sweetness; in affliction, joy; in submission, strength; in the God who punishes, the God who loves. To lose one’s life that one may gain it, to offer it that one may receive it, to possess nothing that one may conquer all, to renounce self that God may give Himself to us, how impossible a problem, and how sublime a reality! No one truly knows happiness who has not suffered, and the redeemed are happier than the elect. (Same day.) — The divine miracle par excellence consists surely in the apotheosis of grief, the transfiguration of evil by good. The work of creation finds its consummation, and the eternal will of the infinite mercy finds its fulfillment only in the restoration of the free creature to God and of an evil world to goodness, through love. Every soul in which conversion has taken place is a symbol of the history of the world. To be happy, to possess eternal life, to be in God, to be saved, all these are the same. All alike mean the solution of the problem, the aim of existence. And happiness is cumulative, as misery may be. An eternal growth is an unchangeable peace, an ever profounder depth of apprehension, a possession constantly more intense and more spiritual of the joy of heaven — this is happiness. Happiness has no limits, because God has neither bottom nor bounds, and because happiness is nothing but the conquest of God through love. The center of life is neither in thought nor in feeling, nor in will, nor even in consciousness, so far as it thinks, feels, or wishes. For moral truth may have been penetrated and possessed in all these ways, and escape us still. Deeper even than consciousness there is our being itself, our very substance, our nature. Only those truths which have entered into this last region, which have become ourselves, become spontaneous and involuntary, instinctive and unconscious, are really our life — that is to say something more than our property. So long as we are able to distinguish any space whatever between the truth and us we remain outside it. The thought, the feeling, the desire, the consciousness of life, are not yet quite life. But peace and repose can nowhere be found except in life, and in eternal life and the eternal life is the divine life, is God. To become divine is then the aim of life: then only can truth be said to be ours beyond the possibility of loss, because it is no longer outside us, nor even in us, but we are it, and it is we; we ourselves are a truth, a will, a work of God. Liberty has become nature; the creature is one with its creator — one through love. It is what it ought to be; its education is finished, and its final happiness begins. The sun of time declines and the light of eternal blessedness arises. Our fleshly hearts may call this mysticism. It is the mysticism of Jesus: “I am one with my Father; ye shall be one with me. We will be one with you.” Do not despise your situation; in it you must act, suffer, and conquer. From every point on earth we are equally near to heaven and to the infinite. There are two states or conditions of pride. The first is one of self-approval, the second one of self-contempt. Pride is seen probably at its purest in the last. It is by teaching that we teach ourselves, by relating that we observe, by affirming that we examine, by showing that we look, by writing that we think, by pumping that we draw water into the well.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1854

April 27, Thursday: Myrthen-Kränze op.154, a waltz, was performed for the initial time, in the Hofburg, Vienna for the wedding of Emperor Franz Joseph II to Princess Elisabeth of Bavaria, and was directed by its composer Johann Strauss.

Waldo Emerson had offered to read a paper in Moncure Daniel Conway’s room at Harvard Divinity School, and Conway had sent out invitations. The authorities had been perplexed for some time at this student’s closeness to the heretic of Concord, and when this latest thing came to their attention, they went into a panic of sorts. Conway would be challenged by Harvard’s Professor of Christian Morals with the possibility that this represented a “decline of Christian morals” in Divinity Hall. Two of the professors would visit student Conway in his room and give voice to their fears that there was being organized “a school within the school,” amounting to an “Emersonian cult.” But the meeting in question, on this date, had in fact gone off without incident, the group having moved because of its size to a public room and Emerson having merely read his paper on “Poetry” to an audience that included Professor Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and faculty spouse Fanny Appleton Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Professor Charles Eliot Norton, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, and Arthur Hugh Clough. We are left wondering why on earth all these authority figures were getting so exercised.19

Meanwhile, out at Walden Pond, Henry Thoreau was hypothesizing that the level of water in the pond ought to become very low again during the period 1866-1869 (amazingly, this anticipation would prove to have been accurate).

April 27. 7 A.M. –To Cliffs. ... The wood thrush [Hermit Thrush Catharus guttatus] afar, –so superior a strain to that of other birds. I was doubting if it would affect me as of yore, but it did measurably. I did not believe there could be such differences. This is the gospel according to the wood thrush. He makes a sabbath out of a week-day — I could go to hear him—could buy a pew in his church— Did he ever practice pulpit eloquence? He is right about the slavery question— ... Forbes says that the guides who crossed the alps with him lost the skin of their faces — (Ap from the reflections from the snow.) It is remarkable that the rise & fall of Walden though unsteady & whether periodical or merely occasional are not completed but after many years. I have observed one rise & part of 2 falls. It attains its maximum slowly & surely though unsteadily. It is remarkable that this fluctuation, whether periodical or not, requires many years for its accomplishment — and I expect that a dozen or 15 years hence it will again be as low as I have ever known it.

19. It wasn’t the fact that Waldo Emerson talked about “arrested and progressive development” in this paper on poetry which had gotten the faculty all excited, even though later it would be proposed, by some folks who demonstrably knew nothing whatever of evolutionary theory, that Emerson had here been anticipating Charles Darwin’s theory. What Emerson had said was simply “The electric word pronounced by [Doctor] John Hunter [1728-1793] a hundred years ago, — arrested and progressive development — indicating the way upward from the invisible protoplasm to the highest organism, — gave the poetic key to natural science, — of which the theories of Geoffroy St. Hilaire, of Lorenz Oken [1779-1851], of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe [1749-1832], of Louis Agassiz [1807-1873], and [Sir] Richard Owen [1804-1892] and [Doctor] Erasmus Darwin [1731-1802] in zoölogy and botany, are the fruits, — a hint whose power is not exhausted, showing unity and perfect order in physics.” –Which is not Darwinism, but the obsolete mental universe of hierarchy and superiority, of Naturphilosophie, the great ladder of being, all of which amounted to the wanna-believe bullshit that Charles Darwin would be struggling to supersede. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Winter: Charles Darwin would later comment, in THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, “I estimate that the winter of 1854-55 destroyed four-fifths of the birds in my own grounds.” It was not this terrible winter, however, that destroyed his hair — even at the tender age of 45, it was already long gone:

This winter was a terrible one for the soldiers of Russia, Turkey, England, and France, fighting in the Crimea north of the Black Sea. During this emergency all opposition was overcome and Florence Nightingale was able for the first time to staff military hospitals with female nurses. In fact, her Reports of the sufferings of the British army in the Crimea, deprived of its supplies in that winter by the Nobel mines in the harbor of Sevastopol in conjunction with the great hurricane of November 14, 1854, would lead not only to a new form of organization under the name of the Red Cross but also to the fall of a British government.

In the absence of Professor of Chemistry John Torrey, Professor Isaac-Farwell Holton was lecturing on the properties of mercury before the medical students of the College of Physicians and Surgeons when he suddenly came to a realization that the name of the white substance “calomel” derived from the Greek , meaning “beautiful,” and mel meaning “black” (this etymology came to his mind as he touched a piece of mercurial chloride with potassa and noticed that it produced a black spot). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Lecture Season of ’54/55, at the Odeon Hall in Boston:

16th Season of The Lowell Institute Professor C.C. Felton. On the Downfall and Resurrection of Greece 12 lectures Honorable John G. Palfrey. New England History 12 lectures James Russell Lowell. English Poetry 24 lectures Reverend Frederic Henry Hedge. Mediæval History 6 lectures HDT WHAT? INDEX

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December 16, Saturday: In a letter to Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner came up with the idea behind the opera Tristan und Isolde. LISTEN TO IT NOW

At what would come to be known as the initial meeting of the Saturday Club, Richard Henry Dana, Jr. recorded in his journal, he dined at the Albion Hotel “in a select company,” which is to say Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, Amos Bronson Alcott, a visiting lecturer Charles H. Goddard from Cincinnati, Thomas Cholmondeley, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, and the Boston attorney Horatio Woodman.20 “Emerson is an excellent dinner table man, always a gentleman, never bores or preaches, or dictates, but drops & takes up topics very agreeably, & has even skill & tact in managing his conversation. So, indeed, has Alcott, & it is quite surprising to see these transcendentalists appearing well as men of the world.”

The National Anti-Slavery Standard suggested that neither Henry Thoreau’s A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS nor WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS had “received ... adequate notice in our Literary Journals.” TIMELINE OF WALDEN TIMELINE OF A WEEK

20. Woodman would be one of the small number purchasing Thoreau’s WALDEN. Whether he would read it, we wish we knew. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1855

At age 48, Professor Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was able to retire from needing to teach at Harvard 21 College, and devote himself entirely to his writing — such as his preposterous SONG OF “HIAWATHA”.

Named to succeed him as Smith Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures was none other than James Russell Lowell — who went off to tour Europe again to brush up on foreign languages. 21. Thoreau would point out that this poem was defective in its grasp of its subject material and Emerson, when he received a copy, would respond to its author that when he read his poetry he felt that he was in “skilful hands, but first of all they were safe hands.” He commented on how “proper” the poem was. One of the commentators has presented Emerson’s subtext here as saying to Longfellow “Your poem is glib and insipid, but at least it is harmless — and I like you too well to say anything mean.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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All water falls, in the Dakota tongue, are called Ha-ha, never Minnehaha [“as Longfellow has it,” Thoreau remarked here in brackets]. The “h” has a strong gutteral sound. The word is applied because of the curling of the waters. The verb I-ha-ha primarily means to curl; secondarily to laugh because of the curling motion of the mouth in laughter.

MINNEHAHA FALLS

Two-thirds of the Longfellow House HDT WHAT? INDEX

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January: Edward Dickinson returned to Washington DC to complete the last session of the 33d US Congress, and his family followed him there.

James Russell Lowell offered a course of lectures at The Lowell Institute. The lectures proved so popular they

were repeated, and members of the Harvard College Board of Overseers were so overwhelmed by this popular triumph that they determined to sponsor him as the college’s replacement for Professor Longfellow. The deal they would seek to cut would be that first their selected inside-track guy would get to spend a year or two vacationing in Europe and boning up on his foreign languages and literatures, and then he would only be required to offer his students two lecture courses per year over and above such casual meetings in his study with small groups of advanced students as he chose to arrange. Of this arrangement, Henry Adams, class of 1858, would later report:

Lowell had brought back from Germany the only new and valuable part of its universities, the habit of allowing students to read with him privately in his study. Adams asked the privilege, and used it to read a little, and to talk a great deal, for the personal contact pleased and flattered him, as that of older men ought to flatter and please the young even when they altogether exaggerate its value. Lowell was a new element in the boy’s life.

January 27, Saturday: Richard Henry Dana, Jr. dined again with the Saturday Club at the Albion Hotel in downtown Boston, with James Russell Lowell, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, Edwin Percy Whipple, and Waldo Emerson. Either before or after this meal Emerson was lecturing in Worcester.

LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? HDT WHAT? INDEX

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

March: THE SONG OF “HIAWATHA” was complete. In his notes to the poem, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow quoted from the coffee-table publication by Mrs. Mary Henderson Eastman, DAHCOTAH; OR, LIFE AND LEGENDS OF THE SIOUX AROUND FORT SNELLING.

Officially designated to succeed Professor Longfellow as Smith Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures at Harvard College, James Russell Lowell went off to tour Europe again — to brush up on his foreign languages.

April 6, Friday: Charles Eliot Norton wrote James Russell Lowell endorsing free-soil politics because this would “confine the Negro within the South.” This Harvard College professor wasn’t against slavery, rather, he was against the enslavable race, which for obvious reasons shouldn’t be allowed to exist, or at the very least, shouldn’t be allowed to exist here.

Get this: he was antislavery because of his racism.

April 6 [1855]. It clears up at 8 P.M. warm and pleasant, leaving flitting clouds and a little wind, and I go up the Assabet in my boat. The blackbirds have now begun to frequent the water's edge in the meadow, the ice being sufficiently out. The April waters, smooth and commonly high, before many flowers (none yet) or any leafing, while the landscape is still russet and frogs are just awakening, is [sic] peculiar. It began yesterday. A very few white maple stamens stand out already loosely enough to blow in the wind, and some alder catkins look almost ready to shed pollen. On the hillsides I smell the dried leaves and hear a few flies buzzing over James Russell Lowell “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

them. The banks of the river are alive with song sparrows and tree sparrows. They now sing in advance of vegetation, as the flowers will blossom, — those slight tinkling, twittering sounds called the singing of birds; they have come to enliven the bare twigs before the buds show any signs of starting. I see a large wood tortoise just crawled out upon the bank, with three oval, low, bug-like leeches on its sternum. You can hear all day, from time to time, in any part of the village, the sound of a gun fired at ducks. Yesterday I was wishing that I could find a dead duck floating on the water, as I had found muskrats, and a hare, and now I see something bright and reflecting the light from the edge of the alders, five or six rods off. Can it be a duck? I can hardly believe my eyes. I am near enough to see its green head and neck. I am delighted to find a perfect specimen of the Mergus merganser, or goosander [Common Merganser Mergus merganser], undoubtedly shot yesterday by the Fast-Day sportsmen, and I take a small flattened shot from its wing, –flattened against the wing-bone apparently. The wing is broken, and it is shot through the head.22 It is a perfectly fresh and very beautiful bird, and as I raise it, I get sight of its long, slender vermillion bill (color of red sealing-wax) and its clean, bright-orange legs and feet, and then of its perfectly smooth and spotlessly pure white breast and belly tinged with a faint salmon (or tinged with a delicate buff inclining to salmon). This, according to Wilson,23 is one of the mergansers, or fisher ducks, of which there are nine or ten species and we have four in America. It is the largest of these four; feeds almost entirely on fin and shell fish; called water pheasant, sheldrake, fisherman diver, dun diver, sparkling fowl, harle, etc., as well as goosander. Go in April, return in November. Jardine has found seven trout in one female. Nuttall24 says they breed in the Russian Empire and are seen in Mississippi and Missouri in winter. He found a young brood in Pennsylvania. Yarrell25 says they are called also saw-bill and jack-saw; are sometimes sold in London market. Nest, according to Selby,26 on ground; according to others, in a hollow tree also. Found on the continent of Europe, northern Asia, and even in Japan(?). Some breed in the Orkneys and thereabouts. My bird is 25 7/8 inches long and 35 in alar extent; from point of wing to end of primaries, 11 inches. It is a great diver and does not mind the cold. It appears admirably fitted for diving and swimming. Its body is flat, and its tail short, flat, compact, and wedge-shaped; its eyes peer out a slight slit or semicircle in the skin of the head; and its legs are flat and thin in one direction, and the toes shut up compactly so as to create the least friction when drawing them forward, but their broad webs spread them three and a half inches when they take a stroke. The web is extended three eighths of an inch beyond the inner toe of each foot. There are very conspicuous black teeth-like serrations along the edges of its bill, and this also is roughened so that it may hold its prey securely. The breast appeared quite dry when I raised it from the water. The head and neck are, as Wilson says, black glossed with green, but the lower part of the neck pure white, and these colors bound on each other so abruptly that one appears to be sewed on to the other. It is a perfect wedge from the middle of its body to the end of its tail, and it is only three and a quarter inches deep from back to breast at the thickest part, while the greatest breadth horizontally (at the root of the legs) is five and a half inches. In these respects it reminds me of an otter, which however I have never seen. I suspect that I have seen near a hundred of these birds this spring, but I never got so near one before. In Yarrell’s plate the depth of the male goosander is to its length (i.e. from tip of tail to most forward part of breast) as thirty- seven to one hundred and three, or the depth is more than one third. This length in Yarrell’s bird, calling the distance from the point of the wing to the end of the primaries eleven inches, is about fourteen and a half inches of which my three and a quarter is not one fourth. In Nuttall’s plate the proportion is thirty-two to ninety-one, also more than one third. I think they have not represented the bird flat enough. Yarrell says it is the largest of the British mergansers; is a winter visitor, though a few breed in the north of Britain; are rare in the southern countries. But, according to Yarrell, a Mr. Low in his Natural History of Orkney 22. The chief wound was in a wing, which was broken. I afterward took three small shot from it, which were flattened against the bill’s base and perhaps (?) the quills’ shafts. 23. Alexander Wilson, AMERICAN ORNITHOLOGY, BY WILSON; WITH NOTES, BY JARDINE: TO WHICH IS ADDED, A SYNOPSIS OF AMERICAN BIRDS; INCLUDING THOSE DESCRIBED BY BONAPARTE, AUDUBON, NUTTALL, AND RICHARDSON, BY T.M. [Thomas Mayo] BREWER. WITH 29 PAGES OF STEEL PLATES OF NEARLY 400 BIRDS. 8vo. New York: H.S. Samuels, 1852. AMERICAN ORNITHOLOGY 24. Professor Thomas Nuttall, AMANUAL OF THE ORNITHOLOGY OF THE UNITED STATES AND OF CANADA, Cam bridge: Hilliard and Brown; Boston: Hilliard, Gray, 1832-1834. NUTTALL’S LAND BIRDS NUTTALL’S WATER BIRDS 25. William Yarrell, AHISTORY OF BRITISH BIRDS, 3 volumes, London: J. Van Voorst, 1843. 26. Prideaux John Selby, ILLUSTRATIONS OF BRITISH ORNITHOLOGY, Volume II, Water Birds (Edinburgh: W.H. Lizars, 1833). VOLUME II, WATER BIRDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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says they breed there, and, after breeding, the sexes separate; and Y. quotes Selby as saying that their nest is near the edge of the water, of grass, roots, etc., lined with down, sometimes among stones, in long grass, under bushes, or in a stump or hollow tree. Y. continues, egg “a uniform buff white,” two and a half inches long. Sometimes carry their young on their backs in the water. It is common in Sweden and, according to the traveller Acerbi, in Lapland they give it a hollow tree to build in and then steal its eggs. The mother, he adds, carries her young to the water in her bill. Y. says it is well known in Russia and is found in Germany, Holland, France, Switzerland, Provence, and Italy. Has been seen near the Caucasus (and is found in Japan, according to one authority). Also in North America, Hudson’s Bay, Greenland, and Iceland.

Prideaux John Selby’s Goosander HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

November 14, Wednesday: Professor James Russell Lowell “of Cambridge” was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in the section of Literature and Fine Arts.

The Law and Order Party organized in a convention at Fort Leavenworth in the Kansas Territory. THE 2D GREAT AMERICAN DISUNION

Nov. 14. Minott hears geese to-day. Heard to-day in my chamber, about 11 A.M., a singular sharp crackling sound by the window, which made me think of the snapping of an insect (with its wings, or striking something). It was produced by one of three small pitch pine cones which I gathered on the 7th, and which lay in the sun on the window-sill. I noticed a slight motion in the scales at the apex, when suddenly, with a louder crackling, it burst, or the scales separated, with a snapping sound on all sides of it. It was a general and sudden bursting or expanding of all the scales with a sharp crackling sound and motion of the whole cone, as by a force pent up within it. I suppose the strain only needed to be relieved in one point for the whole to go off. I was remarking to-day to Mr. Rice on the pleasantness of this November thus far, when he remarked that he remembered a similar season fifty-four years ago, and he remembered it because on the 13th of November that year he was engaged in pulling turnips and saw wild geese go over, when one came to tell him that his father was killed by a bridge giving way when his team was crossing it, and the team falling on him walking at its side.

P. M. — Up Assabet with Sophia. A clear, bright, warm afternoon. A painted tortoise swimming under water and a wood tortoise out on the bank. The rain has raised the river an additional foot or more, and it is creeping over the meadows. My boat is two thirds full and hard to come at. The old weedy margin is covered and a new grassy one acquired. The current is stronger, though the surface is pretty smooth. Much small rubbish is drifting down and slowly turning in the eddies. The motion of my boat sends an undulation to the shore, which rustles the dry sedge half immersed there, as if a tortoise were tumbling through it. Leaves and sticks and billets of wood come floating down in middle of the full, still stream, turning round in the eddies, and I mistake them for ducks at first. See two red- wing blackbirds [Red-winged Blackbird Agelaius phoeniceus] alight on a black willow. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

Winter: Lecture Season of ’55/56, at the Odeon Hall in Boston: James Russell Lowell’s series on the English poets was so popular that each lecture was being repeated, for those who had not managed to get inside the hall on the designated night, on the next afternoon. They were appearing verbatim in the newspaper. It was this series for The Lowell Institute which would win Lowell his appointment to succeed Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at Harvard College:27

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE 17th Season of The Lowell Institute Reverend Orville Dewey. Education of the Human Race 12 lectures Reverend W.H. Milburn. Early History and Settlement of the Mississippi Valley 12 lectures George William Curtis. Contemporaneous English Fiction 6 lectures Professor J.P. Cooke, Jr. Chemistry of the Non-metallic Elements 12 lectures Professor E. Vitalis Scharb. The Great Religious and Philosophical Poems of Modern Times 12 lectures HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1856

After a year-long visit to Italy and Germany in 1855/1856 to study, James Russell Lowell would hold the Smith Professorship in Modern Languages at Harvard College for the following several decades.

Several passages from Henry Thoreau’s writings were included by a sister-in-law of Lowell, Mrs. Anna Cabot Lowell, in an anthology put out by Ticknor and Fields, entitled SEED-GRAIN FOR THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION. SEED-GRAIN FOR THOUGHT SEED-GRAIN FOR THOUGHT

Volume I, pages 96-97:

WALDEN: If one listens to the faintest but constant suggestions of his genius, which are certainly true, he sees not to what extremes, or even insanity, it may lead him; and yet that way, as he grows more resolute and faithful, his road lies. The faintest assured objection which one healthy man feels will at length prevail over the arguments and customs of mankind. No man ever followed his genius till it misled him. Though the result were bodily weakness, yet perhaps no one can say that the consequences were to be regretted, for these were a life in conformity to higher principles. If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal, –that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.

27. This was the way Louis Agassiz also got onto the Harvard College faculty, for he had been brought to America to lecture for The Lowell Institute and had initially given over a hundred popular lectures. Yet, as the Lowell Institute’s historian later boasted:

Crude theories and plans for moral and political reforms are not to be found in the Lowell lectures. The selection of lectures and lecturers is made from a broad and comprehensive knowledge of the safe thought and intelligent study of the time.

Thus Louis Agassiz’s lifelong disdain for the development theory of Charles Darwin may not have been motivated solely by his racism, and by an awareness of how his “scientific” posturing could be utilized to bolster the institution of slavery and the financial interests of his slavemaster friends, but may also have been motivated by his desire to be lauded by and followed by the general public — for in fact no paid Lowell lecturer would have been allowed to advocate anything as leveling as the theory of Darwin. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

Volume I, page 121:

WALDEN: Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore-paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

Volume I, pages 180-1:

WALDEN: Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never fails. In the music of the harp which trembles round the world it is the insisting on this which thrill us. The harp is the travelling patterer for the Universe’s Insurance Company, recommending its laws, and our little goodness is all the assessment that we pay. Though the youth at last grows indifferent, the laws of the universe are not indifferent, but are forever on the side of the most sensitive. Listen to every zephyr for some reproof, for it is surely there, and he is unfortunate who does not hear it. We cannot touch a string or move a stop but the charming moral transfixes us. Many an irksome noise, go a long way off, is heard as music, a proud sweet satire on the meanness of our lives.

Volume I, page 257:

WALDEN: I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, PEOPLE OF I may almost say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign WALDEN form of servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both north and south. It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself. Talk of a divinity in man! Look at the teamster on the highway, wending to market by day or night; does any divinity stir within him? His highest duty to fodder and water his horses! What is his destiny to him compared with the shipping interests? Does not he drive for Squire Make-a-stir? How godlike, how immortal, is he? See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate. Self-emancipation even in the West Indian provinces of the fancy and imagination, – what Wilberforce is there to bring that about? Think, also, of the ladies of the land weaving toilet cushions against the last day, not to betray too green an interest in their fates! As if you could kill time without injuring eternity. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

WILLIAM WILBERFORCE JOSEPH ADDISON “CATO, A TRAGEDY” WM. LLOYD GARRISON HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

Volume I, pages 257-8:

WALDEN: Any prospect of awakening or coming to life to a dead man PEOPLE OF makes indifferent all times and places. The place where that may WALDEN occur is always the same, and indescribably pleasant to all our senses. For the most part we allow only outlying and transient circumstances to make our occasions. They are, in fact, the cause of our distraction. Nearest to all things is that power which fashions their being. Next to us the grandest laws are continually being executed. Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are. “How vast and profound is the influence of the subtile powers of Heaven and of Earth!” “We seek to perceive them, and we do not see them; we seek to hear them, and we do not hear them; identified with the substance of things, they cannot be separated from them.” “They cause that in all the universe men purify and sanctify their hearts, and clothe themselves in their holiday garments to offer sacrifices and oblations to their ancestors. It is an ocean of subtile intelligences. They are every where, above us, on our left, on our right; they environ us on all sides.”

CONFUCIUS HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

Volume II, pages 65-66:

WALDEN: Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to PEOPLE OF the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and WALDEN painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Nay nobleness begins at once to refine a man’s features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them. John Farmer sat at his door one September evening, after a hard day’s work, his mind still running on his labor more or less. Having bathed he sat down to recreate his intellectual man. It was a rather cool evening, and some of his neighbors were apprehending a frost. He had not attended to the train of his thoughts long when he heard some one playing on a flute, and that sound harmonized with his mood. Still he thought of his work; but the burden of his thought was, that though this kept running in his head, and he found himself planning and contriving it against his will, yet it concerned him very little. It was no more than the scurf of his skin, which was constantly shuffled off. But the notes of the flute came home to his ears out of a different sphere from that he worked in, and suggested work for certain faculties which slumbered in him. They gently did away with the street, and the village, and the state in which he lived. A voice said to him, –Why do you stay here and live this mean moiling life, when a glorious existence is possible for you? Those same stars twinkle over other fields than these.– But how to come out of this condition and actually migrate thither? All that he could think of was to practise some new austerity, to let his mind descend into his body and redeem it, and treat himself with ever increasing respect.

JOHN FARMER Volume II, pages 66-67:

WALDEN: I am glad to have drunk water so long, for the same reason that I prefer the natural sky to an opium-eater’s heaven. I would fain keep sober always; and there are infinite degrees of drunkenness. I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor; and think of dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea! Ah, how low I fall when I am tempted by them! HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

Volume II, page 86:

WALDEN: Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable, and that we need not come to open war. We meet at the post-office, and at the sociable, and about the fireside every night; we live thick and are in each other’s way, and stumble over one another, and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another. Certainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty communications.

We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are.

Volume II, pages 128-9:

WALDEN: I called on the king, but he made me wait in his hall, and conducted like a man incapacitated for hospitality. There was a man in my neighborhood who lived in a hollow tree. His manners were truly regal. I should have done better had I called on him. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

Volume II, page 187:

WALDEN: No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is great anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience. But even if the rent is not mended, perhaps the worst vice betrayed is improvidence. I sometimes try my acquaintances by such tests as this; – who could wear a patch, or two extra seams only, over the knee?

May 14, Wednesday: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote to Thomas Gold Appleton, his brother-in-law, in Paris (Appleton happens to have been the Boston wit who originated the famous comment “Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris”) that “We have formed a Dinner Club, once a month, at Parker’s. Agassiz, Motley, Emerson, Peirce, Lowell, Whipple, Sam Ward, Holmes, Dwight, Woodman, myself, and yourself. We sit from three o’clock till nine, generally, which proves it to be very pleasant.”28

May 14. Air full of golden robins. Their loud clear note betrays them as soon as they arrive. Yesterday and to-day I see half a dozen tortoises on a rail, — their first appearance in numbers. Catbird amid shrub oaks. Female red-wing [Red-winged Blackbird Agelaius phoeniceus]. Flood tells me he saw cherry-birds am the 12th of April in Monroe’s garden.

October 11, Saturday: At table at the Parker House in Boston:

LOUIS AGASSIZ HAMMATT BILLINGS RALPH WALDO EMERSON EBENEZER ROCKWOOD HOAR JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL BENJAMIN PEIRCE FRANKLIN BENJAMIN SANBORN SAMUEL GRAY WARD EDWIN PERCY WHIPPLE HORATIO WOODMAN

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

James Russell Lowell “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project

28. Longfellow overlooked to mention that Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, and Corne- lius Conway Felton would soon join. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

1857

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes helped Moses Dresser Phillips found The Atlantic Monthly. It was he who named it. Initially, he contributed “Breakfast-Table” essays. He wrote that the State House, atop Beacon Hill, was “the hub of the solar system.” That’s why, even today, just as New York is referred to as “the Big Apple,” Boston is referred to as “the Hub.”29 James Russell Lowell, just then assuming Longfellow’s position as professor of modern languages at Harvard College, became the magazine’s initial editor (for 4 years).

29. Actually, the doctor’s calculations were off by about twenty statute miles — it is not a high hill in Boston that is the hub of the solar system, but a deep pond in Concord that is the bellybutton of the universe. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

It was at about this time that John Burroughs “got [Waldo Emerson] in my blood.”

He would indicate later that reading them aloud to himself was what determined him to become a writer. Not only did these essays, such as NATURE and the “Divinity School Address,” supply Burroughs with something he needed in regard to natural religion, so that he went into what he described as “a state of ecstasy,” but also, the attitude Emerson took was helpfully different from the attitude that had been taken by Burroughs’s own father. His first literary products would be imitation-Emerson essays, which he would mainly submit to the little literary journals of New York. One essay in particular, titled “Expression,” that he submitted to James Russell Lowell at the new The Atlantic Monthly, was so Emersonian that the editor suspected plagiarism. Well, the editor who was never at a loss published it anyway, anonymously (what’s a little plagiarism when the attitude’s righteous?), and the readership of this magazine promptly presumed that this was a new Emerson piece and actually sent in Letters to the Editor under that presumption.

James Russell Lowell published an article in The Crayon calling for the establishment of a society to protect American trees such as the recently “discovered” California redwoods. CONSERVATIONISM HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

Samuel H. Hammond published WILD NORTHERN SCENES; OR, SPORTING ADVENTURES WITH THE RIFLE AND ROD, an important book in the nascent tradition of the hunter-conservationist, which celebrated the beauty and beneficence of the Adirondack wilds and advocated preservation of limited wilderness areas as resources for recreation and rejuvenation.

In an early example of the growing public concern with fish conservation through fish culture, especially at the state level, George Perkins Marsh published a REPORT, MADE UNDER AUTHORITY OF THE LEGISLATURE OF VERMONT, ON THE ARTIFICIAL PROPAGATION OF FISH, in which he also explored the effects of deforestation, agriculture, and industry on fish populations.30

September 16, Wednesday: In Portland, Maine, James Russell Lowell married a 2d time, to his daughter’s governess Frances Dunlap.

A patent was issued, for the typesetting machine.

