Part 8 (1/2)

These lines fit Henry Th.o.r.eau exactly. Most people think Emerson had him in mind when he wrote them. But as a matter of fact, they were written before he knew Henry Th.o.r.eau.

I wonder how many know the woodc.o.c.k's evening hymn. I have known many sportsmen and naturalists who never heard it or heard of it. When the female is on her nest the male woodc.o.c.k flies straight up into the sky, folds his wings and falls down through the air, coming down within a foot or two of the nest from which he ascended, pouring out a beautiful song, which he never sings at any other time. He is said to be one of the best and sweetest of our song birds.

It is a singular fact that Emerson did not know Henry Th.o.r.eau until after Th.o.r.eau had been some years out of college. Henry walked to Boston, eighteen miles, to hear one of Emerson's lectures, and walked home again in the night after the lecture was over. Emerson heard of it, and invited him to come to his house and hear the lectures read there, which he did.

People used to say that Th.o.r.eau imitated Emerson, and Lowell has made this charge in his satire, ”A Fable for Critics”;

There comes ----, for instance; to see him's rare sport, Tread in Emerson's tracks with legs painfully short.

I think there is nothing in it. Th.o.r.eau's style is certainly fresh and original. His tastes and thoughts are his own.

His peculiarities of bearing and behavior came to him naturally from his ancestors of the isle of Guernsey.

I retained his friends.h.i.+p to his death. I have taken many a long walk with him. I used to go down to see him in the winter days in my vacations in his hut near Walden. He was capital company. He was a capital guide in the wood. He liked to take out the boys in his boat. He was fond of discoursing.

I do not think he was vain. But he liked to do his thinking out loud, and expected that you should be an auditor rather than a companion.

I have heard Th.o.r.eau say in private a good many things which afterward appeared in his writings. One day when we were walking, he leaned his back against a rail fence and discoursed of the shortness of the time since the date fixed for the creation, measured by human lives. ”Why,” he said, ”sixty old women like Nabby Kettle” (a very old woman in Concord), ”taking hold of hands, would span the whole of it.” He repeats this in one of his books, adding, ”They would be but a small tea-party, but their gossip would make universal history.”

Another man who was famous as a writer went to school and afterward tended store in Concord in my childhood. This was George H. Derby, better known as John Phoenix. He was also very fond of small boys. I remember his making me what I thought a wonderful and beautiful work of art, by taking a sheet of stiff paper of what was called elephant foolscap, and folding it into a very small square, and then with a penknife cutting out small figures of birds and beasts. When the sheet was opened again these were repeated all over the sheet, and made it appear like a piece of handsome lace.

He did not get along very well with his employer, who was a snug and avaricious person. He would go to Boston once a week to make his purchases, leaving Derby in charge of the store. Derby would lie down at full length on the counter, get a novel, and was then very unwilling to be disturbed to wait on customers. If a little girl came in with a tin kettle to get some mola.s.ses, he would say the mola.s.ses was all out, and they would have some more next week. So the employer found that some of his customers were a good deal annoyed.

Another rather famous writer who lived in Concord in my time was Mr. A. Bronson Alcott. He used to talk to the children in the Sunday-school, and occasionally would gather them together in the evening for a long discourse. I am ashamed to say that we thought Mr. Alcott rather stupid. He did not make any converts to his theories among the boys.

He once told us that it was wicked to eat animal food; that the animal had the same right to his life that we had to ours, and we had no right to destroy the lives of any of G.o.d's creatures for our own purposes. He lived only on vegetable food, as he told us. But he had on at the time a very comfortable pair of calfskin boots, and the boys could not reconcile his notion that it was wicked to kill animals to eat, with killing animals that he might wear their hides. When such inconsistencies were pointed out to him he gave a look of mild rebuke at the audacious offender, and went on with his discourse as if nothing had happened.

The people who do not think very much of Alcott ought to speak with a G.o.d deal of modesty when they remember how highly Emerson valued him, and how sure was Emerson's judgment; but certainly n.o.body will attribute to Alcott much of the logical faculty. Emerson told me once:

”I got together some people a little while ago to meet Alcott and hear him converse. I wanted them to know what a rare fellow he was. But we did not get along very well. Poor Alcott had a hard time. Theodore Parker came all stuck full of knives. He wound himself round Alcott like an anaconda; you could hear poor Alcott's bones crunch.”

Margaret Fuller used to visit Concord a good deal, and at one time boarded in the village for several months.

She was very peculiar in her ways, and made people whom she did not like feel very uncomfortable in her presence. She was not generally popular, although the persons who knew her best valued her genius highly. But old Doctor Bartlett, a very excellent and kind old doctor, though rather gruff in manner, could not abide her.

About midnight one very dark, stormy night the doctor was called out of bed by a sharp knocking at the door. He got up and put his head out of the window, and said, ”Who's there?

What do you want?” He was answered by a voice in the darkness below, ”Doctor, how much camphire can anybody take by mistake without its killing them?” To which the reply was, ”Who's taken it?” And the answer was ”Margaret Fuller.” The doctor answered in great wrath, as he slammed down the window, and returned to bed: ”A peck.”

William Ellery Channing, the poet, was a constant visitor of my sister, and later of my brother Edward. He was a moody and solitary person, except in the company of a few close friends who testified to the charming and delightful quality of his companions.h.i.+p. I suppose his poems will outlast a great many greater reputations. But they will always find very few readers in any generation.

Channing visited my elder sister almost every day or evening for a good while, but rarely remained more than two or three minutes if he found anybody else in the room.

George William Curtis, afterward the famous orator, and his brother, Burrill, occupied for a year or two a small farmhouse or hut, with one or two rooms in it, in Concord, on the Lincoln road. They had been at Brook Farm and came to Concord, I suppose attracted by Emerson. They came to my father's house during their stay there every afternoon, and their call was as much a regular incident of the day as any stated meal.

Each of them was a boy of a very pleasant and delightful nature.

I think if George Curtis had dwelt almost anywhere but in New York city, he would have been a very powerful influence in the public life of his generation. But he did not find any congenial a.s.sociates in the men in New York who had any capacity to effect much good. His pure and lofty counsel fell unheeded upon the ears of his near neighbors, and the people of Ma.s.sachusetts did not listen very patiently to lectures on political purity or reform in civil service from New York city.

I never maintained any considerable intimacy with Curtis, although I have a few letters from him, expressing his regard for some of my kindred or his interest and sympathy in something I had said or done. These I value exceedingly. One of the very last articles he wrote for _Harper's Weekly,_ written just before his death, contains a far too kind estimate of my public service.

The Concord quality has come down with its people from the first settlement. The town was founded by Peter Bulkeley.

He was a clergyman at Odell in Bedfords.h.i.+re, where the church over which he was settled is still standing. He was a gentleman of good family and of a considerable estate which he spent for the benefit of the people whom he led into the wilderness.

He encountered the hostility of Laud and, to use the phrase of that time, was ”silenced for non-conformity.” With Major Simon Willard, he made a bargain with the Indians, just to both parties, and with which both parties were perfectly satisfied, which rendered the name of Concord so appropriate, although in fact the name was given to the settlement before the company left Boston. That pulpit was occupied by Bulkeley and his descendants either by blood or marriage, from 1635 to 1696; from 1738 to 1841; and from 1882 to 1893.