casement rather. Do not neighbors sometimes halloo with good will across a field, who yet never chat over a fence?118
Thoreau thought Emerson’s coolness and reserve was “because his love for me is waxing and not waning. . . . Heaven is to come. I hope this is not it.”119 Emerson was aware of his own coolness, confessing in his journal in 1843, “It is a pathetic thing to meet a friend prepared to love you, to whom yet, from some inaptitude, you cannot communicate yourself with that grace and power which only love will allow.”120 There was an explosion of writing about friendship as Thoreau tried to work it out in his journal. “Words should pass between friends as the lightning passes from cloud to cloud.” He didn’t want
friends to feed and clothe our bodies,—neighbors are kind enough for that,—but to do the like offices to ourselves. We wish to spread and publish ourselves, as the sun spreads its rays; and we toss the new thought to the friend, and thus it is dispersed. Friends are those twain who feel their interests to be one. Each knows that the other might as well have said what he said. All beauty, all music, all delight springs from apparent dualism but real unity. My friend is my real brother. I see his nature groping yonder like my own. Does there go one whom I know? then I go there.
The field where friends have met is consecrated forever. Man seeks friendship out of the desire to realize a home here. As the Indian thinks he receives into himself the courage and strength of his conquered enemy, so we add to ourselves all the character and heart of our friends. He is my creation. I can do what I will with him. There is no possibility of being thwarted; the friend is like wax in the rays that fall from our own hearts.
The friend does not take my word for anything, but he takes me. He trusts me as I trust myself. We only need be as true to others as we are to ourselves, that there may be ground enough for friendship.121
In April Emerson asked Thoreau to write a review of some scientific surveys of Massachusetts he had been reading. He told Fuller that he had “set Henry Thoreau on the good track of giving an account of them in the Dial, explaining to him the felicity of the subject for him as it admits of the narrative of all his woodcraft, boatcraft and fishcraft.” It was his constant wish to bring Thoreau’s work to a wider audience, and “as private secretary to the President of the Dial, his works and fame may go out into all lands, and, as happens to great Premiers, quite extinguish the titular Master.”122 Thoreau’s “Natural History of Massachusetts” was published in the next issue of The Dial.
As 1842 drew to a close, Thoreau, Emerson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne had a skating party on the frozen meadow next to the Old Manse. Sophia Hawthorne described Thoreau’s “dithyrambic dances and Bacchic leaps on the ice—very remarkable, but very ugly, methought. Next him followed Mr. Hawthorne who, wrapped in his cloak, moved like a self-impelled Greek statue, stately and grave. Mr. Emerson closed the line, evidently too weary to hold himself erect, pitching headforemost, half lying on the air.”123
In his “Address Delivered Before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge,” Emerson noted, “It is already beginning to indicate character and religion to withdraw from the religious meetings.”124 Thoreau signed off from the First Parish Church in Concord at the beginning of 1841, writing simply to the clerk, “I do not wish to be considered a member of the First Parish in this town.”125 God was not to be found in the formal tenets of organized religion. God was not to be found confined between the walls of a church with a ministerial mediator. God was not to be found weekly on Sundays with the Sabbatarians.
As Emerson wrote in his Divinity College address, “In how many churches, by how many prophets, tell me, is man made sensible that he is an infinite Soul; that the earth and heavens are passing into his mind; that he is drinking forever the soul of God?”126 Or as he wrote later in “Politics”: “The wise man . . . needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is a prophet.”127
“The strains of a more heroic faith vibrate through the week days and the fields than through the Sabbath and the Church,” Thoreau wrote. “To shut the ears to the immediate voice of God, and prefer to know him by report will be the only sin.”128 So when Emerson’s mother came home from church in January 1843 to report to Lidian that she had been astonished to see Thoreau, not only sitting in church that Sabbath day, but in Emerson’s pew, it was quite a surprise. Lidian then reported the story to her husband, who was away on a lecture tour. It is possible that Thoreau was in some way conciliating Lidian, who “had a conversation with him a few days since on his heresies—but had no expectation of so speedy a result,”129 but Thoreau also seemed to take some relish in substituting for Emerson when the opportunity arose. Whatever his reasons for sitting in Emerson’s pew, a little over a week later he was writing to his friend, “The best way to correct a mistake is to make it right.”130
Lidian described in a letter to her husband the happy domestic scene he was missing. “It is ‘after dinner,’” she wrote,
and your peerless Edith is looking most beautifully as she dances with Henry or lays her innocent head on his music-box that she may drink yet deeper of its sweetness. Now am I interrupted by an exclamation from all present—the cherub face appears above the screen for Uncle Henry takes care that Edie shall take as high flights in Papa’s absence as ever—she rides on his shoulder or is held high up in the air—I think he adds to her happiness, and she no less to his. I wish you had seen her this morning.131
Lidian went on to recount the popping of the corn: “I brought the warming pan into the dining-room and the corn was quickly shelled into it and held over the fire by Henry who was master of ceremonies—and enjoyed the frolic as well as any child of us all. When the snapping was heard in full chorus I with my napkin lifted the hot cover the pan was taken off and the corn flew over the rug and the children like a snow storm.”132
In the first week of February Lidian described Thoreau recovering from an unspecified illness, and that he “has so far improved in health as to be quite able, as he thinks, to shovel snow once more, deep though it be. He has made very handsome paths from both doors and the great blocks of snow lie on each side attesting that they were no trifle to dispose of—I don’t know that I ever saw the snow deeper on a level.” She told Emerson that Thoreau was not going to write him at this time, “has deferred writing with my consent till you have answered his first one.”133
Emerson had told Lidian how occupied he was, previously saying that he had “received with great contentment Henry’s excellent letter but what kept me from writing to you kept me from him.”134 In a letter to Thoreau he wrote, “I think that some letter must have failed for I cannot have let ten days go by without writing home. I have kept no account but am confident that that cannot be.”135 Emerson was lecturing in Philadelphia, then was in New York visiting his brother William. While he was away Thoreau gave one of his earliest lectures in Concord, “The