September 16, Wednesday: A.M. –To Great Yellow Birch, with the Watsons. Solidago latifolia in prime at Botrychium Swamp. Barberries very handsome now. See boys gathering them in good season. Some fever-bush berries already ripe. Watson has brought me apparently Artemisia vulgaris, growing naturally close to Austin’s house in Lincoln; hardly in bloom. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

Walked through that beautiful soft white pine grove on the west of the road in John Flint’s pasture. These trees are large, but there is ample space between them, so that the ground is left grassy. Great pines two or more feet in diameter branch sometimes within two feet of the ground on each side, sending out large horizontal branches on which you can sit. Like great harps on which the wind makes music. There is no finer tree. The different stages of its soft glaucous foliage completely concealing the trunk and branches are separated by dark horizontal lines of shadow, the flakes of pine foliage, like a pile of light fleeces. I see green and closed cones beneath, which the squirrels have thrown down. On the trees many are already open. Say within a week have begun. In one small wood, all the white pine cones are on the ground, generally unopened, evidently freshly thrown down by the squirrels, and then the greater part have already been stripped. They begin at the base of the cone, as with the pitch pine. It is evident that they have just been very busy throwing down the white pine cones in all woods. Perhaps they have stored up the seeds separately. This they can do before chestnut burs open. Watson gave me three glow-worms which he found by the roadside in Lincoln last night. They exhibit a greenish light, only under the caudal extremity, and intermittingly, or at will. As often as I touch one in a dark morning, it stretches and shows its light for a moment, only under the last segment. An average one is five eighths of an inch long, exclusive of the head, when still; four fifths of an inch, or more, with the head, when moving; one fourth of an inch wide, broadest forward; and from one tenth to one eighth inch deep, nearly (at middle). They have six brown legs within about one fourth of an inch of the forward extremity. This worm is apparently composed of twelve scale-like segments, including the narrow terminal one or tail, and not including the head, which at will is drawn under the foremost scale or segment like a turtle’s. (I do not remember if the 30. The conservation movement was little more than a shabby fraud. From the historical record, these early environmental technocrats were intent not on solving our ecological crisis but on destroying the earth as quickly as possible. Their net impact has been negative: we would have been better off had we never had a conservation movement, to teach us how to manage our looting so that we looted with greater and greater effectiveness and economy. According to Samuel P. Hays’s EXPLORATIONS IN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY: ESSAYS BY SAMUEL P. HAYS (Pittsburgh PA: U of Pittsburgh P, 1998), these men were mere pawns of the powers that be, careerists bought by their careers: Conservation, above all, was a scientific movement, and its role in history arose from the implications of science and technology in modern society. Conservation leaders sprang from such fields as hydrology, forestry, agrostology, geology, and anthropology. Vigorously active in professional circles in the national capital, these leaders brought the ideals and practices of their crafts into federal resource policy. Loyalty to these professional ideals, not close association with the grass-roots public, set the tone of the Theodore Roosevelt conservation movement. Its essence was rational planning to promote efficient development and use of all natural resources. The idea of efficiency drew these federal scientists from one resource task to another, from specific programs to comprehensive concepts. It molded the policies which they proposed, their administrative techniques, and their relations with Congress and the public. It is from the vantage point of applied science, rather than of democratic protest, that one must understand the historic role of the conservation movement. The new realms of science and technology, appearing to open up unlimited opportunities for human achievement, filled conservation leaders with intense optimism. They emphasized expansion, not retrenchment; possibilities, not limitations.... They displayed that deep sense of hope which pervaded all those at the turn of the century for whom science and technology were revealing visions of an abundant future.... Conflicts between competing resource users, especially, should not be dealt with through the normal processes of politics. Pressure group action, logrolling in Congress, or partisan debate could not guarantee rational and scientific decisions. Amid such jockeying for advantage with the resulting compromise, concern for efficiency would disappear. Conservationists envisaged, even though they did not realize their aims, a political system guided by the ideal of efficiency and dominated by the technicians who could best determine how to achieve it. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

other species concealed its head thus, completely.) Looking down on it, I do not see distinctly more than two antennae, one on each side, whitish at base, dark-brown at tip, and apparently about the same length with the longest of the other species. The general color above is black, or say a very dark brown or blackish; the head the same. On each side two faint rows of light-colored dots. The first segment is broadly conical, and much the largest; the others very narrow in proportion to their breadth transversely, and successively narrower, slightly recurved at tip and bristle-pointed and also curved upward at the thin outer edge, while the rounded dorsal ridge is slightly elevated above this. Beneath, dirty white with two rows of black spots on each side. They always get under the sod by day and bury themselves. They are not often much curled up, never in a ring, nor nearly so much as the other kind. They are much more restless when disturbed, both by day and night, than the others. They are a much coarser insect than the other and approach more nearly to the form of a sow-bug. I kept them more than a week. Vide back, August 8th. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

1858

January 23, Saturday: Henry Thoreau wrote to James Russell Lowell. Concord Jan. 23d 1858 Dear Sir, I have been so busy surveying of late that I have scarcely had time to “think” of your proposition, or ascertain what I have for you. The more fatal objection to printing my last Maine-Wood experience, is, that my Indian guide, whose words & deeds I report very faithfully, –and they are the most interesting part of the story,– knows how to read, and takes a newspaper, so that I could not face him again. The most available paper which I have is an account of an excursion into the same woods in ’53; the subjects of which are the Moose, the Pine Tree & the Indian. Mr Emerson could tell you about it, for I remember reading it to his family, after having read it as a lecture to my townsmen. It consists of about one hundred manuscript pages, or a lecture & a half, as I measure. The date could perhaps be omitted, if in the way. On account of other engagements, I could not get it ready for you under a month from this date– If you think that you would like to have this, and will state the rate of compensation, I will inform you at once whether I will prepare it for you. Yrs truly Henry D. Thoreau J.R. Lowell Esq

January 23: The wonderfully mild and pleasant weather continues. The ground has been bare since the 11th. This morning was colder than before. I have not been able to walk up the North Branch this winter, nor along the channel of the South Branch at any time. P.M.–To Saw Mill Brook. A fine afternoon. There has been but little use for gloves this winter, though I have been surveying a great deal for three months. The sun, and cock crowing, bare ground, etc., etc., remind me of March. Standing on the bridge over the Mill Brook on the Turnpike, there being but little ice on the south side, I see several small water-bugs (Gyrinus) swimming about, as in the spring. I see the terminal shield fern very fresh, as an evergreen, at Saw Mill Brook, and (I think it is) the marginal fern and Lycopodium lucidulum. I go up the brook, walking on it most of the way, surprised to find that it will bear me. How it falls from rock to rock, as down a flight of stairs, all through that rocky wood, from the swamp which is its source to the Everett farm! The bays or more stagnant parts are thickest frozen, the channel oftenest open, and here and there the water has overflowed the ice and covered it with a thickening mass of glistening spiculae. The white markings on the under side are very rich and varied,–the currency of the brook, the impression of its fleeting bubbles even. It comes out of a meadow of about an acre. I go near enough to Flint’s Pond, about 4 P. M., to hear it thundering. In summer I should not have suspected its presence an eighth of a mile off through the woods, but in such a winter day as this it speaks and betrays itself. Returning through Britton’s field, I notice the stumps of chestnuts cut a dozen years ago. This tree grows rapidly, and one layer seems not to adhere very firmly to another. I can easily count the concentric circles of growth on these old stumps as I stand over them, for they are worn into conspicuous furrows along the lines of the pores of the wood. One or more rings often gape an eighth of an inch or more, at about their twenty-fourth or twenty- fifth year, when the growth, in three or four cases that I examined, was most rapid. Looking toward the woods HDT WHAT? INDEX

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in the horizon, it is seen to be very hazy. At Ditch Pond I hear what I suppose to be a fox barking, an exceedingly husky, hoarse, and ragged note, prolonged perhaps by the echo, like a feeble puppy, or even a child endeavoring to scream, but choked with fear, yet it is on a high key. It sounds so through the wood, while I am in the hollow, that I cannot tell from which side it comes. I hear it bark forty or fifty times at least. It is a peculiar sound, quite unlike any other woodland sound that I know. Walden, I think, begins to crack and boom first on the south side, which is first in the shade, for I hear it cracking there, though it is still in the sun around me. It is not so sonorous and like the dumping of frogs as I have heard it, but more like the cracking of crockery. It suggests the very brittlest material, as if the globe you stood on were a hollow sphere of glass and might fall to pieces on the slightest touch. Most shivering, splintery, screeching cracks these are, as if the ice were no thicker than a tumbler, though it is probably nine or ten inches. Methinks my weight sinks it and helps to crack sometimes. Who can doubt that men are by a certain fate what they are, contending with unseen and unimagined difficulties, or encouraged and aided by equally mysterious auspicious circumstances? Who can doubt this essential and innate difference between man and man, when he considers a whole race, like the Indian, inevitably and resignedly passing away in spite of our efforts to Christianize and educate them? Individuals accept their fate and live according to it, as the Indian does. Everybody notices that the Indian retains his habits wonderfully,–is still the same man that the discoverers found. The fact is, the history of the white man is a history of improvement, that of the red man a history of fixed habits of stagnation. To insure health, a man’s relation to Nature must come very near to a personal one; he must be conscious of a friendliness in her; when human friends fail or die, she must stand in the gap to him. I cannot conceive of any life which deserves the name, unless there is a certain tender relation to Nature. This it is which makes winter warm, and supplies society in the desert and wilderness. Unless Nature sympathizes with and speaks to us, as it were, the most fertile and blooming regions are barren and dreary. Mrs. William Monroe told Sophia last evening that she remembered her (Sophia’s) grandfather very well, that he was taller than Father, and used to ride out to their house–she was a Stone and lived where she and her husband did afterward, now Darius Merriam’s–when they made cheeses, to drink the whey, being in consumption. She said that she remembered Grandmother too, Jennie Burns, how she came to the schoolroom (in Middle Street (?), Boston) once, leading her little daughter Elizabeth, the latter so small that she could not tell her name distinctly, but spoke thick and lispingly,–” Elizabeth Orrock Thoreau.”31 DOG The dog is to the fox as the white man to the red. The former has attained to more clearness in his bark; it is more ringing and musical, more developed; he explodes the vowels of his alphabet better; and beside he has made his place so good in the world that he can run without skulking in the open field. What a smothered, ragged, feeble, and unmusical sound is the bark of the fox! It seems as if he scarcely dared raise his voice lest it should catch the ear of his tame cousin and inveterate foe.

31. Vide February 7th. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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February 22, Monday: John Brown made contact with two black leaders, the Reverend Jermain Wesley Loguen of Syracuse, New York and Doctor J.N. Gloucester of New-York, for assistance in the recruitment of free black fighters for his scheme to make a raid into slave territory.

Henry Thoreau wrote to James Russell Lowell.

Concord Feb. 22d 1858 My Dear Sir, I think that I can send you a part of the story to which I referred within a fortnight. I am to read some of my latest Maine Wood experiences to my townsmen this week; and in this case I shall not hesitate to call names.

{One-fourth page missing} HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Franklin Benjamin Sanborn trusted that meeting with Captain Brown in Peterboro in upstate New York would reveal the actual threat level of Hugh Forbes’s letters, and therefore, when Stearns was unable to attend, Sanborn himself made the journey, arriving that evening. Brown and a few of his friends, such as Edwin Morton, had already assembled. Morton sang Franz Schubert’s “Serenade” for those assembled, and Brown sang along softly with this, tears in his eyes. Then the whole outline of Brown’s campaign in Virginia was laid before them “to the astonishment and almost the dismay of all present.” The constitution which had been drawn up was exhibited, and a map indicating the territory they intended to capture, and Brown specified that he wanted to attack during the middle of May 1858. He needed only perhaps $800, and $1,000 would be more than ample. Plan A was a fortification in the Southern mountains and Plan B would be a retreat through the North. But to strike at once at the existence of slavery, by an organized force, acting for years, if need be, on the dubious principles of guerrilla warfare, and exposed, perhaps, to the whole power of the country, was something they had never contemplated. That was the long-meditated plan of a poor, obscure, old man, uncertain at best of another ten years’ lease of life, and yet calmly proposing an enterprise which, if successful, might require a whole generation to accomplish. His friends listened until late at night, proposing objections and raising difficulties, but nothing shook the purpose of the old Puritan. To every objection he had an answer; every difficulty had been foreseen and provided for; the great difficulty of all, the apparent hopelessness of undertaking anything so vast with such slender means, he met with the words of Scripture, “If God be for us, who can be against us?” and “Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.” To all suggestions of delay until a more favorable time, he would reply, “I am nearly sixty years old; I have desired to do this work for many years; if I do not begin soon, it will be too late for me.” He had made nearly all his arrangements; he had so many hundred weapons, so many men enlisted, all that he wanted was the small sum of money. With that he would open his campaign with the spring, and he did not doubt that his enterprise would pay. But those who heard him, while they looked upon the success of Brown’s undertaking as a great blessing and relief to the country, felt also that to fail, contending against such odds, might hazard for many years the cause of freedom and union. They had not yet fully attained the sublime faith of Brown when he said, “A few men in the right, and knowing they are right, can overturn a king. Twenty men in the Alleghanies could break slavery to pieces in two years.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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March 5, Friday: William Cooper Nell sponsored a celebration of the anniversary of the beginning of the American Revolution with an elaborate program entitled BOSTON MASSACRE, MARCH 5TH, 1770: THAT DAY WHICH HISTORY SELECTS AS THE DAWN OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. COMMEMORATIVE FESTIVAL, AT FANEUIL HALL FRIDAY MARCH 5, 1848. PROTEST AGAINST THE DRED SCOTT DECISION (published in Boston by E.L. Balach).

Charlotte L. Forten wrote “Went to Boston, to Mr Nell’s ‘Attucks Celebration’.” [Crispus Attucks] HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

Great news from California:

Henry Thoreau went to hear a lecture by a man of the Ojibwa tribe (“Chippeway Indian”). HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

March 5: We read the English poets; we study botany and zoölogy and geology, lean and dry as they are; and it is rare that we get a new suggestion. It is ebb-tide with the scientific reports, Professor ————— in the chair. We would fain know something more about these animals and stones and trees around us. We are ready to skin the animals alive to come at them. Our scientific names convey a very partial information only: they suggest certain thoughts only. It does not occur to me that there are other names for most of these objects, given by a people who stood between me and them, who had better senses than our race. How little I know of that arbor-vitæ when I have learned only what science can tell me! It is but a word. It is not a tree of life. But there are twenty words for the tree and its different parts which the Indian gave, which are not in our botanies, which imply a more practical and vital science. He used it every day. He was well acquainted with its wood, and its bark, and its leaves. No science does more than arrange what knowledge we have of any class of objects. But, generally speaking, how much more conversant was the Indian with any wild animal or plant than we are, and in his language is implied all that intimacy, as much as ours is expressed in our language. How many words in his language about a moose, or birch bark, and the like! The Indian stood nearer to wild nature than we. The wildest and noblest quadrupeds, even the largest fresh-water fishes, some of the wildest and noblest birds and the fairest flowers have actually receded as we advanced....32

Thoreau sent off his “Maine Story” under cover letter to Professor James Russell Lowell, for the new The Atlantic Monthly magazine. Concord Mar. 5th 1858 Dear Sir, I send you this morning, by the Concord & Cambridge expresses, some 80 pages of my Maine Story. There are about 50 pages more of it. I think that it is best divided thus. If, however, this is too long for you, there is a tolerable stopping place after the word “mouse” p 74, which is about the middle of the whole. If there is no objection you can print the whole date 1853. 32. Robert D. Richardson, Jr., the self-described “intellectual biographer” of Thoreau, has had a remark to make about this:

Thoreau is no longer looking for the bravery of science, or scientist, no longer open to the scientist’s new methods, new languages, and new discoveries. Instead he asserts that scientific language actually gets in the way of our understanding how the world relates to us. Thoreau has here pushed his characteristic fondness for paradox too far. Whatever one may say of the American Indian, he did not have a “more practical and vital science” than the European. Not even Thoreau’s intimidating way with exaggeration and extravagance can carry that off. Even his closing generalization about science is a serious underestimate.... The “closing generalization” referred to above is merely the last sentence of the snippet which Professor Richardson chose to excerpt from Thoreau’s journal, which of course continued without such closure and without marking that particular sentence either as a conclusion or as a generalization. Richardson made this inaccurate and quite gratuitous remark about Thoreau’s frame of mind in the early spring of 1858 in an article “Thoreau and Science” in Robert J. Scholnick’s new anthology AMERICAN LITERATURE AND SCIENCE (Lexington KY: UP of Kentucky, 1992), on page 122. (On the “Contributors” sheet at the end of that scholarly anthology the cv information provided for Robert A. Richardson, Jr. is that he has a Guggenheim to do a bio of Emerson. –For sure, this scholar’s heart is in the right place and he won’t do a job on Emerson the way he has done one on Thoreau.) It is hard for me to express just how I am disturbed by such remarks by Richardson. Here we have Thoreau in the 19th Century, amidst all that typological thinking and all that racism, honorably struggling to shake free of the prejudices of his contemporaries, honorably struggling to find points of parity among cultures with differing experiences and languages with differing origins, honorably making attempts at uncovering whatever objective bases there might be found for equivalence studies, honorably and diligently seeking out ways to honor human differences rather than excoriate them — and here we have Professor Richardson in the 20th Century, amidst all our residues, and what Thoreau was struggling with is entirely opaque to him, and what we are struggling with is not in the same universe with him. Although I am tempted to say that such a frame of mind is so scientistic as to be, of necessity, fundamentally racist in its origins and in its presuppositions, I think I will forbear, and leave this topic with the comment that what seems to be bothering me so much here is the fact that strangely, but obviously, Richardson’s not struggling. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL I reserve the right to publish it in another form after it has appeared in your magazine. Will you please send me the proofs on account of Indian names &c — and also, if you print this, inform me how soon you would like the rest? Yrs truly Henry D. Thoreau

Page 472 of Henry Mayer’s ALL ON FIRE: In [William Lloyd Garrison’s] view, Dred Scott had delivered a crowning blow not only to the Republican idea that slavery could be extinguished by preventing its expansion but to the Smith/Douglass contention that the Constitution could be construed as carrying an antislavery mandate. No wonder that in their continuing polemical warfare Douglass insinuated that Garrison and Taney took identical views of the document. They shared, however, not so much a jurisprudence as a realistic appreciation that the Constitution conferred power upon the slaveholders sufficient to protect slavery aggressively and indefinitely.

May 18, Tuesday: The Leavenworth Constitution that would prohibit slavery and allow black citizenship was approved by the voters of the Kansas Territory. THE 2D GREAT AMERICAN DISUNION

Charlotte L. Forten wrote “Had a great surprise in the arrival of Mr. Putnam [George W. Putnam of Lynn] and Mr. Nell [William Cooper Nell]. Stood almost transfixed with astonishment.”

Henry Thoreau wrote to James Russell Lowell. Concord May 18th 1858 Dear Sir, The proofs, for which I did ask in the note which accompanied the MS, would have been an all sufficient “Bulletin”. I was led to suppose by Mr Emerson’s account, –and he advised me to send immediately– that you were not always even one month ahead. At any rate it was important to me that the paper be disposed of soon – I send by express this morning the remainder of the story – of which allow me to ask a sight of the proofs. Yrs truly Henry D. Thoreau

That night, during the hours of darkness, a column of 158 soldiers under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Edward J. Steptoe managed to escape from encirclement by approximately 1,000 Coeur d’Alene warriors, and wend their way toward safety inside the city limits of Spokane, Washington. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

At the age of 51, the widower Henry William Herbert had gotten married for a 2d time. About three months into this marriage, however, his Mrs. had been visited by a woman who had said some things to her – unspecified things– and suddenly there was a lawyer in the picture and this new marriage was decidedly over. In despair on this morning at about 2AM he committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest in his bedroom on the 2d floor of the Stevens House boarding house in Broadway by the Bowling Green, Manhattan Island.

He left a long and detailed missive forgiving every man who had wronged him and asking forgiveness of every man whom he had wronged — a long and detailed suicide note that would be published to the world in all its juicy detail by the New York Times, known to all as “the newspaper of record.” The anonymous obituary writer would recount some unfortunate and some pleasant details of the deceased’s period on this planet and whip out his own upbeat summation:

To those who were familiar with Mr. HERBERT’S irascible temper and his general course of life, the event will not create any very great surprise, and the feelings of those who may have entertained a contempt for his morose and wayward manners will be converted into compassion for his sufferings. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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June 22, Tuesday: Henry Thoreau wrote to James Russell Lowell:33

Concord June 22d 1858.

Dear Sir,

When I received the proof of that portion of my story printed in the July number of your magazine, I was surprised to find that the sentence– “It is as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still.”–(which comes directly after the words “heals my cuts,” page 230, tenth line from the top,) had been crossed out, and it occurred to me that, after all, it was of some consequence that I should see the proofs; supposing, of course, that my “Stet” &c in the margin would be respected, as I perceive that it was in other cases of comparatively little importance to me. However, I have just noticed that that sentence was, in a very mean and cowardly manner, omitted. I hardly need to say that this is a liberty which I will not permit to be taken with my M S. The editor has, in this case, no more right to omit a sentiment than to insert one, or put words into my mouth. I do not ask anybody to adopt my opinions, but I do expect that when they ask for them to print, they will print them, or obtain my consent to their alteration or omission. I should not read many books if I thought that they had been thus expurgated. I feel this treatment to be an insult, though not intended as such, for it is to presume that I can be hired to suppress my opinions. I do not mean to charge you with this omission, for I cannot believe that you knew anything about it, but there must be a responsible editor somewhere, and you, to whom I entrusted my M S. are the only party that I know in this matter. I therefore write to ask if you sanction this omission, and if there are any other sentiments to be omitted in the remainder of my article. If you do not sanction it –or whether you do or not– will you do me the justice to print that sentence, as an omitted one, indicating its place, in the August number? I am not willing to be associated in any way, unnecessarily, with parties who will confess themselves so bigoted & timid as this implies. I could excuse a man who was afraid of an uplifted fist, but if one habitually manifests fear at the utterance of a sincere thought, I must think that his life is a kind of nightmare continued into broad daylight. It is hard to conceive of one so completely derivative. Is this the avowed character of the Atlantic Monthly? I should like an early reply.

Yrs truly, Henry D. Thoreau

The following snippet is from Ellery Sedgwick’s THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY 1857-1909: YANKEE HUMANISM HDT WHAT? INDEX

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AT HIGH TIDE AND EBB (Amherst MA: U of Massachusetts P, 1994, page 60): No reply by James Russell Lowell exists; no notice of the omission appeared in the August The Atlantic Monthly as Thoreau had requested, and he was made to wait several months for payment. Probably the failure to honor Thoreau’s notation [sic] was a conscious act on Lowell’s part. Certainly his handling of the aftermath was shabby. The incident shows Lowell at his worst — high-handed and subject to personal pique. The quarrel with Thoreau also shows that Lowell and Phillips were reluctant, as later editors and publishers would be, to engage too often in religious controversy.

It should be pointed out that Sedgwick is not fair here to Thoreau, for not only does he fail to specify what “too often” means in regard to religious controversy in a popular magazine, other than “not at all,” but also he characterizes the deleted line as “pantheistic” — which, to give this author any benefit of any intelligence whatever, must be considered as a straightforward slur.

June 22: …could excuse a man who was afraid of an uplifted fist, but if one habitually manifests fear at the utterance of a sincere thought, I must think that his life is a kind of nightmare continued into broad daylight.

33. [Humor Alert] Was James Russell Lowell misinterpreting the old German proverb cited by Johann Wolf- gang von Goethe, Es ist dafür gesorgt, dass die Bäume nicht in den Himmel waschen, to mean that trees can- not grow in Heaven, rather than merely that trees cannot grow into the heavens? HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

September 1, Wednesday: The cable signal across the Atlantic had been growing weaker and weaker, but the planned celebration was allowed to go off anyway. In the midst of this national celebration of triumph this 1st trans- Atlantic link went forever dead. There were immediate suspicions that the whole affair had been a hoaxHOAX . CABLE TELEGRAPHY

In the warfare with the Coeur d’Alene, Kamiakin’s Yakima warriors, and their allies, a punitive expedition was organized and the forces under Colonel George Wright, assisted by Nez Percé auxiliaries, defeated Kamiakin on the Spokane Plain. Kamiakin, although injured, managed to escape. Henry Thoreau wrote to James Russell Lowell. {No MS—printed copy Harding and Bode, p. 520}

I shall be glad to receive payment for my story as soon as convenient — will you be so good as to direct it this way.

September 1: P.M.–To Botrychium Swamp. Aster miser not long, but the leaves turned red. At the pool by the oaks behind Pratt’s, I see the Myriophyllum ambiguum still, and going to seed, greening the surface of the water. The Leersia oryzoides, false rice, or rice cut-grass, is abundant and in prime on the shore there. Also find it on the shore of Merrick’s pasture. It has very rough sheaths. Am surprised to see frog(?) spawn just laid, neither in spherical masses nor in a string, but flatted out thin on the surface, some eight or nine inches wide,– a small black spawn, white one side, as usual. I saw one or two F. [sic] fontinalis on the shore. Was it toad- spawn? Ranunculus repens in bloom–as if begun again?–at the violet wood-sorrel spring. Chelone glabra well out, how long? In the same meadow, Aster longifolius well out, not long. That meadow is white with the Eriophorum polystachyon, apparently var. angustifolium (?). On dry land, common, but apparently getting stale, Panicum clandestinum. Dangle-berries now ready for picking. At Botrychium Swamp, Nabalus altissimus. Of twenty plants (all in shade) only one out, apparently two or three days. Elsewhere, in open land, N. Fraseri, apparently several days, say five; but not a very rough one. Ledurn Telephium, how long? In the evening, by the roadside, near R.W.E.’s gate, find a glow-worm of the common kind. Of two men, Dr. Bartlett and Charles Bowen, neither had ever seen it!

Vide it pressed.

October 4, Monday: Henry Thoreau wrote to James Russell Lowell.

Concord Oct 4th 1858 James R. Lowell Esq, Dear Sir, I wrote to you more than a month ago respecting what was due me from the Atlantic Monthly, but I have not heard from you. Perhaps you have not received my note. As I count, your magazine is indebted to me for thirty-three pages at six dollars a page = $198.00 I should be glad to know if you receive this, and also when I may expect to be paid. Yrs Henry D. Thoreau

October 4: Going by Dr. Barrett’s, just at the edge of evening, I saw on the sidewalk something bright like fire, as if molten lead were scattered along, and then I wondered if a drunkard’s spittle were luminous, and HDT WHAT? INDEX

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proceeded to poke it on to a leaf with a stick. It was rotten wood. I found that it came from the bottom of some old fence-posts which had just been dug up near by and there glowed for a foot or two, being quite rotten and soft, and it suggested that a lamp-post might be more luminous at bottom than at top. I cut out a handful and carried it about. It was quite soft and spongy and a very pale brown –some almost white– in the light, quite soft and flaky; and as I withdrew it gradually from the light, it began to glow with a distinctly blue fire in its recesses, becoming more universal and whiter as the darkness increased. Carried toward a candle, it is quite a blue light. One man whom I met in the street was able to tell the time by his watch, holding it over what was in my hand. The posts were oak, probably white. Mr. Melvin, the mason, told me that he heard his dog barking the other night, and, going out, found that it was at the bottom of an old post he had dug up during the day, which was all aglow.

P. M. (before the above).–Paddled up the Assabet. Strong north wind, bringing down leaves. Many white and red maple, bass, elm, and black willow leaves are strewn over the surface of the water, light, crisp colored skiffs. The bass is in the prime of its change, a mass of yellow. See B—— a-fishing notwithstanding the wind. A man runs down, fails, loses self-respect, and goes a-fishing, though he were never seen on the river before. Yet methinks his “misfortune” is good for him, and he is the more mellow and humane. Perhaps he begins to perceive more clearly that the object of life is something else than acquiring property, and he really stands in a truer relation to his fellow-men than when he commanded a false respect of them. There he stands at length, perchance better employed than ever, holding communion with nature and himself and coming to understand his real position and relation to men in this world. It is better than a poor debtors’ prison, better than most successful money-getting. I see some rich-weed in the shade of the Hemlocks, for some time a clear, almost ivory, white, and the boehmeria is also whitish. Rhus Toxicodendron in the shade is a pure yellow; in the sun, more scarlet or reddish. Grape leaves apparently as yellow as ever. Witch-hazel apparently at height of change, yellow below, green above, the yellow leaves by their color concealing the flowers. The flowers, too, are apparently in prime. The leaves are often richly spotted reddish and greenish brown. The white maples that changed first are about bare. The brownish-yellow clethra leaves thickly paint the bank. Salix lucida leaves are one third clear yellow. The Osmunda regalis is yellowed and partly crisp and withered, but a little later than the cinnamon, etc. Scare up two ducks, which go off with a sharp creaking ar-r-week, ar-r-week, ar-r-week. Is not this the note of the wood duck? Hornets are still at work in their nests. Ascend the hill. The cranberry meadows are a dull red. See crickets eating the election-cake toadstools. The Great Meadows, where not mown, have long been brown with wool-grass. The hickories on the northwest side of this hill are in the prime of their color, of a rich orange; some intimately mixed with green, handsomer than those that are wholly changed. The outmost parts and edges of the foliage are orange, the recesses green, as if the outmost parts, being turned toward the sunny fire, were first baked by it. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1859

James Russell Lowell was touring Italy and was not amused:

Even when the Italian beggar is a cripple you suspect him of being a comedian.

Lowell’s wit in The Atlantic Monthly was bound together as a book: THE BIGLOW PAPERS

Napoléon III and Victor Emanuele II joined forces against Austria and won victories at Magenta and Solferino. Lombardy was awarded to Sardinia.

July 19, Tuesday: Moderates from northern German states met in Hanover to discuss German unification under Prussian leadership (this group, and the one formed 2 days earlier, would in September merge to form the Nationalverein).

In the morning was Harvard University’s commencement. After lunch was the annual meeting of the alumni of the Harvard Divinity School, to be followed at 4PM by an address by the Reverend Henry Whitney Bellows. At the after-lunch session the controversy between liberal and conservative Unitarian reverends came out into the open on a motion to praise the terminally ill Reverend Theodore Parker made by the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway and seconded by the Reverend James Freeman Clarke. The meeting degenerated into wild argument and first tried to expel all newspaper reporters and then, failing to get these people to depart, cautioned them that they “knew well enough what to report and what not to.” The Reverend Conway proposed that his motion to praise the Reverend Parker be limited to a simple expression of sympathy in affliction, but even that had become too tainted to be brought to a vote. The participants in this meeting went into the lecture with the issue entirely unresolved, and in the lecture the Reverend Bellows condemned the Reverend Conway as a minister who would “dance in a church” and the Reverend Parker as a minister who would “worship in a theatre.” What was needed was recognition that society depended upon its institutions, and that religion was first and foremost one of those institution. The title of this lecture, which was being offered by the very Reverend who had originally suggested back in 1852 in Virginia that Conway abandon his Methodism and become a Unitarian minister, was, appropriately, “The New Catholic Church.”

The Transcendental philosophy ... delights in making the secular and the sacred, the right and the wrong, the grave and the gay, the male and the female, the world and the church, the human and the divine, the natural and the supernatural, the one and the same.

Since I do love a good fight I can’t help but point out that the Reverend Bellows, who was bellowing this condemnation of the integration of religion into one’s life, neglected to include an important phrase, “the Anglo-Saxon and the inferior races.” Why was this important distinction not also cited? A direct vote was after all escaped. The advertised hour for the annual address, to be delivered that year by Dr. Bellows of New York, had already been passed by a few minutes, and a motion for adjournment was carried. Next day I breakfasted at [James Russell] Lowell’s house with HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Edmund Quincy, who said, “So you could n’t get the Unitarians to pray for Parker?” He and others regarded it as due to my want of familiarity with the old Parkerite polemics that, while repudiating miracles, I should have attempted such a miracle as to soften the heart of militant Unitarianism. AUTOBIOGRAPHY VOLUME II

July 19. P. M.–Up Assabet. The architect of the river builds with sand chiefly, not with mud. Mud is deposited very slowly, only in the stagnant places, but sand is the ordinary building-material. It is remarkable how the river, while it may be encroaching on the bank on one side, preserves its ordinary breadth by filling up the other side. Generally speaking, up and down this and the other stream, where there is a swift place and the bank worn away on one side,–which, other things being equal, would leave the river wider there,–a bank or island or bar is being built up on the other, since the eddy where, on one side, sand, etc., are deposited is produced by the rapidity of the current, thus:–

e.g. north side of Egg Rock, at Hemlocks, at Pigeon Rock Bend, at Swift Place Bank, etc., and on main stream at Ash Tree Bend. The eddy occasioned by the swiftness deposits sand, etc., close by on one side and a little offshore, leaving finally a low meadow outside where was once the bed of the river. There are countless places where the one shore is thus advancing and, as it were, dragging the other after it. I dug into that sand-bank, once sand-bar, at the narrow and swift place off Hildreth’s, five and a half feet deep, this afternoon. It is more than a rod wide and covered with willows and alders, etc. It is built up four or five feet above the summer level. It is uniformly fine sand, more or less darkened with decayed vegetation, probably much of it sawdust, and it has been deposited this depth here by the eddy at high water within a very recent period. The same agent is in a great many places steadily advancing such a bar or bank down the stream a rod or more from the old shore. The more recent and lower extremity of this bank or bar is composed of sawdust and shavings, almost entirely so to a depth of two feet. Before it reaches the surface, pads spring up in it; when [IT] begins to appear, pontederia shows itself, and bulrushes, and next black willows, button-bushes, etc. The finest black willows on the river grow on these sand-banks. They are also much resorted to by the turtles for laying their eggs. I dug up three or four nests of the Emys insculpta and Sternothaerus odoratus while examining the contents of the bank this afternoon. This great pile of dry sand in which the turtles now lay was recently fine particles swept down the swollen river. Indeed, I think that the river once ran from opposite Merriam’s to Pinxter Swamp and thence along Hosmer’s hard land toward the bridge, and all the firm land north of Pinxter Swamp is such a sand-bank which the river has built (leaving its old bed a low meadow behind) while following its encroaching northeast side. That extensive hard land which the river annually rises over, and which supports a good growth of maples and swamp white oaks, will probably be found to be all alluvial and free from stones. The land thus made is only of a certain height, say four to six feet above summer level, or oftener four or five feet. At highest water I can still cut off this bend by paddling through the woods in the old bed of the river. Islands are formed which are shaped like the curving ridge of a snow-drift. Stagnant rivers are deep and muddy; swift ones shallow and sandy. Scirpus subterminalis, river off Hoar’s and Cheney’s, not long.

November 29, Tuesday: Henry Thoreau handed Waldo Emerson $10.00 toward the John Brown Relief Fund and Emerson noted this amount in his account book. (This amount of money would have represented, for Thoreau, approximately 8 or 9 full days of his surveying work.)

Miss Louisa May Alcott received $50.00 for her “Love and Self-Love,” accepted by The Atlantic Monthly — although this magazine’s insouciant editor, Mr. James Russell Lowell, felt so poorly of the authorial abilities of females in general, that he was supposing that she must’ve merely translated this piece from some other language (such as German). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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November 29. P. M.–To Copan. There is a white birch on Copan which has many of the common birch fungus of a very peculiar and remarkable form, not flat thus:

but shaped like a bell or short horn, thus:

as if composed of a more flowing material which had settled downward like a drop. As C. said, they were shaped like icicles, especially those short and spreading ones about bridges. Saw quite a flock of snow buntings not yet very white. They rose from the midst of a stubble-field unexpectedly. The moment they settled after wheeling around, they were perfectly concealed, though quite near, and I could only hear their rippling note from the earth from time to time. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1861

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

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1862

Some of James Russell Lowell’s essays in the Brother Jonathan rural wit tradition of New England for The Atlantic Monthly were recycled in book form as THE BIGLOW PAPERS, SECOND SERIES. THE BIGLOW PAPERS

During the Civil War period Lowell’s essays “E Pluribus Unum” and “Washers of the Shroud” would offer pro-Union opinions.

