concerning Henry’s lecture when that comes—and the brightest star of the winter shed its clear beams on that night!”136 Lidian wrote that
Henry’s Lecture pleased me much—and I have reason to believe others liked it. Henry tells me he is so happy as to have received Mr. Keye’s suffrage and the Concord paper has spoken well of it. I think you would have been a well pleased listener. I should like to hear it two or three times more. Henry ought to be known as a man who can give a Lecture. You must advertise him to the extent of your power. A few Lyceum fees would satisfy his moderate wants—to say nothing of the improvement and happiness it would give both him and his fellow creatures if he could utter what is “most within him”—and be heard.137
When Thoreau did write, possibly without waiting for a letter from Emerson, he told of the family that “it will inform you of the state of all if I only say that I am well and happy in your house here in Concord,” and made only a passing mention to his talk, though referencing Emerson’s wish for a bright starlit night: “I lectured this week. It was as bright a night as you could wish. I hope there were no stars thrown away on the occasion.”138
Days passed without further correspondence. “I think you have made Henry wait a reasonable—or unreasonable time for an answer to his letter,” Lidian wrote.139 Emerson did write Thoreau on that same day, but only on business matters. Thoreau also wrote that day, with an overt nod to their disrupted correspondence,
As the packet still tarries, I will send you some thoughts, which I have lately relearned, as the latest public and private news.
How mean are our relations to one another! Let us pause till they are nobler. A little silence, a little rest, is good. It would be sufficient employment only to cultivate true ones.
The richest gifts we can bestow are the least marketable. We hate the kindness which we understand. A noble person confers no such gift as his whole confidence: none so exalts the giver and the receiver; it produces the truest gratitude. Perhaps it is only essential to friendship that some vital trust should have been reposed by the one in the other. I feel addressed and probed even to the remote parts of my being when one nobly shows, even in trivial things, an implicit faith in me. When such divine commodities are so near and cheap, how strange that it should have to be each day’s discovery! A threat or a curse may be forgotten, but this mild trust translates me. I am no more of this earth; it acts dynamically; it changes my very substance. I cannot do what before I did. I cannot be what before I was. Other chains may be broken, but in the darkest night, in the remotest place, I trail this thread. Then things cannot happen. What if God were to confide in us for a moment! Should we not then be gods?
How subtle a thing is this confidence! Nothing sensible passes between; never any consequences are to be apprehended should it be misplaced. Yet something has transpired. A new behavior springs; the ship carries new ballast in her hold. A sufficiently great and generous trust could never be abused. It should be cause to lay down one’s life,—which would not be to lose it. Can there be any mistake up there? Don’t the gods know where to invest their wealth? Such confidence, too, would be reciprocal. When one confides greatly in you, he will feel the roots of an equal trust fastening themselves in him. When such trust has been received or reposed, we dare not speak, hardly to see each other; our voices sound harsh and untrustworthy. We are as instruments which the Powers have dealt with. Through what straits would we not carry this little burden of a magnanimous trust! Yet no harm could possibly come, but simply faithlessness. Not a feather, not a straw, is entrusted; that packet is empty. It is only committed to us, and, as it were, all things are committed to us.
The kindness I have longest remembered has been of this sort,—the sort unsaid; so far behind the speaker’s lips that almost it already lay in my heart. It did not have far to go to be communicated. The gods cannot misunderstand, man cannot explain. We communicate like the burrows of foxes, in silence and darkness, under ground. We are undermined by faith and love. How much more full is Nature where we think the empty space is than where we place the solids!—full of fluid influences. Should we ever communicate but by these? The spirit abhors a vacuum more than Nature. There is a tide which pierces the pores of the air. These aerial rivers, let us not pollute their currents. What meadows do they course through? How many fine mails there are which traverse their routes! He is privileged who gets his letter franked by them.
I believe these things.140
When Thoreau did finally receive letters from his friend, he joyously wrote, “My dear Friend,—I got your letters, one yesterday and the other to-day, and they have made me quite happy.”141 Feeling confident again in their friendship, Thoreau could write in all honesty, “Do not think that my letters require as many special answers. I get one as often as you write to Concord,” urging Emerson to “make haste home before we have settled all the great questions, for they are fast being disposed of.”142
When his “A Walk to Wachusett” was published in the January 1843 issue of the Boston Miscellany of Literature and Fashion, Thoreau had trouble getting paid by the publisher. “Did I tell you,” Lidian wrote her husband, “that Bradbury & Soden have refused to pay Henry more than two thirds of the money they promised for his ‘Walk to W,’ and that they postpone the payment even of that? Will it not do for you to call on your return through Boston and demand it for him?”143 Emerson did his best, writing Thoreau, “I am sorry to say that when I called on Bradbury & Soden nearly a month ago, their partner in their absence informed me that they could not pay you at present any part of their debt on account of the Boston Miscellany. . . . I shall not fail to refresh their memory at intervals.”144 Thoreau soon told Emerson not to “think of Bradbury & Soden any more. . . . I see that they have given up their shop here.”145
While Emerson was still in New York, Thoreau wrote to him about his “long kindness” and his own unexpressed gratitude that he had been Emerson’s “pensioner for nearly two years, and still left free as under the sky.”146 Realizing his position and the obligations he owed to their friendship, as well as perhaps feeling the weight of such obligations, it was now time to move on, though not without asking Emerson’s assistance. Thoreau wrote in early March that he had been “meditating some other method of paying debts than by lectures and writing which will only do to talk about. If anything of that ‘other’ sort should come to your ears in N.Y. will you remember it for me?”147
Emerson suggested to his brother that Thoreau might make an excellent tutor for his three children—the youngest, Charles, still an infant; three-year-old Haven; but principally seven-year-old Willie. William Emerson agreed. It would give Thoreau not only a paid position for which he was well qualified but also access to the New York publishers and editors. On returning to Concord Emerson discussed the idea with Thoreau. He explained that it was more Willie himself than his grammar and geography that would be subject to Thoreau’s influence; he should take the boy to the woods as well as into the city. For that he would get lodging and board, firewood when needed, and one hundred dollars per annum. Thoreau had found a position he wished to sustain, “to be the friend and educator of a boy, and one not yet subdued by schoolmasters.”148
Perhaps