January 28, Tuesday: The Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway spoke for a select audience at Parker House in Boston. Among the attenders were Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, James Thomas Fields, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the Governor of Massachusetts, John Andrew.34

John J. May wrote from Boston to James M. Stone to indicate that he would be unable to serve on the Executive Committee of the Emancipation League.

George Luther Stearns wrote from Boston to James M. Stone, accepting the office of Treasurer of The Emancipation League.

John Ayres wrote from Boston to Charles (?) Slack, providing a letter of introduction from Charles Norton.

Die ersten Curen op.261, a waltz by Johann Strauss, was performed for the initial time, in the Sophiensaal, Vienna.

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

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1864

James Russell Lowell and Charles Eliot Norton became co-editors of The North American Review.

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. took a snapshot of Professor Lowell on the lawn of his home “Elmwood” in Cambridge, leaning against a tree.

May 24, Tuesday: The 88th Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment was advancing toward Dallas, Georgia. People were continuing to kill each other at North Anna / Jericho Mill / Hanover Junction. In addition, on this day, people were killing each other at Wilson’s Wharf / Fort Pocahontas. US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Far Too Rich And Far Too Important To Ever Get His Ass Drafted HDT WHAT? INDEX

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In Concord on this day, however, people were burying each other. Waldo Emerson recorded in his journal that:

Yesterday, May 23, we buried Hawthorne in Sleepy Hollow, in a pomp of HAWTHORNE sunshine and verdure, and gentle winds. James Freeman Clarke read the service in the church and at the grave. Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Agassiz, Hoar, Dwight, Whipple, Norton, Alcott, Hillard, Fields, Judge LONGFELLOW Thomas, and I attended the hearse as pallbearers. Franklin Pierce was J.R. LOWELL with the family. The church was copiously decorated with white flowers delicately arranged. The corpse was unwillingly shown, — only a few PROF. AGASSIZ moments to this company of his friends. But it was noble and serene in its aspect, — nothing amiss, — a calm and powerful head. A large company JUDGE E.R. HOAR filled the church and the grounds of the cemetery. All was so bright and J.S. DWIGHT quiet that pain or mourning was hardly suggested, and Holmes said to me C.K. WHIPPLE that it looked like a happy meeting. C.E. NORTON Clarke in the church said that Hawthorne had done more justice than any other to the shades of life, shown a sympathy with the crime in our BRONSON ALCOTT nature, and, like Jesus, was the friend of sinners. HILLARD I thought there was a tragic element in the event, that might be more JAMES T. FIELDS fully rendered, — in the painful solitude of the man, which, I suppose, JUDGE THOMAS could not longer be endured, and he died of it. I have found in his death a surprise and a disappointment. I thought him a greater man than any of his works betray, that there was still a great deal of work in him, and that he might one day show a purer power. Moreover, I have felt sure of him in his neighbourhood, and in his necessities of sympathy and intelligence, — that I could well wait his time, — his unwillingness and caprice, — and might one day conquer a friendship. It would have been a happiness, doubtless to both of us, to have come into habits of unreserved intercourse. It was easy to talk with him, — there were no barriers, — only, he said so little, that I talked too much, and stopped only because, as he gave no indications, I feared to exceed. He showed no egotism or self-assertion, rather a humility, and, at one time, a fear that he had written himself out. One day, when I found him on top of his hill, in the woods, he paced back the path to his house, and said, “This path is the only remembrance of me that will remain.” Now it appears that I waited too long. Lately he had removed himself the more by the indignation his perverse politics and unfortunate friendship for that paltry Franklin Pierce awakened, though it rather moved pity for Hawthorne, and the assured belief that he would outlive FRANKLIN PIERCE it, and come right at last. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“The Wayside” would be occupied by the widowed Mrs. Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, with her daughters Una Hawthorne and Rose Hawthorne and her son Julian Hawthorne, until, while again living in Europe, in October 1868 they would vend the place to George and Abby Gray. OLD HOUSES HAWTHORNE MAY 23, 1864 How beautiful it was, that one bright day In the long week of rain! Though all its splendor could not chase away The omnipresent pain. The lovely town was white with apple-blooms, And the great elms o’erhead Dark shadows wove on their aerial looms Shot through with golden thread. Across the meadows, by the gray old manse, The historic river flowed: I was as one who wanders in a trance, Unconscious of his road. The faces of familiar friends seemed strange; Their voices I could hear, And yet the words they uttered seemed to change Their meaning to my ear. For the one face I looked for was not there, The one low voice was mute; Only an unseen presence filled the air, And baffled my pursuit. Now I look back, and meadow, manse, and stream Dimly my thought defines; I only see — a dream within a dream — The hill-top hearsed with pines. I only hear above his place of rest Their tender undertone, The infinite longings of a troubled breast, The voice so like his own. There in seclusion and remote from men The wizard hand lies cold, Which at its topmost speed let fall the pen, And left the tale half told. Ah! who shall lift that wand of magic power, And the lost clew regain? The unfinished window in Aladdin’s tower Unfinished must remain! HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

1865

July: Henry James, Sr. panned Louisa May Alcott and her MOODS in the North American Review. Miss Alcott’s “decided cleverness” mixed with “ignorance of human nature, and her self-confidence in spite of this ignorance” but the publication itself, although “very seldom puerile,” seemed “innocent of any doctrine whatever.” The main male heart-throb, Mr. Adam Warwick, seemed according to James’s intuition to be a literary portrait of the predatory child seducer, and he concludes with an ironic delivery of the Official Truth of the matter:

There are, thank Heaven, no such men at large in society.

Yeah, right, that is in fact what we are supposed to pretend, don’t you know? Miss Alcott, if you have any information about the practices of predatory child seducers, our polite society, as represented by Mr. James, desires that you to have the sense to in the future keep your fucking mouth shut about it. You might, little girl, sometime in the future write a very good novel –per Mr. James– provided you will be satisfied to describe only what you have seen, wink wink, nudge nudge.

President Andrew Johnson, after consulting with his cabinet, decided to try former United States Senator and former Confederate President Jefferson Davis for treason in a civil court rather than before a military tribunal.

Francis Jackson Meriam was discharged for disability from the 57th Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. US CIVIL WAR

An article on Henry Thoreau by the Reverend John Weiss (one of the ringleaders of the student-protest rioting of that period, in which Thoreau had neglected to participate) appeared on pages 96-117 of The Christian Examiner LXXIX:

We could sympathize with his tranquil indifference to college honors.... He was cold and unimpressible. He passed for nothing, it is suspected, with most of us [his college classmates]; for he was cold and unimpressible. The touch of his hand was moist and indifferent, as if he had taken up something when he saw your hand coming, and caught your grasp upon it. How the prominent, grey-blue eyes seemed to rove down the path, just in advance of his feet, as his grave Indian stride carried him down to University Hall. He did not care for people; his classmates seemed very remote. This revery hung always about him, and not so loosely as the odd garments which the pious household care furnished. Thought had not yet awakened his countenance; it was serene, but rather dull, rather plodding. The lips were not yet firm; there was almost a look of smug satisfaction lurking round their corners. It is plain now that he was preparing to hold his future views with great setness and personal appreciation of their importance. The nose was prominent, but its curve fell HDT WHAT? INDEX

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forward without firmness over the upper lip, and we remember him as looking very much like some Egyptian sculpture of faces, large-featured, but brooding, immobile, fixed in a mystic egoism. Yet his eyes were sometimes searching as if he had dropped, or expected to find, something. In fact his eyes seldom left the ground, even in his most earnest conversations with you. He would smile to hear the word “collegiate career” applied to the reserve and inaptness of his college life. He was not signalised by the plentiful distribution of the parts and honours which fall to the successful student. Of his private tastes there is little of consequence to recall, except that he was devoted to the old English literature, and had a good many volumes of the poetry from Gower and Chaucer down through the era of Elizabeth. In this mine he worked with a quiet enthusiasm. ...He went about like a priest of Buddha who expects to arrive at the summit of a life of contemplation, where the divine absorbs the human.... Now it is no wonder that he kept himself aloof from us in college; for he was already living on some Walden Pond, where he had run up a temporary shanty in the depths of his reserve.... But he had no animal spirits for our sport or mischief.

Kathryn Schulz, who writes for The New Yorker, has glanced into the cold eyes of a “Pond Scum” Henry Thoreau, and has engaged in a deep reading of WALDEN, and she finds credible some of these observations that his classmate the Reverend John Weiss made about him: Henry David Thoreau was born David Henry Thoreau, in 1817, the third of four children of a pencil manufacturer in Concord, Massachusetts. In 1833, he went off to Harvard, which he did not particularly like and where he was not found particularly likable. (One classmate recalled his “look of smug satisfaction,” like a man “preparing to hold his future views with great setness and personal appreciation of their importance.”)

In regard to those grey-blue eyes, we can inspect a recent colorized image of Thoreau prepared by Ron Koster:

http://www.psymon.com/art/#new

Professor Walter Roy Harding has taken this inventive article from 1865 to be the original source for the Fake News items that have been created over the years, and retold and retold, about a jail encounter between Thoreau and Emerson: “Why are you in jail?” “Why are you not?” Weiss continued, however: What an easy task it would be for a lively and not entirely scrupulous pen to ridicule his notions, and raise such a cloud of ink in the clear medium as entirely to obscure his true and noble traits! It now appears that Weiss’s speculation about the harm that might be done to Thoreau’s reputation through easy ridicule from “a lively and not entirely scrupulous pen” — was all too accurate. For in October of this year 1865, in the North American Review, James Russell Lowell’s gratuitously derogatory and mocking article “Thoreau’s Letters” would be appearing. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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July 21, Thursday: The 42d Indiana Volunteers “mustered out” in Louisville, Kentucky:

1861 Mustered-in

1862 Wartrace TN Perryville KY Murfreesboro TN

1863 Elk River TN Chickamauga GA Lookout Mountain GA Missionary Ridge GA

1864 Ringgold GA Rocky Face Ridge GA Resaca GA Altoona Mountains GA Kennesaw Mountain GA Chattahoochee River GA Peachtree Creek GA Atlanta GA Jonesboro GA

1865 Savannah GA Charleston SC Averysboro NC Bentonville NC Mustered-out

John Knowles Paine’s Mass in D op.10 was performed for the initial time, directed by the composer.

Upon the conclusion of the Civil War James Russell Lowell expressed his approbation of the victorious Union cause in four memorial odes such as this day’s “Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration.” US CIVIL WAR I WEAK-WINGED is song, Nor aims at that clear-ethered height Whither the brave deed climbs for light: We seem to do them wrong, Bringing our robin’s-leaf to deck their hearse Who in warm life-blood wrote their nobler verse, Our trivial song to honor those who come With ears attuned to strenuous trump and drum, And shaped in squadron-strophes their desire, Live battle-odes whose lines were steel and fire: Yet sometimes feathered words are strong, A gracious memory to buoy up and save From Lethe’s dreamless ooze, the common grave Of the unventurous throng. II To-day our Reverend Mother welcomes back Her wisest Scholars, those who understood The deeper teaching of her mystic tome, And offered their fresh lives to make it good: No lore of Greece or Rome, No science peddling with the names of things, Or reading stars to find inglorious fates, Can lift our life with wings HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Far from Death’s idle gulf that for the many waits, And lengthen out our dates With that clear fame whose memory sings In manly hearts to come, and nerves them and dilates: Nor such thy teaching, Mother of us all! Not such the trumpet-call Of thy diviner mood, That could thy sons entice From happy homes and toils, the fruitful nest Of those half-virtues which the world calls best, Into War’s tumult rude; But rather far that stern device The sponsors chose that round thy cradle stood In the dim, unventured wood, The VE RI TAS that lurks beneath The letter’s unprolific sheath, Life of whate’er makes life worth living, Seed-grain of high emprise, immortal food, One heavenly thing whereof earth hath the giving. III Many loved Truth, and lavished life’s best oil Amid the dust of books to find her, Content at last, for guerdon of their toil, With the cast mantle she hath left behind her. Many in sad faith sought for her, Many with crossed hands sighed for her; But these, our brothers, fought for her, At life’s dear peril wrought for her, So loved her that they died for her, Tasting the raptured fleetness Of her divine completeness: Their higher instinct knew Those love her best who to themselves are true, And what they dare to dream of, dare to do; They followed her and found her Where all may hope to find, Not in the ashes of the burnt-out mind, But beautiful, with danger’s sweetness round her. Where faith made whole with deed Breathes its awakening breath Into the lifeless creed, They saw her plumed and mailed, With sweet, stern face unveiled, And all-repaying eyes, look proud on them in death. IV Our slender life runs rippling by, and glides Into the silent hollow of the past; What is there that abides To make the next age better for the last? Is earth too poor to give us Something to live for here that shall outlive us? Some more substantial boon Than such as flows and ebbs with Fortune’s fickle moon? The little that we see From doubt is never free; The little that we do Is but half-nobly true; With our laborious hiving What men call treasure, and the gods call dross, Life seems a jest of Fate’s contriving, Only secure in every one’s conniving, A long account of nothings paid with loss, Where we poor puppets, jerked by unseen wires, After our little hour of strut and rave, With all our pasteboard passions and desires, Loves, hates, ambitions, and immortal fires, HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

Are tossed pell-mell together in the grave. But stay! no age was e’er degenerate, Unless men held it at too cheap a rate, For in our likeness still we shape our fate. Ah, there is something here Unfathomed by the cynic’s sneer, Something that gives our feeble light A high immunity from Night, Something that leaps life’s narrow bars To claim its birthright with the hosts of heaven; A seed of sunshine that can leaven Our earthly dullness with the beams of stars, And glorify our clay With light from fountains elder than the Day; A conscience more divine than we, A gladness fed with secret tears, A vexing, forward-reaching sense Of some more noble permanence; A light across the sea, Which haunts the soul and will not let it be, Still beaconing from the heights of undegenerate years. V Whither leads the path To ampler fates that leads? Not down through flowery meads, To reap an aftermath Of youth’s vainglorious weeds, But up the steep, amid the wrath And shock of deadly-hostile creeds, Where the world’s best hope and stay By battle’s flashes gropes a desperate way, And every turf the fierce foot clings to bleeds. Peace hath her not ignoble wreath, Ere yet the sharp, decisive word Light the black lips of cannon, and the sword Dreams in its easeful sheath; But some day the live coal behind the thought, Whether from Baäl’s stone obscene, Or from the shrine serene Of God’s pure altar brought, Bursts up in flame; the war of tongue and pen Learns with what deadly purpose it was fraught, And, helpless in the fiery passion caught, Shakes all the pillared state with shock of men: Some day the soft Ideal that we wooed Confronts us fiercely, foe-beset, pursued, And cries reproachful: ‘Was it, then, my praise, And not myself was loved? Prove now thy truth; I claim of thee the promise of thy youth; Give me thy life, or cower in empty phrase, The victim of thy genius, not its mate! ’ Life may be given in many ways, And loyalty to Truth be sealed As bravely in the closet as the field, So bountiful is Fate; But then to stand beside her, When craven churls deride her, To front a lie in arms and not to yield, This shows, methinks, God’s plan And measure of a stalwart man, Limbed like the old heroic breeds, Who stands self-poised on manhood’s solid earth, Not forced to frame excuses for his birth, Fed from within with all the strength he needs. VI Such was he, our Martyr-Chief, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Whom late the Nation he had led, With ashes on her head, Wept with the passion of an angry grief: Forgive me, if from present things I turn To speak what in my heart will beat and burn, And hang my wreath on his world-honored urn. Nature, they say, doth dote, And cannot make a man Save on some worn-out plan, Repeating us by rote: For him her Old-World moulds aside she threw, And choosing sweet clay from the breast Of the unexhausted West, With stuff untainted shaped a hero new, Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true. How beautiful to see Once more a shepherd of mankind indeed, Who loved his charge, but never loved to lead; One whose meek flock the people joyed to be, Not lured by any cheat of birth, But by his clear-grained human worth, And brave old wisdom of sincerity! They knew that outward grace is dust; They could not choose but trust In that sure-footed mind’s unfaltering skill, And supple-tempered will That bent like perfect steel to spring again and thrust. His was no lonely mountain-peak of mind, Thrusting to thin air o’er our cloudy bars, A sea-mark now, now lost in vapors blind; Broad prairie rather, genial, level-lined, Fruitful and friendly for all human kind, Yet also nigh to heaven and loved of loftiest stars. Nothing of Europe here, Or, then, of Europe fronting mornward still, Ere any names of Serf and Peer Could Nature’s equal scheme deface And thwart her genial will; Here was a type of the true elder race, And one of Plutarch’s men talked with us face to face. I praise him not; it were too late; And some innative weakness there must be In him who condescends to victory Such as the Present gives, and cannot wait, Safe in himself as in a fate. So always firmly he: He knew to bide his time, And can his fame abide, Still patient in his simple faith sublime, Till the wise years decide. Great captains, with their guns and drums, Disturb our judgment for the hour, But at last silence comes; These all are gone, and, standing like a tower, Our children shall behold his fame. The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man, Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame, New birth of our new soil, the first American. VII Long as man’s hope insatiate can discern Or only guess some more inspiring goal Outside of Self, enduring as the pole, Along whose course the flying axles burn Of spirits bravely-pitched, earth’s manlier brood; Long as below we cannot find The meed that stills the inexorable mind; So long this faith to some ideal Good, Under whatever mortal names it masks, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Freedom, Law, Country, this ethereal mood That thanks the Fates for their severer tasks, Feeling its challenged pulses leap, While others skulk in subterfuges cheap, And, set in Danger’s van, has all the boon it asks, Shall win man’s praise and woman’s love, Shall be a wisdom that we set above All other skills and gifts to culture dear, A virtue round whose forehead we inwreathe Laurels that with a living passion breathe When other crowns grow, while we twine them, sear. What brings us thronging these high rites to pay, And seal these hours the noblest of our year, Save that our brothers found this better way? VIII We sit here in the Promised Land That flows with Freedom’s honey and milk; But ’twas they won it, sword in hand, Making the nettle danger soft for us as silk. We welcome back our bravest and our best;— Ah me! not all! some come not with the rest, Who went forth brave and bright as any here! I strive to mix some gladness with my strain, But the sad strings complain, And will not please the ear: I sweep them for a pæan, but they wane Again and yet again Into a dirge, and die away, in pain. In these brave ranks I only see the gaps, Thinking of dear ones whom the dumb turf wraps, Dark to the triumph which they died to gain: Fitlier may others greet the living, For me the past is unforgiving; I with uncovered head Salute the sacred dead, Who went, and who return not.—Say not so! ’Tis not the grapes of Canaan that repay, But the high faith that failed not by the way; Virtue treads paths that end not in the grave; No ban of endless night exiles the brave; And to the saner mind We rather seem the dead that stayed behind. Blow, trumpets, all your exultations blow! For never shall their aureoled presence lack: I see them muster in a gleaming row, With ever-youthful brows that nobler show; We find in our dull road their shining track; In every nobler mood We feel the orient of their spirit glow, Part of our life’s unalterable good, Of all our saintlier aspiration; They come transfigured back, Secure from change in their high-hearted ways, Beautiful evermore, and with the rays Of morn on their white Shields of Expectation! IX But is there hope to save Even this ethereal essence from the grave? What ever ’scaped Oblivion’s subtle wrong Save a few clarion names, or golden threads of song? Before my musing eye The mighty ones of old sweep by, Disvoicèd now and insubstantial things, As noisy once as we; poor ghosts of kings, Shadows of empire wholly gone to dust, And many races, nameless long ago, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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To darkness driven by that imperious gust Of ever-rushing Time that here doth blow: O visionary world, condition strange, Where naught abiding is but only Change, Where the deep-bolted stars themselves still shift and range! Shall we to more continuance make pretence? Renown builds tombs; a life-estate is Wit; And, bit by bit, The cunning years steal all from us but woe; Leaves are we, whose decays no harvest sow. But, when we vanish hence, Shall they lie forceless in the dark below Save to make green their little length of sods, Or deepen pansies for a year or two, Who now to us are shining-sweet as gods? Was dying all they had the skill to do? That were not fruitless: but the Soul resents Such short-lived service, as if blind events Ruled without her, or earth could so endure; She claims a more divine investiture Of longer tenure than Fame’s airy rents; Whate’er she touches doth her nature share; Her inspiration haunts the ennobled air, Gives eyes to mountains blind, Ears to the deaf earth, voices to the wind, And her clear trump sings succor everywhere By lonely bivouacs to the wakeful mind; For soul inherits all that soul could dare: Yea, Manhood hath a wider span And larger privilege of life than man. The single deed, the private sacrifice, So radiant now through proudly-hidden tears, Is covered up erelong from mortal eyes With thoughtless drift of the deciduous years; But that high privilege that makes all men peers, That leap of heart whereby a people rise Up to a noble anger’s height, And, flamed on by the Fates, not shrink, but grow more That swift validity in noble veins, [bright, Of choosing danger and disdaining shame, Of being set on flame By the pure fire that flies all contact base But wraps its chosen with angelic might, These are imperishable gains, Sure as the sun, medicinal as light, These hold great futures in their lusty reins And certify to earth a new imperial race. X Who now shall sneer? Who dare again to say we trace Our lines to a plebeian race? Roundhead and Cavalier! Dumb are those names erewhile in battle loud; Dream-footed as the shadow of a cloud, They flit across the ear: That is best blood that hath most iron in’t, To edge resolve with, pouring without stint For what makes manhood dear. Tell us not of Plantagenets, Hapsburgs, and Guelfs, whose thin bloods craw! Down from some victor in a border-brawl! How poor their outworn coronets, Matched with one leaf of that plain civic wreath Our brave for honor’s blazon shall bequeath, Through whose desert a rescued Nation sets Her heel on treason, and the trumpet hears Shout victory, tingling Europe’s sullen ears HDT WHAT? INDEX

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With vain resentments and more vain regrets! XI Not in anger, not in pride, Pure from passion’s mixture rude Ever to base earth allied, But with far-heard gratitude, Still with heart and voice renewed, To heroes living and dear martyrs dead, The strain should close that consecrates our brave! Lift the heart and lift the head! Lofty be its mood and grave, Not without a martial ring, Not without a prouder tread And a peal of exultation: Little right has he to sing Through whose heart in such an hour Beats no march of conscious power, Sweeps no tumult of elation! ’Tis no Man we celebrate, By his country’s victories great, A hero half, and half the whim of Fate, But the pith and marrow of a Nation Drawing force from all her men, Highest, humblest, weakest, all, For her time of need, and then Pulsing it again through them, Till the basest can no longer cower, Feeling his soul spring up divinely tall, Touched but in passing by her mantle-hem. Come back, then, noble pride, for ’tis her dower! How could poet ever tower, If his passions, hopes, and fears, If his triumphs and his tears, Kept not measure with his people? Boom, cannon, boom to all the winds and waves! Clash out, glad bells, from every rocking steeple! Banners, advance with triumph, bend your staves! And from every mountain-peak Let beacon-fire to answering beacon speak, Katahdin tell Monadnock, Whiteface he, And so leap on in light from sea to sea, Till the glad news be sent Across a kindling continent, Making earth feel more firm and air breathe braver: ‘Be proud! for she is saved, and all have helped to save her! She that lifts up the manhood of the poor, She of the open soul and open door, With room about her hearth for all mankind! The fire is dreadful in her eyes no more; From her bold front the helm she doth unbind, Sends all her handmaid armies back to spin, And bids her navies, that so lately hurled Their crashing battle, hold their thunders in, Swimming like birds of calm along the unharmful shore. No challenge sends she to the elder world, That looked askance and hated; a light scorn Plays o’er her mouth, as round her mighty knees She calls her children back, and waits the morn Of nobler day, enthroned between her subject seas.’ XII Bow down, dear Land, for thou hast found release! Thy God, in these distempered days, Hath taught thee the sure wisdom of His ways, And through thine enemies hath wrought thy peace! Bow down in prayer and praise! No poorest in thy borders but may now HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Lift to the juster skies a man’s enfranchised brow. O Beautiful! my country! ours once more! Smoothing thy gold of war-dishevelled hair O’er such sweet brows as never other wore, And letting thy set lips, Freed from wrath’s pale eclipse, The rosy edges of their smile lay bare, What words divine of lover or of poet Could tell our love and make thee know it, Among the Nations bright beyond compare? What were our lives without thee? What all our lives to save thee? We reck not what we gave thee; We will not dare to doubt thee, But ask whatever else, and we will dare!

October: We suppose it was during this month that Emily Dickinson returned from Cambridgeport to Amherst, Massachusetts.

James Russell Lowell published an article in the North American Review entitled “Thoreau’s Letters,” an article that biographer Henry S. Salt would characterize aptly as “a masterpiece of hostile innuendo and ingenious misrepresentation”:35 INGENIOUSLY HOSTILE

What contemporary, if he was in the fighting period of his life, since Nature sets limits about her conscription for spiritual fields, as the state does in physical warfare,) will ever forget what was somewhat vaguely called the “Transcendental Movement” of thirty years ago? Apparently set astirring by Carlyle’s essays on the “Signs of the Times,” and on “History,” the final and more immediate impulse seemed to be given by “Sartor Resartus.” At least the republication in Boston of that wonderful Abraham à Sancta Clara sermon on Lear’s text of the miserable forked radish gave the signal for a sudden mental and moral mutiny. Ecce nunc tempus acceptabile! was shouted on all hands with every variety of emphasis, and by voices of every conceivable pitch, representing the three sexes of men, women, and lady Mary Wortley Montagues. The nameless eagle of the tree Ygdrasil was about to sit at last, and wild-eyed enthusiasts rushed from all sides, each eager to thrust under the mystic bird that chalk egg from which the new and fairer Creation was to be hatched in due time. Redeunt Saturnia regna, — so far was certain, though in what shape, or by what methods, was still a matter of debate. Every possible form of intellectual and physical dyspepsia brought forth its gospel. Bran had its prophets, and the presartorial simplicity of Adam its martyrs, tailored impromptu from the tar-pot by incensed neighbors, and sent forth to illustrate the “feathered Mercury,” as defined by Webster and Worcester. Plainness of speech was carried to a pitch that would have taken away the breath of George Fox; and even swearing had its evangelists, who answered a simple inquiry after their health with an elaborate ingenuity of imprecation that might have been honorably mentioned by Marlborough in general orders. Everybody had a mission (with a capital M) to attend to everybody-else’s business. No brain but had its private maggot, which must have found pitiably short commons sometimes. Not a few impecunious zealots abjured the use of 35. See the response to this article by the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1903: Emerson’s comment would be that Lowell had simply never forgiven Henry Thoreau “for having wounded his self-consciousness.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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money (unless earned by other people), professing to live on the internal revenues of the spirit. Some had an assurance of instant millennium so soon as hooks and eyes should be substituted for buttons. Communities were established where everything was to be common but common sense. Men renounced their old gods, and hesitated only whether to bestow their furloughed allegiance on Thor or Budh. Conventions were held for every hitherto inconceivable purpose. The belated gift of tongues, as among the Fifth Monarchy men, spread like a contagion, rendering its victims incomprehensible to all Christian men; whether equally so to the most distant possible heathen or not, was unexperimented, though many would have subscribed liberally that a fair trial might be made. It was the pentecost of Shinar. The day of utterances reproduced the day of rebuses and anagrams, and there was nothing so simple that uncial letters and the style of Diphilus the Labyrinth could not make into a riddle. Many foreign revolutionists out of work added to the general misunderstanding their contribution of broken English in every most ingenious form of fracture. All stood ready at a moment’s notice to reform everything but themselves. The general motto was: “And we’ll talk with them, too, And take upon’s the mystery of things As if we were God’s spies.” Nature is always kind enough to give even her clouds a humorous lining. We have barely hinted at the comic side of the affair, for the material was endless. This was the whistle and trailing fuse of the shell, but there was a very solid and serious kernel, full of the most deadly explosiveness. Thoughtful men divined it, but the generality suspected nothing. The word “transcendental” then was the maid of all work for those who could not think, as “pre-Raphaelite” has been more recently for people of the same limited housekeeping. The truth is, that there was a much nearer metaphysical relation and a much more distant æsthetic and literary relation between Carlyle and the Apostles of the Newness, as they were called in New England, than has commonly been supposed. Both represented the reaction and revolt against Philisterei, a renewal of the old battle begun in modern times by Erasmus and Reuchlin, and continued by Lessing, Goethe, and, in a far narrower sense, by Heine in Germany, and of which Fielding, Sterne, and Wordsworth in different ways have been the leaders in England. It was simply a struggle for fresh air, in which, if the windows could not be opened, there was danger that panes would be broken, though painted with images of saints and martyrs. Light colored by these reverend effigies was none the more respirable for being picturesque. There is only one thing better than tradition, and that is the original and eternal life out of which all tradition takes its rise. It was this life which the reformers demanded, with more or less dearness of consciousness and expression, life in politics, life in literature, life in religion. Of what use to import a gospel from Judæa, if we leave behind the soul that made it possible, the God who keeps it forever real and present? Surely Abana and Pharpar are better than Jordan, if a living faith be mixed with those waters and none with these. Scotch Presbyterianism as a motive of spiritual progress was dead; New England Puritanism was in like manner dead; in other words, Protestantism had made its fortune and no longer HDT WHAT? INDEX

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protested; bur till Carlyle spoke out in the Old World and Emerson in the New, no one had dared to proclaim, Le roi est mort: vive le roi! The meaning of which proclamation was essentially this: the vital spirit has long since departed out of this form once so kingly, and the great seal has been in commission long enough; but meanwhile the soul of man, from which all power emanates and to which it reverts, still survives in undiminished royalty; God still survives, little as you gentlemen of the Commission seem to be aware of it, — nay, may possibly outlive the whole of you, incredible as it may appear. The truth is, that both Scotch Presbyterianism and New England Puritanism made their new avatar in Carlyle and Emerson, the heralds of their formal decease, and the tendency of the one toward Authority and of the other toward Independency might have been prophesied by whoever had studied history. The necessity was nor so much in the men as in the principles they represented and the traditions which overruled them. The Puritanism of the past found its unwilling poet in Hawthorne, the rarest creative imagination of the century, the rarest in some ideal respects since Shakespeare; but the Puritanism that cannot die, the Puritanism that made New England what it is, and is destined to make America what it should be, found its voice in Emerson. Though holding himself aloof from all active partnership in movements of reform, he has been the sleeping partner who has supplied a great part of their capital. The artistic range of Emerson is narrow, as every well-read critic must feel at once; and so is that of Æschylus, so is that of Dante, so is that of Montaigne, so is that of Schiller, so is that of nearly every one except Shakespeare; but there is a gauge of height no less than of breadth, of individuality as well as of comprehensiveness, and, above all, there is the standard of genetic power, the test of the masculine as distinguished from the receptive minds. There are staminate plants in literature, that make no fine show of fruit, but without whose pollen, the quintessence of fructifying gold, the garden had been barren. Emerson’s mind is emphatically one of these, and there is no man to whom our æsthetic culture owes so much. The Puritan revolt had made us ecclesiastically, and the Revolution politically independent, but we were still socially and intellectually moored to English thought, till Emerson cut the cable and gave us a chance at the dangers and the glories of blue water. No man young enough to have felt it can forget, or cease to be grateful for, the mental and moral nudge which he received from the writings of his high-minded and brave- spirited countryman. That we agree with him, or that he always agrees with himself, is aside from the question; but that he arouses in us something that we are the better for having awakened, whether that something be of opposition or assent, that he speaks always to what is highest and least selfish in us, few Americans of the generation younger than his own would be disposed to deny. His oration before the Phi Beta Kappa society at Cambridge, some thirty years ago, was an event without any formal parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent! It was our Yankee version of a lecture by Abelard, our Harvard parallel to HDT WHAT? INDEX

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the last public appearances of Fichte. We said that the “Transcendental Movement” was the protestant spirit of Puritanism seeking a new outlet and an escape from forms and creeds which compressed rather than expressed it. In its motives, its preaching, and its results, it differed radically from the doctrine of Carlyle. The Scotchman, with all his genius, and his humor gigantesque as that of Rabelais, has grown shriller and shriller with years, degenerating sometimes into a common scold, and emptying very unsavory vials of wrath on the head of the sturdy British Socrates of worldly common sense. The teaching of Emerson tended much more exclusively to self-culture and the independent development of the individual man. It seemed to many almost Pythagorean in its voluntary seclusion from commonwealth affairs. Both Carlyle and Emerson were disciples of Goethe, but Emerson in a far truer sense; and while the one, from his bias toward the eccentric, has degenerated more and more into mannerism, the other has clarified steadily toward perfection of style, — exquisite fineness of material, unobtrusive lowness of tone and simplicity of fashion, the most high-bred garb of expression. Whatever may be said of his thought, nothing can be finer than the delicious limpidness of his phrase. If it was ever questionable whether democracy could develop a gentleman, the problem has been affirmatively solved at last. Carlyle, in his cynicism and his admiration of force as such, has become at last positively inhuman; Emerson, reverencing strength, seeking the highest outcome of the individual, has found that society and politics are also main elements in the attainment of the desired end, and has drawn steadily manward and worldward. The two men represent respectively those grand personifications in the drama of Æschylus,  and  . Among the pistullate plants kindled to fruitage by the Emersonian pollen, Thoreau is thus far the most remarkable; and it is something eminently fitting that his posthumous works should be offered us by Emerson, for they are strawberries from his own garden. A singular mixture of varieties, indeed, there is; — alpine, some of them, with the flavor of rare mountain air; others wood, tasting of sunny roadside banks or shy openings in the forest; and not a few seedlings swollen hugely by culture, but lacking the fine natural aroma of the more modest kinds. Strange books there are of his, and interesting in many ways, — instructive chiefly as showing how considerable a crop may be raised on a comparatively narrow close of mind, and how much a man may make of his life if he will assiduously follow it, though perhaps never truly finding it at last. We have just been renewing our recollection of Mr. Thoreau’s writings, and have read through his six volumes in the order of their production. We shall try to give an adequate report of their impression upon us both as critic and as mere reader. He seems to us to have been a man with so high a conceit of himself that he accepted without questioning, and insisted on our accepting, his defects and weaknesses of character as virtues and powers peculiar to himself. Was he indolent, he finds none of the activities which attract or employ the rest of mankind worthy of him. Was he wanting in the qualities that make success, it is success that is contemptible, and not himself that lacks persistency and purpose. Was he poor, money was an unmixed evil. Did his life seem a selfish one, he condemns doing good as one HDT WHAT? INDEX

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of the weakest of superstitions. To be of use was with him the most killing bait of the wily tempter Uselessness. He had no faculty of generalization from outside of himself, or at least no experience which would supply the material of such, and he makes his own whim the law, his own range the horizon of the universe. He condemns a world, the hollowness of whose satisfactions he has never had the means of testing, and we recognize Apemantus behind the mask of Timon. He had little active imagination; of the receptive he had much. His appreciation is of the highest quality; his critical power, from want of continuity of mind, very limited and inadequate. He somewhere cites a simile from Ossian, as an example of the superiority of the old poetry to the new, though, even were the historic evidence less convincing, the sentimental melancholy of those poems should be conclusive of their modernness. He had no artistic power such as controls a great work to the serene balance of completeness, but exquisite mechanical skill in the shaping of sentences and paragraphs, or (more rarely) short bits of verse for the expression of a detached thought, sentiment, or image. His works give one the feeling of a sky full of stars, — something impressive and exhilarating certainly, something high overhead and freckles thickly with spots of isolated brightness; but whether these have any mutual relation with each other, or have any concern with our mundane matters, is for the most part matter of conjecture, — astrology as yet, and not astronomy. It is curious, considering what Thoreau afterward became, that he was not by nature an observer. He only saw the things he looked for, and was less poet than naturalist. Till he built his Walden shanty, he did not know that the hickory grew in Concord. Till he went to Maine, he had never seen phosphorescent wood, a phenomenon early familiar to most country boys. At forty he speaks of the seeding of the pine as a new discovery, though one should have thought that its gold-dust of blowing pollen might have earlier drawn his eye. Neither his attention nor his genius was of the spontaneous kind. He discovered nothing. He thought everything a discovery of his own, from moonlight to the planting of acorns and nuts by squirrels. This is a defect in his character, but one of his chief charms as a writer. Everything grows fresh under his hand. He delved in his mind and nature; he planted them with all manner of native and foreign seeds, and reaped assiduously. He was not merely solitary, he would be isolated, and succeeded at last in almost persuading himself that he was autochthonous. He valued everything in proportion as he fancied it to be exclusively his own. He complains in “Walden,” that there is no one in Concord with whom he could talk of Oriental literature, though the man was living within two miles of his hut who had introduced him to it. This intellectual selfishness becomes sometimes almost painful in reading him. He lacked that generosity of “communication” which Johnson admired in Burke. De Quincey tells us that Wordsworth was impatient when any one else spoke of mountains, as if he had a peculiar property in them. And we can readily understand why it should be so: no one is satisfied with another’s appreciation of his mistress. But Thoreau seems to have prized a lofty way of thinking (often we should be inclined to call it a remote one) not so much because it was good in itself as because he wished few to share it with him. It seems now and then as if he HDT WHAT? INDEX

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did not seek to lure others up “above our lower region of turmoil,” but to leave his own name cut on the mountain peak as the first climber. This itch of originality infects his thought and style. To be misty is not to be mystic. He turns commonplaces end for end, and fancies it makes something new of them. As we walk down Park Street, our eye is caught by Dr. Windship’s dumb- bells, one of which bears an inscription testifying that it is the heaviest ever put up at arm’s length by any athlete; and in reading Mr. Thoreau’s books we cannot help feeling as if he sometimes invited our attention to a particular sophism as the biggest yet maintained by any single writer. He seeks, at all risks, for perversity of thought, and revives the age of concetti while he fancies himself going back to a pre-classical nature. “A day,” he says, “passed in the society of those Greek sages, such as described in the Banquet of Xenophon, would not be comparable with the dry wit of decayed cranberry-vines and the fresh Attic salt of the moss-beds.” It is not so much the True that he loves as the Out-of-the-Way. As the Brazen Age shows itself in other men by exaggeration of phrase, so in him by extravagance of statement. He wishes always to trump your suit and to ruff when you least expect it. Do you love Nature because she is beautiful? He will find a better argument in her ugliness. Are you tired of the artificial man? He instantly dresses you up an ideal in a Penobscot Indian, and attributes to this creature of his otherwise-mindedness as peculiarities things that are common to all woodsmen, white or red, and this simply because he has not studied the pale-faced variety. This notion of an absolute originality, as if one could have a patent-right in it, is an absurdity. A man cannot escape in thought, any more than he can in language, from the past and the present. As no one ever invents a word, and yet language somehow grows by general contribution and necessity, so it is with thought. Mr. Thoreau seems to us to insist in public on going back to flint and steel, when there is a match-box in his pocket which he knows very well how to use at a pinch. Originality consists in power of digesting and assimilating thought, so that they become part of our life and substance. Montaigne, for example, is one of the most original of authors, though he helped himself to ideas in every direction. But they turn to blood and coloring in his style, and give a freshness of complexion that is forever charming. In Thoreau much seems yet to be foreign and unassimilated, showing itself in symptoms of indigestion. A preacher up of Nature, we now and then detect under the surly and stoic garb something of the sophist and the sentimentalizer. We are far from implying that this was conscious on his part. But it is much easier for a man to impose on himself when he measures only with himself. A greater familiarity with ordinary men would have done Thoreau good, by showing him how many fine qualities are common to the race. The radical vice of his theory of life was, that he confounded physical with spiritual remoteness from men. One is far enough withdrawn from his fellows if he keep himself clear of their weaknesses. He is not so truly withdrawn as exiled, if he refuse to share in their strength. It is a morbid self-consciousness that pronounces the world of men empty and worthless before trying it, the instinctive evasion of one who is sensible of some innate weakness, and retorts the accusation of it before any has made it but himself. To a healthy mind, the world is a constant HDT WHAT? INDEX

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challenge of opportunity. Mr. Thoreau had not a healthy mind, or he would not have been so fond of prescribing. His whole life was a search for the doctor. The old mystics had a wiser sense of what the world was worth. They ordained a severe apprenticeship to law and even ceremonial, in order to the gaining of freedom and mastery over these. Seven years of service for Rachel were to be rewarded at last with Leah. Seven other years of faithfulness with her were to win them at last the true bride of their souls. Active Life was with them the only path to the Contemplative. Thoreau had no humor, and this implies that he was a sorry logician. Himself an artist in rhetoric, he confounds thought with style when he undertakes to speak of the latter. He was forever talking of getting away from the world, but he must be always near enough to it, nay, to the Concord comer of it, to feel the impression he makes there. He verifies the shrewd remark of Sainte-Beuve, “On touche oncore à son temps et très- fort, même quand on le repousse.» This egotism of his is a Stylites pillar after all, a seclusion which keeps him in the public eye. The dignity of man is an excellent thing, but therefore to hold one’s self too sacred and precious is the reverse of excellent. There is something delightfully absurd in six volumes addressed to a world of such “vulgar fellows” as Thoreau affirmed his fellow-men to be. We once had a glimpse of a genuine solitary who spent his winter one hundred and fifty miles beyond all human communication, and there dwelt with his rifle as his only confidant. Compared with this, the shanty on Walden Pond has something the air, it must be confessed, of the Hermitage of La Chevrette. We do not believe that the way to a true cosmopolitanism carries one into the woods or the society of musquashes. Perhaps the narrowest provincialism is that of Self; that of Kleinwinkel is nothing to it. The natural man, like the singing birds, comes out of the forest as inevitably as the natural bear and the wildcat stick there. To seek to be natural implies a consciousness that forbids all naturalness forever. It is as easy — and no easier — to be natural in a salon as in a swamp, if one do not aim at it, for what we call unnaturalness always has its spring in a man’s thinking too much about himself. “It is impossible,” said Turgot, “for a vulgar man to be simple.” We look upon a great deal of the modern sentimentalism about Nature as a mark of disease. It is one more symptom of the general liver complaint. In a man of wholesome constitution the wilderness is well enough for a mood or a vacation, but not for a habit of life. Those who have most loudly advertised their passion for seclusion and their intimacy with nature, from Petrarch down, have been mostly sentimentalists, unreal men, misanthropes on the spindle side, solacing an uneasy suspicion of themselves by professing contempt for their kind. They make demands on the world in advance proportioned to their inward measure of their own merit, and are angry that the world pays only by the visible measure of performance. It is true of Rousseau, the modern founder of the sect, true of St. Pierre, his intellectual child, and of Chateaubriand, his grandchild, the inventor of what we may call the primitive forest cure, and who first was touched by the solemn falling of a tree from natural decay in the windless silence of the woods. It is a very shallow view that affirms trees and rocks to be healthy, and HDT WHAT? INDEX

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cannot see that men in communities are just as true to the laws of their organization and destiny; that can tolerate the puffin and the fox, but not the fool and the knave; that would shun politics because of its demagogues, and snuff up the stench of the obscene fungus. The divine life of Nature is more wonderful, more various, more sublime in man than in any other of her works, and the wisdom that is gained by commerce with men, as Montaigne and Shakespeare gained it, or with one’s own soul among men, as Dante, is the most delightful, as it is the most precious, of all. In outward nature it is still man that interests us, and we care far less for the things seen than the way in which poetic eyes like Wordsworth’s; or Thoreau’s see them, and the reflections they cast there. To hear the to-do that is often made over the simple fact that a man sees the image of himself in the outward world, one is reminded of a savage when he for the first time catches a glimpse of himself in a looking-glass. “Venerable child of Nature,” we are tempted to say, “to whose science in the invention of the tobacco-pipe, to whose art in the tattooing of thine undegenerate hide not yet enslaved by tailors, we are slowly striving to climb back, the miracle thou beholdest is sold in my unhappy country for a shilling!” If matters go on as they have done, and everybody must needs blab of all the favors that have been done him by roadside and river- brink and woodland walk, as if to kiss and tell were no longer treachery, it will be a positive refreshment to meet a man who is as superbly indifferent to Nature as she is to him. By and by we shall have John Smith, of No. ——12, ——12th Street, advertising that he is not the J.S. who saw a cow-lily on Thursday last, as he never saw one in his life, would not see one if he could, and is prepared to prove an alibi on the day in question. Solitary communion with Nature does not seem to have been sanitary or sweetening in its influence on Thoreau’s character. On the contrary, his letters show him more cynical as he grew older. While he studied with respectful attention the minks and woodchucks, his neighbors, he looked with utter contempt on the august drama of destiny of which his country was the scene, and on which the curtain had already risen. He was converting us back to a state of nature “so eloquently,” as Voltaire said of Rousseau, “that he almost persuaded us to go on all fours,” while the wiser fates were making it possible for us to walk erect for the first time. Had he conversed more with his fellows, his sympathies would have widened with the assurance that his peculiar genius had more appreciation, and his writings a larger circle of readers, or at last a warmer one, than he dreamed of. We have the highest testimony36 to the natural sweetness, sincerity, and nobleness of his temper, and in his books an equally irrefragable one to the rare quality of his mind. He was not a strong thinker, but a sensitive feeler. Yet his mind strikes us as cold and wintry in its purity. A light snow has fallen everywhere where he seems to come on the track of the shier sensations that would elsewhere leave no trace. We think greater compression would have done more for his fame. A feeling of sameness comes over us as we read so much. Trifles are recorded with an overminute punctuality and conscientiousness of detail. We cannot help thinking sometimes of the man who “watches, starves, freezes, and sweats 36. Mr. Emerson, in the Biographical Sketch prefixed to the “Excursions.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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To learn but catechisms and alphabets, Of unconcerning things, matters of fact,” and sometimes of the saying of the Persian poet, that “when the owl would boast, he boasts of catching mice at the edge of a hole.” We could readily part with some of his affectations. It was well enough for Pythagoras to say, once for all, “When I was Euphorbus at the siege of Troy”; not so well for Thoreau to travesty it into “When I was a shepherd on the plains of Assyria.” A naive thing said over again is anything but naive. But with every exception, there is no writing comparable with Thoreau’s in kind, that is comparable with it in degree where it is best; where it disengages itself, that is, from the tangled roots and dead leaves of a second-hand Orientalism, and runs limpid and smooth and broadening as it runs, a mirror for whatever is grand and lovely in both worlds. George Sand says neatly, that “Art is not a study of positive reality,” (actuality were the fitter word,) “but a seeking after ideal truth.” It would be doing very inadequate justice to Thoreau if we left it to be inferred that this ideal element did not exist in him, and that too in larger proportion, if less obtrusive, than his nature-worship. He took nature as the mountain-path to an ideal world. If the path wind a good deal, if he record too faithfully every trip over a root, if he botanize somewhat wearisomely, he gives us now and then superb outlooks from some jutting crag, and brings us out at last into an illimitable ether, where the breathing is not difficult for those who have any true touch of the climbing spirit. His shanty- life was a mere impossibility, so far as his own conception of it goes, as an entire independency of mankind. The tub of Diogenes had a sounder bottom. Thoreau’s experiment actually presupposed all that complicated civilization which it theoretically abjured. He squatted on another man’s land; he borrows an axe; his boards, his nails, his bricks, his mortar, his books, his lamp, his fish-hooks, his plough, his hoe, all turn state’s evidence against him as an accomplice in the sin of that artificial civilization which rendered it possible that such a person as Henry D. Thoreau should exist at all. Magnis tamen excidit ausis. His aim was a noble and a useful one, in the direction of “plain living and high thinking.” It was a practical sermon on Emerson’s text that “things are in the saddle and ride mankind,” an attempt to solve Carlyle’s problem of “lessening your denominator.” His whole life was a rebuke of the waste and aimlessness of our American luxury, which is an abject enslavement to tawdry upholstery. He had “fine translunary things” in him. His better style as a writer is in keeping with the simplicity and purity of his life. We have said that his range was narrow, but to be a master is to be a master. He had caught his English at its living source, among the poets and prose-writers of its best days; his literature was extensive and recondite; his quotations are always nuggets of the purest ore; there are sentences of his as perfect as anything in the language, his thoughts as clearly crystallized; his metaphors and images are always fresh from the soil; he had watched Nature like a detective who is to go upon the stand; as we read him, it seems as if all-out-of-doors had kept a diary and become its own Montaigne; we look at the landscape as in a Claude Lorraine glass; compared with his, all other books of similar aim, even White’s Selborne, seem dry as a country clergyman’s HDT WHAT? INDEX

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meteorological journal in an old almanac. He belongs with Donne and Browne and Novalis; if not with the originally creative men, with the scarcely smaller class who are peculiar, and whose leaves shed their invisible thought-seed like ferns. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1866

George William Curtis was actively involved in the elections of this year and was chosen as delegate-at-large to the Convention for revising the New York State Constitution.

Thomas Hicks painted his “Authors of the United States” as a name-dropping set piece to show off various of the portraits of prominent personages he had painted at his studio in New-York. We have no idea as to the present whereabouts of the original of this, but an engraving of it was made by A.H. Ritchie. We note that the statues on the upper balcony are of course of founding literary giants Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Shakespeare, and Dante Alighieri. Henry Thoreau is of course as always not noticeably absent, since he would HDT WHAT? INDEX

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not emerge into his present renown until well into the 20th Century.

The personages depicted are 1=Washington Irving 2=William Cullen Bryant 3=James Fenimore Cooper 4=Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 5=Miss Sedgwick 6=Mrs. Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney 7=Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth 8=Mitchell 9=Nathaniel Parker Willis 10=Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. 11=Kennedy 12=Mrs. Mowatt Ritchie 13=Alice Carey 14=Prentice 15=G.W. Kendall 16=Morris 17=Edgar Allan Poe 18=Frederick Goddard Tuckerman 19=Nathaniel Hawthorne 20=Simms 21=P. Pendelton Cooke 22=Hoffman 23=William H. Prescott 24=George Bancroft 25=Parke Godwin 26=John Lothrop Motley 27=Reverend Henry Ward Beecher 28=George William Curtis 29=Ralph Waldo Emerson 30=Richard Henry Dana, Jr. 31=Margaret Fuller, marchesa d’Ossoli 32=Reverend William Ellery Channing 33=Harriet Beecher Stowe 34=Mrs. Kirkland 35=Friend John Greenleaf Whittier 36=James Russell Lowell 37=Boker 38=Bayard Taylor 39=Saxe 40=Stoddard 41=Mrs. Amelia Welby 42=Gallagher 43=Cozzens 44=Halleck. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1867

After the American Civil War James Russell Lowell’s essays devoted to Unionism, written for The Atlantic Monthly, were reissued as a book entitled MELIBŒUS-HIPPONAX. THE BIGLOW PAPERS. SECOND SERIES. MELIBŒUS-HIPPONAX

Publication in Boston in 2 volumes of 49 lectures that Professor Cornelius Conway Felton of Harvard College had delivered before The Lowell Institute, as GREECE, ANCIENT AND MODERN. NEW “HARVARD MEN” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1869

The idiom “cross lots” was in use, as witness this extract from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s OLD TOWN FOLKS: I came cross lots from Aunt Sawin’s and I got caught in those pesky blackberry bushes in the graveyard.

John Cam Hobhouse, Lord Broughton died.

Ralph Gordon Noel King, Lord Wentworth got married with Fanny Heriot.

Anne Isabella Noel King got married with Wilfred Scawen Blunt.

The Atlantic Monthly incautiously published an article by Stowe about the personal life of George Gordon, Lord Byron. Her intent had been to “arrest Byron’s influence upon the young” but young readers would be fascinated by the salacious detail to the point of outraging their parents — resulting in 15,000 canceled subscriptions. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1869

March 4, Thursday: Thomas Carlyle visited the Queen of England in her castle home. At one point this confirmed explainer became so intense in informing her about the beauties of his Galloway that he pinned her dress to the floor with the leg of his chair.37

Ulysses S. Grant was inaugurated as President of the United States of America. INAUGURAL ADDRESS

James Russell Lowell would become so alarmed with the political corruption that would be so obvious in this president’s administrations that he would attempt to manufacture models of heroism and idealism in literature. As co-editor, with Charles Eliot Norton, of the North American Review there would appear a series of critical essays on such major literary figures as Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, John Milton, William Shakespeare, John Dryden, William Wordsworth, and John Keats. These and other critical essays would be collected in the two versions of AMONG MY BOOKS, the version of 1870 and the version of 1876.

Ulysses Simpson Grant succeeded Andrew Johnson as President of the United States.

Two songs for female chorus and piano from op.44 by Johannes Brahms were performed for the initial time, in Basel. They were Fragen op.44/4 to tradtional Slavonic words translated by Grün, and Und gehst du über den Kirchhof op.44/10, to words of Heyse.

37. Talk about captivating one’s audience! We were not amused. To her journal, Victoria would describe this man as “a strange- looking eccentric old Scotchman, who holds forth, in a drawling melancholy voice, with a broad Scotch accent, upon Scotland and upon the utter degeneration of everything.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1870

January: James Russell Lowell’s later poetry includes the lengthy “The Cathedral,” published this month in The Atlantic Monthly as an attempt to deal with the conflicting claims of religion and modern science. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1871

January 26, Thursday: An armistice was signed between Germany and the French Republic.

A meeting of 21 Rugby teams at the Pall Mall Restaurant in London created Rugby Union Football.

Giulio Ricordi wrote to Giuseppe Verdi that he recently met with Arrigo Boito. He reported that Boito would be thrilled to write the libretto to a projected Nerone to be composed by Verdi. Verdi would not create the opera but this would be the beginning of a working relationship between the two.

George Ticknor died in Boston at the age of 79.

Under the heading “New Publications” in the Boston Daily Advertiser, mention was made of the fact that James Russell Lowell’s MY STUDY WINDOWS included an essay on Henry Thoreau. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1873

December 18, Thursday: Boston newspapers were edged in black as Louis Agassiz was laid to rest. An alpine boulder weighing 2,500 pounds was on order from Switzerland, perhaps to make sure this corpse stayed below ground. The worshipful James Russell Lowell was in Italy and wouldn’t learn of the event until several months later: …with vague, mechanic eyes, I scanned the festering news we half despise … When suddenly, As happens if the brain, from overweight Of blood, infect the eye, Three tiny words grew lurid as I read, And reeled commingling: Agassiz is dead!

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1875

April 19, Monday: In the Oration Tent, Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, the President of the Day, called the assemblage to order by declaiming “Friends and fellow-citizens, in this solemn hour, when the nation enters upon its second century, on the spot which was its birthplace, let us reverently ask God to be with us, as he was with our fathers. The Reverend Grindall Reynolds then offered a prayer: Almighty God, Giver of every good, from whose kind providence every blessing and joy, all honor, all greatness, and all success, do proceed, we praise and magnify thy holy name. We rejoice in this bright, beautiful morning, which smiles upon us, as we meet to remember the great, pure, and honorable deeds which have made this spot sacred. We rejoice, in this great presence, that the sons and daughters of this town, from the east and from the west, have gathered together to refresh heart and soul by tearful remembrance and by glad thanksgiving. We rejoice in the presence of this great multitude, who have come up hither from all the towns and states of a great and free country, which has grown up since the day we commemorate. We rejoice in the presence of these citizen soldiers, representatives of the men who came forth from farm-houses, from countingrooms, from all the places of human duty and labor, to offer up their lives a sacrifice to liberty. We rejoice in the presence of those who have been called to rule over this country, in the presence of him who is the chief magistrate of this great nation, and of all who, in their various places, seek to do their part in executing the laws, in promoting the welfare of the people, and in building this nation up to a greater glory and to a purer righteousness. We thank thee for the memories which we cherish of the plain, simple men, who, not for any worldly honors, but for conscience’ sake, and God’s sake, confronted the enemy in that hour of fiery trial. And, as we gather to deepen and make sacred these recollections of their courage and sacrifice, we rejoice that thy goodness has blessed their toils, and from a little people built us up to be a great nation. With hearts full of gratitude, we bow, and say, “Not unto us the glory, but unto thy great name, 0 Lord of Hosts.” Prepare our hearts for the words which shall be spoken to-day, for the eloquent utterances which the memories and the hopes of the hour shall call forth. Prepare us for the sacred influences which shall steal into our hearts, that, when this day is over, we may return to our homes, here or in distant places, to do our duty, to be good citizens, honestly and nobly to fill our places in the world. And as thy blessing comes to us in the beauty of this morning, may it be with us throughout the day, and may it go with us to our homes. We ask and offer all in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen. The President of the Day then said, “In the presence of the President and Vice-President of the United States, attended by the Cabinet, in the presence of the Governor, the Executive Council, and the Legislature of Massachusetts, in the presence of the Governor of each of the New England states, we have to-day dedicated a statue to the memory of the first soldiers of the Revolution upon the spot where the first order was given to the soldiers of the people to fire upon the soldiers of the king. In appropriate notice of that act, you will be addressed for a few moments by Mr. Emerson.” Waldo Emerson spoke: FELLOW-CITIZENS,— Ebenezer Hubbard, a farmer who inherited land HDT WHAT? INDEX

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in this village on which the British troops committed depredation, and who had a deep interest in the history of the raid, erected, many years ago, a flagstaff on his ground, and never neglected to hoist the stars and stripes on the Nineteenth of April, and the Fourth of July. It grieved him deeply that yonder monument, erected by the town in 1836, should have been built on the ground on which the enemy stood in the Concord Fight, instead of on that which the Americans occupied; and he bequeathed in his will one thousand dollars to the town of Concord, on condition that a monument should be erected on the identical ground occupied by our minute-men and militia on that day; and an additional sum of six hundred dollars, on the condition that the town should build a foot-bridge across the river, on the site where the old bridge stood in 1775. The late Mr. Stedman Buttrick having given the necessary piece of land on the other side of the river, the town accepted the legacy of Mn Hubbard, built the bridge, and employed Daniel Chester French to prepare a statue to be erected on the specified spot. Meanwhile the United States Congress gave to this town ten bronze cannon to furnish the artist with fit material to complete his work. The finished statue is before you: it was approved by the town, and to-day it speaks for itself. The sculptor has rightly conceived the proper emblems of the patriot farmer, who, at the morning alarm, left his plough to grasp his gun. He has built no dome over his work, believing that blue sky makes the best canopy. The statue is the first serious work of our young townsman, who is now in Italy to pursue his profession. In the year 1775, we had many enemies and many friends in England; but our one benefactor was King George the Third. The time had arrived for the political severance of America, that it might play its part in the history of this globe; and the inscrutable Divine Providence gave an insane king to England. In the resistance of the colonies, he alone was immovable on the question of force. England was so dear to us, that the colonies could only be absolutely united by violence from England; and only one man could compel the resort to violence. So the king became insane. Parliament wavered; Lord North wavered; all the ministers wavered; but the king had the insanity of one idea. He was immovable, he insisted on the impossible: so the army was sent, America was instantly united, and the nation born. On the 19th oF April, eight hundred soldiers with hostile purpose were sent hither from Boston: on their way, they made the previous attack on Lexington, then continued their march hither to search for and capture military stores. Three companies were left at this bridge, two of which were drawn back towards the hill close behind us. The number of our -own militia Companies is believed to have been from two hundred and fifty to three hundred men. In some memorable events in history, Nature has seemed to sympathize with Man. We mark in the rude air and the still brown fields of this morning the slow departure of winter; but on the same day of the year 1775, a rare forwardness of the spring is recorded, marked by the fact that “the rye -waved on the 19th of April.” Shall we believe that the patriotism of the people was so hot, that it melted the snow? We gladly see among us this morning the representatives of Acton, Bedford, Lincoln, and Carlisle, four towns once included in our town limits, whose citizens were mindful of their mother-town, and used their lives for her on the memorable day we celebrate. Isaac Davis of Acton HDT WHAT? INDEX

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was the first martyr; Abner Hosmer of Acton, the next. In all noble action, we say ’tis only the first step that costs. Who will carry out the rule of right must take his life in his hand. We have no need to magnify the facts. Only two of our men were killed at the bridge, and four others wounded. But here the British army was first fronted, and driven back; and if only two men, or only one man, had been slain, it was the first victory. The thunderbolt falls on an inch of ground; but the light of it fills the horizon. The British instantly retreated. We had no electric telegraph; but the news of this triumph of the farmers over the King’s troops flew through the country, to New York, to Philadelphia, to Kentucky, to the Carolinas, with speed unknown before, and ripened the colonies to inevitable decision. This sharp beginning of real war was followed, sixty days later, by the battle of Bunker Hill; then by General Washington’s arrival in Cambridge, and the raising of his redoubts on Dorchester Heights. In ten months and twenty-five days from the death of Isaac Davis and Abner Hosmer, one hundred and twenty vessels loaded with General Howe and his army (eight thousand men), with all their effects, sailed out of -Boston Harbor never to return. It is a proud and tender story. I challenge any lover of Massachusetts to read the fifty-ninth chapter of Bancroft’s History [History of the United States, vol. VIII. chap. 1] without tears of joy.” James Russell Lowell then stood and committed a long poem: ODE READ AT THE ONE HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FIGHT AT CONCORD BRIDGE 19TH APRIL, 1875

I

Who cometh over the hills, Her garments with morning sweet, The dance of a thousand rills Making music before her feet? Her presence freshens the air; Sunshine steals light from her face; The leaden footstep of Care Leaps to the tune of her pace, Fairness of all that is fair, Grace at the heart of all grace, Sweetener of hut and of hall, Bringer of life out of naught, Freedom, oh, fairest of all The daughters of Time and Thought!

II

She cometh, cometh to-day: Hark! hear ye not her tread, Sending a thrill through your clay, Under the sod there, ye dead, Her nurslings and champions? Do ye not hear, as she comes, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The bay of the deep-mouthed guns, The gathering rote of the drums? The belts that called ye to prayer, How wildly they clamor on her, Crying, ‘She cometh! prepare Her to praise and her to honor, That a hundred years ago Scattered here in blood and tears Potent seeds wherefrom should grow Gladness for a hundred years!’

III

Tell me, young men, have ye seen Creature of diviner mien For true hearts to long and cry for, Manly hearts to live and die for? What hath she that others want? Brows that all endearments haunt, Eyes that make it sweet to dare, Smiles that cheer untimely death, Looks that fortify despair, Tones more brave than trumpet’s breath; Tell me, maidens, have ye known Household charm more sweetly rare, Grace of woman ampler blown, Modesty more debonair, Younger heart with wit full grown? Oh for an hour of my prime, The pulse of my hotter years, That I might praise her in rhyme Would tingle your eyelids to tears, Our sweetness, our strength, and our star, Our hope, our joy, and our trust, Who lifted us out of the dust, And made us whatever we are!

IV

Whiter than moonshine upon snow Her raiment is, but round the hem Crimson stained; and, as to and fro Her sandals flash, we see on them, And on her instep veined with blue, Flecks of crimson, on those fair feet, High-arched, Diana-like, and fleet, Fit for no grosser stain than dew: Oh, call them rather chrisms than stains, Sacred and from heroic veins! For, in the glory-guarded pass, Her haughty and far-shining head She bowed to shrive Leonidas With his imperishable dead; Her, too, Morgarten saw, Where the Swiss lion fleshed his icy paw; She followed Cromwell’s quenchless star Where the grim Puritan tread Shook Marston, Naseby, and Dunbar: Yea, on her feet are dearer dyes HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Yet fresh, nor looked on with untearful eyes.

V

Our fathers found her in the woods Where Nature meditates and broods, The seeds of unexampled things Which Time to consummation brings Through life and death and man’s unstable moods; They met her here, not recognized, A sylvan huntress clothed in furs, To whose chaste wants her bow sufficed, Nor dreamed what destinies were hers: She taught them bee-like to create Their simpler forms of Church and State; She taught them to endue The past with other functions than it knew, And turn in channels strange the uncertain stream of Fate; Better than all, she fenced them in their need With iron-handed Duty’s sternest creed, ’Gainst Self’s lean wolf that ravens word and deed.

VI

Why cometh she hither to-day To this low village of the plain Far from the Present’s loud highway, From Trade’s cool heart and seething brain? Why cometh she? She was not far away. Since the soul touched it, not in vain, With pathos of Immortal gain, ’Tis here her fondest memories stay. She loves yon pine-bemurmured ridge Where now our broad-browed poet sleeps, Dear to both Englands; near him he Who wore the ring of Canace; But most her heart to rapture leaps Where stood that era-parting bridge, O’er which, with footfall still as dew, The Old Time passed into the New; Where, as your stealthy river creeps, He whispers to his listening weeds Tales of sublimest homespun deeds. Here English law and English thought ’Gainst the self-will of England fought; And here were men (coequal with their fate), Who did great things, unconscious they were great. They dreamed not what a die was cast With that first answering shot; what then? There was their duty; they were men Schooled the soul’s inward gospel to obey, Though leading to the lion’s den. They felt the habit-hallowed world give way Beneath their lives, and on went they, Unhappy who was last. When Buttrick gave the word, That awful idol of the unchallenged Past, Strong in their love, and in their lineage strong, Fell crashing; if they heard it not, Yet the earth heard, Nor ever hath forgot, As on from startled throne to throne, Where Superstition sate or conscious Wrong, A shudder ran of some dread birth unknown. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Thrice venerable spot! River more fateful than the Rubicon! O’er those red planks, to snatch her diadem, Man’s Hope, star-girdled, sprang with them, And over ways untried the feet of Doom strode on.

VII

Think you these felt no charms In their gray homesteads and embowered farms? In household faces waiting at the door Their evening step should lighten up no more? In fields their boyish feet had known? In trees their fathers’ hands had set, And which with them had grown, Widening each year their leafy coronet? Felt they no pang of passionate regret For those unsolid goods that seem so much our own? These things are dear to every man that lives, And life prized more for what it lends than gives. Yea, many a tie, through iteration sweet, Strove to detain their fatal feet; And yet the enduring half they chose, Whose choice decides a man life’s slave or king, The invisible things of God before the seen and known: Therefore their memory inspiration blows With echoes gathering on from zone to zone; For manhood is the one immortal thing Beneath Time’s changeful sky, And, where it lightened once, from age to age, Men come to learn, in grateful pilgrimage, That length of days is knowing when to die.

VIII

What marvellous change of things and men! She, a world-wandering orphan then, So mighty now! Those are her streams That whirl the myriad, myriad wheels Of all that does, and all that dreams, Of all that thinks, and all that feels, Through spaces stretched from sea to sea; By idle tongues and busy brains, By who doth right, and who refrains, Here are our losses and our gains; Our maker and our victim she.

IX

Maiden half mortal, half divine, We triumphed in thy coming; to the brinks Our hearts were filled with pride’s tumultuous wine; Better to-day who rather feels than thinks. Yet will some graver thoughts intrude, And cares of sterner mood; They won thee: who shall keep thee? From the deeps Where discrowned empires o’er their ruins brood, And many a thwarted hope wrings its weak hands and weeps, I hear the voice as of a mighty wind From all heaven’s caverns rushing unconfined, ‘I, Freedom, dwell with Knowledge: I abide HDT WHAT? INDEX

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With men whom dust of faction cannot blind To the slow tracings of the Eternal Mind; With men by culture trained and fortified, Who bitter duty to sweet lusts prefer, Fearless to counsel and obey. Conscience my sceptre is, and law my sword, Not to be drawn in passion or in play, But terrible to punish and deter; Implacable as God’s word, Like it, a shepherd’s crook to them that blindly err. Your firm-pulsed sires, my martyrs and my saints, Offshoots of that one stock whose patient sense Hath known to mingle flux with permanence, Rated my chaste denials and restraints Above the moment’s dear-paid paradise: Beware lest, shifting with Time’s gradual creep, The light that guided shine into your eyes. The envious Powers of ill nor wink nor sleep; Be therefore timely wise, Nor laugh when this one steals, and that one lies, As if your luck could cheat those sleepless spies, Till the deaf Fury comes your house to sweep!’ I hear the voice, and unaffrighted bow; Ye shall not be prophetic now, Heralds of ill, that darkening fly Between my vision and the rainbowed sky, Or on the left your hoarse forebodings croak From many a blasted bough On Yggdrasil’s storm-sinewed oak, That once was green, Hope of the West, as thou; Yet pardon if I tremble while I boast; For I have loved as those who pardon most.

X

Away, ungrateful doubt, away! At least she is our own to-day. Break into rapture, my song, Verses, leap forth in the sun, Bearing the joyance along Like a train of fire as ye run! Pause not for choosing of words, Let them but blossom and sing Blithe as the orchards and birds With the new coming of spring! Dance in your jollity, bells; Shout, cannon; cease not, ye drums; Answer, ye hillside and dells; Bow, all ye people! She comes, Radiant, calm-fronted, as when She hallowed that April day. Stay with us! Yes, thou shalt stay. Softener and strengthener of men, Freedom, not won by the vain, Not to be courted in play, Not to be kept without pain. Stay with us! Yes, thou wilt stay, Handmaid and mistress of all, Kindler of deed and of thought, Thou that to hut and to hall Equal deliverance brought! Souls of her martyrs, draw near, Touch our dull lips with your fire, That we may praise without fear Her our delight, our desire, Our faith’s inextinguishable star, Our hope, our remembrance, our trust, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Our present, our past, our to be, Who will mingle her life with our dust And makes us deserve to be free!

April 19, Monday: At Concord’s April 19th celebration Waldo Emerson, like the 1,250-pound statue, had not much to say, and at any rate could not be heard by the assembled mass of some 3,500 to 5,000 listeners. James Russell Lowell read some sort of ode over which we need not linger. The speakers’ platform collapsed twice but despite such disruptions George William Curtis (formerly of Concord and currently the editor of Harper’s Weekly: A Journal of Civilization in the city of New-York) was able to deliver an oration that we may possibly now consider to be a tad too racist for our 21st-Century sensibilities — and may possibly have been a tad too prolonged even for 19th-Century sensitivities. Curtis described at length the dangers presented by new immigrants: not only do foreigners not understand our “republican ideas” but also they are in general possessed of “an immense ignorance.” Shamelessly, Curtis rang in a parallelism between the 1st December 25th in Bethlehem and the “shot heard ’round the world” of the 1st April 19th by permuting “Glory to God in the highest, for Christ is born” into “Good-will to men, America is born.”38

Mr. President, and Fellow Citizens of Concord, of Middlesex County, of Massachusetts, of the Union, — I see, what you may not, the deep malevolence of the President of the Day. For as he knows that in the unequal contest of my voice with a hundred bands of music and a cracking platform, that voice got irretrievably the worst of it, in revenge for holding so many of my fellow-citizens for more than an hour in the cold, the President of the Day, with malicious intent, is resolved to make an end of that voice altogether. But, sir, when the name of Rhode Island is mentioned, every son of Rhode Island falls into line. Little in size, but great in soul! Like the minute-men of one hundred years ago, who marched to the North Bridge under three leaders, so Rhode Island always marches under her three historical men, — Roger Williams, Doctor Channing and General Greene, the friend of Washington. Little in size, but great in soul! for the founder of Rhode Island was the first man among the founders of States who ever asserted absolute religious 38. At one point during the oration, the speaker had to be halted so that President of the United States Ulysses S. Grant could depart in order to fulfil a speaking engagement at the celebration in nearby Lexington: Ladies and gentlemen, Concord always keeps faith with Lexington. We promised to deliver to them the President at one o’clock; and he is therefore obliged to leave. Give him three parting cheers. Three cheers were then given, which the President acknowledged by bowing to the assembly, and with the Vice-President, the Cabinet, Governor Gaston, the Executive Council and Legislature of Massachusetts, the Judges of the Supreme Judicial Court, and several others of our guests who had accepted the Lexington invi- tation, left the tent. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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liberty as the truest foundation of human society. Fellow- citizens, as I stand here in Middlesex County on a day devoted to Revolutionary remembrances, it is my pleasure to remember that when the first regiment from Massachusetts marched to the late war, when it was passing through the city of New York, a friend of mine joined a soldier on the march, and said to him, “Well, my friend, what part of the old Commonwealth do you come from?” And that soldier, whose ear for music, I take it, was not very good, anxious to answer the question while he still kept time to the drum-beat, answered my friend as he marched on, “From Bunker Hill, from Bunker Hill, from Bunker Hill.” And so, fellow-citizens, I think we may take this lesson from this day, and the spot on which we stand, — that every American citizen, whatever the summons may be, when it is a summons to march for liberty, may reply, when asked from what part of this Union he takes his departure, not from Maine, from Florida, from Massachusetts, from Rhode Island, from Virginia, from Illinois, from Nevada, from Oregon: let him say only, “From Concord Bridge, from Concord Bridge, from Concord Bridge,” and then the whole world will know that he, too, is marching to victory. Mr. President: I hope it will be always as true as it was one hundred years ago, if a man should be asked, when he is marching to fight or die in the service of his Country, from what part of Massachusetts he came, that he might answer, “From the whole of it;” and it would not be a very hard thing to say of Rhode Island. We have here, to which I must call attention, a good many Revolutionary relics. You have had already shown to you what is left of tile sword –broken off, a foot of it, and the point sharpened– that Isaac Davis carried at the North Bridge. There is before me a sword taken by Nathaniel Bemis of Watertown from a British officer whom he himself shot; and the gun is here with which he shot him. The sword bears the legend, and the gun has on the breech, “David Bemis, 1775.” But, gentlemen, I hold in my hand one sacred relic, whose historic glory is unsurpassed. Little local jealousies may exist among neighboring towns as to the particular share that this or that spot had in this great American day. The title of Concord North Bridge rests upon one unquestioned fact: that there first, by a duly commissioned officer in command of soldiers, an order to the soldiers of the people to fire upon the soldiers of the King was given, and was obeyed. Major John Buttrick of Concord, whose gun I hold in my hand, gave the order to fire, and fired this gun, his own gun that he held in his hand, in execution of his own order; and it was the first gun fired in obedience to military authority in the war of the Revolution. Fifty years ago, when Lafayette visited the United States, this gun was shown to him, and this story told him. He grasped and held it up over his head, and said it was “the alarum gun of liberty throughout the world.” I have already said to you that I considered the independence of America as assured by what took place between the North Bridge and Charlestown Neck one hundred years ago. It made conciliation impossible, and independence certain. Lord Chatham had already prophesied in the British parliament, in January, 1775, that the first drop of blood shed in civil and unnatural war might be a wound that never could be cured. He put into that speech a recommendation to the ministry, which, read in the light of this day, sounds curiously enough, although not in the meaning which he gave to it. He introduced into the British parliament a HDT WHAT? INDEX

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resolution calling on the King to withdraw his troops from Boston. It did not pass: it received but a few votes in the House of Lords. In the course of that speech, he said that he advised the ministry “to make the first advances to Concord.” And Gen. Gage made them. You know how they turned out. Now, my friends, although this, as we all know, is the great centennial, some allusion was made by the orator, in an oratorical spirit, undoubtedly, to the Fourth of July. He knows that comes this year and next, and we think very well of the Fourth of July. It is a natural deduction from the 19th of April; and whoever gets the spirit of the 19th of April may be trusted anywhere on the Fourth of July. My friend General Hawley, late Governor Hawley of Connecticut, entitled to memory as General Hawley of the late war, Chairman of the National Centennial Commission, is here; and I am sure, if any body can say any thing in favor of the Fourth of July, he can say it, and I should like to hear from him on that subject. We are fortunate that we behold this day. The heavens bend benignly over; the earth blossoms with renewed life; and our hearts beat joyfully together with one emotion of filial gratitude and patriotic exultation. Citizens of a great, free, and prosperous country we come hither to honor the men, our fathers, who, on this spot and upon this day, a hundred years ago, struck the first blow in the contest which made that country independent. Here beneath the hills they trod, by the peaceful river on whose shores they dwelt, amidst the fields that they sowed and reaped, proudly recalling their virtue and their valor, we come to tell their story, to try ourselves by their lofty standard to know if we are their worthy children, and, standing reverently where they stood and fought and died, to swear before God and each other, in the words of him upon whom in our day the spirit of the Revolutionary fathers visibly descended, that government of the People, by the People, for the People, shall not perish from the earth. This ancient town, with its neighbors who share its glory, has never failed fitly to commemorate this great day of its history. Fifty years ago, while some soldiers of the Concord fight were yet living.- twenty-five years ago, while still a few venerable survivors lingered, - with prayer and eloquence and song you renewed the pious vow. But the last living link with the Revolution has long been broken. Great events and a mightier struggle have absorbed our own generation. Yet we who stand here to-day have a sympathy with the men at the old North Bridge, which those who preceded us here at earlier celebrations could not know. With them, war was a name and a tradition. So swift and vast had been the change and the development of the country, that the Revolutionary clash of arms was already vague and unreal, and Concord and Lexington seemed to them almost as remote and historic as Arbela and Sempach. When they assembled to celebrate this day, they saw a little group of tottering forms, eyes from which tile light was fading, arms nerveless and withered, thin white hairs that fluttered in the wind; they saw a few venerable relics of a vanished age, whose pride was, that, before living memory, they had been minute-men of American Independence. But with us how changed! War is no longer a tradition half romantic and obscure. It has ravaged how many of our homes! it has wrung how many of the hearts before me! North and South we know the pang. Our common liberty is consecrated HDT WHAT? INDEX

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by a common sorrow. We do not count around us a few feeble veterans of the contest; but we are girt with “a cloud of witnesses.” We are surrounded - everywhere by multitudes in the vigor of their prime. Behold them here to-day sharing in these pious and peaceful rites, - the honored citizens, legislators, magistrates, yes, the Chief Magistrate of the republic, - whose glory it is that they were minute-men of American liberty and union. These men of to-day interpret to us with resistless eloquence the men and the times we commemorate. Now, if never before, we understand the Revolution. Now we know the secret of those old hearts and homes. We can measure the sacrifice, the courage, the devotion; for we have seen them all. Green hills of Concord, broad fields of Middlesex, that heard the voice of Hancock and of Adams, you heard, also, the call of Lincoln and of Andrew; and your Ladd and Whitney, your Prescott and Ripley and Melvin, have revealed to US more truly the Davis and the Buttrick, the Hosmer and the Parker, of a hundred years ago. The story of this old town is the history of New England. It shows us the people and the institutions that have made the American republic. Concord was the first settlement in New England above tide-water. It was planted directly from the mother-country, and was what was called a mother-town, the parent of other settlements throughout the wilderness. It was a military post in King Philip’s war; and two hundred years ago –just a century before the minute-men whom we commemorate– the militia of Middlesex were organized as minute-men against the Indians. It is a Concord tradition, that in those stern days, when the farmer tilled these fields at the risk of his life, Mary Shepard, a girl of fifteen, was watching on one of the hills for the savages, while her brothers threshed in the barn. Suddenly the Indians appeared, slew the brothers, and carried her away. In the night, while the savages slept, she untied a horse which they had stolen, slipped a saddle from under the head of one of her captors, mounted, fled, swam the Nashua River, and rode through the forest home. Mary Shepard was the true ancestor of the Concord matrons who share the fame of this day, - of Mrs. James Barrett, of the Widow Brown, of Mrs. Amos Wood, and Hannah Burns, with the other faithful women whose self- command, and ready wit and energy, on this great morning, show that the mothers of New England were like the fathers, and that equally in both their children may reverence their own best virtues. A little later than Philip’s war, one hundred and eighty-six years ago last night, while some of the first settlers of Massachusetts Bay still lingered, when the news came that King James the Second had been dethroned, a company marched from this town, and joined that general uprising of the colony which the next day, this very day, with old Simon Bradstreet at its head, deposed Sir Edmund Andros, the king’s governor, and restored the ancient charter of the colony. “We demand only the traditional rights of Englishmen,” said the English nobles, as they seated William and Mary upon the throne. “We ask nothing more,” said the freemen of Concord, as they helped to dissolve royal government in America, and returned to their homes. Eighty-five years later, the first Provincial Congress, which had been called to meet at Concord, if, for any reason, the General Court at Salem were obstructed, assembled in the old meeting-house on the 11th of October, 1774, the first HDT WHAT? INDEX

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independent legislature in Massachusetts, in America; and from that hour to this the old mothertown has never forgotten the words, nor forsworn the faith, of the Revolution, which had been proclaimed here six weeks before: “No danger shall affright, no difficulties intimidate us; and if, in support of our rights, we are called to encounter even death, we are yet undaunted, sensible that he can never die too soon who lays down his life in support of the laws and liberties of his country.” But the true glory of Concord, as of all New England, was the town meeting the nursery of American Independence. When the Revolution began, of the eight millions of people then living in Old England, only one hundred and sixty thousand were voters; while in New England the great mass of free male adults were electors. And they had been so from the landing at Plymouth. Here in the wilderness the settlers were forced to govern themselves. They could not constantly refer and appeal to another authority twenty miles away through the woods. Every day brought its duty, that must be done before sunset. Roads must be made, schools built, young men trained to arms against the savage and the wild-cat, taxes must be laid and collected for all common purposes, preaching must be maintained; and who could know the time, the means, and the necessity, so well as the community itself? Thus each town was a small but perfect republic, as solitary and secluded in the New England wilderness as the Swiss cantons among the Alps. No other practicable human institution has been devised or conceived to secure the just ends of local government so felicitous as the town meeting. It brought together the rich and the poor, the good and the bad, and gave character, eloquence, and natural leadership full and free play. It enabled superior experience and sagacity to govern; and virtue and intelligence alone are rulers by divine right. The Tories called the resolution for committees of correspondence the source of the rebellion; but it was only a correspondence of town meetings. From that correspondence came the confederation of the colonies. Out of that arose the closer, majestic union of the Constitution, the greater phoenix born from the ashes of the lesser; and the national power and prosperity to-day rest securely only upon the foundation of the primary meeting. That is where the duty of the citizen begins. Neglect of that is disloyalty to liberty. No contrivance will supply its place, no excuse absolve the neglect; and the American who is guilty of that neglect is as deadly an enemy of his country as the British soldier a century ago. But here and now I cannot speak of the New England town meeting without recalling its great genius, the New Englander in whom the Revolution seemed to be most frilly embodied, and the lofty prayer of whose life was answered upon this spot and on this day. He was not eloquent like Otis, nor scholarly like Quincy, nor all-fascinating like Warren, yet bound heart to heart with these great men, his friends, the plainest, simplest, austerest, among them, he gathered all their separate gifts, and, adding to them his own, fused the whole in the glow of that untiring energy, that unerring perception, that sublime will, which moved before the chosen people of the colonies a pillar of cloud by day, of fire by night. People of Massachusetts, your proud and grateful hearts outstrip my lips in pronouncing the name of Samuel Adams. Elsewhere to-day, nearer the spot where he stood with his immortal friend Hancock a hundred years ago this HDT WHAT? INDEX

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morning, a son of Massachusetts, who bears the name of a friend of Samuel Adams, and whose own career has honorably illustrated the fidelity of your State to human liberty, will pay a fitting tribute to the true American tribune of the people, - the father of the Revolution, as he was fondly called. But we also are his children, and must not omit our duty. Until 1768, Samuel Adams did not despair of a peaceful issue of the quarrel with Great Britain. But when, in May of that year, the British frigate “Romney” sailed into Boston harbor, and her shotted guns were trained upon the town, he saw that the question was changed. From that moment, he knew that America must be free, or slave; and the unceasing effort of his life by day and night, with tongue and pen, was to nerve his fellow-colonists to strike when the hour should come. On that gray December evening, two years later, when he rose in the Old South, and in a clear, calm voice said, “This meeting can do nothing more to save the country,” and so gave the word for the march to the tea-ships, he comprehended more clearly, perhaps, than any man in the colonies, the immense and far-reaching consequences of his words. He was ready to throw the tea overboard, because he was ready to throw overboard the King and Parliament of England. During the ten years from the passage of the Stamp Act to the day of Lexington and Concord, this poor man, in an obscure provincial town beyond the sea, was engaged with the British ministry in one of the mightiest contests that history records. Not a word in parliament that he did not hear, not an act in the cabinet that he did not see. With brain and heart and conscience all alive, he opposed every hostile order in council with a British precedent, and arrayed against the Government of Great Britain the battery of principles impregnable with the accumulated strength of centuries of British conviction. The cold Grenville, the brilliant Townsend, the obsequious North, the reckless Hillsborough, the crafty Dartmouth, all tile ermined and coroneted chiefs of the proudest aristocracy in the world, derided, declaimed, denounced, laid unjust taxes, and sent troops to collect them, cheered loudly by a servile parliament, the parasite of a headstrong king; and the plain Boston Puritan laid his finger on the vital point of the tremendous controversy, and held to it inexorably king, lords, commons, the people of England, and the people of America. Entrenched in his own honesty, the king’s gold could not buy him; enshrined in the love of his fellow-citizens, the king’s writ could not take him: and when, on this morning, the king’s troops marched to seize him, his sublime faith saw beyond the clouds of the moment the rising sun of the America that we behold; and careless of himself, mindful only of his country, he exultingly exclaimed, “Oh, what a glorious morning!” Yet this man held no office but that of clerk of the assembly, to which he was yearly elected, and that of constant moderator of the town meeting. That was his mighty weapon. The town meeting was the alarm-bell with which he aroused the continent: it was the rapier with which he fenced with that ministry: it was the claymore with which he smote their counsels: it was the harp of a thousand strings that he swept into a burst of passionate defiance, or an electric call to arms, or a proud paean of exulting triumph, defiance, challenge, and exultation-all lifting the continent to independence. His indomitable will, and command of the popular confidence, played Boston against London, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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the provincial town meeting against the royal parliament, Faneuil Hall against St. Stephen’s. And as long as the American town meeting is known, its great genius will be revered, who with the town meeting overthrew an empire. So long as Faneuil Hall stands, Samuel Adams will not want his most fitting monument; and, when Faneuil Hall falls, its name with his will be found written as with a sunbeam upon every faithful American heart. The first imposing armed movement against the colonies, on the 19th of April, 1775, did not, of course, take by surprise a people so prepared. For ten years they had seen the possibility, for five years the probability, and for at least a year, the certainty, of the contest. They quietly organized, watched, and waited. The royal governor, Gage, was a soldier; and he had read the signs of the times. He had fought with provincial troops at the bloody ambuscade of Braddock; and he felt the full force of the mighty determination that exalted New England. He had about four thousand effective troops, trained veterans, with brilliant officers, who despised and ridiculed the Yankee militia. Massachusetts had provided for a constitutional army of fifteen thousand men. Minute companies were everywhere organized, and military supplies were deposited at convenient towns. Everybody was on the alert. Couriers were held ready to alarm the country, should the British march, and wagons to remove the stores. In the early spring, Gage sent out some of his officers as spies; and two of them came in disguise as far as Concord. On the 22d of March, the Provincial Congress met in this town, and made the last arrangements for a possible battle, begging the militia and minute-men to be ready, but to act only on the defensive. As the spring advanced, it was plain that some movement would be made; and on Monday, the 17th of April, the Committee of Safety ordered part of the stores deposited here to be removed to Sudbury and Groton, and the cannon to be secreted. On Tuesday, the 18th, Gage, who had decided to send a force to Concord to destroy the stores, picketed the roads from Boston into Middlesex to prevent any report of the intended march from spreading into the country. But the very air was electric. In the tension of the popular mind, every sound and sight was significant. It was part of Gage’s plan to seize Hancock and Adams, who were at Lexington; and, on the evening of the 18th, the Committee of Safety, at Cambridge, sent them word to beware, for suspicious officers were abroad. A British grenadier, in full uniform, went into a shop in Boston. He might as well have proclaimed that an expedition was on foot. In the afternoon, one of the governor’s grooms strolled into a stable where John Ballard was cleaning a horse. John Ballard was a son of liberty; and when the groom idly remarked, in nervous English, that “there would be hell to pay to-morrow,” John’s heart leaped, and his hand shook; and, asking the groom to finish cleaning the horse, he ran to a friend, who carried the news straight to Paul Revere, who told him he had already heard it from two other persons. That evening, at ten o’clock, eight hundred British troop, under Lieut.-Col. Smith, took boat at the foot of the Common, and crossed to the Cambridge shore. Gage thought that his secret had been kept; but Lord Percy, who had heard the people say on the Common that the troops would miss their aim, undeceived him. Gage instantly ordered that no one should leave the town. But HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Dr. Warren was before him; and, as the troops crossed the river, William Dawes, - with a message from Warren to Hancock and Adams, was riding over the Neck to Roxbury, and Paul Revere was rowing over the - river farther down to Charlestown, having agreed with his friend Robert Newman to show lanterns from the belfry of the Old North Church - “One, if by land, and two, if by sea” — as a signal of the march of the British. Already the moon was rising; and, while the troops were stealthily landing at Lechmere Point, their secret was flashed out into the April night; and Paul Revere, springing into the saddle upon the Charlestown shore, spurred away into Middlesex. “How far that little candle throws his beams!” The modest spire yet stands, reverend relic of the old town of Boston, - of those brave men and of their deeds. Startling the land that night with the warning of danger, let it remind -the land forever of the patriotism with which that danger was averted, and for our children, as for our fathers, still stand secure, the Pharos of American liberty. It was a brilliant April night. The winter had been unusually mild, and the spring very forward. The hills were already green; the early grain waved in the fields; and the air was sweet with blossoming orchards. Already the robins whistled, the bluebird sang, and the benediction of peace rested upon the landscape. Under the cloudless moon the soldiers silently marched, and Paul Revere swiftly rode, galloping through Medford and West Cambridge, rousing every house as he went, spurring for Lexington, and Hancock and Adams, and evading the British patrols who had been sent out to stop the news. Stop the news! Already the village church bells were beginning to ring the alarm, as the pulpits beneath them had been ringing for many a year. In the awakening houses, lights flashed from window to window. Drums beat faintly far away and on every side. Signal- guns flashed and echoed. The watch-dogs barked, the bocks crew. Stop the news! Stop the sunrise! The murmuring night trembled with the summons so earnestly expected, so dreaded, so desired. And as, long ago, the voice rang out at midnight along the Syrian shore, wailing that great Pan was dead, but in the same moment the choiring angels whispered, “Glory to God in the highest, for Christ is born,” so, if the stern alarm of that April night seemed to many a wistful and loyal heart to portend the passing glory of British dominion, and the tragical chance of war, it whispered to them with prophetic inspiration, “Good-will to men: America is born!” There is a tradition, that, long before the troops reached Lexington, an unknown horseman thundered at the door of Capt. Joseph Robbins, in Acton, waking every man and woman, and the babe in the cradle, shouting that the regulars were marching to Concord, and that the rendezvous was the Old North Bridge. Capt. Robbins’s son, a boy of ten years, heard the summons in the garret where he lay,. and in a few minutes was on his father’s old mare, a young Paul Revere, galloping along the road to rouse Capt. Isaac Davis, who commanded the minute-men of Acton. He was a young man of thirty, a gunsmith by trade, brave and thoughtful, and tenderly fond of his wife and four children. The company assembled at his shop, formed, and marched a little way, when HDT WHAT? INDEX

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he halted them, and returned for a moment to his house. He said to his wife, “Take good care of the children,” kissed her, turned to his men, gave the order to march, and saw his home no more. Such was the history of that night in how many homes! The hearts of those men and women of Middlesex might break; but they could not waver. They had counted the cost. They knew what and whom they served; and, as the midnight summons came, they started up, and answered, “Here am I!” Meanwhile the British bayonets, glistening in the moon, moved steadily along the road. Col. Smith heard and saw that the country was aroused, and sent back to Boston for re- enforcements, ordering Major John Pitcairn, with six companies, to hasten forward, and seize the bridges at Concord. Paul Revere and Dawes had reached Lexington by midnight, and had given the alarm. The men of Lexington instantly mustered on the Green; but, as there was no sign of the enemy, they were dismissed to await his coming. He was close at hand. John Pitcairn swiftly advanced, seizing every man upon the road, and was not discovered until half-past four in the morning, within a mile or two of Lexington meeting-house. Then there was a general alarm. The bell rang, drums beat, guns fired; and sixty or seventy of the Lexington militia were drawn up in line upon the Green, Capt. John Parker at their head. The British bayonets, glistening in the dawn, moved rapidly toward them. John Pitcairn rode up, and angrily ordered the militia to surrender and disperse. But they held their ground. The troops fired over their heads. Still the militia stand. Then a deadly volley blazed from the British line; and eight of the Americans fell dead, and ten wounded, at the doors of their homes, and in sight of their kindred. Capt. Parker, seeing that it was massacre, not battle, ordered his men to disperse. They obeyed, some firing upon the enemy. The British troops, who had suffered little, with a loud huzza of victory pushed on toward Concord, six miles beyond. Four hours before, Paul Revere and William Dawes had left Lexington to rouse Concord, and were soon overtaken by Dr. Samuel Prescott of that town, “a high son of liberty,” who had been to Lexington upon a tender errand. A British patrol captured Revere and Dawes; but Prescott leaped a stone wall, and dashed to Concord. Between one and two o’clock in the morning, Amos Melvin, the sentinel at the court-house, rang the bell, and roused the town. He sprang of heroic stock. One of his family, thirty years before, had commanded a company at Louisburg and another at Crown Point; while four brothers of the same family served in the late war, and the honored names of the three who perished are carved upon your soldiers’ monument. When the bell rang, the first man that appeared was William Emerson, the minister, with his gun in his hand. It was his faith that the scholar should be the minute-man of liberty, - a faith which his descendants have piously cherished, and illustrated before the world. The minute-men gathered hastily upon the Common. The citizens, hurrying from their homes, secreted the military stores. Messengers were sent to the neighboring villages, and the peaceful town prepared for battle. The minute-men of Lincoln, whose captain was William Smith, and whose lieutenant was Samuel Hoar,-a name not unknown in Middlesex, in Massachusetts, and in the country, and, wherever known, still honored for the noblest qualities of the men of the Revolution, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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- had joined the Concord militia and minute-men; and part of them had marched down the Lexington road to reconnoiter. Seeing the British, they fell back toward the hill, over the road at the entrance of the village, upon which stood the liberty-pole. It was now seven o’clock. There were, perhaps, two hundred men in arms upon the hill. Below them, upon the Lexington road, a quarter of a mile away, rose a thick cloud of dust, from which, amidst proudly rolling drums, eight hundred British bayonets flashed in the morning sun. The Americans saw that battle where they stood would be mere butchery; and they fell gradually back to a rising ground about a mile north of the meetinghouse, - the spot upon which we are now assembled. The British troops divided as they entered the town; the infantry coming over the hill from which the Americans had retired, the marines and grenadiers marching by the high-road. The place was well known to the British officers through their spies; and Colonel Smith, halting before the court-house, instantly sent detachments to hold the two bridges, and others to destroy the stores. But so care fully had these been secreted, that, during the two or three hours in which they were engaged in the work, the British only emptied about sixty barrels of flour, half of which was afterward saved, knocked off the trunnions of three cannon, burned sixteen new carriage-wheels and some barrels of wooden spoons and trenchers, threw five hundred pounds of balls into the pond and wells, cut down the liberty-pole, and fired the court-house. The work was hurriedly done; for Colonel Smith, a veteran soldier, knew his peril. He had advanced twenty miles into a country of intelligent and resolute men, who were rising around him. All Middlesex was moving. From Acton and Lincoln, from Westford, Littleton MA, and Chelmsford, from Bedford and Billerica, from Stow, Sudbury, and Carlisle, the sons of Indian fighters, and of soldiers of the old French war, poured along the roads, shouldering the fire-locks and fowlingpieces and old king’s-arms that had seen famous service when the earlier settlers had gone out against King Philip, or the later colonists had marched under the flag on which George Whitefield had written, “Nil desperandum Cristo Duce,” - Never despair while Christ is captain; and those words the children of the Puritans had written on their hearts. As the minute-men from the other towns arrived, they joined the force upon the rising ground near the North Bridge, where they were drawn into line by Joseph Hosmer of Concord, who acted as adjutant. By nine o’clock, some five hundred men were assembled, and a consultation of officers and citizens was held. That group of Middlesex farmers, here upon Punkatasset, without thought that they were heroes, or that the day and its deeds were to be so momentous, is a group as memorable as the men of Riitli on the Swiss Alps, or the barons in the meadow of Runnymede. They confronted the mightiest empire in the world, invincible on land, supreme on the sea, whose guns had just been heard in four continents at once, girdling the globe with victory. And that empire was their mother-land, in whose renown they had shared, - the land dear to their hearts by a thousand ties of love, pride, and reverence. They took a sublime and awful responsibility. They could not know that the other colonies, or even their neighbors of Massachusetts, would justify their action. There was as yet no Declaration of Independence, no continental army. There was, indeed, a general feeling that a blow would soon be struck; but to mistake the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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time, the place, the way, might be to sacrifice the great cause itself, and to ruin America. But their conscience and their judgment assured the in that the hour had come. Before them lay their homes, and on the hill beyond, the graveyard in which their forefathers slept. A guard of the king’s troops opposed their entrance to their own village. Those troops were at that moment searching their homes, perhaps insulting their wives and children. Already they saw the smoke as of burning houses rising in the air, and they resolved to march into the town, and to fire upon the troops if they were opposed. They resolved upon organized, aggressive, forcible resistance to the military power of Great Britain,- the first that had been offered in the colonies. All unconsciously every heart beat time to the music of the slave’s epitaph in the graveyard that overhung the town: - “God wills us free man wills us slaves: I will as God wills: God’s will be done.” Isaac Davis of Acton drew his sword, turned toward his company, and said, “I haven’t a man that’s afraid to go.” Colonel Barrett of Concord gave the order to march. In double file, and with trailed arms, the men moved along the Causeway, the Acton company in front; Major John Buttrick of Concord, Captain Isaac Davis of Acton, and Lieutenant-Colonel John Robinson of Westford, leading the way. As they approached the bridge, the British forces withdrew across it, and began to take up the planks. Major Buttrick ordered his men to hasten their march. As they came within ten or fifteen rods of the bridge, a shot was fired by the British, which wounded Jonas Brown, one of the Concord minutemen, and Luther Blanchard, fifer of the Acton Company. A British volley followed; and Isaac Davis of Acton, making a way for his countrymen, like Arnold von Winkelried at Sempach, fell dead, shot through the heart. By his side fell his friend and neighbor, Abner Hosmer, a youth of twenty-two. Seeing them fail, Major Buttrick turned to his men, and, raising his hand, cried, “Fire, fellow soldiers! for God’s sake, fire!” John Buttrick gave the word. The cry rang along the line. The Americans fired. The Revolution began. It began here. Let us put off the shoes from off our feet; for the place whereon we stand is holy ground. One of the British was killed, several were wounded; and they retreated in confusion toward the centre of the village. The engagement was doubtless seen by Smith and John Pitcairn from the graveyard hill that overlooked the town; and the shots were heard by all the searching parties, which immediately returned in haste and disorder. Colonel Smith instantly prepared to retire; and at noon, one hundred years ago, at this hour, the British columns marched out of yonder square. Then and there began the retreat of British power from the Amen can colonies. Through seven weary and wasting years it continued. From Bunker Hill to Long Island, from Princeton, Trenton, and Saratoga, from the Brandywine, Monmouth, and King’s Mountain, through the bloody snow at Valley Forge, through the treachery of Arnold and of Lee, through cabals and doubt, and poverty and despair, but steadily urged by one great heart that strengthened the continent, - the heart of George Washington, - the British retreat went on from Concord Bridge and Lexington Green to the plains of Yorktown, and the king’s acknowledgment of American HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Independence. Of the beginning of this retreat, of that terrible march of the exhausted troops from this square to Boston, I have no time fitly to tell the tale. Almost as soon as it began, all Massachusetts was in motion. William Prescott mustered his regiment of minute- men at Pepperell; and Timothy Pickering, at Salem and Marblehead. Dedham left no man behind between the ages of sixteen and seventy. The minute-men of Worcester marched out of the town one way as the news went out the other, and, flying over the mountains, sent Berkshire to Bunker Hill. Meanwhile the men of Concord and the neighborhood, following the British over the Bridge, ran along the heights above the Lexington road, and posted themselves to await the enemy. The retreating British column, with wide-sweeping flankers, advanced steadily and slowly. No drum beat, no fife blew: there was the hushed silence of intense expectation. As the troops passed Merriam’s Corner, a little beyond Concord, and the flank-guard was called in, they turned suddenly, and fired upon the Americans. The minute-men and militia instantly returned the fire; and the battle began that lasted until sunset. When Colonel Smith ordered the retreat, although he and his officers may have had some misgivings, they had, probably, lost them in the contempt of regulars for the militia; but, from the moment of the firing at Merriam’s Corner, they were undeceived. The landscape was alive with armed men. They swarmed through every wood-path and by-way, across the pastures, and over the hills. Some came up in order along the roads, as from Reading and Billerica, from East Sudbury and Bedford; and John Parker’s company from Lexington waited in a woody defile to avenge the death of their comrades. The British column marched steadily on; while from trees, rocks, and fences, from houses, barns, and sheds, blazed the withering American fire. The hills echoed and flashed. The woods rang. The road became an endless ambuscade of flame. The Americans seemed to the appalled British troops to drop from the clouds, to spring from the earth. With every step, the attack was deadlier, the danger more imminent. For. some time, discipline, and the plain extremity of the petil, sustained the order of the British line. But the stifling clouds of dust, the consuming thirst, the exhaustion of utter fatigue, the wagons full of wounded men moaning and dying, madly pressing through the ranks to the front, the constant falling of their comrades, officers captured and killed, and, through all, the fatal and incessant shot of an unseen foe smote with terror that haughty column, which, shrinking, bleeding, wavering, reeled through Lexington panic-stricken and broken. The officers, seeing the dire extremity, fought their way to the front, and threatened the men with death if they advanced. The breaking line recoiled a little, and even steadied under one of the sharpest attacks of the day; for not as yet were Hessians hired to enslave Americans, and it was English blood and pluck on both sides. At two o’clock in the afternoon, a half-mile beyond Lexington meeting-ho use, just as the English officers saw that destruction or surrender was the only alternative, Lord Percy, with a re-enforcement of twelve hundred men, came up, and, opening with two cannon upon the Americans, succored his flying and desperate comrades, who fell upon the ground among Percy’s troops, their parched tongues hanging from their mouths. The flower of General Gage’s army was now upon the field; but HDT WHAT? INDEX

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its commander saw at once that its sole hope of safety was to continue the retreat. After half an hour’s delay, the march was resumed, and with it the barbarities, as well as the sufferings, of war. Lord Percy threw out flanking-parties, which entered the houses upon the line of march, plundering and burning. The fields of Menotomy, or Arlington, through which lay the road, became a plain of blood and fire. But the American pursuit was relentless and beyond Lexington the lower counties and towns came hurrying to the battle. Many a man afterward famous was conspicuous that day; and, near West Cambridge, Joseph Warren was the inspiring soul of the struggle. It was now past five o’clock. The British ammunition was giving out. The officers, too much exposed in the saddle, alighted, and marched with the men, who, as they approached Charlestown, encountered the. hottest fire of the day. General Gage had learned the perilous extremity of his army from a messenger sent by Percy, and had issued a proclamation threatening to lay Charlestown in ashes if the troops were attacked in the streets. The town hummed with the vague and appalling rumors of the events of the day, and, just before sunset, the excited inhabitants heard the distant guns, and soon saw the British troops running along the old Cambridge road to Charlestown Neck, firing as they came. They had just escaped the militia seven hundred strong from Salem and Marblehead, — the flower of Essex; and, as the sun was setting, they entered Charlestown and gained the shelter of their frigate-guns. Then General Heath ordered the American pursuit to stop, and the battle was over. But all that day and night the news was flying from mouth to mouth, from heart to heart, rousing every city, town, and solitary farm in the colonies; and before the last shot of the minute-men on the British retreat from Concord Bridge was fired, or the last wounded grenadier had been rowed across the river, the whole country was in arms. Massachusetts, New England, America, were closing around the city; and the siege of Boston, and the war of American Independence, had begun. Such was the opening battle of the Revolution, - a conflict, which, so far as we can see, saved civil liberty in two hemispheres, - saved England as well as America, and whose magnificent results shine through the world as the beacon-light of free popular government. And who won this victory? The minute-men and militia, who, in the history of our English race, have been always the vanguard of freedom. The minute-man of the American Revolution - who was he? He was the husband and father, who, bred to love liberty, and to know that lawful liberty is the sole guaranty of peace and progress, left the plough in the furrow, and the hammer on the bench, and, kissing wife and children, marched to die - or to be free. He was the son and lover, the plain, shy youth of the singing-school and the village choir, whose heart beat to arms for his country, and who felt, though he could not say, with the old English cavalier, - “I could not love thee, deare, so much, Loved I not honor more.” The minute-man of the Revolution! he was the old, the middle-aged, and the young. He was Captain Charles Miles of Concord, who said that he went to battle as he went to church. He was Captain Davis of Acton, who reproved his men for jesting on the march. He was Deacon Josiah Haynes of HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Sudbury, eighty years old, who marched with his company to the South Bridge at Concord, then joined in the hot pursuit to Lexington, and fell as gloriously as Warren at Bunker Hill. He was James Hayward of Acton, twenty-two years old, foremost in that deadly race from Concord to Charlestown, who raised his piece at the same moment with a British soldier, each exclaiming, “You are a dead man!” The Briton dropped, shot through the heart. James Hayward fell mortally wounded. “Father,” he said, “I started with forty balls: I have three left. I never did such a day’s work before. Tell mother not to mourn too much; and tell her whom I love more than my mother, that I am not sorry I turned out.” This was the minute-man of the Revolution, the rural citizen trained in the common school, the church, and the town meeting, who carried a bayonet that thought, and whose gun, loaded with a principle, brought down not a Wan, but a system. Him we gratefully recall to-day, - him, in yon manly figure wrought in the metal which but feebly typifies his inexorable will, we commit in his immortal youth to the reverence of our children. And here among these peaceful fields, - here in the county whose children first gave their blood for American union and independence, and, eighty-six years later, gave it first also for a truer union and a larger liberty, - here in the heart of Middlesex, county of Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill, stand fast, Son of Liberty, as the minute-man stood at the Old North Bridge! But should we or our descendants, false to liberty, false to justice and humanity, betray in any way their cause, spring into life as a hundred years ago, take one more step, descend, and lead us, as God led you in saving America, to save the hopes of man! At the end of a century, we can see the work of this day as our fathers could not: we can see that then the final movement began of a process long and unconsciously preparing, which was to in trust liberty to new forms and institutions that seemed full of happy promise for mankind. And now, for nearly a century, what was formerly called the experiment of a representative republic of imperial extent and power has been tried. Has it fulfilled the hopes of its founders, and the just expectations of mankind? I have already glanced at its early and fortunate conditions, and we know how vast and splendid were its early growth and development. Our material statistics soon dazzled the world. Europe no longer sneered, but gazed in wonder, waiting and watching. Our population doubled every fifteen years; and our wealth every ten years. Every little stream among the hills turned a mill; and the great inland seas, bound by the genius of Clinton to the ocean, became the highway of boundless commerce, the path of unprecedented empire. Our farms were the granary of other lands. Our cottonfields made England rich. Still we chased the whale in the Pacific Ocean, and took fish in the tumbling seas of Labrador. We hung out friendly lights along thousands of miles of coast to tempt the trade of every clime; and wherever, on the dim rim of the globe, there was a harbor, it was white with American sails. Meanwhile at home the political foreboding of Federalism had died away; and its very wail seemed a tribute to the pacific glories of the land. “The ornament of beauty is Suspect, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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A crow that flies in heaven’s sweetest air.” The government was felt to be but a hand of protection and blessing; labor was fully employed; capital was secure; the army was a jest; enterprise was pushing through the Alleghanies, grasping and settling the El Dorado of the prairies, and still braving the wilderness, reached out toward the Rocky Mountains, and, reversing the voyages of Columbus, rediscovered the Old World from the New. America was the Benjamin of nations, the best-beloved of Heaven; and the starry flag of the United States flashed a line of celestial light around the world, the harbinger of freedom, peace, and prosperity. Such was the vision and the exulting faith of fifty years ago. “Atlantis hath risen from the ocean!” cried Edward Everett to applauding Harvard; and Daniel Webster answered from Bunker Hill, “If we fail, popular governments are impossible.” So far as they could see, they stood among the unchanged conditions of the early republic. And those conditions are familiar. The men who founded the republic were few in number, planted chiefly along a temperate coast, remote from the world. They were a homogeneous people, increasing by their own multiplication, speaking the same language, of the same general religious faith, cherishing the same historic and political traditions, universally educated, hardy, thrifty, with general equality of fortune, and long and intelligent practice of self-government, while the slavery that existed among them, inhuman in itself, was not seriously defended, and was believed to be disappearing. But within the last half-century causes then latent, or wholly incalculable before, have radically changed those conditions; and we enter upon the second century of the republic with responsibilities which neither our fathers, nor the men of fifty years. ago, could possibly foresee. Think, for instance, of the change wrought by foreign immigration, with all its necessary consequences. In the State of Massachusetts to-day, the number of citizens of foreign birth who have no traditional association with the story of Concord and Lexington is larger than the entire population of the State on the day of battle. The first fifty years after that day brought to the whole country fewer immigrants than are now living in Massachusetts alone. At the end of that half-century, when Mr. Everett stood here, less than three hundred thousand foreign immigrants had come to this country; but, in the fifty years that have since elapsed, there has been an immigration of more than nine millions of persons. The aggregate population in the last fifty years has advanced somewhat more than threefold; the foreign immigration, more than thirty-fold; so that now immigrants and the children of immigrants are a quarter of the whole population. This enormous influx of foreigners has added an immense ignorance, and entire unfamiliarity with republican ideas and habits, to the voting-class. It has brought other political traditions, other languages, and other religious faiths. It has introduced powerful and organized influences not friendly to the republican principle of freedom of thought and action. It is to the change produced by immigration that we owe the first serious questioning of the public school system, which was the nursery of the early republic, and which is to-day the palladium of free popular government. Do not misunderstand me. I am not lamenting, even in thought, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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the boundless hospitality of America. I do not forget that the whole European race came hither but yesterday, and has been domesticated here not yet three hundred years. I am not insensible of the proud claim of America to be the refuge of the oppressed of every clime; nor do I doubt in her maturity her power, if duly directed, to assimilate whole nations, if need be, as in her infancy she achieved her independence, and in her prime maintained her unity. But if she has been the hope of the world, and is so still, it is because she has understood both the conditions and the perils of freedom, and watches carefully the changing conditions under which republican liberty is to be maintained. She will still welcome to her ample bosom all who choose to be called her children. But, if she is to remain the mother of liberty, it will not be the result of those craven counsels whose type is the ostrich burying his head in the sand, but of that wise and heroic statesmanship, whose symbol is her own heaven-soaring eagle, gazing undazzled even at the spots upon the sun. Again: within the century, steam has enormously expanded the national domain; and every added mile is an added strain to our system. The marvellous ease of communication both by rail and telegraph tends to obliterate conservative local lines, and to make a fatal centralization more possible. The telegraph, which instantly echoes the central command at the remotest point, becomes both a facility and a temptation to exercise Command; while below upon the rail the armed blow swiftly follows the word that flies along the wire. Steam concentrates population in cities. But, when the government was formed, the people were strictly rural, and there were but six cities with eight thousand inhabitants or more. In 1790, only one-thirtieth of the population lived in cities: in 1870, more than one-fifth. Steam destroys the natural difficulties of communication; but those very difficulties are barriers against invasion, and protect the independence of each little community, the true foundation of our free republican system. In New England, the characteristic village and local life of the last century perishes in the age of steam. Meanwhile the enormous accumulation of capital engaged in great enterprises, with unscrupulous greed of power, constantly tends to make itself felt in corruption of the press, which moulds public opinion, and the legislature which makes the laws. Thus steam and the telegraph tend to the concentration of capital, and the consolidation of political power, - a tendency which threatens liberty, and which was wholly unknown when the republic began, and was unsuspected fifty years ago. Sweet liberty if a mountain nymph, because mountains baffle the pursuer. But the inventions that level mountains and annihilate space alarm that gracious spirit, who sees her greater insecurity. But stay, heaven-eyed maid, and stay forever! Behold, our devoted wills shall be thy invincible Alps, our loyal hearts thy secret bower, the spirit of our fathers a cliff of adamant, that engineering skill can never pierce nor any foe can scale. But the most formidable problem for popular government which the opening of our second century presents springs from a source which was unsuspected a hundred years ago, and which the orators of fifty years since forbore to name. This was the system of slave labor, which vanished in civil war. But slavery had not been the fatal evil that it was, if, with its abolition, its HDT WHAT? INDEX

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consequences had disappeared. It holds us still in mortmain. Its dead hand is strong as its living power was terrible. Emancipation has left the republic exposed to a new and extraordinary trial of the principles and practices of free government. A civilization resting upon slavery, as formerly in part of the country, however polished and ornate, is necessarily aristocratic, and hostile to republican equality, while the exigencies of such a society forbid that universal education which is indispensable to wise popular government. When war emancipates the slaves and makes them equal citizens, the ignorance and venality which are the fatal legacies of slavery to the subject class, whether white or black, and the natural alienation of the master class, which alone has political knowledge and experience, with all the secret conspiracies, the reckless corruption, the political knavery, springing naturally from such a situation, and ending often in menacing disorder that seems to invite the military interference - and supervision of the government -all this accumulation of difficulty and danger lays a strain along the very fibre of free institutions; for it suggests the twofold question, whether the vast addition of the ignorance of the emancipated vote to that of the immigrant vote may not overwhelm the intelligent vote of the country, and whether the constant appeal to the central hand of power - however necessary it may seem, and for whatever reason of humanity and justice it may be urged-must not necessarily destroy that local self-reliance which was the very seed of the American republic, and fatally familiarize the country with that employment of military power which is inconsistent with free institutions, and bold resistance to which has forever consecrated the spot on which we stand. These are some of the more obvious changes in the conditions under which the republic is to be maintained. I mention them merely; but every wise patriot sees and ponders them. Does he therefore despond? Heaven forbid! When was there ever an auspicious day for humanity that was not one of doubt and conflict? The robust moral manhood of America confronts the future with steadfast faith and indomitable will, raising the old battle-cry of the race for larger liberty and surer law. It sees clouds, indeed, as Sam Adams saw them when this day dawned; but with him it sees through and through them, and with him thanks God for the glorious morning. There is, indeed, a fashion of scepticism of American principles, even among some Americans; but it is one of the oldest and worst fashions in our history. There is a despondency, which fondly fancies, that, in its beginning, the American republic moved proudly toward the future with all the splendid assurance of the Persian Xerxes descending on the shores of Greece, but that it sits to-day among shattered hopes, like Xerxes above his ships at Salamis. And when was this golden age? Was it when John Adams appealed from the baseness of his own time to the greater candor and patriotism of this? Was it when Fisher Ames mourned over lost America, like Rachel for her children, and would not be comforted? Was it when William Wirt said that he sought in vain for a man fit for the presidency or for great responsibility? Was it when Chancellor Livingston saw only a threatening future, because Congress was so feeble? Was it when we ourselves saw the industry, the commerce, the society, the church, the courts, the statesmanship, the conscience, of America seemingly prostrate under the foot of HDT WHAT? INDEX

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slavery? Was this the golden age of these doubting sighs, this the region behind the north wind of these reproachful regrets? And is it the young nation which with prayer and faith, with untiring devotion and unconquerable will, has lifted its bruised and broken body from beneath that crushing heel, whose future is distrusted? Nay, this very scepticism is one of the foes that we must meet and conquer. Remember, fellow-citizens, that the impulse of republican government given a century ago at the Old North Bridge has shaken every government in the world, but has been itself wholly unshaken by them. It has made monarchy impossible in France. It has freed the Russian serfs. It has united Germany against ecclesiastical despotism. It has flashed into the night of Spain. It has emancipated Italy, and discrowned the pope as king. In England, repealing the disabilities of Catholic and Hebrew, it forecasts the separation of Church and State, and step by step transforms monarchy into another form of republic. And here at home how glorious its story! In a tremendous war between men of the same blood, - men who recognize and respect each other’s valor,-we have proved what was always doubted,- the prodigious power, endurance, and resources of. a republic; and, in emancipating an eighth of the population, we have at last gained the full opportunity of the republican principle. Sir, it is the signal felicity of this occasion, that, on the one hundredth anniversary of the first battle in the war of American Independence, I may salute you, who led to victory the citizen- soldiers of American liberty, as the first elected president of the free republic of the United States. Fortunate man! to whom God has given the priceless boon of associating your name with that triumph of freedom which will presently bind the East and the West, the North and the South, in a closer and more perfect union for the establishment of justice, and the security of the blessings of liberty, than these States have ever known. Fellow-citizens, that union is the lofty task which this hallowed day and this sacred spot impose upon us. And what cloud of doubt so dark hangs over us as that which lowered above the colonies when the troops of the king marched into this town, and the men of Middlesex resolved to pass the Bridge? With their faith and their will we shall win their victory. No royal governor, indeed, sits in yon stately capital, no hostile fleet for many a year has vexed the waters of our coasts, nor is any army but our own ever likely to tread our soil. Not such are our enemies to-day. They do not come proudly stepping to the drum- beat, with bayonets flashing in the morning sun. But wherever party spirit shall strain the ancient guaranties of freedom; or bigotry and ignorance shall lay their fatal hands upon education; or the arrogance of caste shall strike at equal rights; or corruption shall poison the very springs of national life, - there, minute-men of liberty, are your Lexington Green and Concord Bridge; and as you love your country and your kind, and would have your children rise up and call you blessed, spare not the enemy! Over the hills, out of the earth, down from the clouds, pour in resistless might. Fire from every rock and tree, from door and window, from hearthstone and chamber; hang upon his flank and rear from noon to sunset, and so, through a land blazing with holy indignation, hurl the hordes of ignorance and corruption and injustice back, back, in utter defeat and ruin. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1876

Our national birthday, Tuesday the 4th of July: There was a well-publicized celebration in Concord of the 100th birthday of the Declaration of Independence. The trains out from Cambridge past Walden Pond were so crowded that two of the expected dignitaries, Mark Twain (who had just published TOM SAWYER) and William Dean Howells, were unable to board and would miss the oration by Waldo Emerson, the ode by James Russell Lowell, and under the weight of all this profundity the spectacular collapse of the speakers’ platform. It was unusually cold, the dinner tent was inadequate to the occasion, and a lot of the visitors would need to deal with the difficulties by getting drunk. The Boston Daily News would comment, about this fiasco, that “There is no difficulty now in understanding the hurried retreat of the British from Concord and Lexington.” Judge John Shepard Keyes orated at Concord’s 1850 Townhouse that “the hill extended beyond where we meet tonight to the road leading to the north bridge. In the ragged curb where that road wound around the side of the hill was buried one of the British soldiers who died of wounds received in the fight at the bridge” (John S. Keyes Papers, Special Collections, Concord Free Public Library).

Centennial celebrations (many are three-day celebrations, 3-5 July) were occurring throughout the United States and abroad.

In Philadelphia at Fairmount Park, two separate celebrations included the German societies unveiling a statue of Baron Alexander von Humboldt and the dedication, including an address provided by John Lee Carroll, Governor of Maryland, of the Catholic Temperance Fountain. Meanwhile, Bayard Taylor’s “National Ode, July 4, 1876,” was read at Independence Square, while Susan B. Anthony and others belonging to the National Woman’s Suffrage Association presented and read their Declaration of Rights for Women at the Centennial Celebration. In Philadelphia as well, General Sherman reviews the troops as they paraded.

In Washington DC, at the 1st Congregational Church, the poem “Centennial Bells,” by Bayard Taylor was read by the poet.

The long-standing tradition of Navy vessels participating in July 4th celebrations in Bristol, Rhode Island, began in this year with the presence there of the sloop USS Juniata.

In Washington, 11 couples celebrated the 4th by getting married, while a committee of 13 members of Congress attended a celebration of the Oldest Inhabitants Association, and 300 artillery blasts were fired: 100 at sunrise, 100 at noon, and 100 at sunset.

In Richmond, Virginia, the US and Virginia flags were raised together on the Capitol, for the first time on the 4th in 16 years. The Richmond Grays, an African-American regiment, was in Washington celebrating.

In New Orleans, the monitor Canonicus fired a salute from the Mississippi River.

In Hamburg, South Carolina, black militiamen attempted to march in the parade and white townspeople killed some of them. (These white murderers would of course be found innocent by a white jury.)

In Montgomery, Alabama, the Declaration of Independence was read by Neil Blue, the oldest citizen of Montgomery and the only survivor of those who voted for delegates to the territorial convention which had adopted the Constitution under which Alabama had been admitted into the Union in 1819. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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In San Francisco, a mock engagement with the iron-clad Monitor occurred and there was a parade that stretched over 4 miles in length, boasting fully 10,000 participants. The city provided its citizens with a 1st public exhibition of electric light.

In Chicago, at the Turners and Socialists celebration, a revised Declaration of Independence from the socialist’s standpoint was distributed.

In Joliet and Quincy, Illinois, the cornerstone of a new Court House was laid.

In Freeport, Illinois and Chicago, the Declaration of Independence was read in both English and German.

In Evanston, Illinois, a centennial poem “The Girls of the Period” was publicly read by Mrs. Emily H. Miller.

In Wilmette, Illinois, a woman (Miss Aunie Gedney) read the Declaration of Independence.

In Savannah, Georgia, a centennial tree was planted, accompanied by appropriate speeches.

In New-York, on the eve of the 4th, an Irish couple had named their baby American Centennial Maloney.

In Rochester, New York, a centennial oak was planted in Franklin Square.

In Utica, New York, 30 veterans of the War of 1812 joined in a parade — along with a couple of Napoleon’s soldiers for good measure. CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1876

June 16, Friday: The Republican National Convention in Cincinnati nominated Ohio’s governor Rutherford B. Hayes for President of the United States of America, and New York’s William A. Wheeler for Vice President.

James Russell Lowell threw his support to Hayes and would be paid off by being appointed as minister to Spain (1877-1880) and ambassador to Great Britain (1880-1885). Lowell would achieve ample popularity in the literary and political circles of England and be anointed as president of the Wordsworth Society, succeeding Matthew Arnold.

Horace Rice Hosmer of Concord would comment that “I voted for freedom every time until Hayes made me tired,” and to understand this comment you will need to know something about the political climate of those times. Explanation follows.

Founded in 1854, for its first couple of decades the Republican Party had promoted African-American parity. Abraham Lincoln and the “Radical Republicans” in Congress had striven to end slavery and to give black men full citizenship. As early as this year, however –not 1960, as the Philadelphia conventioneers suggested in the year 2000– the leaders of the GOP began to abandon black Americans. In this year’s presidential election, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Ohio Republican Rutherford B. Hayes agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South in exchange for southern Democratic support, and thus secured the presidency for himself over his rival Samuel J. Tilden.39 Democrats would seize power in the South and ushered in legalized “Jim Crow” segregation.40

When the Bush family touts its party’s history, they do not seem to be aware that Republican advocacy of black equality was already waning by the early 20th century. Not even on the scourge of lynching would Republicans muster enough enthusiasm to take federal action. Although House Republicans would enact an anti-lynching bill in January 1922, their Senate counterparts wouldn’t agree to this. COLDBLOODED MURDER

Heartland Republicans such as William Borah of Idaho would ally with Southern Democrats to defeat the bill, arguing that it licensed federal interference with states’ autonomy — that is, that it was unacceptable because

39. At some point prior to this corrupt “Hayes-Tilden” bargain, the plantation masters of the American South had toyed with the idea of replacing their blacks with Chinese. The main difficulty with that fantasy was the numbers: Coolie laborers could be earning somewhere between $0.90 and $1.50 per day out west, building railroad tracks, and the Southern planters certainly were not entertaining the idea of paying anyone that kind of money — they were not in the habit of paying their labor more than about $0.75 to $1.00 per day. Although a few coolies had been obtained, they had of course soon voted with their feet, disappearing from the Louisiana plantations and beginning their own enterprises as fishermen and as truck farmers in the vicinity of New Orleans. (Bravo!) 40. “Lincoln freed the slaves.” Sure, you believe that! Why don’t I also believe that? –The general impact of the Emancipation Proclamation and the XIIIth Amendment to the US Constitution was seen not so much in the leveling upward of the condition of the “liberated” black slaves to match the previous condition of the small Southern free black population, as in the leveling downward of the condition of these former freemen, under the “Jim Crow” Black Code of segregation, to the condition of “sharecropper” — someone who would always be, as depicted in the movie “The Color Purple,” merely a disposable slave of the white society as a while, toward whom no particular white person needed to display any affect other than hostility or any behavior other than persecution. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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it would prevent the Southern states from torturing and murdering their own citizens.

Well, but in writing the above, I seem to have made it seem that what happened was all the fault of the Republicans.

The fact is, after our Civil War and our supposed “abolition of slavery,” the situation had gone back to very much business as usual. Few, if any, former American slaves had received the “40 acres and a mule” which had been promised, because the Confiscation Bill, which would have carved up plantations of rebel leaders to create these lands for redistribution, would never be enacted by the federal Congress. What happened was that the southern white representatives were accepted back into the federal legislature too early, and once they got back in, the existing provisions of the Electoral College, which had always favored southern states over northern ones and rural states over urban states, operated to grant them a great deal of national influence. Basically, whereas before the Civil War the southern influence in the Electoral College amounted to one vote for each white adult, plus only three-fifths of a vote for each adult of color (cast by the southern white adult HDT WHAT? INDEX

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for the benefit of the southern white adult), under the new system the southern influence in the Electoral college amounted to one vote for each white adult, plus one vote for each adult of color (still cast by the southern white adult for the benefit of the southern white adult). That is to say, in this specific sense, in the sense of federal political influence, actually the Southern whites had won the Civil War, effectively garnering even greater national political power for themselves. Under these new circumstances, it is not hard to see why it was that black emancipation was never to be pursued with any great rigor or attention. By and large, those American black families that owned land in the South often were the families of veterans of the Union army who had purchased that land with their wages. Faced with continual assaults by the Ku Klux Klan and by unfair

treatment in the marketplace, it would have been a miracle if any of these freedmen managed to maintain such landholdings. Indeed, many freed Southern black families, known as “Exodusters,” elected to move on to Kansas and to Oklahoma. Those who became “sharecroppers” quickly lost all capability of movement, for this freedom was abrogated by the creation of a system of debt peonage, tied to the crop lien, which reinstituted slavery in all but name, or, to put this another way, instituted a serfdom, as found for instance in Russia or in medieval Europe, in all but name. Since the tenants always had to mortgage their portion of the crop in order to purchase needed daily food and supplies, they almost always remained in debt to the landowner and thus needed to work another season to pay it of, and on and on. When sharecroppers did move, usually this was after the owner, for whatever reason, had elected no longer “to rent to them.” Some ex-slaves may have seen HDT WHAT? INDEX

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a distinction between slavery before the civil strife and slavery after the civil strive but the preponderance of evidence, especially from blues and folk songs, suggests that they knew things weren’t all that different in a practical sense. White sharecroppers probably held on to the belief that they possessed mobility and freedom longer than did black sharecroppers, but the collapse of the “agricultural ladder” (the idea that one might move up from hired hand to renter to landowner) would by the 1890s render this virtually impossible. The number of sharecroppers and small farmers engaged in nightriding against the large land owners and one open revolt, Oklahoma’s Green Corn Rebellion, signaled an awareness that sharecropper was a snare and once trapped, escape was unlikely.

Human insolence knowing no limits, after Reconstruction any number of former white slavemasters attempted to obtain compensation for their freed slaves, from the federal government. Here is one of their petitions: State of Mississippi, County of Claiborne (“Claiborne” is written in a blank left on the form) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Personally came before the undersigned, a Justice of the peace in and for the County and State aforesaid, ______who being duly sworn according to law, deposes and states on oath, that on the first day of January, 1863, the date on which the Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Lincoln, dated September 22d, 1862, went into effect, ______was the lawful owner in ______own right, under the Constitution and Laws of the United States, and of the State of Mississippi, of each and all the slaves numbering ______that the value of each was the amount set opposite to each name, in lawful money of the United States, as set forth in the list embraced in this affidavit, and the whole value as there set forth was ______Dollars, that the legal title in and to the said named slaves was vested in ______on the first day of January, 1863, the day on which said Emancipation Proclamation liberated said slaves and divested ______of all right and title thereto, and the loss of each and all of said slaves was incurred in consequence of said Emancipation Proclamation, and ______do hereby appoint and constitute Joshua and Thomas Green, trading under the firm of J. & T. Green, _____ legal attorneys to represent in ______interest the said claim for the value of the said slaves, against the Government of the United States, or in the Congress of the United States, in the Court of Claims of the United States, or in any United States District Courts, or in any of the State Courts in States constituting the United States, to maintain actions for, recover and receipt for all or such payment or remuneration as may be obtainable for the said slaves, and their receipts for such amount shall be in law as if made by

Sworn to and subscribed before me, this ______187 J.P. (SEAL)

The claim is based on a supposed right of compensation for slaves liberated by the Emancipation Proclamation, on the basis of the US Constitution. (Mississippi’s having rejected the Constitution would have been quite irrelevant, the point being that the federal government had not rejected it.) It appears as if this Green law firm was collecting such suppositious claims sometime in the 1870s, perhaps after the end of Congressional Reconstruction, perhaps for a class action lawsuit, in hopes that the Hayes administration might create some scheme for compensation of slave owners, even if they were in rebellion at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation. We note in passing that these folks would have had an inordinately difficult time attempting to establish at law that their slaves had actually been lost in consequence of the Emancipation Proclamation, since that proclamation hadn’t actually resulted in anyone obtaining any emancipation documentation! In the national legislature, however, given a certain degree of good will, a certain measure of good ol’ white boy winking and nodding, the Green law firm might have been persuasive. It appears to me that whether they would have obtained the remuneration themselves, or this Green law firm would have been able to retain the remuneration, would have depended upon some separate document of agreement, which we do not have before us. Perhaps there would have been some sort of “retainer” document, which stipulated that x% of the proceeds would constitute a commission for the law firm. Bear in mind that after the southern states had HDT WHAT? INDEX

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been allowed back into the union, they had a somewhat greater degree of control over the federal government than they had had heretofore, because their numbers of representatives in the US House of Representatives had swollen from a number that counted each black slave as 3/5ths of a person for electoral purposes, to a number that counted each former black slave as a whole person for electoral purposes. With the end of the Reconstruction, these black Southerners could no longer represent themselves, and were again being “represented” for their own good by Southern white politicians! On that basis, I can imagine that various persons must have been having hot fantasies, of being able to vote remuneration for themselves. After all, prior to the Emancipation Proclamation, the slaveowning members of the House of Representatives had been allowed to dip into the federal coffers and fill their pockets, to the tune of $200 for each slave they owned in the District of Columbia. What they had managed to accomplish once, they might be able to accomplish again! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1880

Here is the US ambassador to Great Britain, none other than James Russell Lowell, as he seemed in this year to a British caricaturist: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1884

January 6, Sunday: Rochester, New York’s Democrat and Chronicle carried its 1st pictures, of politician James G. Blaine, US Ambassador to England James Russell Lowell, and M. Roustan, new French minister to the US.

Great Britain ordered an evacuation of the Sudan.

Olive Gilbert died. (She had never married. She was well educated. She had been a friend of the Garrisons and a close friend of Sarah Benson. She had lived for several years in Kentucky. She had been a member of the group at the Association of Industry and Education in Northampton, Massachusetts. The body would be placed with those of her relatives in the South Cemetery at Brooklyn, Connecticut, located a half mile south of center on Canterbury Road. Other than this, and her writing down of Sojourner Truth’s narrative for her, nothing much is known. For instance, we have no idea what she looked like.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1885

February 19, Thursday: William J. Brown, who had been blind for some time, died of apoplexy in Providence, Rhode Island. His funeral would be held at the Baptist Church on Congdon Street, after which his body would be buried in the North Burial Ground.

Upon the death of his 2d wife Frances Dunlap Lowell in England, James Russell Lowell retired from public life.

December 21, Monday: Thomas Russell delivered an address at the Anniversary of the Pilgrim Society, after a dinner at which the Honorable James Russell Lowell was present. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1887

Publication in Cambridge by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. of more of H.G.O. Blake’s excerpts from Henry Thoreau’s journal, as WINTER: FROM THE JOURNAL OF HENRY D. THOREAU. H.G.O. BLAKE’S “WINTER”

In this edition Blake suppressed something that Thoreau had learned in 1840 from Professor François Pierre Guillaume Guizot’s ESSAY ON THE CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE OF WASHINGTON IN THE REVOLUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:

We are all familiar with the censorship of A YANKEE IN CANADA by George William Curtis, whose editorial correction of “very flagrant heresies” and “defiant Pantheism” led to Thoreau’s withdrawal of the manuscript from Putnam’s Monthly Magazine. We are all familiar with the censorship of THE MAINE WOODS by bigoted, timid, mean, cowardly James Russell Lowell, whose suppression of the concluding observation “It is as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still” on behalf of The Atlantic Monthly led to Thoreau’s demanding from him an apology. Here, however, is a 3d instance of censorship, one of which we seem until now to have been unaware. Unlike these previous two censorships to which Thoreau had been able to react –and to which Thoreau did react– this is a censorship that occurred after his death against which he was therefore defenseless. When, in this year, H.G.O. Blake went to publish extracts from Thoreau’s journal in the WINTER volume, he suppressed the final remark in Henry’s journal section about our worshipful reprocessing of DWM George Washington: “But we are not sorry he is dead.” This shattering final remark tied a knot in the tale. It is almost as if Thoreau was uttering more truth than his friend Blake considered that the general American public could be able to bear! For what is it, to point out that in fact we are not sorry that General, then President, George Washington is dead? –It is to point out that our usage of these “founding father” figures has little to do with them as actual human beings, having instead to do with them in abstraction, as functioning cogs in a public process. While he was still alive this human being might begin to misbehave, and sadly embarrass us. Only when one of these actual human beings has been safely interred, do we dare thus to iconize him — reduce him to a functionality as a cultural artifact. Thus it comes about that –although of course we do not face this unsentimental fact– we’re not at all sorry he died. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1891

August 8, Saturday: On page 539 of the Worcester Light, the column “Books and Bookmen” offered Henry Thoreau’s pencil as “a reminder of the man who gave a new gloss to the out-door life, who imparted charm to Walden Pond and to rural Concord that even Hawthorne and Emerson failed to create.”

August 12, Wednesday: James Russell Lowell died in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

August 22, Saturday: Walter Lewin offered, in The Academy, an “Obituary. James Russell Lowell,” He wrote in regard to Lowell’s “excess of ‘self-consciousness,’ that sometimes barred him for forming an impersonal and impartial estimate,” He offered that Lowell’s “estimate of Thoreau is as perverse as Margaret Fuller’s estimate of himself. When his selfconsciousness was excited, his criticism was hopeless.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1892

May: The Arab slavemasters of the Belgian Congo rebelled.

On St. Helena, Reverend Daine experimented with the breeding of silkworms and the cultivation of cotton.

George William Curtis made a final public address in New-York, his topic being James Russell Lowell, recently deceased. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1898

November 29, Tuesday: Clive Staples Lewis was born.

The Malolos Congress approved a constitution for the First Philippine Republic.

Thanks to the amply published derogations of such as Waldo Emerson, Ellery Channing, James Russell Lowell, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, by the end of the 19th Century it would be possible for any number of people who had never known Henry Thoreau to praise his writing while waxing wise, and simultaneously expressing considerable contempt for him as a human being. For instance, Thoreau had been the apostle of the idea that books and gaslight and conventionality and sometimes even companionship are mistakes, shutting one out from a communion with nature which is higher and better — of such thoughts he was the apostle. He never questioned that he was a god Apollo. He told the story of Nature in undress as only one who had hidden in her bedroom could have told it. Personal traits that Emerson considered had been in one way a strength, in another way could be considered a weakness: for instance, he was always self-conscious and friendship was to him only a means of developing himself. He was dry, priggish, and selfish, and imitated many things about Emerson such as his manner of speech but never imitated the sweetness of Emerson’s character. It was profit to himself that he was after in his intimacies with others, moral profit certainly but still profit to himself. He was not in fact a man of principle, as is shown by his obtaining release from prison by allowing someone else to pay his tax: note by way of radical contrast, that Emerson would have died in that Concord jail cell had it been with him a matter of principle which conscience compelled. Thoreau’s contribution to mankind is great not because of his oddity but in spite of it, and except for it would have been much greater. His friends he treated as if they were mere dictionaries, rather than human beings who needed pleasure or laughter or kisses or any quality of flesh and blood! As for taking his arm, one might as soon think of taking the arm of an elm tree. He cared little for manners, describing a person of manners as an insect in a tumbler. It cost him nothing to say no; indeed he found this much easier than to say yes. He could be as rude to friends as to strangers, and when he was polite to someone who invited him to visit, that was unusual for him. Not a particle of respect had he for the opinions of any man or body of men, and he declared at 30 that he had yet to hear the 1st syllable of valuable advice from his seniors. He found savage pleasure in defacing the traditional idols of our religion, declaring he would sooner worship the parings of his own nails. Good works meant nothing to him and he very rarely indeed, if ever, felt any itching to make himself useful to his fellow-man. Naturally he despised clergymen, who speak of God as though they enjoy a monopoly of the subject. His curse was his self-confidence: he believed in neither idols nor demons, but put his sole trust in his own strength of body and soul. He was in person small and inferior looking, so homely that he was usually assumed by strangers to be a peddler, and in result he was consistently unmindful of his personal appearance; in fact when someone robbed a local bank while he was walking on Cape Cod, he fell under suspicion. His greatest weakness was what he probably considered his greatest strength, the habit of glancing off from the fact to moralizing. He stated everything as a paradox. A certain habit of antagonism defaced his earlier writings, a trick of rhetoric not quite outgrown in his later, of substituting for the obvious word or thought its diametrical opposite. His poems were often rude and defective. Much of what he deemed sincerity was a morbid desire to be different from other people. In matters religious he showed a warped judgment. When he built up a theory of friendship and of love based on intellectual estimate and excluding the affections, he was singular but he deprived himself of the most needed help his kind can give. By supposing the rest of mankind to be fools, he was able to suppose himself by contrast to be wise. His attitude toward the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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world was superficial, as is revealed by his abundant inconsistencies. Habitually prodigal of his own health, through under-feeding and overwork he broke down his constitution. His lungs became severely affected and so of course at his own fault for not being more careful he reaped a premature death at 45. Shame, that.

A case in point, for this sort of easy personal derogation, would be AUTHORS’ BIRTHDAYS: CONTAINING THE EXERCISES FOR THE CELEBRATION OF THE BIRTHDAYS OF BAYARD TAYLOR, LOWELL, HOWELLS, MOTLEY, EMERSON, SAXE, THOREAU, E.S. PHELPS-WARD, PARKMAN, CABLE, ALDRICH, J.C. HARRIS (2d series. Standard Teachers’ Library), which on this day Charles William Bardeen was presenting for the higher education of America’s vulnerable children, schoolchildren who might be seduced by Thoreau’s crafted sentences into betraying their own lives: I Who has not felt as he gazed upon the starlit sky, or reached the summit of a mountain, or saw the sun rise over an Adirondack lake, that books and gaslight and conventionality and sometimes even companionship were mistakes, shutting him out from a communion with nature which was higher and better? Of this thought Thoreau was the apostle. He declared that a day passed in the society of those Greek sages, as described in the banquet of Xenophon, would not be comparable with the dry wit of decayed cranberry vines, and the fresh Attic salt of the moss-beds;41 that in the sunset are all the qualities that can adorn a household, and that sometimes in a fluttering leaf one may hear all Christianity preached.42 II He was born July 12, 1817, in Concord, the only one of the group that made Concord such a noted literary centre who was a native of the village, and of all of them much the most exclusively a resident of Concord. He said he had a real genius for staying at home;43 that “cars sound like cares”44 and that it was not worth while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.45 “Better fifty fifty [sic] years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay. Then fifty years of Europe better one New England ray!”46 “What a fool he must be who thinks that his El Dorado is anywhere but where he lives!”47 he exclaims; and he declares that nothing is to be hoped for you if the bit of mould under your feet is not sweeter than any other in the world.48 “Henry talks about nature,” said Margaret Fuller, “just as if she’d been born and brought up in Concord.”49

III 41. A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. 42. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVI D THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 43. AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS, HENRY D. THOREAU, by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (Boston, 1882). 44. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVI D THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 45. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 46. A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. 47. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVI D THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 48. Biographical Sketch by R.W. Emerson, in MISCELLANIES, BY HENRY DAV ID THOREAU (Boston, 1894). 49. AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS, HENRY D. THOREAU, by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (Boston, 1882). HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

He was graduated from Harvard in 1837, without particular distinction; characteristically refusing the diploma because it cost five dollars and was not worth it. In his sophomore year he had kept a school of 70 pupils at Canton, where he was examined by the Rev. 0.A. Brownson, and boarded with him;50 and upon graduation he went to Maine seeking a school there. Being unsuccessful, he took the town school at Concord. Here he announced that he should not flog, but would talk morals as a punishment instead. After a fortnight a knowing deacon, one of the school committee, walked in and told Mr. Thoreau that he must flog and use the ferule, or the school would spoil. So he did, feruling six of his pupils after school, one of whom was the maid-servant in his own house. But it did not suit well with his conscience, and he reported to the committee that he should no longer keep their school.51 In 1843 he was for two months tutor in Mr. Wm. Emerson’s family; but he afterward declined the same place in Horace Greeley’s home at Chappaqua. He wrote: “I have thoroughly tried schoolkeeping, and found that my expenses were out of proportion to my income, for I was obliged to dress and train, not to say think and believe accordingly, and I lost my time into the bargain. As I did not teach for the good of my fellowmen, but simply for a livelihood this was a failure. Probably I should not consciously and deliberately forsake my particular calling to do the good which society demands of me to save the universe from annihilation.”52 IV Until 1847 he relied for support principally upon hand labor. Both he and his father were ingenious persons, the latter a pencil-maker. After his father’s death he carried on the pencil and plumbago business, and showed the punctuality and prudence which always distinguished him.53 For several years he supplied fine ground plumbago for electrotyping to publishers, among others to the Harpers.54 He also did occasional surveying. V But he worked as little as possible. He says he found he could meet the expenses of living by working six weeks a year;55 and he thought the seventh day should be man’s day of toil,-the other six his Sabbath of the affections and the soul, in which to range this widespread garden, and drink in the soft influences and sublime revelations of Nature.56 Let not to get a living be thy trade but thy sport.57 If you would live simply and wisely, life would be not a hardship but a pastime, as the pursuits of simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial.5859 He 50. THOREAU THE POET NATURALIST, WITH MEMORIAL VERSES, by William Ellery Channing (Boston, 1873). 51. THOREAU THE POET NATURALIST, WITH MEMORIAL VERSES, by William Ellery Channing (Boston, 1873). 52. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 53. THOREAU THE POET NATURALIST, WITH MEMORIAL VERSES, by William Ellery Channing (Boston, 1873). 54. AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS, HENRY D. THOREAU, by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (Boston, 1882). 55. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 56. AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS, HENRY D. THOREAU, by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (Boston, 1882). 57. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 58. THOREAU THE POET NATURALIST, WITH MEMORIAL VERSES, by William Ellery Channing (Boston, 1873). 59. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

wrote: “I am as unfit for any practical purpose,-! mean for the furtherance of the world’s ends,-as gossamer for ship timber; and I, who am going to he a pencil-maker to-morrow, can sympathise with god Apollo, who served King Ametus for awhile on earth. But I believe he found it for his advantage at last, and I am sure I shall, though I shall hold the nobler part at least out of the service.” This comparison is frequent in his writings. He never questions that he is a god Apollo. VI He was naturally deft in the handling of tools. He boasts: “A man once applied to me to go into a factory, stating conditions and wages, observing that I succeeded in shutting a window of a railroad car in which we were travelling, when the other passengers had failed.”60 In a thunder-storm he sometimes erected a transitory house by means of his pocket-knife, rapidly paring away the white-pine and oak, taking the lower limbs of a large tree and pitching on the cut brush for a roof! Wanting to measure a bank, he says: “I borrowed the plane and square, level and dividers, of a carpenter who was shingling a barn near by, and, using one of those shingles made of a mast, contrived a rude sort of quadrant, with pins for sights and pivots, and got the angle of elevation of the Bank opposite the lighthouse, and with a couple of cod lines the length of its slope, and so measured its height on the shingle.”61

VII This deftness was of great advantage to him, combined as it was with the habit of immediate and accurate record. He had gauges for the height of the river, noted the temperature of the springs and ponds, the tints of the morning and evening sky, the flowering and fruit of plants, all the habits of birds and animals, every aspect of nature from the smallest to the greatest.62 This gives his writings veracity. When he says that the blueberry on Cape Cod was but an inch or two high,63 and that an apple tree which had been set ten years, was on an average 18 inches high, and spread 9 feet, with a flat top, and had borne one bushel of apples two years before,64 we take these figures for facts and not for guesses; and when he tells of catching a pickerel which has swallowed a brother pickerel half as large as itself, with the tail still visible in its mouth, while the head was already digested in its stomach,65 we accept it not for a fish-story but for a fact. VIII His senses were unusually keen.Alcott says they seemed double, giving him access: to secrets not easily read by others; in 60. Biographical Sketch by R.W. Emerson, in MISCELLANIES, BY HENRY DAV ID THOREAU (Boston, 1894). 61. CAPE COD. 62. AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS, HENRY D. THOREAU, by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (Boston, 1882). 63. CAPE COD. 64. CAPE COD. 65. A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

sagacity resembling that of the bee, the dog, the deer; an instinct for seeing and judging, as by some other, or seventh sense.6667 One day walking with a stranger who inquired where Indian arrow-heads could be found he replied “Everywhere,” and stooping forward, picked one on the instant from the ground.68 He was continually picking them up on Cape Cod. His hearing was very acute. He says: “At a sufficient distance over the woods this sound [of bells] acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept.”69 He delighted in echoes, and said they were almost the only kind of kindred voices that he heard.70 He thought the scent a more oracular inquisition than the sight, more oracular and trustworthy, revealing what is concealed from the other senses. By it he detected earthiness.71 He says he was frequently notified of the passage of a traveller among the highway sixty rods off by the scent of his pipe;72 and he writes: “As I climbed the cliffs, when I jarred the foliage I perceived an exquisite perfume which I could not trace to its source. Ah, those fugacious, universal fragrances of the meadows and woods! odors rightly mingled!”73 IX Holmes says Thoreau told the story of Nature in undress as only one who had hidden in her bedroom could have told it.74 Thoreau tells of his life at Walden: “There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hand. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes in a summer morning after taking my accustomed bath I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, wrapped in a reverie, amidst the pines and hickories and sumach, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang round, or flitted noiselessly through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or by some traveller’s wagon on a distant highway I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands could have been. They were not times subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. This was sheer idleness to my fellow- townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting.”75 X Certainly he drank in the true spirit of nature. Alcott says: “One seldom meets with thoughts like his, coming 66. THOREAU THE POET NATURALIST, WITH MEMORIAL VERSES, by William Ellery Channing (Boston, 1873). 67. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVI D THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 68. Biographical Sketch by R.W. Emerson, in MISCELLANIES, BY HENRY DAV ID THOREAU (Boston, 1894). 69. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 70. Biographical Sketch by R.W. Emerson, in MISCELLANIES, BY HENRY DAV ID THOREAU (Boston, 1894). 71. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 72. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 73. SUMMER, with a map of Concord. 74. AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS. RALPH WALDO EMERSON, by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Boston, 1885. 75. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

so scented of mountain and field breezes and rippling spring, so like a luxuriant clod from under forest leaves, moist and mossy with earth spirits. His presence was tonic, like ice-water in dog-days to the parched citizen pent in chambers and under brazen ceilings. Welcome as the gurgle of brooks and dipping of pitchers, — then drink and be cool.”76 Emerson says Thoreau would draw out his diary and read the names of all the plants which should bloom on this day, whereof he kept account as the banker of when his notes fall due. He thought if waked up from a trance in a swamp he could tell by the plants what time of year it was.77 Four books have been made from his journals by selecting the extracts for successive years on each date, showing the observations he made; and these have been appropriately named “Spring,” “Summer,” “Autumn,” “Winter.” XI His observations show how intimately he entered into the life about him. “Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy,”78 he declares; and again: “Sympathy with the fluttering alder: and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath, yet like the lake, my serenity is rippled but not ruffled.”79 He was as thoughtful of the wild forest as an old maid of her garden. “I have watered the red huckleberry,” he says, “the sand cherry and the nettle tree, the red pine and the black ash, the white grape and the yellow violet, which might have withered else in dry seasons.”80 Here is an extract: “The sumach (rhus glabra) grew luxuriantly about the house, pushing up through the embankment which I had made, and growing five or six feet the first season. Its broad pinnate, tropical leaf was pleasant though strange to look on. The large buds suddenly pushing out late in the spring from dry sticks which had seemed to be dead, developed themselves as if by magic into graceful green and tender boughs, an inch in diameter; and sometimes, as I sat at my window, so heedlessly did they grow and tax their weak joints, I heard a fresh and tender bough suddenly fall like a fan to the ground when there was not a “breath of air stirring, broken off by its own weight.”81 XII Equally keen and sympathetic was his observation of animals. The twelfth chapter, “Brute Neighbors,” is by far the most interesting in “Walden.” He speaks of the bittern carrying its precious eggs away to deposit them in a place of safety,82 and his description of a partridge, and of the battle of the ants, and his frequent pictures of squirrels are extremely felicitous. “For all the motions of the squirrels,” he says, “in the most solitary recesses of the forest, imply spectators as much as those of the dancing girl.”83

76. CONCORD DAYS. by A. Bronson Alcott. Boston, 1872 77. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 78. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 79. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 80. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 81. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 82. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVI D THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

Read this account of the owl: “When other birds are still the screech owls take up the strain, like mourning women their ancient u-lu-lu. Their dismal scream is truly Ben Jonsonian.Wise midnight hags! It is no honest and blunt tu-whit tu-who of the poets, but, without jesting, a most solemn graveyard ditty, the mutual consolations of suicide lovers remembering the pangs and the delights of supernal love in the infernal groves. Yet I love to hear their wailing, their doleful responses, trilled along the woodside; reminding me sometimes of music and singing birds; as if it were the dark and tearful side of music, the regrets and sighs that would fain be sung. They are the spirits, the low spirits and melancholy forebodings, of fallen souls that once in human shape night-walked the earth and did the deeds of darkness, now expiating their sins with their wailing hymns or threnodies in the scenery of their transgressions. They give me a new sense of the variety and capacity of that nature which is our common dwelling. Oh-o-o-o-o that I had never been bor-r-r- r-n! sighs one on this side of the pond, and circles with the restlessness of despair to some new perch on the gray oaks. Then — That I had never had been bor-r-r-r-n! echoes another on the farther side with tremulous sincerity, and bor-r-r-r-n! comes faintly from far in the Lincoln woods.”84 XIII He gained unusual familiarity with animals, and was in this respect the original of Hawthorne’s Donatello in “The Marble Faun.” He says, “You only need sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the wood, that all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you by turns.”85 Of a mouse at Walden he tells: “It probably had never seen a man before, but it soon became quite familiar, and would soon run over my shoes and up my clothes. When at last I held still a piece of cheese between my thumb and finger it came and nibbled it, and afterwards cleaned its face and paws like a fly, and walked away.”86 Even fish showed little apprehension. “I have often attracted these small perch to the shore at evening by rippling the water with my finger, and they may sometimes be caught by attempting to pass inside your hand.”87 He tells of a pout that he drew from its ova without its making opposition.88 “The breams are so careful of their charge that you may stand close by in the, water and examine them at your leisure. I have thus stood over them half an hour at a time, and stroked them familiarly without frightening them, suffering them to nibble my fingers harmlessly, and feel them erect their dorsal fins in anger when my hand approached their ova, and have even taken them gently out of the water with my hand.”89 He was himself equally ready to accept the advances of living things. “The wasps came by thousands to my lodge in October as to winter quarters, and settled on my windows and on the walls overhead, sometimes deterring visitors from entering. Each

83. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 84. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 85. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 86. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 87. A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. 88. SUMMER, with a map of Concord. 89. A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

morning when they were numbed with cold I swept some of them out, but I did not trouble myself much to get rid of them. I felt complimented by their regarding my house as a desirable shelter. They never molested me seriously, though they bedded with me.”90 XIV He was an expert fisherman, and might have been an expert hunter, but this sympathy eventually made such sport distasteful. He said at Walden: “I have found repeatedly of late years that I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect;”91 and again: “The carcases of some poor squirrels however, the same that frisked so merrily in the morning, which were skinned and embowelled for our dinner, we abandoned in disgust, with tardy humanity, as too wretched a resource for any but starving men. It was to perpetuate the practice of a barbarous era. If they had been larger, our crime had been less. Their small red bodies, little bundles of red tissue, mere gobbets of venison, would not have ‘fattened fire.’ With a sudden impulse we threw them away, and washed our hands, and boiled some rice for our dinner. Behold the difference between him who eateth flesh and him to whom it belonged! The first hath a momentary enjoyment, whilst the latter is deprived of existence! Who would commit so great a crime against a poor animal, who is fed only by the herbs which grow wild in the woods, and whose belly is burnt up with hunger?”92 XV He prided himself on loving nature for its own sake, as an end, not a means. He says with sarcasm: “We had the mountain all to ourselves that afternoon and night. There was nobody going up that day to engrave his name on the summit, nor to gather blueberries.”93 He was an honorary member of the Boston society of natural history, and he left them his collection of plants, Indian tools, and the like.94 Early in 1847 he made collections of fishes, turtles, etc. for Agassiz, then newly arrived in America. But he would not offer the society a memoir of his observations. “Why should I? To detach the description from its connection in my mind would make it no longer true or valuable to me, and they do not wish what belongs to it.”95 None knew better than he that it is not the fact that imports, but the impression or effect of the fact on your mind.96 It was not nature he cared particularly to observe, but the effect of nature upon him.97 He records the minutest feeling or thought that comes to him for fear the world should lose it. XVI

90. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 91. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 92. A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. 93. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVI D THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 94. THOREAU THE POET NATURALIST, WITH MEMORIAL VERSES, by William Ellery Channing (Boston, 1873). 95. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 96. Biographical Sketch by R.W. Emerson, in MISCELLANIES, BY HENRY DAV ID THOREAU (Boston, 1894). 97. THOREAU THE POET NATURALIST, WITH MEMORIAL VERSES, by William Ellery Channing (Boston, 1873). HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

If this was as Emerson thinks in one way a strength, it was in another a weakness. He was always self-conscious. Friendship was to him only a means of developing himself. Stevenson says: “Thoreau is dry, priggish, and selfish. It is profit he is after in these intimacies, moral profit certainly, but still profit to himself. ‘If you will be the sort of friend I want,’ he remarks naively, ‘my education cannot dispense with your society.’98 His education! as though a friend were a dictionary! And with all this not one word about pleasure or laughter or kisses, or any quality of flesh and blood. It was not inappropriate surely that he had such close relations with the fish. We can understand the friend already quoted when he cried,99 ‘As for taking his arm, I would as soon think of taking the arm of an elm tree.’”100 He writes to Mrs. Ralph Waldo Emerson: “I like to deal with you for I believe you do not lie or steal, and these are very rare virtues”;101 but how curious a letter he could write appears in one that he wrote to her on June 20, 1843, probably as near a love-letter he ever penned. Margaret Fuller wrote to him: “The unfolding of affections, a wider and deeper human experience, the harmonizing influences of other natures will mould a man and melt his verse. He will seek thought less and find knowledge the more.” XVII Naturally a man of Thoreau’s convictions cared little for manners. In fact he said the man of manners was an insect in a tumbler. “It would indeed be a serious bore to be obliged to touch your hat several times a day. A Yankee has not leisure for it.”102 Emerson says: “It cost him nothing to say no; indeed he found it much easier than to say yes.”103 Men of note would come to talk with him. “I don’t know,” he would say; “perhaps a minute would be enough for both of us.” “But I come to walk with you when you take your exercise.” “Ah, walking — that is my holy time.”104 He could be as rude to friends as to strangers “who did not know when their visit had terminated.”105 When in Walden his poet friend Ellery Channing comes to call on him he says: “I will go with you gladly soon, but I am just concluding a serious meditation. I think that I am near the end of it. Leave me alone then for a while.”106 To David Ricketson, a wealthy merchant of New Bedford, who frequently entertained him, and who permitted him to come in his

98. A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. 99. Biographical Sketch by R.W. Emerson, in MISCELLANIES, BY HENRY DAV ID THOREAU (Boston, 1894). 100. FAMILIAR STUDIES OF MEN AND BOOKS, by Robert Louis Stevenson (New York, 1896). 101. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 102. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 103. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 104. TALKS WITH RALPH WALDO EMERSON, by Charles J. Woodbury. New York, 1890. 105. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 106. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

old clothes, he wrote declining an invitation: “Such are my engagements to myself that I dare not promise to come your way;”107 but this was unusually polite. On another occasion he wrote: “I have a faint recollection of your invitation referred to, but I suppose that I had no new or particular reason for declining, and so made no new statement”;108 and again in a response to a reproach for not having written: “You know I never promised to correspond with you, and so when I do I do more than I promised.”109 XVIII Yet he sometimes made great sacrifices to avoid hurting the feelings of poor people. “The Irishman’s wife could not give me fresh water, so shutting my eyes, and excluding the motes by a skilfully directed under-current, I drank to genuine hospitality the heartiest draught I could. I am not squeamish in such cases when manners are concerned.”110 “When I would go a-visiting,” he says. “I find that I go off the fashionable street to where man meets man, and not polished shoe meets shoe.”111 He came to see the inside of every farmer’s house and head, his pot of beans and mug of hard cider. Never in too much hurry for a dish of gossip he could sit out the oldest frequenter of the barroom, and was alive from top to toe with curiosity.112 “I love to see the herd of men feeding heartily on coarse and succulent pleasures,” he said, “as cattle on the husks and stalks of vegetables;”113 and again: “It chanced that the Sunday morning that we were there I had joined a party of men who were smoking and lolling over a pile of boards on one of the wharves, (nihil humanum a me, etc.).”114 Channing says that when Hawthorne and Thoreau laughed, the operation was sufficient to split a pitcher.115 He was sometimes given to music and songs, and now and then in moments of great hilarity would dance gaily, and sing his unique song “Tom Bowline,” which none who heard would ever forget.116 XIX But unless he saw something genuinely original in a companion he preferred to be alone. He would not consent “to feebly fabulate and paddle in the social slush.”117 “I occasionally observed that he was thinking for himself and expressing his own opinions,” he says, “a phenomenon so rare that I would any day walk ten miles to observe it;”118 but again: “I have an immense appetite for solitude, like an infant for sleep, and if I don’t get enough of it this year, I shall cry all the next.”119

107. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 108. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 109. AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS, HENRY D. THOREAU, by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (Boston, 1882). 110. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 111. SUMMER, with a map of Concord. 112. AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS, HENRY D. THOREAU, by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (Boston, 1882). 113. A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. 114. CAPE COD. 115. THOREAU THE POET NATURALIST, WITH MEMORIAL VERSES, by William Ellery Channing (Boston, 1873). 116. CAPE COD. 117. FAMILIAR STUDIES OF MEN AND BOOKS, by Robert Louis Stevenson. New York, 1896. 118. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

Even with those with whom conversation seemed worth while it is a favorite thought of his that the nearer they get together the less they speak. “Each moment as we nearer drew to each, A stern respect withheld us farther yet, So that we seemed beyond each other’s reach, And less acquainted than when first we met.”120 He prided himself upon being an iconoclast. Holmes called him the nullifier of civilization, who insisted on nibbling his asparagus at the wrong end.121 Emerson says, “Not a particle of respect had he to the opinions of any man or body of men;”122 and Thoreau declared at thirty that he had yet to hear the first syllable of valuable advice from his seniors.123 “If a man does not keep pace with his companion,” he says, “perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything it is very likely to be my good behavior.”124 He advises Mr. Blake not to be too moral; he may cheat himself out of much life.125 XXI Naturally his disregard of tradition was most marked with reference to religion. Holmes said of Emerson that he took down our idols from their pedestals so tenderly that it seemed an act of worship,126 but Thoreau found savage pleasure in defacing them. Thus he declares: “If I could, I would worship the paring of my nails”; and again: “Jehovah, though with us he has acquired new attributes, is more absolute and unapproachable, but hardly more divine, than Jove. He is not so much of a gentleman, not so gracious and catholic, he does not exert so intimate and genial an influence on nature, as many a god of the Greeks.”127 “The reading which I love best,” he says, “is the scriptures of the several nations, though it happens that I am better acquainted with those of the Hindoos, the Chinese and the Persians, than of the Hebrews.”128 Later he makes this distinction: “The New Testament is remarkable for its pure morality, the best Hindoo scripture for its pure intellectuality.”129 Hence as he chose the latter, it is not strange to hear him say: “No greater evil can happen to anyone than to hate reasoning. Man is evidently made for thinking: this is the whole of his dignity, and the whole of his merit. To think as he ought is the whole of his duty”;130 and again: “The most

119. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVI D THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 120. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 121. AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS. RALPH WALDO EMERSON, by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Boston, 1885. 122. Biographical Sketch by R.W. Emerson, in MISCELLANIES, BY HENRY DAVI D THOREAU (Boston, 1894). 123. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 124. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 125. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 126. AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS. RALPH WALDO EMERSON, by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Boston, 1885. 127. A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. 128. A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. 129. A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. 130. THOREAU THE POET NATURALIST, WITH MEMORIAL VERSES, by William Ellery Channing (Boston, 1873). HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

glorious fact in my experience is not anything that I have done or may hope to do, but a transient thought, or dream, or vision I have had. I would give all the wealth of all the world and all the deeds of all the heroes for one true vision.” XXII In such a creed good works have no place. “I very rarely indeed, if ever,” he says, “feel any itching to be what is called useful to my fellow-men.”131 And again: “If I knew for a certainty that a man was about coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good I should run for my life, as from that dry and parching wind of the African desert culled the simoom, which fills the mouth and ears and nose and eyes with dust till you are suffocated, for fear that I should get some of his good done to me, — some of its virus mingled with my blood.”132 Naturally he despises clergymen, “who speak of God,” he says, “as though they enjoyed a monopoly of the subject.”133 At Montreal he writes: “From time to time we met a priest in the streets, for they are distinguished by their dress, like the civil police. Like clergymen generally, with or without the gown, they made on us the impression of effeminacy. We also met some Sisters of Charity, dressed in black, with Shaker-shaped black bonnets and crosses, and cadaverous faces, who looked as if they had almost cried their eyes out, their complexions parboiled with scalding tears; insulting the daylight by their presence, having taken an oath not to smile.”134 It seems strange that a man who appreciated flowers so much should get this impression of Sisters of Charity, in whom all the world, christian and pagan, has united in seeing rare attractiveness, and questioned only whether its source was the garb or the self-sacrificing soul speaking through the countenance. We are revenged to find that soon after he thinks he sees the soldiers drilling in white kid gloves. XXIII But there are glimpses here and there of other things. “Let no one think,” he says, “that I do not love the old ministers, who were probably the best men in their generation, and they deserve that their biographies should fill the pages of the town history. If I could but hear the glad tidings of which they tell, and which, perchance, they heard, I might write in a worthier strain than this.”135 “As I stand over the insect, crawling over the pine needles on the forest floor, and endeavoring to conceal itself from my sight, and ask myself why it will cherish those humble thoughts, and hide its head from me, who might, perhaps, be its benefactor, and impart to its race some cheering information, I am reminded of the greater Benefactor and Intelligence that stands over me

131. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 132. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 133. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 134. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 135. CAPE COD. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

the human insect.”136 XXIV His curse here as elsewhere is his self-confidence.Alcott quotes the famous speech -of an old Northman as thoroughly characteristic of this Teuton: “I believe in neither idols nor demons; I put my sole trust in my own strength of body and soul.”137 This is an early prayer of Thoreau’s: “Great God! I ask Thee for no meaner pelf, Than that I may not disappoint myself; That in my conduct I may soar as high As I can now discern with this clear eye. That my weak hand may equal my firm faith, And my life practise more than my tongue saith; That my low conduct may not show, Nor my relenting lines, That I Thy purpose did not know, Or over-rated Thy designs.”138 From his own point of view he was consistent. “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 the future, which is precisely the present moment, to toe that line.”139 March 31, 1862, he writes: “I suppose that I have not many months to live; but of course I know nothing about it. I may add that I am enjoying existence as much as ever, and regret nothing.”140 To Parker Pillsbury, who approached him on the 1mbject of religion the winter before his death, he replied gently, “One world at a time.”141 XXV He was consistently unmindful of personal appearance. Nature had given him little encouragement. He was small, inferior looking, usually taken for a peddler by strangers; and when the Provincetown bank was robbed soon after his first trip to Cape Cod he was suspected of being one of the thieves. Emerson says: “Henry was homely in appearance, a rugged stone hewn from the cliff. I believe it is accorded to all men to he moderately homely; hut he surpassed his sex.”142 Channing said: “In height he was about the average; in his build spare, with limbs that were longer than usual, or of which he made longer use. His features were marked; the nose aquiline or very Roman, like one of the portraits of Cæsar (more like a beak, as was said); large overhanging brows above the deepest-set blue 136. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 137. CONCORD DAYS. by A. Bronson Alcott. Boston, 1872 138. AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS, HENRY D. THOREAU, by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (Boston, 1882). 139. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 140. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 141. TALKS WITH RALPH WALDO EMERSON, by Charles J. Woodbury. New York, 1890. 142. TALKS WITH RALPH WALDO EMERSON, by Charles J. Woodbury. New York, 1890. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

eyes that could be seen, — blue in certain lights and in others gray; the forehead not unusually broad or high, full of concentrated energy and purpose; the mouth with prominent lips, pursed up with meaning and thought when silent, and giving out when open a stream of the most varied and unusual and instructive sayings. His whole figure had an active earnestness, as if he had no moment to waste; the clenched hand betokened purpose. In walking he made a short cut, and when sitting in the shade or by the wall-side, seemed merely the clearer to look forward into the next piece of activity. The intensity of his mind, like Dante’s, conveyed the breathing of aloofness, — his eyes bent on the ground, his long swinging gait, his hands perhaps clasped behind him, or held closely at his side, — the fingers made into a fist.”143 XXVI As for clothes, while he evidently prides himself here and there on the fact of having a new coat, and writes to Mr. Blake that he will come to see him as soon as he gets a new coat if he has money enough left,144 yet he wonders that people spend so much money on clothes. “While one thick garment is for most purposes as good as three thin ones, and cheap clothing can be obtained at prices really to suit customers; while a thick coat can be bought for five dollars which will last many years, thick pantaloons for two dollars, cow-hide boots for a dollar and a half a pair, a summer hat for a quarter of a dollar, and a winter cap for sixty-two and a half cents, or better be made at home at a nominal cost, where is he so poor that, clad in such a suit of his own earning, there will not be found wise men to do him reverence?”145 “Kings and queens who wear a suit but once, though made by some tailor or dressmaker to their majesties, cannot know the comfort of wearing a suit that fits. They are no better than wooden horses to hang clean clothes on.”146 XXVII On his excursion to Canada he wore a 25-cent unlined straw hat and a linen duster, and prided himself on being the worst dressed man in the party. He writes: “It is not wise for a traveller to go dressed. I should no more think of it than of putting on a clean dicky and blacking my shoes to go a-fishing; as if you were going out to dine, when, in fact, the genuine traveller is going out to work hard, and fare harder, — to eat a crust by the wayside whenever he can get it. Honest travelling is about as dirty work as you can do, and a man needs a pair of overalls for it. As for blacking my shoes in such a case, I should as soon think of blacking my face. I carry a piece of tallow to preserve the leather and keep out the water; that’s all; and many an officious shoeblack, who carried off my shoes when I was slumbering, mistaking me for a gentleman, has had occasion to repent it before he produced a gloss on them.”147 143. AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS, HENRY D. THOREAU, by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (Boston, 1882). 144. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 145. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 146. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 147. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

He always carried an umbrella; and as for a valise: “After considerable reflection and experience I have concluded that the best bag for the foot traveller is made with the handkerchief, or if he study appearances [!], a piece of stiff brown paper, well tied up, with a fresh piece within to put outside when the first is torn.”148 At Walden he dug potatoes bare-footed until so late in the day that the sun would blister his feet, and on his walk to Wachusett he and his companion refreshed themselves by bathing their feet in every rill that crossed the road.149 XXVIII In food he was equally original. Emerson says that when asked at table what dish he preferred Thoreau answered, “The nearest.” That was probably at Mr. Emerson’s house where there was always pie, for he was as fond of that as Mr. Emerson, and added a special fondness for plum cake.150 In Montreal he was much troubled because he could find no pie for sale, and no good cake to put in his box; and the Quebec restaurants were disappointing, for when he inquired for pies or puddings he could get only mutton chops, roast beef, beef steak, and cutlets, etc., so he had to buy musty cake and fruit in the open market place.151 He often speaks of refraining from meat to keep down his brute nature; and believes that “every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his highest or poetical faculties in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, or much food of any kind.”152 “Hasty pudding for the masculine eye, chicken and jellies for the girls.”153 XXIX Trying to advise a poor laborer struggling with a big family, “I told him”, he says, “I did not use tea, nor coffee, nor butter, nor milk, nor fresh meat, and so did not have to work to get them. Again as I did not work hard I did not have to eat hard, and it cost me but a trifle for my food. But if he began with tea and coffee and butter and milk and beef, he had to work hard to pay for them, and when he had worked hard he had to eat hard again to repair the waste of his system, and so it was as broad as it was long; indeed, it was broader than it was long, for he was discontented and wasted his life into the bargain.”154 When he goes up Wachusett he makes his supper with blueberries he picks, with milk bought at a farmhouse,155 and his general advice to travellers is to go afoot, carrying a dipper, a spoon, and a fish-line, some Indian meal, some salt, and some sugar. “When you come to a brook or pond, you can catch fish and cook them; or you can boil a hasty pudding; or you can buy a loaf of bread at a farmer’s house for fourpence, moisten it in the next

148. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 149. THE MAINE WOODS. 150. THOREAU THE POET NATURALIST, WITH MEMORIAL VERSES, by William Ellery Channing (Boston, 1873). 151. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 152. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 153. THOREAU THE POET NATURALIST, WITH MEMORIAL VERSES, by William Ellery Channing (Boston, 1873). 154. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 155. THE MAINE WOODS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

brook that crosses the road, and dip into it your sugar, — this alone will last you a whole day; — or, if you are accustomed to heartier living, you can buy a quart of milk for two cents, crumb your bread or cold pudding into it and eat it with your own spoon out of your own dish.”156 XXX He is equally stoical as to bed clothing when travelling. On the top of Saddle mountain he says: “As it grew colder toward midnight I at length encased myself completely in boards, managing even to put a board on top of me with a large stone on it to keep it down, and so slept comfortably. I was reminded it is true of the Irish children, who inquired what their neighbors did who had no door to put over them in winter nights as they had. But I am convinced there was nothing very strange in the inquiry.”157 “Mr. Edward Hoar remembers with a shiver to this day the rigor of a night spent on the bare rocks of Mt. Washington with insufficient blankets, — Thoreau sleeping from habit, but himself lying wakeful all the night, and gazing at the coldest of full moons.”158 XXXI He was always prodigal of his health, as he constantly shows in his account of his excursions to the Maine woods. He climbed four pines after hawks’ nests, and gathered the brilliant flowers of the white pine from the very top of the tallest pines.159 He was, moreover, in the habit of abnormally early rising. On his excursions he seems always to be getting up at three o’clock and starting off in a fog long before he could distinguish the very objects he had come to see. The consequence of this under-feeding and over-working was that with all his inherited strength of constitution he was almost never well. He certainly was not a man to complain, and yet his letters and journals are full of such statements as these: “I must still reckon myself with the innumerable army of invalids, though I am tougher than formerly;”160 “I do not see how strength is to be got into my legs again;”161 “What I got by going to Canada was a cold”;162 “There is danger that the cold weather may come again before I get over my bronchitis.”163 Finally his lungs became so severely affected that he went to Minnesota with young Horace Mann in hope of recovery; hut returned little benefited, and died May 6, 1862. XXXII

156. A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. 157. A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. 158. AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS, HENRY D. THOREAU, by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (Boston, 1882). 159. THOREAU THE POET NATURALIST, WITH MEMORIAL VERSES, by William Ellery Channing (Boston, 1873). 160. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 161. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 162. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 163. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

Up to 1847, as we have said, he supported himself mainly by labor of his hands. By that time he began to be somewhat known as a writer and lecturer. At Concord, the headquarters of the lecture movement, he gave his first lecture in 1838, and afterwards lectured there nearly every year for twenty years.164 While Hawthorne was surveyor at Salem he invited Thoreau to come there to lecture, telling him that the fee was $20.165 But his lectures were less in demand than those of his fellow- townsmen. In 1852 he offered to lecture in New York, but Greeley replied that the course was full for the season, and even if it were not his name would probably not pass.166 In 1856, he writes: “I have not heard from Harrisburg since offering to go there, and have not been invited to lecture anywhere else in the meantime;”167 and again: “Perhaps it always costs me more than it comes to to lecture before a promiscuous audience. It is an irreparable injury done to my modesty even, — I became so indurated. O solitude! obscurity! meanness! I never triumph so as when I have the least success in my neighbor’s eyes. The lecturer gets fifty dollars a night; but what becomes of his winter? What consolation will it be hereafter to have fifty thousand dollars for living in the world? I should not like to exchange any of my life for money.”168 XXXIII His first writing of consequence appeared in the Dial, where several of his pieces were published. Horace Greeley became interested in him, and secured the publication of several of his articles. Among them that on Carlyle in Graham’s Magazine for 1857. While Bayard Taylor was editor of the Union magazine, Greeley brought him a roll of manuscript, saying: “You must do something for this young man. His name is Thoreau. He lives in a shanty on Walden Pond, near Concord, on $37.21 a year. He must he encouraged.” The manuscript was “Ktaadn and the Maine Woods.” Taylor persuaded the publisher to give $75 for it, and it was published in 1848; but it contained so many misprints that Thoreau became indignant.169 In 1852 Sartain offered him $3 a page for what he might write for the magazine, and in April Greeley offered him $50 for an article on Emerson, in advance if he desired.170 “The Yankee in Canada,” an account of a ten-day excursion on which his total expenses were $11.62,171 began in Putnam’s magazine in September, 1853; followed in 1855 by the paper on “Cape Cod,” which became the subject of controversy, first as to price and then as to its tone toward the people of that region. The editor wanted to make some changes, which Thoreau refused, and the articles came abruptly to an end. When Lowell 164. AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS, HENRY D. THOREAU, by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (Boston, 1882). 165. AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS, HENRY D. THOREAU, by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (Boston, 1882). 166. AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS, HENRY D. THOREAU, by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (Boston, 1882). 167. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 168. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 169. AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS, BAYARD TAYLOR, by Albert Smyth. Boston, 1896. 170. AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS, HENRY D. THOREAU, by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (Boston, 1882). 171. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

left out this sentence from one of his pieces about the pine tree, “It is as immortal as I am, perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still,” Thoreau having given no authority considered the bounds of right were passed, and would write no more for the Atlantic. XXXIV His first book (1849) was “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.” It was published at his own expense, and as the sale was small it brought a heavy burden of debt upon him. In 1853 Thoreau records that for a year or two past his publisher, falsely so called, has been writing from time to time to ask what disposition should be made of the copies still on hand, at last suggesting that he had use for the room they occupied in his cellar. “So I have had them all sent to me here, and they have arrived to-day by express, filling the man’s wagon, 706 copies out of an edition of 1000, which I bought of Monroe four years ago, and have been ever since paying for, and have not quite paid for yet. Of the remaining 290 and odd, 75 were given away, the rest sold. I have now a library of nearly 900 volumes, over 700 of which I wrote myself.”172 XXXV The wonder is that the book sold at all. It is an account of a week’s journey on two quiet New England rivers, in a boat that two young men had made, and in which they met with no adventure. It would seem hard to make out of this excursion, ten years afterwards, a book of 518 pages, but as a matter of fact the book is not made out of the excursion, which is only an excuse for it. Besides the poems and the local history, and the quotations from the Gazetteer, and the thoughts which the journey itself suggested, it gathers apparently everything that Thoreau had ever thought out on any subject. Here are 5 pages about gardening, 4 about mythology, 21 about religion, 25 about books and reading, 25 more about reformers and the scriptures, 15 about the Indian scriptures and history, 14 about a trip up Saddle mountain, 7 about Anacreon and 7 more about Persius with translations, 40 about friendship, 9 about Goethe, 11 about Ossian, 32 about Chaucer, with a multitude of others; so that of the 518 pages hardly half had any more relation to this particular trip than to his hoeing beans at Walden. Lowell well says: “Mr. Thoreau becomes so absorbed in these discussions that he seems as it were to catch a crab, and disappear uncomfortably from his seat at the bow-oar. We could forgive them all, * * * we could welcome them all were they put by themselves at the end of the book; but as it is they are out of proportion and out of place, and mar our Merrimacking dreadfully. We were invited to a river party, and not to be preached at.”173 XXXVI His next book, “Walden, or Life in the Woods” (1854), was more successful, and is the one by which he is best known. It is the account of an experiment he made to prove that “a man is rich 172. A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. 173. MY STUDY WINDOWS, by James Russell Lowell (Boston, 1871). HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.”174 He occupied land owned by Mr. Emerson, on Walden pond, borrowed an axe of Mr. Alcott, bought an Irishman’s shanty for $4.25 and moved the timber, spent two hours digging the cellar, got his friends to help him to raise the frame, and completed the cabin at a total cost of $28.12½, though it was 10 feet wide, 15 feet long, with a garret and a closet, a large window on each side, two trap doors, a door at the end, and a brick fireplace opposite. There was no other house in sight, and his nearest neighbor was a mile distant. He never fastened his door night or day, even when he spent a fortnight in Maine. XXXVII To support himself he planted seven miles of beans, “making the yellow soil express its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood and piper and millet grass.”175 He used to hoe from five o’clock in the morning until noon, then swim, dress, and go to the village, or write, his principal work being to edit his “Week.”176 The expense of his food for eight months was $8.74177 and his entire expenses $61.99¾, while he got for farm produce $23.40, and earned by day labor $13.34, leaving a balance of $25.21¾, or about what he started with. His food alone cost him in money 27 cents a week. It was for nearly two years after this rye and Indian meal without meat, potatoes, rice, a very little salt pork, molasses and salt, with water for drink. At one time, owing to lack of money, he had no bread at all for a month. He found yeast not an essential ingredient, and thought it simpler and more respectable to omit it; he even questioned the utility of salt: “If I did without it altogether I should probably drink less water. I do not learn that the Indians ever troubled themselves to go after it.”178 XXXVIII He staid from July 4, 1845 to Sept. 6, 1847. He says: “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more for that one.”179 As a protest against extravagant living this is the bold statement he makes: “I have no doubt that some of you who read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners which you have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are past wearing, or are already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour.”180 He continually asserts that property, especially real estate, is a needless incumbrance. When a young man inherits a farm he wonders why he should eat 60 acres of dirt, when man is condemned to eat only a peck. He says: “How many a poor immortal soul have

174. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 175. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 176. A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. 177. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 178. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 179. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 180. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn 75 feet by 40, its Augean stables never cleansed, and 100 acres of land, mowing, tillage, pasture and woodlot.” It is not the farmer that has got the house, but the house that has got him. It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail. He thinks it absurd that Harvard students have to pay as much for the rent of a single room as his house costs him, not remembering that there is no land in Cambridge to be squatted upon. There was nothing remarkably abstemious about his house at Walden. The writer of this article lived for two winters in houses he built for himself simply by digging out a rectangle of dirt 6 feet by 2 and 8 inches deep, piling it on an adjoining rectangle 6 feet by 2, divided from the first by a log so as to form a raised bed, putting over all a piece of cotton cloth, covering up the ends with logs plastered with mud, and making a chimney also of logs. To privates in the Union army such a house as Thoreau lived in at Walden would have seemed a palace, yet we were not seriously uncomfortable. XXXIX His narrative and descriptive style is certainly admirable. He says: “What I was learning in college was chiefly how to express myself, and I see now as the old orator prescribed first action, second action, third action, my teacher should have prescribed to me, first sincerity, second sincerity, third sincerity.”181 He says again: “A true account of the actual is the rarest poetry, for common-sense always takes a hasty and superficial view. Though I am not much acquainted with the works of Goethe, I should say that it was one of his chief excellencies as a writer, that he was satisfied with giving an exact description of things as they appeared to him, and their effect upon him.” 182 * * * “As for style of writing, if one has anything to say it drops from him simply and directly, as a stone falls to the ground. There are no two ways about it, but down it comes, and he may stick in the points and stops whenever he can get a chance. New ideas come into this world somewhat like fallen meteors, with a flash and an explosion, and perhaps somebody’s castle-roof perforated. To try to polish the stone in its descent, to give it a peculiar turn, and make it whistle a tune, perchance, would be of no use, if it were possible. Your polished stuff turns out to be not meteoric, but of this earth.”183 XL On the other hand he writes to a friend: “Let me suggest a theme for you: to state to yourself precisely and completely what that walk over the mountains amounted to for you, — returning to this essay again and again, until you are satisfied that all that was important in your experience is in it. Give this good reason to 181. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 182. A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. 183. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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yourself for having gone over the mountains, for mankind is ever going over a mountain. Don’t suppose you can tell it precisely the first dozen times you try, but at ’em again, especially when, after a sufficient pause, you suspect that you are touching the heart or summit of the matter, reiterate your blows there, and account for the mountain to yourself. Not that the story need be long, hut it will take a long time to make it short.”184 Alcott declares of his prose, that in substance and pith it surpasses that of any naturalist of his time.185 Much of it is surpassed by few writers of his time, whatever their subject. He has himself expressed his aim: “Their sentences are not concentrated and nutty, — sentences which suggest far more than they say, which have an atmosphere about them, which do not report an old, but make a new impression; sentences which suggest many things, and are as durable as a Roman aqueduct, to frame these, — that is the art of writing.”186 XLI Here are some of his sentences: “Time cannot bend the line which God has writ.”187 “What exercise is to the body employment is to the mind and morals.”188 “How can we expect a harvest of thoughts who have not had a seed- time of character?”189 “Some circumstantial evidence is strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.” “The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a wood-shed with them.” Of a Cape Cod fisherman he said: “He looked as if he sometimes saw a doughnut, but never descended to comfort. Too grave to laugh, too tough to cry; as indifferent as a clam; like a sea- clam with hat on and legs, that was out walking the strand.”190 He speaks of the powdered snow, where not a rabbit’s track, nor even a fine print, the small type of a meadow mouse, was to be seen.191 XLII His greatest weakness was what he probably considered his greatest strength, the habit of glancing off from the fact to moralizing, already instanced in “A Week.” Of another fault Emerson says: “The habit of a realist to find 184. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 185. CONCORD DAYS. by A. Bronson Alcott. Boston, 1872 186. THOREAU THE POET NATURALIST, WITH MEMORIAL VERSES, by William Ellery Channing (Boston, 1873). 187. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 188. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 189. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 190. CAPE COD. 191. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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things the reverse of their appearance inclined him to put every statement in a paradox. A certain habit of antagonism defaced his earlier writings, a trick of rhetoric not quite outgrown in his later, of substituting for the obvious word or thought its diametrical oposite [sic]. He praised wild mountains and winter forests for their domestic air; in snow and ice he would find sultriness; and commended the wilderness for resembling Rome and Paris; it was so dry that you might call it wet.”192 Thoreau says: “I have heard of a dog that barked at every stranger who approached his master’s premises with clothes on, but was easily quieted by a naked thief.”193 It might be inquired in what part of the year naked thieves were common in New England. XLIII Theoretically he disapproves of humor, and cut out many of his humorous passages,194 though much genuine humor remains. He says of Chaucer’s poetry: “For picturesque description of persons it is perhaps without a parallel in English poetry; yet it is essentially humorous, as the loftiest genius never is. Humor, however broad and genial, takes a narrower view than enthusiasm.”195 But he has a marked weakness for puns, such as: “Even the elephant carries but a small trunk on his journey.”196 “Next came the fort of George’s Island. These are bungling contrivances, not our fortes, but our foibles.”197 “It was literally, or litorally, walking down to the shore.”198 “The more tired the wheels, the less tired the horses.”199 “A government lighting its mariners on a wintry coast with summer-strained oil to save expense. That were surely a summer- strained mercy.”200 This is strained if the quality of mercy is not. “As I walked on the glacis I heard the sound of a bagpipe from the soldier’s dwelling in the rock, and was further soothed and affected by the sight of a soldier’s cat walking up a cleeted plank into a high loop-hole, designed for mus-catry.”201 “Thaw, with his gentle persuasion, is more powerful than Thor with his hammer.”202 “But whether Thor-finn saw the mirage here or not, Thor-eau, one of the same family, did; and perchance it was because Lief the Lucky had, in a previous voyage, taken Thor-er and his people off the rock in the middle of the sea, that Thor-eau was born

192. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 193. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 194. FAMILIAR STUDIES OF MEN AND BOOKS, by Robert Louis Stevenson. New York, 1896. 195. A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. 196. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 197. CAPE COD. 198. CAPE COD. 199. CAPE COD. 200. CAPE COD. 201. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 202. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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to see it.”203 XLIV There is often conscious effort for the snap he speaks of. “You might make a curious list of articles which fishes have swallowed; sailors’ open-clasped knives, bright tin snuff- boxes, not knowing what was in them, and jugs, and jewels, and Jonah.”204 “This hotel was kept by a tailor, his shop on one side of the door, his hotel on the other; and his day seemed to be divided between carving meat and carving broad-cloth.”205 How much broadcloth he would have to carve for Cape Cod fishermen is not stated. He shows his study of words when he says of the French: “Their very rivière meanders more than our river.”206 Not much need be said of his poetry. Emerson speaks charitably: “His own verses are often rude and defective; the gold does not yet run pure, it is drossy and crude: the thyme and marjoram are not yet honey.”207 XLV As one studies the life and writings of Thoreau the conviction grows that much of what he calls sincerity was a morbid desire to be different from other people. It was his habit when he climbed or descended a mountain to disregard the beaten paths and go straight by the compass for the point aimed at, clambering up cliffs and wading through swamps rather than follow in the footsteps of others. His persistent determination enabled him to get there, but his way was not the easiest or the wisest. When he prefers the Veda to the Bible, he is odd, but he shows a lack of literary taste. When he declares that he would rather trust himself to the Greek divinities than to Jehovah he is audacious, but he shows a warped judgment. When he builds up a theory of friendship and of love based on intellectual estimate and excluding the affections, he is singular, but he deprives himself of the most needed help his kind can give. When he does the work of a porter on the diet of a hermit, he flies in the face of tradition, but he breaks down his constitution, and reaps a premature death at forty-five. XLVI It is not necessarily a proof of wisdom to consider the rest of mankind fools. “I haven’t credulity to believe in religion,” said a flippant young man to his teacher. But his sage instructor replied, “Does it not take more credulity to believe that most of the best and wisest men who have ever lived have been wrong?” It is not necessarily true that whatever is is right, but whatever is has the presumption of being right, and should not be disturbed until one is quite sure he has something better to propose.

203. CAPE COD. 204. CAPE COD. 205. CAPE COD. 206. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 207. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The superficialness of Thoreau’s attitude toward the world is shown by his abundant inconsistencies. He boasted that his first book was hypaethral, like Egyptian temples, open to the heavens, and might have been written wholly out of doors; yet it contains three hundred quotations from a hundred different authors. He rails against newspapers, saying, “Blessed are they who never read them for they shall see nature;” and yet he reads even to the advertisements the scraps in which his lunches are wrapped. XLVII He lived for a time in Emerson’s family, and unconsciously grew to imitate Emerson’s tone and manner till Lowell declared that with his eyes shut he could not tell which was talking. But he never imitated the sweetness of Emerson’s character. When he was imprisoned for refusing to pay a poll-tax to a State that sanctioned slavery, Emerson came to him and asked, “Henry, why are you here?” to which Thoreau replied, “Why are you not here?” But the reproach was unmerited. When a friend paid the tax for him, Thoreau accepted his release; Emerson would have died in that Concord jail had it been with him a matter of principle. But while Emerson never yielded where conscience forbade, he never made an issue with society unless conscience compelled. Thoreau’s contribution to mankind is great not because of his oddity but in spite of it, and except for it would have been much greater. As Emerson says, “Instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party.”208

208. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1901

James Russell Lowell’s bitter resentment of the fact that Henry Thoreau had not thought a whole lot of him as a human being had again boiled over before he died, and he had complained of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS that “we were bid to a river-party, not to be preached at.” How could Henry have been so utterly insolent, as to have attempted to preach at him –a fine upstanding Lowell, a mover in Boston social circles, a powerful and judgmental editor with a bust sporting the blankest of blank white eyeballs– to attempt to correct his soul?

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1903

In America in this year the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in his advanced age, was taking issue, in A READER’S HISTORY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE (co-authored with Henry Walcott Boynton), with James Russell Lowell’s 1865 dismissal of Henry Thoreau, that “Thoreau hated civilization, and believed only in wilderness,” pointing out that Thoreau had been a gardener and a surveyor, as well as an “affectionate” and “faithful” son and brother. (Professor Lawrence Buell, on page 354 of THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMAGINATION, characterizes this as a “bourgeois reduction” of Thoreau to the status of a “thrifty latter-day Puritan who follows what all sensible readers of his enduringly absorbing work will recognize as a legitimate and productive calling.”)

Higginson, mentioned earlier as a younger Transcendentalist and admiring friend of both Emerson and Thoreau, sought to make Thoreau look appealingly respectable to establishment literati and mainstream readers. Predictably, he began his account (1903 ) by locking horns with Lowell, whose 1865 critique still stood as the most imposing disparagement, being from the pen of America’s still most eminent critic. “Lowell accepts throughout,” says Higginson, “the popular misconception … that Thoreau hated civilization, and believed only in wilderness.” In truth, Thoreau was never “really banished from the world,” nor did “he seek or profess banishment.” He earned “an honest living by gardening and land- surveying”; furthermore, “his home life –always the best test– was thoroughly affectionate and faithful.” For Higginson, the significance of the Walden experiment was that it was an experiment in simple living and it allowed time to write what became a literary classic. His interpretation might be called the “bourgeois reduction of Thoreau”: Thoreau as thrifty latter-day Puritan who follows what all sensible readers of his enduringly absorbing work will recognize as a legitimate and productive calling. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1905

A momentous event, the publication of a Standard Library Edition of the complete works of James Russell Lowell by Houghton, Mifflin of Boston and New York in 13 volumes Octavo, in dark brown morocco with

marbled boards, raised bands, and gilt trim lettering, with the final two volumes bearing small ornaments in their spine compartments. The 1919 edition of BARTLETT’S FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS would contain 99 quotes by this most famous and profound author!

Let not a drool be lost for posterity! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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He had become so famous, in fact, that in this year Daniel Chester French did not one but two busts of him (we note, by way of contrast, that this famous Concord sculptor never bothered to craft a bust of low-rent Concord local Henry David Thoreau). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1940

February 20, Tuesday: As part of an “American Poets” series with Longfellow worth 1¢, Whittier coming in at 2¢, and Poe tied with Lowell for 3¢, a colorful version of James Russell Lowell was issued. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1991

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

An editorial headlined “On Walden Pond. (Zuckerman and Co.’s plans for an office development in the Walden Woods)” by Richard Lingeman appeared in The Nation.209 One of the most widely quoted phrases Henry Thoreau ever wrote is “in wildness is the preservation of the world.” It originally appeared in “Walking” published in the June 1862 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

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

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

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

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

209. v253, n14 (October 28 1991):504 (2 pages). Copyright by The Nation Company Inc. 1991. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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visit Henry in his cabin.

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

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

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politicians and conservationists.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING, HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project James Russell Lowell HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2015

October 19, Monday: Kathryn Schulz, who writes for The New Yorker, had provided us with a new central source for Thoreau-bashing, “Pond Scum: Henry David Thoreau’s moral myopia.” Here Assistant Professor of Religion Jonathan Malesic of King’s College in Wilkes-Barre responded to The New Yorker in the online pages of New Republic:

Why, given his hypocrisy, sanctimony, and misanthropy, has Thoreau been so cherished?

Henry David Thoreau’s Radical Optimism: The political vision of ‘Walden’ is still essential reading Henry David Thoreau was callous to others’ misfortune, puritanical, misanthropic, adolescent, hypocritical, “as parochial as he was egotistical,” and morally despotic, according to the New Yorker staff writer Kathryn Schulz. Given all of that, Schulz ought to praise Thoreau for hiding out in the woods instead of making a nuisance of himself in the town square. But in fact, in her recent essay eviscerating Thoreau’s politics and character, Schulz is most critical of Thoreau’s preference for solitude. On her view, Thoreau’s moral program of deliberate, simple living is not only impractical, but unpracticed, as Thoreau was not nearly as independent as he makes himself out to be in WALDEN. As is well known, Thoreau was hardly isolated in his pondside cabin, with neighbors all around and his mother’s house a twenty-minute walk away. Schulz argues that in trying to realize “a fantasy about escaping the entanglements and responsibilities of living among other people,” Thoreau offers readers nothing we could use to build a HDT WHAT? INDEX

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society. For this reason, she laments his canonization as a democratic hero.

SIDEBAR: Thoreau’s political aims rest upon a radically optimistic assessment of the intellectual and spiritual heights every one of us is capable of.

Schulz is right that WALDEN is “more revered than read,” but she gets Thoreau’s ethics and politics wrong. Above all, she misses that Thoreau’s political aims rest upon a radically optimistic assessment of the intellectual and spiritual heights every one of us is capable of. Thoreau’s point is that if people could strip away unnecessary consumption, they would free themselves and each other from soul-eating labor, and then begin to realize their higher potential. We would be a nation of philosopher- kings, truly capable of pursuing the common good instead of immediate self-interest. To read Schulz’s account, you would think that Thoreau’s asceticism was an end in itself, that his “account of how to live reads less like an existential reckoning than like a poor man’s budget, with its calculations of how much to eat and sleep crowding out questions of why we are here and how we should treat one another.” But getting rid of your stuff is only the necessary first step to finding metaphysical or moral answers. Thoreau summarized his theory of alienation, developed around the same time as Karl Marx’s, by saying that “men have become the tools of their tools.” When you own something —it can equally be a doormat, a retirement account, or a sterling reputation— it often comes to own you as it demands attention and maintenance, adding to your duties. When you lose possessions, you gain time, energy, and focus that can be spent elsewhere. Long before Marie Kondo wrote her book, THE LIFE-CHANGING MAGIC OF TIDYING UP, Thoreau was making a “sacrament” of his periodic purges. By consuming less, Thoreau also thought he could help undermine slavery and American imperialism. As imperialism and even slavery are not quite behind us, even 170 years later, Thoreau’s critique of the morality of our consumption remains trenchant. Whose freedom do we steal in our thoughtless quest for security, property, or a good price on dog food? Thoreau’s abstinence from coffee makes him suspect in Kathryn Schulz’s eyes, but in forswearing this luxury, Thoreau limited both his expenses and his indirect economic support of slavery on Brazilian plantations.

Despite Thoreau’s desire to live in greater harmony with nature, he also sees nature as an alien and unwelcome force imposing on him the regrettable need to keep warm and fed. (He envies furred species that can get by without fuel.) To keep himself alive, then, he must labor, and in doing so, he runs the risk of building bad habits and stunting his intellect. As Adam Smith had lamented, the skills that a laborer gains through repeating a single action countless times at work were “acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues,” making the laborer a bad citizen.

SIDEBAR: The chance to act in accordance with one’s genius is what freedom is for; it makes possible “a higher life than we HDT WHAT? INDEX

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fell asleep from,” and grants access to the transcendent.

Thoreau feels that he must farm beans as a cash crop, but he finds that he also enjoys the work. This is why it is dangerous, an activity “which, continued too long, might have become a dissipation.” In the immediate pleasure of hoeing the beans, being productive, and ultimately making money, Thoreau would quite understandably feel proud. Insofar as he inherited the Protestant ethic, he might seek greater pride in greater productivity in the following season. But then, imperceptibly, he would “have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven,” become a full-time bean farmer, and allowed his higher aims to dissipate. Those aims, as WALDEN makes plain, are to observe the world with unparalleled acuity, to contemplate, and to write (Schulz concedes that Thoreau was a great nature writer). To do these things is to follow his “genius,” a sort of divine spirit that speaks to each of us in our peculiarity. The chance to act in accordance with one’s genius is what freedom is for; it makes possible “a higher life than we fell asleep from,” and grants access to the transcendent. The great tragedy of the many who “lead lives of quiet desperation” is that for them, the music of their genius is drowned out by “mechanical nudgings” and “factory bells” that demand immediate attention. It strikes me as charitable to remind others that higher ways of life are available to all, including to the materially poor and uneducated. The Canadian woodcutter who appears in WALDEN as a simple, animalistic philosopher, and whose company Thoreau clearly enjoys, convinces him “that there might be men of genius in the lowest grades of life, however permanently humble and illiterate.” While Thoreau thinks that the immediacy of the man’s thinking holds back the strength of his insight, he does believe that the woodcutter’s thoughts were “more promising than a merely learned man’s.” This brings up questions about the role of education in a democracy. In higher education today, we who advocate on behalf of the liberal arts are stuck between two contrary arguments: on the one hand, that studying the humanities can be a great career move and, on the other, that they show a way beyond careerism. This leads to dilemmas about what sort of education might be best for students from poor families. Should they be encouraged to study Greek and Latin in college, despite the low starting salaries typical of classics majors? If so, then are those who encourage them complicit in the graduates’ economic immobility? If not, then are we perpetuating the elitist myth that the classics, or philosophy, or art history belong solely to the rich?

SIDEBAR: It’s too costly, both morally and politically, to offer the poor strictly vocational training and push them to work their way to prosperity.

Questions like these are more political than they sound. A Thoreauvian answer to them would be hard to accept, but it would take seriously the full dignity of each person and the full range of aspiration that ought to be available to each of us. It’s too costly, both morally and politically, to offer the poor strictly vocational training and push them to work their HDT WHAT? INDEX

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way to prosperity. That is in fact the death of democracy, because citizens learn political quiescence on the job. If people like the Canadian woodcutter had more leisure, they might remain poor, but they would be better able to cultivate mind and spirit and insist that others be similarly liberated. Winning this leisure would entail the revolution in values that Thoreau calls for: to see material deprivation as less shameful than spiritual deprivation, and to see work as a necessary evil that ought to be limited instead of as our noblest activity. American capitalism would not survive such a revolution. The solitude Thoreau attempted at Walden Pond is surely not the only, or best, way to realize a democracy of self-transcendence on the national scale. It takes communities and institutions to sustain each other’s aspiration. Even in quitting Concord for the cabin, Thoreau may have realized this. In a moment of self- deprecating humor that escaped Schulz’s eye, he admits that what he really wanted was a cushy job as a public official. It was only after the townsfolk failed to provide one that he began to look “more exclusively than ever to the woods, where I was better known.”

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: August 18, 2017 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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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 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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

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